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He shot a knowing glance at Janis. ‘Our representatives were impressed with your aplomb in not mentioning the incident.’

Janis flushed, with pride or embarrassment.

‘And then something happened,’ Van continued. He told them about the Clearing House (‘You mean it really exists?’ Kohn interjected) and what had gone on there. Kohn felt a grim relief to learn that others besides himself believed he had somehow triggered the emergence of a new AI. Not crazy after all.

It was, he thought, a rather self-centred relief.

He held his tongue between his teeth when Van mentioned the pattern of extracts of biological data from Van’s company’s subsidiaries, and when he described the retrieval of US/UN records: how his name had led them to the files on his father. Why Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s and Donovan’s plan to find him had fallen through was that they hadn’t known Van was even higher in the councils of the Lao Dong than he was in the company. Within minutes, Van had alerted the ANR, who had put their nearest agents – the nurse and the Body Bank teller – on to the task of getting Cat out of the way and pulling Moh in. Van had then caught the next shuttle to Sydney and the suborbital to Glasgow.

‘And thence to the liberated area,’ he finished, smiling through a puff of smoke. ‘Now, perhaps you will be so good as to fill us in on how you have experienced recent events.’

Kohn fumbled for one of Van’s Marlboros, taking his time about lighting it while thinking fast. There was no way to make sense of any of it without telling them everything, including about the Star Fraction. Would that betray a secret Josh had wanted to keep from the ANR, even from his own Party and International? It was too late for that, he realized – whatever secret agenda Josh had built into the Black Plan, whatever organizations he’d set up and…programmed…they were active now, running in the real world. It had to be assumed they were robust, and that trying to understand them was the best anyone could do. So he told the two men everything, with Janis helping to keep things straight. MacLennan frowned when they mentioned the Black Planner, and seemed troubled enough to raise the point when they’d finished.

‘There are no Black Planners,’ he said, with unshakable finality. ‘That is…a piece of disinformation we put about. The face this man Jordan saw must have been an interface of the Black Plan itself. Not one I can recall seeing,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘but, ach, the system has its own way of doing things.’

‘What, exactly, does the Black Plan do?’ Janis asked.

Moh leaned forward, listening intently as MacLennan explained the system in functional terms. Blocks of code, remembered from the hours and days in front of his father’s screen, came and went in his mind like the apparently irrelevant imagery he’d sometimes noticed shadowing his thoughts while he worked on a tricky calculation; a penumbra of the numbers.

The Plan, they were given to understand, took information in from sources that ranged from stock-market indices to cadre reports; sifted it through news-analysis routines; crunched the hard numbers in the CAL system, a vast analytical engine with Leontieff matrices at its core; and drew its conclusions in a twin-track process: an expert system, whose rules had built up over the years from condensations of political experiences, and a neural net that made up new rules, spun out new hypotheses as it went along.

‘And then we come to the sharp end. We like to call it just-in-time destruction,’ MacLennan concluded, a trace of humour in his solemn, patient voice. ‘We assemble the components for any particular action as late as possible before the action, and we try to keep those components innocuous in themselves as long as possible. When they all come together, bang. The business with the parachutes is one example.’

‘Where,’ Moh said slowly, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, do all these programs reside?’

MacLennan shrugged. ‘They’re distributed. There’s no one centre, no big computer