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‘Now that,’ she said with a sharp look, ‘is a very good idea.’ She reached past me and flipped a switch. Shuddering, firing-up noises came from the walls. ‘Half an hour,’ she said, leading me into her living-room. It had one double-glazed window overlooking the street. The view extended past the replicated streets of the district, over the older prefab town and out to the steppe.

A central-heating radiator stood cold beneath the window-sill, an electric heater threw up hot dry air. Insulation was what kept the room warm; it was thickly carpeted, the walls hung with rugs, their patterns – blocky like the pixels of an early computer-game – a display of traditional Afghan designs of helicopter gunships and MiGs and AK-47s. Between them were political and tourist posters of Kazakhstan’s history and geography (the ISTWR itself being deficient in both), and old advertisements of rocket blast-offs and nuclear explosions. A television screen, hung among the posters, was tuned, sound off, to a Bolshoi Luna ballet; floating flights and falls, the form’s illusions made real under another sky. Huge antique Sony speakers high up on over-loaded bookshelves pounded out Chinese rock.

An old IBM PC stood on the table beside Myra’s hand bag and a stack of coding manuals. A glance over their titles suggested that she’d had to encrypt her message by hand. No wonder it was so brief: it must have taken days.

She made me a breakfast, of cereal and yoghurt and bitter Arabic coffee. We chatted about the flight, and about the changes in our lives since we’d last met, several years earlier in an Alexandra Port bar. She still saw her ex-husband, the dashing officer she’d once subverted, and I got the impression that something was still going on between them, but for months he’d been in Almaty, supposedly negotiating with the KPF. She implied that he was being kept out of the way.

‘So is this place still a Trotskyist state?’ I asked.

Myra set down her cup, her hand trembling slightly.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s…just like Russia when Lev Davidovich was in charge.’

That bad? I raised my eyebrows; she nodded.

‘And you’re not in the government any more?’

‘Not for some time.’ She smiled wryly.

‘I’m sure you still have a lot to say,’ I said. ‘Does anyone listen to you?’ I cocked my head.

‘They sure do,’ she said. ‘I can’t complain.’

She looked at her watch. ‘Your shower is ready.’

The shower was in a stall off her bedroom. I laid my clothes on the foot of her bed, carefully – I didn’t want them creased. As I smoothed out my jacket my fingers brushed the hard edge of my pistol, a neat, flat plastic piece no longer or thicker than my hand. After a moment’s thought I took it out and as I got into the shower laid it across the top corner of the stall. Then I turned the shower on and stood in its steamy spray, grateful that this at least was built to spec. I had barely rinsed off my first soaping when the splash-door opened, and Myra stepped in.

‘It’s an old trick but it works,’ she whispered in my ear, rubbing my back. ‘White noise is white noise, no matter what they use.’

‘You really think you’re being bugged?’

She laughed. ‘It’s what I would do, in their position.’

‘Who’s “they”? What’s going on?’

She picked up a tiny disposable razor and an aerosol that extruded pine-scented foam. She lathered my face and began to shave it, thus ensuring the fixity of my gaze. Just as well, because it almost took lip-reading to make out her whispered words in the steady hot rain, and there was no time for her to repeat herself or for me to interrupt.

‘You know there’s something going on,’ she said. ‘I left that message weeks ago, because I thought if anyone was gonna investigate, it’d be you.’ She grinned. ‘And I was right. OK, here’s the story. Deep technology – nanotech, genetic engineering, AI and so on – was restricted under the Yanks, and it’s still under attack in most places, what with the bloody Greens and religious zealots and shit. Two things happened. One, places like this took in scientific refugees and let them get