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But a minute passed, and she still hadn’t done it. It wasn’t fear that Dee and Leo would kill her when they discovered what she’d done. They probably would, but she didn’t care about that.

The reason she hadn’t killed him, she realised, was that she still wanted some questions answered, and if she killed him, she’d never know.

‘You think it’s a crime,’ Baskerville said softly.

‘Don’t you?’ she asked, angry.

‘I suppose it is. But what’s wrong with crime? I’ve always thought the world should be run along Mafia lines. When the Soviet Union fell, the Mafia took over. As a soldier. I hated to see gangsters and pimps running the country. But they paid good money, at a time when the government couldn’t even pay its own workers, let alone provide for anyone else.’

He suddenly seemed quite tired.

‘Areas controlled by criminals have far lower crime rates, that’s the irony.’

‘They rule by terror. They charge protection money.’

‘And governments rule by default, and charge taxes. I tell you what, my dear, if a gang tried demanding forty or fifty percent of people’s income, they wouldn’t last very long.’

‘There would be anarchy. Who would be in charge?’

‘Whoever made the streets the safest, whoever could supply the most of what people demanded. It’s the free market, you should appreciate that.’

‘It’s not what the majority want.’

‘Yes it is. You don’t vote for someone who looks good on the datanet and who isn’t quite as awful as the other chap. But you do get someone who knows the local area, someone who wants to look after it, someone who’s got an interest in keeping the local businesses running. Not like the Eurozone, where someone who’s never even been to your country decides to close the factory that’s your town’s only employer because he needs to tidy up a balance sheet or reduce a subsidy budget.’

‘Those people are accountable.’

Baskerville shook his head. ‘No. They’re elected, but that’s hardly the same thing. Do you think they have the real power? Do you know who controls the world, Anji? Do you know who it is who guides the markets, regulates supply and demand? Follow the money, follow the flow of capital.’

Anji readied herself for some racist bile. If Baskerville – or whatever his real name was – really had grown up in post‐Soviet Russia, she could excuse him it, she supposed. Their civilisation had literally collapsed, a superpower that put the first man into space had been reduced to lawlessness in a very few years. She didn’t know how long it had taken to rebuild. It would have been many years after her native 2001, and they weren’t that many years after 2001.

So, he’d blame the ‘international financiers’, or the ‘Western Bankers’, or maybe he’d come right out and just say ‘Jews’. Or he’d blame some other immigrants, or dole scroungers, or single mothers. He’d blame someone who was manifestly doing even worse, getting even less, out of the system.

‘No one,’ Baskerville said quietly. ‘That’s the most frightening thing. There are all those conspiracy theories about secret cabals running the world. My conspiracy theory is that they’re a myth, put about by people who desperately don’t want their citizens to realise that there’s no one in charge. There’s no one flying the plane, and no one knows where it’s heading.’

‘The market –’

‘The “market” is a myth. No… it’s just a cosy way of saying “the situation we’re in”. It’s a way of talking about the flow of capital, the trading of shares and commodities, the IFEC computers and traders pressing a button or running a program that sells a trillion euros worth of shares because the President Minister of the UK is looking a bit peaky.’

Anji shuffled a little on her feet. There was a bit more to it than that. Admittedly not much more than that, though.

‘It’s not a perfect system. You have an alternative, I suppose?’

Baskerville nodded.

‘Actually, yes I do.’

* * *

The Turkish government was a little surprised to receive word that the President