I too felt a cold fury towards the wretched individual who had carried out such a cowardly attack, but I would not let that emotion, however understandable, cloud my professional judgement regarding the task in hand or allow any rashness or overreaction so caused to effectively offer this animal of an extremist an overly quick escape from the torments he so richly deserved.

The specific operational details of the interrogation need not detain us here. The desire to know of such things can be almost prurient at times, in my opinion. My colleagues and I are paid to do such things and are trained to cope with the psychological fallout of our actions and there are good reasons why a veil is drawn over such matters to protect the general populace, who do not deserve to have to confront the realities that we have to face every day to keep them safe.

Suffice to say, despite the subject's attempts to convert me to his bizarre, perverted and cruel religion with its emphasis on martyrdom, cannibalism and the alleged ability of their holy men to forgive all sins no matter how horrendous and barbaric, I did not reconvert to become a Christian! And let me just say that I do not even concede that he was displaying any real bravery or strength of will in trying to do so. Fanatics are driven purely by their own fanaticism, and anyway it is a common technique used by subjects trained to resist interrogation to try to turn the resultant discourse back upon the questioner, not so much in any realistic hope of altering their views or causing them to cease or go easier in what they are doing, of course, but simply as a way for the subject to take his mind off the process itself.

In any case, I am satisfied that while the cell system of the terrorist organisation sadly protected the ident.i.ties of its other members apart from the six in the suicide team itself, I, along with my colleagues, extracted all that there was to be extracted from the subject and, thanks to our restraint, we were able to deliver him alive if not intact, and certainly not unbroken, to the Justice Ministry for his trial and subsequent (well-deserved in my opinion) execution.

Adrian I made a lot of money for Mr Noyce. Not like that dingbat son of his. Barney lost Mr N a lot of money. Soaked it up, p.i.s.sed it away and snorted it. He would reappear from his bar in Goa every couple of years and announce he was coming back to stay in London and do something useful but he never did. Always ended up going back to the bar. He thought his dad ought to bail him out by giving him a job with his own firm, but Mr N wasn't having it. Blood might be thicker than water but it's no match for liquidity, know what I mean? Money is serious. You f.u.c.k about with it at your peril.

Barney was always at Mr N to give him the bar, too, to turn it over to him legally but Mr N was too clever for that as well. He knew Barney would just sell it or lose it in a poker game or use it as collateral to fund some s.h.i.twit scheme that he'd make the usual unholy f.u.c.king mess of and be back at Mr and Mrs N's with the begging bowl shortly after.

Frankly, I think Ed found his boy a bit of an embarra.s.sment. He was glad he was mostly arm's length away in sunny Goa. Barney and me weren't getting on so well any more either. I found him a bit of a moaner, always on about how tough things were for him when this was clearly a load of b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. Little c.u.n.t had had a charmed life with all the advantages, hadn't he? Not my fault or his dad's that he'd f.u.c.ked it. And I mean, running a bar on a beach? That's the f.u.c.king jackpot prize for most people, that is, that's what your average geezer would regard as a brilliant retirement. Hard done by, my a.r.s.e.

And he had the nerve to blame me for this, at least partly. Good as told me this when we were drunk together once during a weekend at Spetley Hall. Like it was all my fault because I'd replaced him in Mr and Mrs N's affections. So what if I had? I was a better friend to them than he was a son. I mean, the soft git.

But I was the golden boy, wasn't I? Never mind that the Noyces were like a second family to me, Mr N's firm was like the first national bank of AC. I made a f.u.c.king mint. Most of it went to the firm but a lot came back to me in the way of a decent salary but especially in bonuses. Mr N and I had some heated discussions on the subject of bonuses on a few occasions but we always came to an agreement in the end.

I suppose we both always knew I'd be leaving and going elsewhere eventually, but in the meantime the good times rolled with no hard feelings.

Bought a bigger flat in delightful Docklands and a succession of less and less practical cars. Thought about a yacht but decided they just weren't me you could always charter if you really needed to. Took me hols in Aspen, the Maldives, Klosters, the Bahamas, New Zealand and Chile. Not to mention Majorca and Crete, doing a bit of old-fashioned raving in the big hot loud clubs.

And the girls. Oh, bless their little cotton gussets, the girls: Saskia and Amanda and Juliette and Jayanti and Talia and June and Charley and Charlotte and Ffion and Jude and Maria and Esme and Simone. There were lots of others, but those were the non-casual ones, the ones I took the trouble of remembering their names and was happy to have stay over more than once. I loved them all in my own way and I guess they returned the favour. Most of them wanted to take things further but I never did. There's no "us" in commitment, I'd tell them, there's just a "me." They couldn't complain. I was generous and if there were ever hard feelings then it wasn't my fault.

And every month that 10K in US greenery appeared in my main spending account, and every time I saw it on the statement I got a little leap of the heart, remembering what had happened or what had seemed to happen that night in chilly Moscow, at the Novy Pravda.

After our visit to the room with the black furniture and the amber light, Mrs M and I went back to the table where Connie Sequorin was chatting to two large Russian guys. They didn't look very pleased to see me and Mrs M, especially me, but they left their cards and a bottle of Cristal and f.u.c.ked off soon enough. We ate more blinis and caviar, drank more champagne and Mrs M and Connie both danced with me. I was still in a daze, though, not really paying attention to very much at all. Soon enough Mrs M paid the bill, we got our coats and walked straight to the waiting Merc that had brought us here. Snow was swirling from the orange-black sky. We went to this ma.s.sive, very bright and warm hotel and I was handed the key to my own room. Mrs M said she'd be in touch and pecked me on the cheek. Connie said the same and did the two-cheek pretend-kiss thing. They had a suite and I wondered, as I padded down a very broad tall corridor to my room, if they had something going together.

I slept till mid-afternoon the next day and found an envelope had been shoved under my door with a thousand roubles in it and a first-cla.s.s BA ticket to Heathrow on a flight leaving four hours later. The room had been paid for. Mrs M and Connie had checked out hours earlier. A note left behind reception by Mrs M just said, "Welcome abroad. Mrs M." Welcome abroad. Not Welcome aboard. Welcome abroad. I couldn't tell if this was a mistake or a bit of cleverness.

I went back. Back to Moscow and back to the club, the following month. I made friends with the manager guy Kliment (after a bit of suspicion he didn't really remember me or Mrs M or Connie Sequorin and probably thought I was police or a journalist or something) and got to have a look round the place one day. I found the room, the bedroom where Mrs M had taken me and we'd seemed to go on the weirdest of weird trips to a marshy wasteland where there was no Moscow, just ruins.

It hadn't occurred to me at the time to bring back a flower or a pebble or something I'd been too f.u.c.king freaked out, I suppose. Not that that would have proved anything anyway. I knew something bizarre had happened but I didn't know exactly what. I had the use of the room and the run of the place for the afternoon, until the staff arrived in the early evening to make the club ready for the night's fun, and I had a good look round the room, the rooms on either side and even the cellar underneath and the little private bar directly above but it all looked plain and kosher, just slightly seedy in the cold strip light of day and I couldn't see how the trick, a.s.suming it was a trick, obviously, had been pulled. Drugs, I supposed. Or hypnosis. Suggestion and all that, know what I mean?

No, I didn't know what I meant either. It had just been too f.u.c.king real. I left the place no wiser than when I'd arrived and even turned down the offer of VIP entry, a nice table and a free bottle of bubbles from my new friend Kliment. Tired, I said. Some other time. Flew straight back to dear old f.u.c.k-off Blighty that night.

I looked into travelling back to the Zone, around Chern.o.byl, but it was properly difficult to arrange and I never really felt happy with the whole idea. The more I thought about it the more sure I was I'd go back, at some risk to my future health, find the place where Mrs M had been hanging out and discover, oh wow, it was empty and deserted and it was as if it had all never been. No office, just an old supermarket or warehouse or whatever the f.u.c.k.

Tried asking Ed about it but he claimed he knew nothing. Never met or heard of a Mrs Mulverhill. Connie S was just a woman he'd vaguely heard of recently at the time when she asked to be introduced to me. He swore he'd never heard of anything called the Concern and he certainly wasn't getting any mysterious dosh every month, eight and a half K or otherwise. I'd have pushed further but he was just on the edge of getting annoyed with me, I could tell, and I was pretty sure I knew when Mr N was telling the truth by now. I hadn't told him any more than I'd needed to but he was obviously intrigued just from the little I had said and started asking me questions. I stonewalled him, told him he didn't want to know any more.

Connie herself seemed to have disappeared off the face of the f.u.c.king Earth. Phones disconnected, business address a briefly rented office in Paris, unheard of by anybody who might have known somebody in her line of work.

Checked the account, saw the money, waited for the call that never came. All that happened was that a couriered letter arrived from a C. Sequorin in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with a bunch of weird-looking names that were codes, apparently. I was to commit them to memory if I could, otherwise just keep the letter safe for future reference. I put it in my safe. (I hired a private eye in Tashkent, because you can do that sort of thing these days in the wonderful new globalised world, providing only that you have access to piles of dosh. Nothing. Another deserted office. No joy tracing the source of the funds in the Cayman Islands either. Well, of course not. If governments can't trace anything in tax havens, how the f.u.c.k was I supposed to? When I thought about this it was actually highly f.u.c.king rea.s.suring.) A week after the letter with the codes, a padded envelope arrived with something the size and weight of a brick inside. It was a black box of thick plastic and inside that was a steel box with a sort of dial on the top made of seven concentric rings of different metals arranged around a very slightly concave b.u.t.ton in the centre. These rings circled round and back with a sort of smooth clickiness, if you know what I mean, and if you looked carefully they had lots of little patterns of dots on them but they didn't seem to do anything. There was a thinner-than-hair fine line around the middle of the box, like it was meant to open, maybe if you got the dials on the top arranged just right, like a combination lock on a safe, I suppose, but with the box came a note from Mrs Mulverhill saying I was to keep this metal box safe, guard it with my life and only give it to somebody who knew the codes from the letter.

I tried having it X-rayed via a pal who works in airport security at City, but the box wasn't having it. In fact, my mate thought his machine must be broken cos the thing didn't show up at all. How f.u.c.king weird is that? If you could make a gun out of this stuff you could saunter onto any plane in the world totally tooled up. My guy pointed this out and I told him it'd be very unhealthy indeed for both of us if he breathed so much as a syllable about it. I'd barely finished telling him this when I got a very terse text message on my mobile telling me never to X-ray the box again or even think about trying any other method of looking inside.

Keep it hidden, keep it safe. That was all.

How the f.u.c.k had they known?

Anyway, I lobbed the f.u.c.ker into the back of the safe with the letter and did my best to forget about both of them, quite successfully.

Months, years pa.s.sed. Left Mr N's firm when he retired in 2000, became a hedgie working out of an ultra-smart property in Mayfair with another dozen or so guys, left NYC the day before the towers came down and was never sure if I'd had a narrow escape or had missed something it would have been worth being there for, despite all the nastiness of it, just to be able to say I'd been there, know what I mean? Anyway, I was on a beach in Trinidad so it didn't matter. Didn't see much of the Noyces after Ed retired, though they kept inviting me to Spetley Hall for years afterwards.

Made more money. Lost some of it opening a restaurant with a couple of mates when each of us thought one of the others must be the one who actually knew what he was doing. Still, live and learn, eh? Me and half a dozen other guys broke away from Tangible Topiary (that was the name of the hedge fund) and started up a new one a few doors down from our old office. We called it FMS. It was registered at Companies House and in the Cayman Islands as just FMS Ltd with no further detail though we told people who insisted on knowing that the letters stood for Financial Merchant Securities or Future Market Superstars or some such tosh, but really it stood for f.u.c.k Me Sideways. As in f.u.c.k Me Sideways, Look At The Amount Of Money We're Making.

Our Mayfair office was even grander than TT's, deliberately. We had a pool put in in the bas.e.m.e.nt, a gym in the attic, and a games room with wraparound monitors for driving and shoot-'em-up games. Oh, and a flotation pod each. All tax-deductible, as you'd expect. Even the computer games were there to help us work off all that testosterone and aggression, weren't they? The place usually contained more people there to advise us or tutor us on stuff than it did us actual hedgies. We had personal trainers, an in-house ma.s.seur, fine-wine advisers, bespoke personal-scent consultants, grooming and presentational experts, lifestyle and diet gurus, yacht brokers, fencing instructors and personal shoppers arriving from Harrods or Jermyn Street every couple of hours or so with stuff they thought would suit us (no time or inclination to actually go to the shops or mix with the plebs).

Not to mention an account with a very discreet top-of-the-range escort service based a couple of streets away for when all that testosterone needed another sort of outlet. We had a special room for that too that we called the canteen, though the joke was some guys took it at their desk. I was slow to start using that particular service. Never paid for it before, so it was like a pride thing? Only there'd be times when you'd be sitting there in front of the screens and feeling suddenly h.o.r.n.y and knowing a fabulous-looking girl who needed absolutely no chatting up or dining or alcoholic lubrication or talk of Where do we think this is going? Where do we think this is going? or even cuddling was only a phone call and maybe ten minutes away and even though it was a week's wages for some w.a.n.ker it was only petty cash given what we were making. Daft not to really, know what I mean? Like fast food, only really quality fast food. or even cuddling was only a phone call and maybe ten minutes away and even though it was a week's wages for some w.a.n.ker it was only petty cash given what we were making. Daft not to really, know what I mean? Like fast food, only really quality fast food.

Lot of toot taken too. Not so much by yours truly but the other guys got wired into it. I was like the sommelier of the office, though, know what I mean? We had very good contacts though mostly the dealers weren't people I'd mixed with, the turnover being what it is in the industry, but I was always the one they came to to check it was good stuff, which it almost always was. Stamp of authority, me. I should have issued certificates, charged.

When Chas, the other senior guy from TT who'd left with me to set up FMS in the first place retired to raise kids and thoroughbred racehorses I realised I was actually the oldest of the people in the office, and I was only in my early thirties. FMS indeed.

And we had our own financial advisers, believe it or not. We could make it and we could spend it (with a bit of help see all the above), but putting it to best use, saving for a rainy day, that was another area of expertise. I mean, obviously we had a pretty good idea what to do with the loot, hundred times better than your average Joe Mug in the street, but there were people who specialised in that sort of stuff, so you listened to them. Tax shelters, write-offs, offshoring all you could, putting stuff in trusts which in theory were controlled elsewhere and just doled out what you needed if you asked nicely (ha ha). Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland...

In the end we were paying less tax than our Paki cleaners. I'd drive through the clogged and teeming streets of west London and look at all those pa.s.sing faces thinking, You mugs, you f.u.c.king mugs You mugs, you f.u.c.king mugs.

Some of us were genius mathematicians. Not me, obviously. We split into two lots, really. There were the instinctive hedgies like me who just had a feel for what was going on and put ourselves about, keeping eyes and ears open and calling in and doing little favours here and there, and the Quants, the pure numbers guys, the mathematics wizards who in another stupider age would have been mouldering away in some ancient pile of stones in Oxbridge, inventing new numbers and burbling on about f.u.c.k knows what and doing nothing useful for society. We put them to work and paid them more money than even they could count. Then there were the programmers. They were a sort of subset of the maths guys, working on stuff that none of the rest of us even started to understand but that made everything work even more efficiently and let us make even more money.

The lease on the property next door came up. We bought that, knocked through, upped the numbers. Place became a computer centre. Had to install industrial air-conditioning plant to get rid of all the heat that the machines produced.

Guess what? Made even more money. Cars, flats, Mayfair townhouse, a nice little eight-bed new-build in Surrey, lots of hols, and girls girls girls. Still no call to make me start earning that 10K a month. Not that I needed the money, of course, but it was sort of a tradition by now, know what I mean?

Still, it always gave me an ever so slight funny turn whenever I saw it on the statement.

10

Patient 8262

I think it was our Philosophy tutor at UPT who said something which I took for granted (or, just as likely, didn't bother to think about) at the time and have only lately begun to find worrying, now that I have had all this time to think about it. It was this: Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted. think it was our Philosophy tutor at UPT who said something which I took for granted (or, just as likely, didn't bother to think about) at the time and have only lately begun to find worrying, now that I have had all this time to think about it. It was this: Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted.

Solipsism, he told us, was in a sense the default state of humanity. There was, arguably, a kernel of us that always believed that we personally, our own individual consciousness, was the only thing that really existed and that nothing else mattered. That feeling we have certainly that behaviour we exhibit of utter selfishness as a child, absolutely demanding (beginning as an infant, when we are paradoxically all-powerful due to our very helplessness), transfigures into the common adolescent intuition that we are invulnerable, almost certainly marked out for something special, but in any event simply not capable of dying, not in our present gloriously fresh state of youthful primacy.

Armed forces at war, our tutor pointed out, are full of barely mature individuals who are perfectly convinced by the proposition It Won't Happen to Me, and that, significantly, this applies to many who have no serious religious faith predisposing them to such wildly optimistic and irrational self-centredness. This is not to say that there aren't plenty of others who know perfectly well that It Can Happen to Anybody, or that somebody who started out feeling special and invulnerable cannot change into somebody who is rightly terrified by the randomness and capriciousness of fate especially military fate but the vast majority are convinced, despite the evidence all around them of that essentially uncaring arbitrariness, that nothing bad will happen to them.

It might be said that we never entirely shake off this feeling, no matter how many of our illusions we lose in later life or how let down, abandoned and irrelevant we may feel as age extracts its various tolls from us. Of course, this persistence did not in any way mean it might actually be true. We had to a.s.sume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit.

The tutor's point, though, was to provide a kind of check on the wilder excesses of philosophical investigation. Of course it was always interesting and sometimes worthwhile to speculate on highly outre propositions and explore exquisitely rarefied and unlikely ideas, but that ought not to distract one overmuch from the mainstream of philosophical thought, or indeed reality.

Whenever one was struck by a previously unlikely-seeming idea that had come to appear plausible or even sensible, one ought to apply that test: was it inherently any more likely than solipsism? If solipsism seemed to make just as much sense, then the idea could be dismissed.

Of course, the proposition that nothing or at least n.o.body else in the universe really existed could never be disproved from first principles. No evidence that might be produced was capable of convincing somebody fully and determinedly holding this idea that they were not the only thinking, feeling thing in existence. Every apparently external event could be consistently accounted for through strict adherence to that central hypothesis, that only one's own mind existed and that one had therefore made up simply imagined all apparent externalities.

Now, our tutor pointed out that there was a weakness in the hard-line or extreme solipsist's position which came down to the question why, if they were all that existed, they bothered to deceive themselves so? Why did it appear to the solipsistic ent.i.ty that there was an external reality in the first place, and, more to the point, why this one specifically? Why did the solipsist appear to be constrained in any way by that supposedly physically non-existent and therefore utterly pliable reality?

Often, in practice, one would be talking to the solipsist concerned in a sheltered inst.i.tution or outright lunatic asylum. Why did they appear to be there, with all the restrictions such establishments tended to involve, rather than living some life of maximally efficient hyper-pleasure a G.o.d, a super-heroic master-figure capable of any achievement or state of bliss through the simple act of thinking of it?

How this argument affected the individual solipsist apparently depended entirely on their degree of self-deception and the history and development of their delusional state, our tutor informed us, but the depressing truth was that it pretty much never resulted in a eureka moment and the solipsist now happily convinced of the existence of other people returning to society as a rational and useful part of it. There was inevitably some underlying psychological reason why the individual had retreated to this deceptive bastion of selfish untouchability in the first place, and until that had been successfully addressed little real progress towards reality was likely.

But do you start to appreciate my concerns? Here I am, lying in my hospital bed, relatively powerless and certainly obscure, unheeded by almost everybody, of merely pa.s.sing interest even to those charged with my care, and yet I am convinced that I am merely hiding, biding my time before I resume my rightful place in the world indeed, in the many worlds! Before this I had a life of adventure and excitement, of great risk and even greater achievement, of unarguable importance and prominence, and yet now I am here, an effectively bed-bound nonent.i.ty who spends a lot of the time asleep, or lying here with my eyes closed, listening to the ba.n.a.lity of the clinic going on all around me, day after almost unchanging day, remembering or imagining my earlier life of dashing, daring feats of elegance and style, and positions of importance and great power attained.

How likely, really, is it that these memories are real? The more vivid and spectacular they are, the more likely, perhaps, that they are dreams, mere notions, not the set-down traces of actual historical events. What is most likely? That these things happened, threaded through my life like some charged conducting wire spun through the drab fabric of my existence? Or that doubtless under the influence of some of the drugs prescribed by the Clinic seemingly as a matter of course I have used a febrile, undemanded-of mind with too much time to think and too little happening in the common weft of reality to distract it to conjure up a theatre of colourful characters and exciting events that flatter my own need to feel important?

I could easily believe that I am mad, or at least self-deceiving, or at the very least that I have been so, and that only now am I beginning to grasp the reality of my situation, my plight. Perhaps these very thoughts are the start of the process of me dragging myself out of this pit of lies that I have dug for myself.

And yet, where did all these traces come from? Where could they have come from? Whether they are genuine memories of actual events which occurred in the real world, or even several real worlds, or whether they are stories I have told myself, where must they have come from? Could I really have made them all up? Or is it not more likely that their very variety and dazzle indicated that they must genuinely have happened? If I am so ba.n.a.l and ordinary, where did these absurd fancies appear from? I must have had some life before I ended up here. Why should it not be as I appear to recall?

I think I can remember a common enough upbringing in a world no more exotic than any might appear to an outsider. A city, a house and home, parents, friends, schooling, jobs, l.u.s.ts and loves, ambitions, fears, triumphs and disappointments. All seem present and correct (if a little vague, perhaps due to their very ordinariness). All in a minor key, though. All humdrum, everyday, unremarkable, that's all.

Then my true life (as I think of it) commenced; my entry into the many worlds and l'Expedience, my dealings with persons and events that were anything but ordinary. That was when I became the me I was, even if I am, temporarily, a pale reflection of that person now.

I shall be that person again. I know it.

But you can see why I might be worried. You, who might be a part of me, or a future self.

The Transitionary Did I do what I think I just did? Surely not. If I did, I'd be the first. (Or not, of course. Maybe it happens all the time but they keep it secret. This is the Concern we're dealing with here. Secrecy comes as standard. But wouldn't there be rumours?) Could I have just flitted without septus? That isn't supposed to be possible. You must have septus, the drug is absolutely necessary, even if it is not entirely sufficient, if an individual is to transition between realities. I was out of the stuff. They'd taken the emergency pill out of my hollow tooth and taken the tooth itself for good measure. I was unconscious but it must have happened because the tooth was gone.

Or, it occurs to me, I swallowed the pill in a lucid interval between the smack in the face in the plane and waking up tied to the chair which I don't remember. Or maybe it went down my throat by pure chance when they punched me. The punch in the face could easily have dislodged it; I swallowed it and they didn't know I had. They'd have needed a bulky piece of kit like an NMR scanner or something to have a chance of locating the pill inside my body, so even after they found the hollow tooth...

But they said they had had found the hollow tooth, and removed the pill. Why lie about that? Didn't make sense. And why the post-flit hangover? I didn't even know who I was for the first few seconds, and my head still hurts. Never had that before, not even in basic training. found the hollow tooth, and removed the pill. Why lie about that? Didn't make sense. And why the post-flit hangover? I didn't even know who I was for the first few seconds, and my head still hurts. Never had that before, not even in basic training.

Still, even with bits that didn't add up right, that was a far more plausible explanation than somebody accomplishing a septus-free flit. I had to go with the must-have-swallowed-it-by-accident scenario; I'd just got lucky, once again.

Anyway, whatever: I am naked, hardly presentable to the outside world, so the first thing to do is find some clothes. I try the light switches by the door as I pad out of the great ballroom, but nothing happens. Pausing at the tall double doors to the anteroom beyond, I listen for any sound that might indicate I am not alone in the Palazzo Chirezzia. Quiet as a tomb. I shiver as I cross the anteroom and hall, making for the central staircase. The air is cool but it is the air of ghostly desolation all these rolled-up carpets, this sheet-wrapped furniture and gloomy light and smell of long abandonment that truly affects me.

I try one of the grand bedrooms on the first floor, but the wardrobes and cupboards in the dressing room are empty save for mothb.a.l.l.s sitting in little nests of twisted paper, or rolling around with dull and lazy clicks in drawers. My reflection stares back at me through the shuttered gloom. Another bland-looking man of generally medium build, though reasonably well-muscled.

On the second floor, one room holds a wardrobe with various sets of clothing, some of which might be my size, but the clothes look antique. I go to the window, crack the shutters and look out. The people I can see in the calle running along the side of the palace look to be dressed in colourful, relatively slim-fitting, moderately heterogeneous clothes.

I would guess I am in a fairly standard late-twentieth or early-twenty-first-century Degenerate Christian High-Capitalist reality (a Greedist world, to use the colloquial). The fragre certainly feels right. Probably the same Earth I visited before, when my little pirate captain tried to recruit me, or near as dammit. If I did flit away from torture, without septus, through sheer desperation, then a familiar world, one I'd visited before and felt comfortable in, but not one they'd expect me to resort to, is where I would head for automatically.

Calbefraques might have seemed the obvious destination; you might think, why didn't I just wake in my own body, in my own house in the trees looking out over the town beneath? Because for years I have known I might turn traitor in deed as well as thought, and prepared for it mentally, telling myself that in any transition under duress or in a state of semiconsciousness, the place I thought of as home would be the last place I ought to aim for.

All the same, I would not have thought I'd end up here.

The clothes in this wardrobe are fancy dress, I realise; ancient costumes for b.a.l.l.s and masquerades.

Three rooms later I discover men's clothes of the appropriate era and that fit. Just dressing makes me feel better. There is no hot water in the Palazzo Chirezzia; I wash myself from a bathroom cold tap.

There is no electric power either, but when I remove the sheet from the desk in the Professore's study and lift the telephone I hear a dialling tone.

But what to do next? I stand there until the phone starts making electronic complaining noises at me. I replace it on the cradle. I'm here without money, connections and a supply of septus; conventionally the first thing I ought to do is establish contact with an enabler or other sympathetic and Aware, clued-in soul, to put myself back in contact with l'Expedience and to locate a source of septus. But I'd only be putting myself in jeopardy, handing myself back to my earlier captors and my gently talking friend with his sticky tape, if I do. I have been faced with the choice Mrs M always said I would be faced with and I have made my decision. It is a big thing that I have done and I am still not entirely certain I have jumped the right way, but it is done and I must live with the consequences.

However, the point here is that I will play into the hands of those I oppose if I take the most obvious route and attempt to contact a normally accredited agent of l'Expedience in this world.

The most important thing is to get my hands on some septus. Without that, probably, there's little I can do. Certainly I appear to have flitted, once, without the aid of the drug. However, it was in extremis, uncontrolled, impromptu (a surprise even to me when it happened), it was to a semi-random location and it resulted in considerable discomfort as well as a state of profound confusion I did not even know who I was initially that lasted quite long enough to have made me extremely vulnerable in the immediate aftermath of the flit. Had there been anybody who wished me ill present at that point, I would have been in their power, or worse.

For all I know I had that one spontaneous flit in me and no more perhaps some residue of septus had built up in my system that allowed me to make that single transition, but is now cleared out, exhausted and even voluntarily putting myself in another situation as terrifying and threatening as being suffocated while tied to a chair would fail to result in anything more remarkable than me p.i.s.sing my pants. So, I need septus. And the only supplies of it in this world, as in all worlds, are supposed to be in the obsessively wary and inveterately paranoid gift of the Concern.

However, there ought to be a way round this.

I run my hand over the sheet covering the seat by the telephone. Very little dust.

I sit and start entering short strings of numbers at random into the telephone keypad until I hear a human voice. I have forgotten almost all the Italian I learned last time so I have to find somebody who shares a language. We settle on English. The operator is patient with me and finally we establish that what I require is Directory Enquiries, and not here but in Britain.

The Concern has bolt-holes, safe houses, deep-placement agents and cover organisations distributed throughout the worlds it operates most frequently in. As far as I was aware I knew about all the official Concern contacts in this reality, though of course it would be naive to a.s.sume there would be none that had been kept from me.

However, I also knew of one that wasn't an official Concern contact because it had been set up by somebody who wasn't part of the Concern proper at all: the ubiquitous and busy Mrs M. So she had a.s.sured me, anyway.

"Which town?"

"Krondien Ungalo Shupleselli," I tell them. I ought to be remembering the name correctly; we are solemnly a.s.sured in training that these emergency codes should be so ingrained within us that we ought still to remember them even if we have, through some shock or trauma, forgotten our own names. This one has been thought up, probably, by Mrs Mulverhill rather than some name-badged Concern techies in an Emergency Procedures (Field Operatives) Steering Group committee meeting, but, like the official codes, it ought to work across lots of worlds and languages. It will probably sound odd in almost all of them, but not to the point of incomprehensibility. And it should be far enough removed from the name of any person or organisation to avoid accidental contacts and resultant misunderstandings with possible security implications.

"Sorry. Where?"

"It may be a business or a person. I don't know the town or city."

"Oh."

I think about it. "But try London," I suggest.

There is indeed a business answering to that name in the English capital. "Putting you through."

"... h.e.l.lo?" says a male voice. It sounds fairly young, and just that single word, spoken slowly and deliberately, had been enough for a tone of caution, even nervousness, to be evident.

"I'm looking for Krondien Ungalo Shupleselli," I say.

"No kidding. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while."

"Yes," I say, sticking to the script. "Perhaps you might be able to help."

"Well, that's what this is all about, isn't it?"

"May I ask to whom I'm talking?"

A laugh. "My name's Ade."

"Aid?" I ask. This seems a little too obvious.