Jon Grimwood - Felaheen

"Your name's not on today's approved list," he said apologetically. "But I'll call his PA." The nod he gave the other three was perfunctory, more a reminder to stay alert than any apology for leaving them.

"Your boss?" Sally asked.

One of them nodded.

"Doesn't like doing door duty, right?"

Another nod, more emphatic this time.

"All hands to the pump I guess. What with anarchists trashing everything of value . . ."

Behind Sally, Bozo turned a snort of laughter into a hasty cough and swallowed his smile inside a hastily grabbed silk handkerchief. The handkerchief was blue. It matched his stolen suit.

"There's a problem . . ." The returning guard sounded more apologetic than ever. "Your grandfather's not here at the moment."

"Godfather," Sally corrected. "My godfather. What about Mike Pierpoint?" That was the fiftyish WASP she actually needed to meet, the one with receding hair and a weight problem. She knew this because she'd seen a shot of him in the back of Harpers, a moon-faced academic in rimmed glasses out of his depth at some black tie do for ethical genome research . . .

"He's on the phone," the guard recited from memory. "He sends his apologies and asks you to wait."

"No problem," said Sally. Sliding past the guard, she strolled towards a bank of lifts and punched the correct button without needing to look at the list displayed in a brass frame on the wall. A puff piece in the local business press had already revealed the right floor.

Gazing down from his twenty-second-floor office, billionaire Charlie Savoy can almost see the tiny corner shop where his father . . .

"He meant wait down here." The guard's voice faltered as Sally turned, her face suddenly worried.

"If we must," she said, sounding less than happy. "Although I'd feel safer waiting in his office."

They rode an Otis to the twenty-second floor, thanked the lift politely when it wished them a profitable day and had to wait for Atal to get over his attack of giggles. As the doors shut Atal was still grinning. The man who came out to greet them wore Gap chinos, canvas deck shoes and a striped sweatshirt with an anchor on the pocket.

"Annie . . ."

Sally shook his hand warmly, holding her grip for a second longer than strictly necessary and the man smiled politely, but only after noticing her nipples.

"Beautiful dress." Mike Pierpoint blushed as he said this.

"Dior," Sally agreed. "A present from my father." And the bald man nodded as if he knew who she meant.

"I don't think we've met?" he said, his question just the wrong side of anxious.

"We did," said Sally. "But you won't remember. I was much younger. More of a kid really."

Mike Pierpoint wanted to say she was still a kid, Sally could see it in his eyes. But he resisted the urge, helped probably by the half glances he kept throwing at her tits.

"At a baseball match or company barbecue," Sally added, busking it.

"Barbecue," Mike said with certainty. "It must have been a barbecue. Your godfather hates baseball with a passion."

Sally smiled.

"I don't want to keep you," she said. "If you can just show me the way."

The room was everything Wu Yung had led Sally to expect. A huge corner office full of heavy furniture and carpeted in burgundy, with blue washed-silk wallpaper between faux marble half pillars that supported a panelled ceiling probably made from embossed card, although a century's worth of paint would need to be cut away before anyone could be sure. In the six-foot drop between the ceiling's ornate coving and a slightly less ornate picture rail, bare-breasted nymphs hit stucco tambourines and flicked their hair in a static wind.

Charlie Savoy's desk was equally imposing. Solid not veneer, made from some wood so oxblood it was undoubtedly endangered.

Atal nodded. "Meranti," he said, "from the shorea tree." He looked at the wood, considering it carefully. "Probably thought they were buying teak."

On top of the desk stood an old-fashioned PC, a stand-alone Dell, lacking even a modern connection. Beside the PC a newish laptop slotted into a docking bay that bled wires in a waterfall to the floor. Atal switched on both machines without Sally having to say a thing.

"Too worried about being phreaked to go infrared," said Atal, pointing to the wires, his dismissive grin that of someone who'd once read a complete stranger's dear john e-mail across a crowded railway carriage, using a basic Van Eck box.

"The fire door's out there," Sally told Bozo as she tossed him a pack of Marlboros. "Check it's not alarmed and go have a cigarette. Warn me if that creep comes back."

"I don't use tobacco."

"That's right," said Atal, snapping on a wristband and letting its antistatic wire hang free while he struggled into new surgical gloves. "Don't you know his body is a temple?"

"Yeah," said Sally, "and yours is Disney World."

With Bozo standing guard by the fire door and Atal busy unscrewing grey boxes, Sally made a slow circuit of Charlie Savoy's office and let her instincts run free. She was big on instinct. Instinct was what steered an albatross through storm-torn skies and let salmon do feats of navigation only long-dead Polynesians could imitate; it was what let Aboriginal kids remember routes they'd travelled only once, years back. Instinct was survival hardwired and way more important than most people allowed.

In fact, Sally was pretty certain that even human belief in free will was hardwired and she didn't have a problem with that contradiction, she had a problem with what it allowed humanity to do to the rest of the planet.

So if she was Charlie Savoy, local boy made extremely good courtesy of a Ph.D. in microbiology and a couple of lucky guesses, where would she stash all those valuables she couldn't risk taking home?

Assuming she could intuit what valuables such a man might want to stash . . .

Dirty money, maybe. Negatives featuring random acts of senseless sex? Quite possibly from what she'd heard, but she doubted he'd mind having his prowess exposed to the world. It would be something technically brilliant but deeply illegal. Sally was counting on it.

Wu Yung was already in line for whatever Dr. Savoy kept on the hard disk of his stand-alone, which, for all she knew, was kiddie porn, but Sally intended to take spoils for herself. Charlie Savoy was one of the bad guys and somewhere there'd be leverage, something to make him stop.

There always was. Look at her father.

In the corner of Savoy's office stood a filing cabinet made from mahogany with solid brass handles. When Sally opened the top drawer she half expected it to be lined with padded silk like a coffin. Instead she got bundles of yellowing papers in hanging files gone brittle with age. Accounts mostly, a few ancient tax returns. He'd been rich for longer than she'd been alive.

"Story of my life," said Sally.

"What?" Atal glanced up, the cross-blade screwdriver in his hand a fetching shade of orange. He'd shoplifted it from The Wiz along with his antistatic band the day before. "What's the story of your life?"

"All of this." Sally gestured to a row of bronze figures that lined a long ebony sideboard near the filing cabinet. A Roman slave with a rope round his neck lay dying on a poorly carved patch of earth. A half-naked bronze dancer, wearing a wisp of tin over her pudendum pirouetted on one leg, both arms raised above her head.