Cadel shrugged.

'Blackmail can backfire,' Thaddeus went on.

'Not if you're careful.'

'Careful people take out insurance policies,' Thaddeus remarked, with a glint in his eye. 'Drop a name in my ear, Cadel, and I can a.s.sure you that nothing will happen to its bearer unless something further happens to you. No one will ever know.'

Cadel shook his head a whereupon Thaddeus smiled a chilling smile.

'Don't you trust me, Cadel? Don't you trust me to keep my temper?'

'It's not that.' Cadel hesitated. He remembered what Thaddeus had always told him: Never trust anyone. 'It's more...it's my dad. He might not be able to help himself. You know what I mean?'

There was a long pause. Finally Thaddeus said: 'I take your point.'

Cadel was surprised.

'He is very protective,' Thaddeus conceded. 'He also doesn't like it when people flout his rules.'

'But it really was a mistake,' Cadel insisted, sensing that he was beginning to convince Thaddeus. 'They wouldn't have done it deliberately. They were shattered.'

'I should hope so.'

'I can't let Dad see my face,' Cadel went on. 'Will you help me? Will you pretend you can't get a visual, or something?' Thaddeus narrowed his eyes. 'You wouldn't be asking much, would you?' he said. 'Please? Please, Thaddeus, I can handle this myself. Really.

How will I ever get a degree in world domination, when I'm not allowed to handle something like this by myself?' Cadel marshalled his arguments. 'This is my chance to start forming my own network! Recruiting my own people! I've got leverage now. Just like Dad did, when he was starting the inst.i.tute. Can't you give me a chance?'

Thaddeus stared at Cadel. Outside, a fir tree swayed in the wind, sc.r.a.ping itself against the gutters. There was no other sound for at least half a minute.

'I will,' Thaddeus said at last, 'if you give me a name. Just me. I shan't pa.s.s it on.'

Cadel took a deep breath.

'I'll do that,' he replied, 'if I get worried.'

Thaddeus smiled.

'Your father won't be pleased,' he pointed out, 'if he discovers that I knew about this a.s.sault and kept it from him. I need my own insurance, Cadel.' Almost without thinking, Cadel retorted: 'He won't be pleased either if he learns that you promised not to tell him.'

The words were barely out of his mouth before Cadel regretted them. His hands jumped up to his face, as if he was trying to grab the threat and force it back down his own throat. But the foolish remark had already escaped, and was hanging in the air like a thundercloud.

Thaddeus's expression was hard to read.

'Well, well,' he said. 'Interesting.'

'I a I a '

'It's all right, Cadel. Don't look so scared. You've no reason to be frightened of me.' 'Can I please go home?' Cadel squeaked. 'My head hurts.' 'A headache?' Thaddeus c.o.c.ked his own head, considering this proposal. 'I suppose it's a reasonable excuse. We certainly don't want your father seeing you like this, do we? If he's to be kept in the dark.'

Cadel gasped. 'Are you a '

'Go home, dear boy. Rest up. Think of a reasonable explanation that might account for your bruises when you next speak to your father. Because they won't be disappearing in a hurry, I'll tell you that much.'

Cadel was more bewildered than he was relieved. He had won so quickly. It didn't make sense. Why had Thaddeus suddenly capitulated? Would he really conceal the incident from Dr Darkkon?

It hardly seemed possible.

'Th-thank you,' Cadel murmured, peering at the psychologist's face. He thought he detected a trace of sly amus.e.m.e.nt, but couldn't be sure.

He was on his way home in a taxi when it crossed his mind that Thaddeus might already know about Dr Deal. The whole exchange in that office might have been a great big fake, designed to test Cadel, somehow. The question was: had he pa.s.sed the test or failed it?

Cadel didn't know. He couldn't be sure of anything. There were so many possibilities, he couldn't even begin to catalogue them. Especially not when his head hurt.

TWENTY-FIVE.

The next morning, Cadel slept in. His first cla.s.s wasn't until eleven, so he could afford to take his time. By staying in bed until after nine, he also avoided Mrs Piggott, who had left for work before eight-thirty. Since she had also come home late the previous night, she hadn't yet seen Cadel's injuries.

Cadel was hoping that she never would.

He ate a mushy breakfast of oatmeal and yoghurt, trying not to put too much pressure on the muscles around the left side of his jaw. Then he caught a cab to the inst.i.tute, where he arrived just in time to see Carla being whisked into an ambulance. In the blazing sunlight, the ambulance looked very white against the vivid green lawn. Carla was lying on a stretcher, so heavily bundled up in layers of gauze and plastic that Cadel couldn't make out what was wrong with her. He could see only that she was connected to several suspended bags of liquid.

Quite a crowd had already gathered to watch, though Terry was trying to disperse it. Thaddeus was also there, talking to the ambulance officers. He caught sight of Cadel, and nodded briefly before turning away.

At that moment, Carla's stretcher was heaved into the back of the ambulance. One of the ambulance officers jumped in with her. A couple of doors banged and the engine roared. Someone tapped Cadel's shoulder.

'What happened to you? ' Gazo exclaimed.

For an instant, Cadel didn't understand what Gazo was talking about. He had forgotten his own injuries, which no longer pained him unless they were touched. Carla's plight had driven them straight out of his head. 'Oh, nothing,' he said, dismissing the subject with a wave of his hand. 'What happened to Carla? Was it a b.o.o.by-trap?'

Gazo shrugged.

'Bound to be,' remarked Douglas Prindle. The old accountant had appeared out of nowhere. He was regarding the scene in front of him with detached interest. 'She's not exactly Miss Popular.'

'Maybe it was an accident,' said a pyrogenic student in red leotards. 'Maybe she got infected with one of her own bugs.'

Cadel shuddered. Douglas said dryly: 'Speaking of which, what happened to the famous vial? The one she's supposed to be carrying round with her all the time? I hope that didn't break, when she fell.'

'How do you know she fell?' Gazo queried. Whereupon the accountant threw him a contemptuous glance.

'Did she look as if she was standing up?' he replied, and turned on his heel.

The rest of the crowd began to melt away as the ambulance drove off. Thaddeus, heading for his car, called out: 'Cadel! Gazo! Cla.s.s is cancelled! Tell the others!' He waved at them, before disappearing around a corner.

Gazo and Cadel exchanged glances.

'I wonder if Doris already knows?' said Gazo. 'She does a course wiv Carla.'

'We should hang around outside the lecture room,' was Cadel's opinion. 'Catch them as they come.'

'It's good this happened. I didn't do me Lying a.s.signment.'

Gazo spoke without a trace of concern. Even Cadel couldn't dredge up much sympathy for Carla, whom he didn't really know. And when he informed Doris, Abraham and Kunio of the latest developments, they were equally unmoved. Kunio probably failed to understand what Cadel was trying to tell him. Abraham looked too sick to care. Doris simply snorted, in her unpleasant way, and wanted to know about Cadel's bruises.

'Someone been beating you up?' she inquired, with obvious satisfaction.

'No,' said Cadel.

'Looks that way to me,' Doris taunted, and Gazo frowned.

'Did someone hit you, Cadel?' he said.

'No. I told you.'

'Whoever it was, they're sure going to pay.' Once again, Doris sounded rather pleased. 'Who was it?'

'No one!' snapped Cadel. And because he was tired of the whole subject, he marched off to Hardware Heaven, with Gazo clumping after him.

'Cadel? Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. I said so.'

'What happened?'

'It was an accident. I was stupid.'

'So you don't need help?'

'No.' Cadel reached the lift and stabbed at the 'up' b.u.t.ton. The lift door immediately opened. Cadel stepped inside.

'Well, tell me if you do,' said Gazo. A steel panel slid shut, cutting off Cadel's view of his anxious face. As the lift hummed up to the next floor, Cadel felt a twinge of guilt, which he strove to suppress. After all, it wasn't his fault that Gazo had a pathetic, puppy-like nature.

When he reached Hardware Heaven, he found Sark and the pasty-faced Richard murmuring together beside the only window in the room. It was odd to hear them conversing (because no one talked much in Hardware Heaven) and even odder to see them out of their seats. Com, as always, was stationed at his keyboard.

'You missed all the fun,' Sark told Cadel, by way of a greeting.

'No, I didn't,' Cadel replied, slinging his backpack onto his desk. 'I saw the ambulance. Downstairs.'

'That was no ambulance. That was the Grunts. Evacuation. They've closed off the whole top floor.' Sark looked smug. 'If you ask me, they're worried about the vial.'

'It can't have been anything obvious,' said Richard, arguing a point. 'If there was an obvious threat, we'd all be in quarantine by now. They wouldn't have let Cadel up here.'

'Maybe not,' Sark conceded.

'Did you see anything?' Richard asked Cadel, who had turned on his computer. 'Did you see any fluids leaking out of her, or anything?'

'No,' said Cadel, after a pause. A few alarms had been tripped in his latest firewall, suggesting that someone was trying to hack into his data again. The Virus, no doubt. Cadel wondered what he was up to.

'Hoist with her own petard,' Sark was saying. 'I hope she enjoys whatever she's got.'

'You don't know that,' Richard objected. 'For all you know, it could have been a heart attack.'

'Oh, sure. A heart attack. Why would they close off the labs if it was a heart attack?'

'Because of the vial, stupid!'

'Would you two please keep it down?' Cadel requested. 'Some of us are trying to work here.'

Com suddenly made a creaking sound, as if to imply that he seconded the motion. Grumpily, Richard slouched back to his own computer. Sark folded his arms.

'What happened to you, Genius?' he asked, studying Cadel's face.

'Nothing.'

'I thought you were supposed to be off limits?'

'It was an accident.'

'Carla didn't beat you up, by any chance?'

'No.' Cadel raised his eyes, and fixed them on Sark, who suddenly blanched, as if the full impact of his own words had only just hit him. Had Carla been killed because she'd a.s.saulted Cadel?

'It wasn't Carla,' Cadel insisted, seeing the expression on Sark's face. 'It wasn't anyone. I fell down.' But Sark had sidled away, avoiding eye contact. Cadel had a feeling that, from now on, Sark would be treating him with kid gloves.

He sighed, and fixed his attention on the computer in front of him. After the incident with Dr Deal, he had become more curious about all the inst.i.tute staff. Nothing in Dr Deal's computer records had alerted him to the risks that a young girl might run if she was alone with Dr Deal. So what else had Cadel missed? What secrets were the staff hiding? Cadel decided to piggy-back on another sweep through their private databanks. This time, he would do it properly. This time, he would carefully consider every single piece of information that he found. He wouldn't just flip through it, with one eye on the clock.

The material that he collected by this means took him hours to review. Despite concentrated scrutiny, however, he didn't find much that was new. Dr Deal didn't have a lot to offer. His emails and spreadsheets, bank records and business calendar were all pretty dull. There were no payments to unnamed accounts, or threatening emails to young women. He didn't even appear to be involved in any of the feuds brewing between various other staff members.

Cadel already knew that most of the staff hated Brendan, whom they regarded as an insult. Someone who was autistic, they felt, shouldn't be receiving equal pay. There was also a lot of bad feeling about Tracey Lane; she was seen as a bit of an idiot, not to mention unreliable. Apparently, she had gone out with nearly every male working for Dr Darkkon (including Maestro Max, Luther, Art and, most recently, the Fuhrer). At present, she was seeing Terry and Dr Deal: her emails made that pretty obvious. Perhaps the relationship with Terry was one reason why Carla despised Tracey. 'That ditz' was how Carla described the former newsreader in her private emails.

There was also a lot of tension on the Yarramundi campus. The Fuhrer was always ordering expensive materials, and seemed to require enormous budgets. Relations between Luther, who was head of the School of Destruction, and the Fuhrer, who treated the Grunts as his own private army, weren't good. Part of the problem was that the Fuhrer kept signalling yellow alerts. After carefully studying the Fuhrer's security codes, Cadel had worked out that a yellow alert was far less serious than a red alert, but that it still involved all kinds of annoying lockdowns and authorisations. The Fuhrer had once signalled a yellow 'intruder' alert because Alias had turned up to cla.s.s dressed as a pizza-delivery boy. After that little misunderstanding, the Fuhrer had tried to have Alias fired on the grounds that he was 'too much of a security risk'. Cadel wasn't surprised to see that Alias and the Fuhrer hadn't got on since then.

So the Fuhrer was at odds with Alias, Brendan Graham, Tracey Lane (his ex-girlfriend), Dr Deal (the man Tracey had left him for), and, of course, Luther Lasco. Luther, too, had a lot of enemies; Maestro Max was one of them. The cause of the problem seemed to be that Max had once refused to help Luther with his a.s.sa.s.sination course. Although Max had a lot of expertise in the area of a.s.sa.s.sination, he claimed that he was now 'beyond all that'. Luther wasn't the only one who disliked Max's att.i.tude. It was argued by Carla and many other staff that while their own subjects were attracting fee-paying students, Max's 'purist' course was of little value, and shouldn't be as generously funded as their own. (Thaddeus, Cadel noticed, seemed to spend a great deal of time defending the way he'd divided up available funds between the pure and applied sciences.) All in all, Max was a bit of a loner. In his letters and emails, he came across as isolated and paranoid. He disliked Carla, abhorred the Fuhrer a whom he condemned as clumsy a and felt that Brendan was beneath his notice. Tracey he regarded with contempt, now that he was no longer involved with her. And he didn't trust the Virus at all. He had sent repeated warnings to Thaddeus about the security of software programs with someone like the Virus around. He was also, curiously enough, rather nervous about Cadel.

At first, Cadel hadn't been able to understand why Max kept sending coded messages to Terry and Luther Lasco, pointing out that he could find no official records of Cadel's birth. It had only gradually become obvious that Max was concocting a theory. He didn't trust Dr Darkkon any more than he trusted the Virus, and was worried that Cadel might be some kind of spy.

Reading between the lines, Cadel had soon become convinced that Max was concerned about Dr Darkkon's motive for founding the Axis Inst.i.tute. Max refused to accept the explanation offered by Thaddeus Roth. He didn't believe that Dr Darkkon was worried about the ultimate future of humankind. In Max's opinion, no one was ever really that selfless. No a the Maestro feared that Dr Darkkon had created Axis to bring together all his possible rivals in crime. This, Max reasoned, would make them an easy target.

With the compet.i.tion wiped out, Dr Darkkon wouldn't have to share any of his global plunder.

It was a pretty far-fetched idea, though not totally stupid. Cadel had sometimes wondered about Dr Darkkon's motives himself. He had one advantage over Max, however: he knew how important he was to his dad. If Dr Darkkon had founded the inst.i.tute simply so that Cadel could pit his skills against the best (or worst) in the business, and thereby educate himself as to the workings of the criminal mind a well, it wouldn't have surprised Cadel. Not one little bit.