"The provenance," Ngemi assures her, "is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors. Shipping alone will require the funds I had earmarked for the scaffolding, and more."

Cayce nods.

"And now I must deal with Hobbs Baranov," Ngemi continues, less happily, "and he is in one of his moods."

If he hadn't been, when I saw him, Cayce thinks, I wouldn't want to see him when he was.

"Hobbs wanted his share of the Curta sale in order to bid on a very rare piece that went up for auction in Den Haag this past Wednesday. A factory prototype of the earliest Curta, exhibiting a peculiar, possibly unique variation in the mechanism. It went to a Bond Street dealer instead, and for not a bad price. Hobbs will be difficult, when I see him."

"But you've sold his, as well, haven't you?"

"Yes, but once anything's in Bond Street, it's beyond the reach of mere mortals. Even Hobbs Baranov. Too dear."

Magda, who's been working her way through the retsina a little more determinedly than the rest of them, makes a bitter face. "This man is appalling. You should have nothing to do with him. If that is what American spies are like, they are worse even than the Russians they defeated!"

"He was never a spy," Ngemi says, somberly, lowering his glass. "A cryptographer. A mathematician. If the Americans were as heartless, or as efficient, as people imagine them, they would never leave poor Hobbs to drink himself to death in a leaking caravan."

Cayce, feeling neither particularly heartless nor very efficient, asks: "What would they do, then, if they were?"

Ngemi, about to put a forkful of the remaining calamari into his mouth, pauses. "I suppose," he says, "they would kill him."

Cayce, having been raised to some extent within the ghostly yet in her experience remarkably banal membrane of the American intelligence community, has her own set of likelihood-filters when it comes to these things. Win had never, as far as she knew, been an intelligence of-ficer in his own right, but he had known and worked with them. He had shared a certain experiential core with them, partaking in his own way of the secret world and its wars. And very little Cayce ever hears of that world, as described by those with even less a sense of it than her own, sounds like anything but fantasy, "Actually," she tells them, "it's sort of traditional to let them drink themselves to death."

Something about her tone stops the conversation, which she hadn't intended. "What did you mean, in a caravan?" she asks Ngemi, to end the silence.

Win had lived long enough to bury a number of his colleagues, none of them, as far as she knew, felled by anything more sinister than stress and overwork, and perhaps by a species of depression engendered by too long and too closely observing the human soul from certain predictable but basically unnatural angles.

"He lives in a little trailer," Ngemi says. "Squats, really. Near Poole."

"But he has a bloody pension from the CIA," protests Magda. "I don't believe this caravan! And he buys those Curta things, they cost fortunes. He's hiding something. Secrets." Drinking deep of her retsina.

"NSA," Ngemi corrects her. "Disability pension, I imagine, though I'd certainly never ask him. He has perhaps ten thousand pounds in net worth, I believe. Most of it, at any given time, in calculators. No fortune. Not even enough to keep them, really. A collector, he must buy, but a poor man, he must sell." Ngemi sighs. "It is that way for many people, not least myself."

But Magda isn't having it. "He's a spy. He sells secrets. Voytek told me."

Flustered, her brother looks from Cayce to Ngemi, back to Cayce. "Not a spy. Not government secrets. You should not say this, Magda."

"Then what does he sell?" Cayce asks.

"Sometimes," Voytek says, lowering his voice slightly, "I think he locates information for people."

"He's a spy!" declares Magda, gleefully.

Voytek winces.

"He perhaps has retained certain connections," Ngemi qualifies, "and can find certain things out. I imagine there are men in the City…" His wide black brow creases with seriousness. "Nothing illegal, one hopes. Old-boy networks are something one understands, here. One doesn't ask. We assume Hobbs has his own, still."

"Sig-int," Magda says, triumphantly. "Voytek says he sells sig-int."

Voytek stares gloomily at his glass.

SIGINT, Cayce knows. Signals intelligence.

She decides to change the subject. Whatever this is about, it's detracting from what pleasure she's able to take in the evening.

AFTER leaving the restaurant, they stop at a crowded pub near the station. Cayce, remembering from college that retsina is not a good mix with any other species of alcohol, orders a half shandy and leaves most of it.

Sensing that the patronage-hustle is probably about to be more overtly launched in her direction, she opts for preemptive action. "I hope you find a backer soon, Voytek. I'm sure you will. It makes me wish I had that sort of money myself, but I don't."

As she'd somehow expected, they all glance at one another.

It's Ngemi who decides to have a shot. "Is your employer perhaps in a position to—"

"I couldn't ask. Haven't been there long enough." Thinking, however, not of Bigend but of his credit card, in her wallet. She could indeed buy Voytek's load of rusty scaffolding for him. She will, she decides, if it looks like nothing else is going to turn up. Let Dorotea's Russians, who she isn't quite sure she believes in, figure that one out.

27. THE SHAPE OF THE ENTHUSIAST

- /

Climbing the stairs, she reflects on how she feels no interest now in doing the Bond thing.

No spit-secured hair waiting to be checked. Less a matter of faith in the German locks than a sort of fatalism. Anyone able to get into Kather-ine McNally's Fifth Avenue office and steal or copy her notes on Cayce's sessions would be able get past those locks, she seems to have decided. But could that really have happened? Had some figure entered, in the dead of night, and crept past the low table in the small reception area, with its three-year-old copies of Time and Cosmopolitan?

She unlocks the door, twice. Opens it, seeing she's forgotten to leave a light on. "Fuck you," she calls, to anyone who might be waiting.

Turning on the light. Locking the door behind her, she has a look upstairs.

Cayce Pollard Central Standard indicating that sleep is not yet worth attempting.

She powers up Damien's G4, opens Netscape, and goes to F:F:F, watching the keystrokes required to get there. If Dorotea is telling the truth, her Asian Sluts boy had installed software on this machine that records the user's every keystroke. The recorded sequences can be retrieved from elsewhere, via some sort of back door. Does it give them mouse-clicks as well? She wonders. But how would they know what you were clicking on? Perhaps all they see is keystrokes, or keystrokes and URLs?

F:F:F is starting to look unfamiliar, after her relatively long absence. She doesn't recognize most of the handles of the posters on the current page. She remembers something about a recent television special having generated a wave of newbies. Are these unfamiliar names then? She scans a few threads without opening any posts, judging them by titles alone. Segment 78 is still a hot topic, as is the Brazilian Satanic Footage thing.

She sits back and stares at the screen, hands in her lap (the keyboard spooks her, now) and imagines more shadowy figures, in another room, a sort of Man from U.N C.L.E. room, seated, staring at a huge screen on which there is nothing but this page of F:F:F, waiting for Cayce to open a post.