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Moh hesitated, wondering whether anything nastier than a message might arrive. He decided that, since the Kalashnikov firmware had withstood everything ever thrown at it, there was little risk. There was not the slightest possibility that his reading the message would give its sender any trace of his physical location. In a sense he wouldn’t even be reading it here; his agent programs would have automatically done a search of the standard maildrop host machines as soon as he’d linked into the communication net. He hit Enter.

No pathway listing; pretty good anonymity. Just:

You wrote:

Donovan I got a problem with Cat shes

left the hospital and is’nt tracable.

Can you delay the Geneva Court bisines

until I get this sorted out. Please axcept

my apologies for offending you’re org it was

just a personal thing with Cat I was pist of

with her working for the CLA because she should

of known better. I know the CLA are good fighters

and we have always treated hostages and

casualties etc by the book.

I appreciate that, and I understand your problem, but I must insist that it is *your* problem. The challenge has been issued and I cannot retract it without further possible loss of respect. Privately, I agree to delay any appeal to the Geneva Convention court system but in the meantime the call for a citizen’s arrest must stand until you personally claim a ransom for Ms C Duvalier the aforesaid person to be in your (nominal) custody at the time. In normal cases a settlement between our respective organizations would suffice but this has become a question of the good name of both Ms Duvalier and myself.

Regards

Brian Donovan

Carbon Life Alliance

Registered Terrorist Organization #3254

Go to the ANR, Logan had said. The idea had its merits, not least that it would get him out of the whole mess with Donovan. Still leave the comrades in it, though – that was the problem. At some point he might have to approach the ANR in any case, although what they would make of his story was anybody’s guess.

Moh turned and stepped out of the booth. Jordan and Janis looked up at him, but he nodded absently and ignored them. Asking them to keep a lookout had been careless: it wasn’t what they did for a living, or what they habitually did to keep on living. He flipped his glades down and made a slow sweep of all he could see.

The streams of people entering and leaving the mall had, if anything, thickened. Smaller groups wandered around the outlying stalls in the building’s shadow or in the harsh sunlight. The only breaches of the peace going on were knots of Neos swaying back from their lunchtime drinking sessions, raucously singing assorted national-communist anthems.

In the distance, traffic on the old flyover was stationary. Nothing unusual in that – it was a public road – but…

Some kind of commotion in the shanty-towns piled up below the road. Moh unclipped the gunsight and held it up, patching the image to his glades. Typical settlement scene, lots of visual clutter: the distracting diversity of the shacks, clothes-lines sagging across yards and paths, diverted power cables strung all over the place, aerials on jury-rigged pylons, grey gleam of sewage streams. In among it all, the gaudy colours of variegated costumes and flapping rags on…people moving, fast, scattering and scurrying from…

A spread-out line of black-clad, visored figures striding steadily through the narrow lanes. Kingdom cops. Moh could hardly believe the sight until he remembered that this wasn’t legally part of Norlonto at all. It still seemed outrageously provocative of the Hanoverians to march in like this – the area was if anything more anarchistic than the anarchy around it.

He whirled around, calling to Janis and Jordan to look over there, and started checking for any reaction. Nobody’d noticed yet, or they were taking it calmly. Glancing from group to group he saw a familiar face in the crowd – couldn’t be, wrong walk – wait a second, never saw her walking, why…

His attention, and a moment later