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‘Uh-huh,’ muttered the guard’s voice. ‘The Cats.’

‘Hey!’ another voice broke in, ignoring all comm discipline. ‘We got one of your exes!’

‘Lookout One to unidentified,’ Kohn said firmly. ‘Clarify message.’

‘Red Crescent truck to Lookout, repeat. Patient Catherin Duvalier has employment history of work on your team.’

Catherin Duvalier. Gee Suss! ‘One of your exes’, indeed.

‘She was freelancing,’ Kohn lied. ‘Where are you taking her?’

‘Hillingdon Hospital. You want her released on recovery?’

‘Like hell,’ Kohn choked. ‘Don’t even put her in the bank. We’re keeping her this time.’

‘Secure ward, got you.’ The medics slammed the rear door and leapt into the ambulance, which screamed off round the perimeter road like they had a brain to save. Fucking cowboys. Subcontractors for the Muslim Welfare Association in Ruislip. Probably trained by veterans of Cairo. Always assume incoming…

Behind him he heard a heavy, dull crump and the song of falling glass. ‘You missed the backup fuse,’ he snarled at the gun and himself as he flattened to the roof. But then, in the sudden babble in his phones, he realized it was not his bomb.

The crank raid had been a diversion after all.

Janis Taine lay in bed for a few minutes after the diary woke her. Her mouth was dry, thick with the aftertaste of ideas that had coloured her dreams. Just outside her awareness floated the thought that she had an important day ahead. She kept it there and tried to tease the ideas back. They might be relevant.

No. Gone.

She swallowed. Perhaps, despite all precautions, minute traces of the hallucinogens at the lab infiltrated her bloodstream, just enough to give her vivid, elusive but seemingly significant dreams? More worryingly, she thought as she swung her legs out of bed with a swish of silk pyjamas and felt around for her slippers, maybe the drugs gave her what seemed perfectly reasonable notions, sending her off down dead ends as convoluted as the molecules themselves…Par for the course. Bloody typical. Everything got everywhere. These days you couldn’t keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect –

She heard the most pleasant mechanical sound in the world, the whirr of a coffee-grinder. ‘Pour one for me,’ she called as she padded to the bathroom. Sonya’s reply was inarticulate but sounded positive.

It was an important day so she brushed her teeth. Not exactly necessary – she’d had her anti-caries shots at school like everybody else, and some people went around with filthy but perfect mouths – but a little effort didn’t hurt. She looked at herself critically as she smoothed a couple of layers of suncream over her face and hands. Bouncy auburn hair, green eyes (nature had had a little encouragement there), skin almost perfectly pale. Janis brushed a touch of pallor over the slight ruddiness of her cheeks and decided she looked great.

Sonya, her flatmate, was moving around in the kitchen like a doll with its power running down, an impression heightened by her blond curls and short blue nightdress.

‘Wanna taab?’

Janis shuddered. ‘No thanks.’

‘Zhey’re great. Wakesh you up jusht like zhat.’ She was making scrambled eggs on toast for three.

‘Gaia bless you,’ said Janis, sipping coffee. ‘How much sleep have you had?’

Sonya looked at the clock on the cooker and fell into a five-second trance of mental arithmetic.

‘Two hours. I was at one of your campus discos. It was phenomenome…fucking great. Got off with this guy.’

‘I was kind of wondering about the third portion,’ Janis said, and immediately regretted it because another glacial calculation ensued, while the toast burned. The guy in question appeared shortly afterwards: tall, black and handsome. He seemed wide awake without benefit of a tab, unobtrusively helpful to Sonya. His name was Jerome and he was from Ghana.

After breakfast Janis went into her bedroom and started throwing clothes from her wardrobe on to the bed. She selected a pleated white blouse, then hesitated with a long skirt in one hand and a pair of slate calf-length culottes in the other.

‘Sonya,’ she