Progenitor E-Book

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 566

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The Slavonic Federation's secret service persuades a geneticist to access the brain of a visiting American financial wizard at the head of a trade delegation. The geneticist, who is seeking funds for research to improve human mental capacity, is unaware that he is involved in a bizarre plot to topple his country's government. The plot goes badly awry and leads to the collapse of the global economy and a descent into anarchy. Years later, when the world has reverted to a kind of neo-fascist politically correct normality, a Danish billionaire is persuaded to fund research by the same geneticist into the genomic source of intelligence with a view to creating a superior strain of homo sapiens. However, the billionaire is more interested in creating an intellectual elite with himself at its apex. Things don't turn out exactly as planned, and a contest ensues for control of his industrial empire against a background of government corruption and a media culture that has given 'spin' a new meaning.

Leseprobe

For Jytte and Susan

Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part One

The leather-coated driver hauled open the door. “We’re here,” he said.

Professor Lev Tolstoy must have looked confused; given the nature of his business, he had not expected the driver to bring him to the Agency for Foreign Trade.

“Don’t worry. It’s the right address. Buzz off up the stairs before I splatter you.”

The driver patted the armpit of his baggy coat and leered nastily at Tolstoy to show that he had probably been joking.

Tolstoy climbed out of the black, boxy Zil limousine—a reconstructed icon of a glorious, if distant, Soviet past—and plodded up the steps to a circulating door, which was heavy and hard to move. He entered a hall, once part of a grand palace but now an open-plan office in the service of foreign trade, which must have been slow, judging by the lack of activity.

“Professor Tolstoy?”

A frock-coated manikin had popped up from somewhere. “Please follow me.”

After several flights of stairs, Tolstoy, breathing more heavily than usual, was ushered into a stateroom of disconcerting elegance. The middle-aged man who rose to greet him stretched and yawned as though he had just taken a nap. He was not your usual apparatchik. Apart from being dapper, he could smile.

“I’m Brovnichenko, head of—well, you don’t really need to know. Can I offer you some tea?”

“Tea would be nice,” said Tolstoy, relieved at not being required to down the standard glass of brutal vodka.

Brovnichenko poured two cups of steaming black liquid from a samovar, placed them on a low table, and invited Tolstoy to sit on a chaise longue, clearly the star piece of furniture in the room; Brovnichenko himself balanced on a lowly leather pouf.

The humble informality was no doubt meant to be reassuring; yet Tolstoy was all too aware he was dealing with a representative of the notorious Committee for State Security.

“If you’re going to sup with the Devil, you need a long spoon. Is that what you’re thinking?” Brovnichenko slid one of the cups towards Tolstoy. His face puckered as though he were trying to stone an olive with his tongue. “You have a gold medal in biology. Is that what you want to see me about—some breakthrough in biology of use to the clandestine services?”

As Tolstoy stated his business, Brovnichenko had every appearance of being an attentive listener, nodding sagely in the right places and smiling benignly the rest of the time, but he seemed to have no idea of the evolutionary implications of Tolstoy’s research.

“It’s all very interesting, I’m sure, but why are you approaching the Committee with this synapses-enhancing potion you’re trying to perfect—this mind amplifier, as you call it?”

Tolstoy cleared his throat. “The Committee have access to secret funding which they can deploy at their discretion, and they must have an almost endless supply of political prisoners upon whom I could experiment.”

Brovnichenko wagged his finger close to Tolstoy’s face. “You’re not supposed to know about the availability of secret funding, and I’m not sure I can officially condone your ethics.”

“No harm would come to the prisoners,” Tolstoy assured him. “On the contrary, if the experiments are successful, their intelligence will be greatly enhanced.”

“They’re not exactly the sort of clientele we would want to endow with enhanced intelligence—most of them are too clever by half as it is.”

“Perhaps it would make them realise the error of their ways.”

“If it didn’t, we could always put them on the payroll.”

“I take this harmless banter to be an encouraging sign.”

“The encouraging sign is I haven’t thrown you out.”

Brovnichenko began to pace the floor with slow, ostrich-like solemnity.

“Are you familiar with brain scanning and computer technology?”

“Of course—I use them in my research. But they don’t fall within my area of expertise.”

“What would you say if I told you that we had found a way of scanning a brain and uploading its essence into a new kind of computer?”

Professor Tolstoy shrugged as he always did when he thought laymen were confusing technology with science fiction.

“We plan to upload the brain of a very important person into a biological computer. We’ve made a couple of trial runs, of course, on a few unsuspecting volunteers, but we can’t achieve proper definition of the essence of their brains. It’s like trying to take a snapshot in the dark without a flashbulb.”

Being a practised fund raiser, Tolstoy knew better than not to humour a host who was taking himself too seriously.

“Yes, it would be.”

He must have sounded facetious.

“What I’m telling you is no more fantastic than what you’ve been telling me,” Brovnichenko said crossly, then, looking less severe, held out his arms in a kind of welcome. “What would you say to all the funding and all the political prisoners you need as a quid pro quo?”

“As a quid pro quo for what?”

“For boosting the synaptic networks in the brain of this very important person.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“If you boost his synaptic networks, which you tell me is the whole point of your research, it will be like using a flashbulb to take a snapshot of what’s inside his brain.”

“The whole point is that I haven’t perfected the technique. It might kill him.”

Brovnichenko led Tolstoy to the door, arm around his shoulder. “I’ve every confidence you can do it.”

Tolstoy had forgotten that preposterous bribes were a way of life for erstwhile members of the nomenklatura.

“Don’t look so worried,” said Brovnichenko. “You’ll get your funding, won’t you?”

“It would not be considered at all impolite to smoke a cigar on the balcony between courses,” she suddenly volunteered in her strangely guttural English.

“Goddammit, Natalia, that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

The way she supported Volvo’s elbow when he rose, as though he were some kind of invalid, added to his annoyance, although he knew it was crass of him to blame her for the state-authorised drivel she had carefully been translating from Russian into English, down to the last hyperbole, for an hour and a half from her seat just behind his.

The balcony belonged to an epoch of imperial princes in operetta uniforms and their high-busted ladies. Now, it was the refuge of a sprinkling of sashed ambassadors and their ageing, painted spouses, and groups of medal-bedecked Slav functionaries, some of them loud and drunken.

Volvo walked to the parapet, to where the suburbs of Moscow lay clustered and waiting in the distance. As he lit his cigar, he nodded a greeting to the President of the Slavonic Federation, who was listening, with the semblance of interest, to a youngish-looking foreigner sucking, very importantly, on a pipe.

Volvo raised an eyebrow.

“Who’s the guy boring the pants off the President?”

Natalia’s fingers brushed his sleeve.

“That’s Nigel Grew. British politician. He’s into agriculture. Supposed to be an economist of sorts. They say he’s very capable.”

“What’s he doing in Moscow?”

“On a fact-finding tour of European capitals. Just flew in from Brussels. They say he’s in the running for a top job on the Commission.”

“So the question is whether the bastard’s making polite small talk or trying to sell off the European Union’s food mountains. Well, the son of a bitch is too damned late.”

He took a tighter grip on his cigar and scowled at nothing in particular, hoping the appearance of being good and sore would scare off any wandering nitwits bent on engaging him in conversation.

Brovnichenko pulled Grew towards him with lazy urgency. “You know, not everybody in the Federation likes this agricultural deal with the Americans.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Grew said, and he frowned to lend import to his words.

“Perhaps we could influence events in some way,” Brovnichenko said.

Grew shrugged. He knew when to shut up and listen.

“Matters are at a very delicate stage,” Brovnichenko continued. “Anything that discredited the American delegation might easily benefit the European position.”

“I was under the impression that Volvo was home and dry.”

“He certainly thinks he is, but I think I can find a way of scotching the deal,” said Brovnichenko.

“Why would you want to scotch the Volvo deal against the wishes of the Federation President?”

“That need not bother you, Mr Grew, for the moment. Volvo must be disgraced. We must make him guilty of a grave offence. That should be easy because her real job is to provide sexual favours.”

“Whose real job?”

“The interpreter’s.”

“The United States government won’t let themselves be conned by a sex scandal. Believe me! It’s a question of dollars and cents—and the farm lobby.”

“It is a question of first things first,” Brovnichenko said, plopping a lumpy mess of caviar onto a sliver of toast. “I have already reviewed our options. One is the dainty Russian interpreter, and the other is you and your charming wife.”

“Me and my wife?”

“I think she deserves the chance to prove herself worthy of the escalating standard of expense-account living with which you provide her. You must persuade her to participate in an orgy. You must participate yourself in order to put Volvo off his guard.”

“I must protest in the strongest possible terms.”

But in the end, Brovnichenko got his way, for once he had heard the plan, Grew had to admit to himself that it had a kind of unassailable logic. And as Brovnichenko had said: it was a question of first things first. Besides, it might be fun.

“Don’t worry,” Brovnichenko assured him. “The faces of you and your wife will be covered with black nylon stockings.”

Natalia tugged at his sleeve.

“Brovnichenko says that, if you would like to leave, he will order the car.”

Volvo pursed his lips.

“Perhaps you better get him over here first, little lady.”

A small informal party was being held later that evening at the head office of the Agency for Foreign Trade. Volvo had been reluctant to go along. A millionaire banker and chairman of the Fed for twelve years, Volvo was nothing if not astute. He knew he was a prime target for an exercise in blackmail. The significance of his having been provided with a young, vivacious, perfumed and personable lady interpreter was not lost on him (it would surely have been a man, had Volvo had other sexual proclivities), and now they were going out of their way to get him to a vodka-swilling binge for a session of candid camera.

“Mr Volvo! Paulus!”

Natalia had returned with Brovnichenko and a mock-Cossack waiter straining under the weight of an enormous tray loaded with champagne glasses. The absurdity of it all was tiring.

Brovnichenko almost begged Volvo, in a jovial kind of way, to join the party at the Agency.

“It wouldn’t be polite to leave in the middle of dinner,” Volvo said, taking a glass of champagne from the tray.

“I’ve invited Nigel Grew and his wife,” said Brovnichenko. “They’re an amusing couple. He’s an agricultural economist with the European Union.”

“An economist! A priest of the dismal science! An agricultural economist! That does sound like a barrel of laughs.”

“Oh, I don’t know … If we pretend to be holding a top-secret conference on agricultural policy, you can get rid of your bodyguards. You can let your hair down.”

No breath of scandal had ever touched Volvo: he was propriety personified. But it hadn’t gotten him the American presidency. It never would because he was not a native-born American.

It irked him because he could have done something worthwhile with the job.

Much later, as Volvo staggered from the vestibule, buttoning his coat against the damp, a forbidding limousine trundled forward.

Five of them crowded into the back: himself, his petite interpreter, the Britisher who was into agriculture and his floozy of a wife, and Brovnichenko. They were all pretty drunk by then, and Volvo didn’t feel like giving a damn about anything. Perhaps it was time to take Brovnichenko’s advice— let his hair down.

“The Volvo debacle leaves us both highly exposed to reprisals,” Professor Tolstoy said, as he rummaged with his forefinger in a crumpled cigarette packet.

Brovnichenko decapitated a daffodil with his umbrella. It was a fine late-April day, and the trees that lined the avenue were beginning to bud.

“I didn’t reckon on the Americans being that smart. Once they whiffed a conspiracy to roll back the old-crony neo-capitalism of our new Federation President, they stopped whining about Volvo’s abduction. The President’s prestige took a beating, but he’s a very resilient man. We’d all better look out when he makes his comeback. He’ll want revenge.” He pointed his umbrella playfully at Tolstoy, while he squeezed an imaginary trigger.

Brovnichenko liked to exude cheerful avuncularity. When it suited him, he could seem like a sympathetic listener deserving the trust of normal people. This aptitude was wasted on Tolstoy, who had quickly realised that it was all an act.

“What were you going to do with the data you downloaded from Volvo’s brain?”

“I was going to stick it to the financial markets and become the first gentleman oligarch,” said Brovnichenko. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think the download would work.”

“It wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t made me boost his synaptic responses,” said Tolstoy. “What’s worrying me is that they’ll eventually find out about your conspiracy and my part in it. Depending on how the cards fall, that could mean dire punishment.”

Tolstoy finally managed to retrieve a bent cigarette from the packet. He straightened it tenderly and kindled it.

Brovnichenko idly destroyed another daffodil with the ferule of his umbrella.

“Then we must make the cards fall to your advantage— and mine—by removing the evidence. No one must be left to snitch.”

Tolstoy didn’t like the sound of that. “You know about my report on the interpreter Natalia Markova.”

(He had examined her for pregnancy at the Moscow University Hospital. She was destined to be the mother of twins—a detail he had not mentioned in his report. They had been fathered, however, by two different men—one was Volvo, whose DNA proved it, and the other had to be Grew. Heteropaternal superfecundation was the medical term, and it was common in humans, although more common among cats and dogs. In Natalia’s case, the two embryos displayed exciting characteristics that could lead to some very interesting experimentation. It was a unique opportunity he could not let pass.)

Brovnichenko smiled in a gloating sort of way. Of course he knew about the report. Pregnant or not, she was expendable as far as he was concerned.

“Nigel Grew and his hare-brained spouse aren’t a problem,” he said, patently unmoved by Tolstoy’s plea on behalf of Natalia. “Not only is it in their interests not to talk, they’ve opened themselves to blackmail. Volvo’s another matter: he’s still hidden in the lunatic asylum, but he’ll be hopping mad. If I release him, he’ll make sure everybody finds out, so we might have to arrange an accident. It’s a pity your potion didn’t kill him like it was supposed to.”

Tolstoy scratched a shred of imaginary stray tobacco from his tongue to give himself time to think. The potion should have killed Volvo: it was still killing everyone else Tolstoy had tried it on, but Volvo was unmistakably alive and deserved to remain that way after what he had been through.

“Volvo’s the only identifiable person, and the man’s finished. He’s in disgrace. The footage you put out on the web saw to that.”

“I should hope so! But he strikes me as being vindictive enough to tell the President how I saved the economy of the Slavonic Federation from collapse. If the President learns that I have a biological computer containing all of Volvo’s financial expertise, he will put two and two together. He will realise that my spectacularly successful market operations are not born of my singular financial talent but of algorithms created by Volvo’s uploaded brain. I will no longer be indispensable, except as a target for the firing squad for trying to bring the President down.”

Tolstoy’s own possible execution as an accessory to the murder by Brovnichenko of an American government official, who remained prominent even if disgraced, was not in Tolstoy’s scheme of things. He made a last plea.

“Volvo’s personality has changed. Since I boosted his synaptic responses, he’s become almost blissful. He says it’s because of his enhanced insight. He told me, and I quote, that he was no longer a scum-sucking son of a bitch. He’s not a threat.”

“You’re probably right, but why take the chance?”

They continued their walk along the avenue in silence, Brovnichenko believing he had put the mind of his partner in crime at rest.

No deal engineered by Volvo could have endured Brovnichenko’s brilliant piece of sabotage.

It was clear that the new government of the recently formed Slavonic Federation needed to be taught a lesson. For how could they dare allow footage to be posted on the web of the high-ranking head of an American delegation cavorting at a sex orgy and, then, even more embarrassingly, running buck-naked around Red Square pursued by Slavonic security operatives? How could they dare arrange his abduction to a secret asylum for treatment of the insane?

Had the truth been known, the Slavonic government, who were responsible for Volvo’s safety while on their territory, had told a long string of stonewalling lies to hide their genuine lack of knowledge of his whereabouts.

But since the truth wasn’t known, mutual suspicion had led to a breakdown in communication and the Slavonic-American agricultural accord had been torn up.

By the time it became evident that the Volvo incident was a move in a domestic political intrigue by persons as yet unknown to topple the Federation President, it was too late for the Americans to resurrect the accord: Nigel Grew had moved swiftly to ensure the signing of the Agricultural Protocol between the European Union and the Slavonic Federation. He had turned the tables on Volvo, who had been disgraced, while he, Grew, had landed the fat job on the European Commission and was now—six months later— on his way in Brovnichenko’s Zil limousine to another pleasurable orgy at the Agency for Foreign Trade.

Or so he thought. How are the mighty fallen and their jobs put on the line!

“Volvo’s disappeared into the Committee’s private asylum for the criminally insane so he’s out of reach of the media, but it won’t take them long to track down that little interpreter,” said Brovnichenko innocently enough. “She was quite a cracker, wasn’t she?”

“It doesn’t matter what she says, I was wearing a nylon-stocking mask and can’t be identified.”

“What about your wife?”

“Same answer.”

Brovnichenko languidly switched on the screen in the back of the limousine and poured himself a drink. “This sequence hasn’t been posted on the web yet.”

Yet. What did he mean by that?

“Aren’t you going to offer me some champagne?” Grew asked

“I don’t want you to choke.”

This seemed to be an ominous invitation for Grew to take a closer look at the screen. He recognised, as only a husband could for her face was completely hidden, a back view of his naked wife doing interesting things to Paulus Volvo. The camera panned down her shoulders to rest on the tattoo in the middle of her back.

“It’s a Chinese proverb followed by a lucky number,” said Grew in an attempt to appear blasé.

“I’m afraid not. It translates as The Happy Moon, Reykjavik's only genuine Chinese Eatery. The lucky number’s the company registration.”

“My God! Wait a minute! What’s that number on the sole of her foot?”

“Your wife's Danish, isn’t she?” It was a poisonous question. “It appears to be a Danish ten-digit CPR number.”

“What’s that?”

“Every Dane is assigned at birth a personal identification number from the Civic Personal Register. It’s unique and follows them for the rest of their life.”

“Why’s she got it tattooed on her foot?”

“Quick identification in the event of an accident? Ask her!”

It became instantly clear to Nigel Grew that, if Brovnichenko chose to release the video, his wife could be exposed as a participant in the Volvo orgy from the number on her foot. It wouldn’t take long for some snide political commentator to infer that Grew himself was the man in the nylon-stocking mask.

Grew had always considered the job on the Commission to be a comfortable base for an attack on the high ground of British politics, from whence he could move on to the top echelons of the European Government. But he knew that, the moment he was implicated in the Volvo scandal, the Party would dump him. It would be goodbye to Brussels: they would shunt him off to some UN agency in faraway New York or Botswana, and, after his retirement, let him be the unpaid chairman of committees on inner-city decay or police corruption or anything else that did not require action.

He reconsidered the fate of Paulus Volvo and shuddered. It was nemesis. Volvo’s great career had been cut down in full bloom and another, his own, was about to be callously nipped in the bud by that Slav bastard Brovnichenko, who had cynically exploited Grew’s legitimate ambition by involving him in setting up Volvo in the first place.

He cursed himself for being too trusting, but that of course was what came of being a visionary—visionaries were always blind to the venality of people like Brovnichenko.

It turned out that Brovnichenko did not want much. “All you’ve got to do is get rid of the interpreter. Without her as a witness, you—we— can brazen it out. I’d do it myself, but the President’s men have got me under surveillance.”

Captain Seamus Nolan Fenwick of the Irish Army sulkily prodded the lonely ice cube bobbing in his third double Tullamore Dew.

It was early in the forenoon, and the Pool Room was almost empty. He liked the Pool Room. It reminded him of the gambling palaces of Las Vegas, where he had once been after doing a survival course in the Mojave Desert. The clientele were less raucous and the lighting more discreet, but there was no daylight or clock to remind him of the passage of time.

The Pool Room was Fenwick’s local. It was the first of the three restaurants at the Moscow Diplomats Club to open in the morning. Officially, it served breakfasts and light luncheons but, since it was well stocked with alcoholic drink, it had degenerated—at least in the eyes of some—into a hangout where people like Fenwick could brood over the wreckage of their careers while embarking on, or recovering from, a bout of drinking.

Captain Fenwick had been an almost daily guest since his tour of duty had started. He had developed a reinforced addiction to drink, partly because he had very few duties as Irish military attaché. His posting to Moscow had been a put-up job to forestall embarrassment in high places after the business with General Boland’s wife, so he had resigned himself to sitting things out until he was ordered back to be court-martialled for conduct unbecoming.

“Do you mind if I sit down while I catch my breath?” said an altogether too breezy voice.

The track-suited newcomer was perspiring slightly, and was still panting after his session in the club gymnasium.

Fenwick noted the expensive track suit and the soft leather exercise boots. The gear had not seen much use.

“I’ve been getting over-sedentary of late,” said the man. “It’s all new. Only bought it yesterday,” he continued, as though divining Fenwick’s thoughts. “I thought I’d start out with some light exercise, but I’m afraid there’s no such thing.”

Although Fenwick’s sojourn in Moscow had turned him a little vinegary and he had long affected the dourness expected of a man who had once spent months of privation as an officer with a UN peace-keeping force, he possessed the innate sociability of the drinking man.

“Would you like to join me?” he asked, as he studied the man in the track suit.

“Just coffee and a doughnut for me, thank you.”

That was not a good start, Captain Fenwick was thinking, as he swatted the air with his free hand to attract the waiter. He decided to chance his arm.

“Bring me a bottle and a bucket of ice.”

Within an astonishingly short time for that country, the waiter—a spruce lad for a Russian, very fastidious, occasionally seen patting the sleeked-down hair and running his tongue over the pencil moustache, and not long on the job—was gliding over with a silver tray upon which was a fresh ice bucket and ice tongs, and a full bottle of Tullamore Dew. He laid everything out before Fenwick geometrically.

“What are you hanging about for?” Fenwick growled, as he reached out for the bottle.

The waiter hesitated. He had been warned of Fenwick’s reputation for getting drunk, forgetting what he had ordered, and disputing the bill. He wanted his money at once.

“Allow me!” said the man in the track suit, waving a high-denomination banknote.

Fenwick warmed to him. “You new here?” he asked tentatively.

“Just passing through. I’m up from Brussels to sign a few papers.”

How bloody casual! Fenwick thought.

“The name’s Grew.”

“Christ! Grew from the European Commission?”

“The very same.”

The whiskey gurgled from the neck of the bottle as Captain Fenwick topped up his glass.

“Cheers!” he said, nodding deferentially.

“Be my guest and forget the coffee and doughnut. I wonder, though, if I could prevail on you to do me a small service. I’ll make it well worth your while.”

The look of initial suspicion on Fenwick’s ruddy Irish countenance dissolved immediately

Picking the lock had been easy. It would be a long wait, and the office was chilly. But it beat the cupboard in the corridor, where Captain Seamus Nolan Fenwick of the Irish Army had been hiding until after the watchmen had put in their token appearance before going back to their cards and vodka in the guardhouse near the entrance to the hospital.

He wrapped his overcoat tightly around him and plonked himself in a comfortable couch.

The cleaners, shuffling unexpectedly in with their clanging pails and stringy grey mops, had strained his powers of improvisation.

“I’ve got an appointment in ten minutes,” Fenwick had said improbably, but it didn’t matter because they couldn’t understand English.

The two moronic women had looked him over, took the cigarettes he had proffered, and had started slopping dirty water around the floor.

They had left without a word. For a long while, he could hear them pottering about. Then there was silence, except for creaking beds and tickling coughs from the wards, and the steps of solitary walkers on distant nocturnal streets.

It had been a long time since he had murdered anybody.

He dozed off. In the dream-state between waking and sleeping, he told himself to be careful. This was an important operation; slovenly execution could jeopardise it—might even derail his new career with the European Union before it got underway.

He was awakened by the sound of a key being gently inserted into the door.

He was on his feet by the time the dishevelled old man and the obviously pregnant woman had entered the room. They caught sight of him and stopped short—she with a frightened yelp.

Fenwick smiled reassuringly.

“Natalia Markova? I’m on a special mission for the European Union.”

The dishevelled old man stepped forward protectively. “I’m Professor Lev Tolstoy. Mr Grew said he would come in person.”

“There’s been a small change of plan,” Fenwick said, moving towards them as his hand tightened around the revolver—an antiquated, totally untraceable colt concealed in the big shoot-through pockets of his old Austrian lodenfrey overcoat.

Fortunately for the girl and the professor, Fenwick was unable to raise the colt to the firing position because his self-indulgent lifestyle in Moscow had made the overcoat a tighter fit than he remembered.

“I won’t have to spoil my overcoat after all,” he said, still smiling in a way he thought was reassuring, as he tried to extract the cumbersome weapon from his pocket.

It accidentally went off and the bullet passed through his femoral artery.

The lift smelt of cooking-fat and cabbage. How very bloody Russian!

The automatic doors groaned open. Grew stepped out quickly.

The lift doors sneaked shut, leaving him in pitch darkness. He was groping for the button that would reopen the lift door when the light clicked on. He saw a white-coated man in an open doorway. The man was older than Grew had expected and surprisingly unlike a secret-police operative.

“I am Lev Tolstoy,” the man said. “I am a professor.”

The eyes were mild, if determined, under the ragged grey brows, and a weary smile seemed to hang on the man’s lips.

“Your assassination attempt has failed.”

Grew had a contingency plan that had never yet failed him. “I’ve got three blank cheques drawn on a Luxembourg bank, which happens to have branches in Panama, Grand Cayman and the Netherlands Antilles.”

“I want nothing for myself,” Tolstoy said.

That wasn’t going to fool anybody, especially not Grew: alleged altruism was a not uncommon negotiating ploy.

Tolstoy lit a cigarette and held it between a thumb and forefinger as he watched the smoke curl. “We’re not supposed to smoke in here, but the fire sensors don’t work.”

He carefully opened a match box, and scraped a little ash into it from the end of his cigarette.

“Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity,” Tolstoy said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If I were William of Occam, I would tell you that I am about to speak the truth, and advise you not to assume that things are not what they seem.”

“I’m sorry, but ...”

“Your Irishman Fenwick was very talkative.”

“I believe he’s led a colourful life,” Grew said defensively.

“You’re referring, I suppose to traipsing around the boggy interior of Ireland on survival courses where he learnt to bite the head off a rabbit. Or perhaps you’re referring to his fraternisation with war criminals during his stab at anti-insurgence or to his affair with the wife of his commanding officer, which is going to lead to his imminent discharge because they’re very strait-laced about that sort of thing.”

Grew had the feeling he was about to be nailed like a butterfly to a board.

“I didn’t ask for his life story. I just asked around. I knew he was rotten as soon as I spoke to him. I’m a good judge of character.”

“Your Captain Seamus Nolan Fenwick,” the professor continued “has confessed that you hired him to assassinate a pregnant woman who happens to be one of my patients.”

“I thought people like him were trained to sustain torture.”

A look of distaste passed over Tolstoy’s face. “Please Mr Grew. This hospital is well-supplied with psychopharmacological drugs. Besides, not even the police bother to use torture nowadays—unless they’re in a terrible hurry.”

Grew didn’t try to deny anything. Tolstoy had him by the balls, and there was no use in prolonging the agony.

“I think we should pretend he’s suffering from cancer instead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound …he was badly hurt and nearly died, but luckily I was on hand… and I think we should pretend he wants to return to Ireland for treatment.”

The professor crushed out his cigarette.

“I hope you’re listening Mr Grew, for you will have to provide the logistics. Captain Nolan is being held at a lunatic asylum, together with two people I think you know—Natalia Markova and Paulus Volvo. I will take you there and procure their release. There is a disused airfield in the vicinity where you will have a small chartered aircraft waiting for them—and me.”

“Why Ireland? Nobody goes for treatment for anything in Ireland.”

“That’s where I happen to have my connections. There’s a hospital there I always use in these cases. It’s very reliable. Natalia Markova will give birth to twins. She will leave with one and leave the other behind. She will obtain diplomatic immunity by marrying Captain Fenwick and be safe from extradition to the Slavonic Federation.”

In the end, everybody got something. Some got more than others, but that was the way of the world, and nobody had any right to expect perfect justice.

The professor had his guinea pig safely stashed away in a remote Irish hospital. Nigel Grew salvaged his political career and eventually fixed Captain Seamus Nolan Fenwick up with a newly created fat job as military co-ordinator for the European Union in London, where he was out of the clutches of the Slavs, who could be very pedantic about attempted murder— especially if they could turn it into a diplomatic crisis.

As for Natalia, she escaped to the West at the price of marriage to an unreliable dipsomaniac who was careless with firearms. But the life of a military co-ordinator’s wife was not disagreeable, as long as Captain Fenwick was content to leave her to her own devices—and he was. Indeed, he was.

She took her healthy son to London, and left the other in Ireland in the care of the priests and the nuns, just as Tolstoy had planned it.

The cemeteries are full of indispensable people. So Volvo’s enforced resignation should not have made a cedilla of difference to anyone but the journalists who owed their inflated salaries to writing about the rich and famous, and their supposed misfortunes.

The President of the United States was aware of this. He was a former theme-park proprietor, who owed his millions to an ability to pick able men to run his business for him. He would pick an able man to replace Volvo.

Admittedly, Volvo was a hard act to follow. It was generally agreed that it was Volvo who had saved the world’s financial system from collapse at the time of the global crisis. As chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, it had fallen upon him to orchestrate the rescue. Of course, he and his fellow central bankers knew that removing the huge debt overhang was beyond the wit of them all. But Volvo enjoyed one invaluable asset, enormous respect. People trusted him. Or, rather, he deported himself in a way that allowed them to pretend to do so.

Unfortunately, the importance of that kind of charisma was lost upon the American President. Although Maxwell Pierce, the President’s nominee as new chairman, was a quiet analytical professional, he did not instil the confidence that might have averted disaster.

It started innocently enough. Soon after Volvo’s fall from grace, a twenty-year old arbitrageur in a New York investment bank was giving a rundown on Maxwell Pierce to his opposite number in a London clearer.

“Nobody seems to know much about him,” said the arbitrageur. “Guess the media will start running features in a couple of days. Course, the appointment needs the approval of the Senate. No foregone conclusion. They’ll want this guy to be impeccable after the Volvo thing.”

It was the kind of conversation dealers indulged in after trades. They called it getting the feel of the market.

“Okay! Thanks and cheerio,” the London man said.

Then, as the American was putting down the phone, slowly, because he was studying his multiple-split-screen display, an item of news caught his eye. He whistled in surprise. “Jeez! The grand jury has indicted Pierce for murder.”

The London man, who was trying to find the three-month dollar-yen interest-swap rate on his own, no less hypnotic, electronic array, still had his phone to his ear.

“The new Fed chairman designate has been indicted for murder,” he shouted at the rest of the chaps in his dealing room.

It was not a wholly accurate statement; the subject of the indictment was not Maxwell Pierce but Marvin Pierce, whose wife’s freeze-dried carcass had been found in a ventilation shaft at a local ice-cream manufactory. It had been touch-and-go whether the indictment would stand due to the lack of forensic evidence tying the husband to the crime. If it was indeed a crime, for accidental death had not been outside the bounds of possibility, which accounted for the arbitrageur’s whistle of surprise.

In the dealing room of the clearing bank in London, there was a moment of silence. What had just been shouted across the room sounded so improbable that it cried out for verification. A ten-second phone call to New York would have been enough. But that was beside the point. The name of the game was to offload as many dollars and dollar-denominated assets as possible before the rest of the market got wise.

A phone call to New York was duly made, and a reliable source scotched the rumour of the homicidal Maxwell Pierce. A groan went round the London dealing room as the adrenalin ceased to pump, but they nevertheless went on selling dollars and dollar-denominated assets for a while on the assumption that the market would dip, and they could buy the lot back at a cheaper price. That was what arbitrage was all about for the dealers at the London clearing bank, who fully intended to turn the rumour of their own making into an opportunity to turn a profit.

Within minutes, those never-sleeping monsters begat of satellite communications and the digital computer, the global financial markets, had gobbled up the news that one of the big London clearers had caught the scent of something sinister.

Now Robo trading was the name given to the automatic sale or purchase of financial assets when the markets dropped or rose by a certain amount. It had been around for years and was originally known, more descriptively to the uninitiated, as programmed trading.

Across the world, while dealers slept in Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore; or sat, too petrified to interfere, before their flickering screens in Frankfurt, London and New York, thousands of computer programs began to issue sell-orders for US currency, US stocks, US treasury bonds. Worst of all, trillions of dollars’ worth of financial derivatives—those instruments hardly anybody, including bank executives, understood—suddenly looked like an exceedingly unlucky gamble. The American economy was about to be trampled underfoot by the stampede to sell.

All was not yet lost, however. Chastened by the experience of Black Wednesday, when a wave of programmed selling had caused stock markets around the globe to crash, the authorities had put mechanisms in place to suspend all computerised trading as soon as it reached a certain volume.

Within minutes, the offending computer programs were duly shut down, and the President of the United States immediately appeared live on all the television networks, assuring his fellow Americans, as Herbert Hoover had done in 1929, that the fundamental business of the country was sound, and promising to visit unspecified havoc on speculators.

The stampede had been brought up short, and the President’s show of bull-headed, stupid confidence had, seemingly, dispelled any doubts about economic vulnerability.

Then the President went and suffered a heart attack—on camera. As the presidential helicopter was alighting from the White House lawn, and even before anyone could be sure that the man was dead, the markets collapsed into a black hole of unreasoning panic.

That needn’t have mattered too much. Catastrophes occur regularly and are what keep financial journalists in champagne and foie gras. In a few days or weeks, the markets would have calmed down, if need be helped by injections of taxpayers’ money to resuscitate any ailing financial institutions.

Alas, there was a Chinaman in the woodpile in the person of the newly elected Chairman of the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic, a fanatical advocate of a return to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy as an antidote to the obvious failure, as he saw it, of new-fangled Chinese capitalism. He was fomenting nationalistic fervour in a bid to dominate the region. He had been hatching plans to invade Taiwan, and was already threatening Japan over some disputed islands in the East China Sea. Conflict loomed.

The one deterrent to the implementation of the Chairman’s ambitions was the United States, which was the guarantor of the status quo.

Americans felt it was their destiny to defend the free world, although it necessitated huge military expenditure and bribes masquerading as foreign aid. Successive administrations had attempted to hide the cost to the American taxpayer by selling treasury bonds on the international markets—in effect, borrowing money from foreigners instead of raising taxes at home.

In a simple manoeuvre, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party undermined America’s military might, or rather he made it superfluous, by ordering the immediate sale of the immense portfolio of American treasury bonds his procapitalist predecessors had accumulated over the previous many decades. The American currency became almost worthless in one fell swoop.

The neo-capitalist foundation of the Chinese economy was destroyed too, but that was what the Chairman wanted, and he still had his teeming well-disciplined millions to till the land and man the factories at cut prices.

It was the day of the Mega Crash. The day the American economy—and with it the global economic system—collapsed. Social anarchy, around the world, followed within a few months.

The democracies of the West never regained their hegemony and were forced eventually to discard some humanistic baggage in order to survive at all.

To the surprise of most economic analysts who still had a job, the Slavonic Federation rode out the crisis without excessive turmoil—some said because of the unexpected sophistication of its financial system.

Wiesbaden was depressing. Some ruined cities retain an aura of past glories. Not Wiesbaden. Not for Colonel Charles Lestrange.

He had been there before Nato had begun to fall apart, when they still needed a liaison officer to the American forces. Wiesbaden, for all its long history and culture, was for him a town of clip-joints where naked, goose-stepping maidens, wobbled their flesh while they marched and counter-marched to big-band renderings of the latest hits from the American charts, and where the ersatz champagne cost a bomb.

Now the clip-joints were gone, and the Americans were gone, and the German police had gone because they hadn’t been paid, leaving the streets to be roamed by armed gangs of young thugs.

He had never expected to see the place again but for orders to investigate a message that said: “British grunts, remnants of rearguard, held hostage USAF hospital Wiesbaden”.

The sky was overcast, and it was difficult to see where the smoke from the burning buildings ended and the clouds began. From up there, as the transport banked to make its approach to the runway, the fires were quietly pretty white and orange.

The lighting in the corridor was nervy neon tinged with blue. Appropriate for a military hospital.

The building looked sound enough, although it showed the signs of the neglect he had come to associate with crumbling military organisations.

Lestrange moved quickly down the corridor, checking the open doors on both sides. Deserted, so far.

They were making more noise than he cared for, thanks to Sergeant Wilkins, who didn’t like to tiptoe down corridors.

“You’ve only got another eighteen months to demobilisation, sergeant,” Lestrange whispered. “Keep it quiet.”

“Sorry, sir,” Wilkins answered gravely. “I shouldn’t underestimate these untrained civilians.”

“Sergeant, I don’t want to mistake your cockney humour for insubordination. Shut it!”

Sergeant Wilkins’ low hairline belied his intelligence—or confirmed his animal cunning. Lestrange was undecided.

After ten years with the Death Heads, Wilkins did not have a single scar. Ten years of minor wars, police actions against hostage takers, raids on terrorist camps, commando attacks on desert palaces—and nary a scratch. He should have been thinking about when his luck was going to run out, which was why Lestrange would have preferred to have been flanked by somebody with a nervous tic.

The wind rasped against a broken pane. From somewhere in the distance, the sound of electric guitars pitched high and faded.

Suddenly, Wilkins stopped and grabbed Lestrange by the shoulder.

“Hold on, mate!”

“I’m not your mate.”

“Sorry, sir!”

Wilkins, grinning infuriatingly, held his finger to his lips.

Lestrange forgot his irritation and listened hard.

Then he heard it. A rhythmic metallic click, click, clickety-click. He signalled Wilkins forward.

The central corridor they were reconnoitring was intersected at right angles by other corridors.

Wilkins, his back to the wall, slid silently to the next corner and peered round it.

The youth he saw siting on the floor with his back turned did not look much like a terrorist. He was dressed in a sweater and jeans and grimy sneakers, and he wore a big silver ring that he was banging against the barrel of his gun to the rhythm of distant rock and roll. Click, click, clickety-click.

Wilkins was behind the youth in a few silent steps.

Lestrange did not know more than a few words of German, and his prisoner’s English was halting, perhaps deliberately so.

“All right, Gunther! Where are you keeping the British soldiers?”

They had moved back two intersecting corridors.

“Soldiers—how you say it?—not to fight. Bandage—in the bed.”

The prisoner made a circling motion with his finger above his head. Wilkins grabbed him by the throat, and jammed him up against the wall.

“Now, what might that mean, sonny?”

Wilkins drew a short stubby bayonet from behind his back. The black-painted blade was very sharp. He inserted it into the prisoner’s nostril. The boy tried to suppress a sob as he felt the first trickle of blood.

“You Kraut bastards ought to learn to speak better English. If we misunderstand something, we might get upset.”

“Can you show us where they are?” Lestrange asked quietly, emphasising the sane and reasonable side of his nature.

Gunther began to nod furiously.

“Sergeant, take that bloody knife out of his nose. All right, all right! Take it easy! How many soldiers, soldaten, are there? Thirty? Thirty-five?”

“Not so many—ten maybe.”

Wilkins backhanded him in the mouth.”

“No, it’s true—ten, no more.”

“How many guards are there?”

Lestrange was still quietly reasonable.

“Three, sometimes four, sometimes five.”

Wilkins shook the boy violently, banging him four or five times against the wall, and then looked at Lestrange as if waiting for the order to continue.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“There is a doctor, a doctor—an American doctor!”

Lestrange turned the prisoner over to the two commandos guarding the intersection and took Wilkins aside.

“How do you assess this situation, sergeant?”

Wilkins gave his colonel the benefit of his ten years’ worth of front-line experience.

“We could be sussed at any time by some rebel bloke on the way for a piss. Assuming this lad can lead us to them, I think us four should hit them as hard and as fast as we can. We’ve got to use the element of surprise. We’re four. They’re five at the most. No sweat!”

The Americans had kept their medical supplies near the operating theatres and recovery wards in the bowels of the hospital, presumably because it was bombproof. The supplies were still there but the Americans were gone—except for the one mysterious doctor.

Gunther led them to the ward where the British soldiers were being held. The insurgents had probably thought they were defying a useless military ritual by not posting guards. It would prove to be a regrettable mistake.

“It would have taken us hours to find this place on our own,” muttered Lestrange. “Well done, Gunther!”

The boy looked grateful.

Lestrange edged along the floor to the chink of light between the doors, and peered cautiously into the ward.

The lighting was subdued, almost cosy. There were about twenty beds. More than half of them were occupied.

Most of Gunther’s ten soldiers were heavily bandaged. Some seemed to be making groaning or whimpering sounds, some seemed still as death. They were strewn on the beds lining one side of the room. That makes it a lot easier, thought Lestrange. Three men lay sprawled on beds against the other wall. They were passing a bottle of liquor between them. Two men stood in the aisle, facing the wounded soldiers. One of them, like the three men passing round the bottle, was toting a standard-issue Nato assault rifle. The other, a wiry, olive-skinned man with a moustache and close-cropped curly hair, was smiling broadly in a perplexed way.

“Listen, man! Let me give them some morphine.”

That must be the doctor, Lestrange thought.

“No way!”

“But why not?”

“Morphine is a valuable commodity on the street. Anyway, why should you care? You’re American. They’re British. They were the ones who shot the hostages.”

“Fortunes of war, man. They didn’t want to be here. They’re the soldiers of the new Roman army. The world’s falling apart. Back home in England they’d probably be doing the same as you. That’s why they’ve been sent. They’re the new Roman army, man.”

“The new Roman army! So that’s why I am here.” Lestrange hadn’t thought about it quite like that.

He signalled to Sergeant Wilkins, who still had Gunther pinned against the wall, that they were going in.

“Sorry, mate, duty calls!” whispered Wilkins, as he rammed the dagger up under Gunther’s ribs, just below the heart. There was a momentary look of bewilderment, and then a soft groan—almost a sigh—and the eyelids fell shut. Wilkins let the body slip to the floor, and an instant later was at Lestrange’s side.

Lestrange pointed to the door. Holding up two fingers, he mouthed the words: “One friendly.” Then he pointed towards the left, where the three terrorists lay slouching on the beds. He held up three fingers, then clenched his fist and turned it quickly as though wringing the neck of a chicken.

On his nod, Wilkins moved forward and kicked open the swing doors.

Wilkins' first shot hit the man who had been talking to the doctor in the cheek. Lestrange heard the doctor’s alarmed shout and saw him dive for cover. The commando crouching on Lestrange’s right got off a burst. The terrorist lying on the nearest bed stiffened as the bullets thudded into his abdomen. Then the commando’s line of fire was obscured by Wilkins and Lestrange as they leapt into the ward. Lestrange was conscious of the doors swinging shut behind him. He tried to locate a target, but the room seemed to be full of Wilkins’ back. Lestrange heard the crack of two neat shots being placed into the heads of the remaining terrorists.

Lestrange quickly took stock of the situation. The doctor was sprawled half way under a bed. He seemed dazed.

One of the ten wounded soldiers tried to rise. Half of his head was swathed in gauze, and his uniform was charred.

“We’ll soon have you out of here, men,” Lestrange said, as he helped the doctor to his feet.

“I’m Alfonsin—Dr Alfonsin.”

“I gathered that,” Lestrange said, pushing him gently towards the door. “Clue me up on the situation.”

“Clue you up?”

“Give me a status report.”

“Oh, yeah! Sure!” the doctor said. “Just gotta clear my head.”

Wilkins was going through the pockets of one of the dead terrorists he had just despatched. Lestrange turned as he ushered Alfonsin through the door. “Well done, sergeant.”

It was one of the few times he had complimented Sergeant Wilkins and, with all the regret of hindsight, Lestrange hoped it had been appreciated.

The explosion blasted Lestrange through the swing doors. He rammed into the soft body of the American doctor before losing consciousness.

He did not know how long he had been out, but the smoke had not yet cleared.

“An interesting problem,” said Dr Alfonsin, as he held the foot by the big toe between his thumb and forefinger. The boot had been blown off.

Lestrange was about to faint. He could feel no pain, just numbness. He began to laugh at the sight of the blood pulsing out of the stump at the end of his leg.

“Private, would you mind fetching a blanket,” Alfonsin said cheerfully to a wide-eyed commando with a blackened face. “He’s in shock.”

The commando ran back into the ward. The doors had been blown off their hinges, and Lestrange could see him frantically tearing at the bedding that was still tightly wrapped in that absurd military fashion around a mattress dangling from the remains of a cot.

Lestrange was grey with agony. One side of his face felt as though it had been smashed with a hammer, while his left leg felt as though it had been run over by a tank. The rest of him just throbbed.

Dr Alfonsin bent over Lestrange’s lacerated face.

“I’m sorry, colonel, but there’s no more morphine. It was destroyed in the explosion”

“You don’t look very damned sorry,” Lestrange said through gritted teeth.

“You lost an ear,” the doctor said. “But I sewed it back on. You also lost a foot.”

A cloud of anguish passed across Lestrange’s face.

“Don’t worry! I sewed that back on too.”

The doctor seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.

“You’re a surgeon?”

”Not exactly. I know the basics, of course, but you are actually my first patient under the knife.”

Dr Alfonsin began to examine his nails. He took a manicure-set out of his shirt pocket.

“The ear was easy, but it’s the part you’ll most hate me for. But not to worry. The main thing was to get it back on. The plastic surgeon guys’ll fix it up real good. You may also have some permanent damage to an eye. I haven’t touched that. Eyes are real specialist stuff.”

He began to push back his cuticles meticulously, before glancing down at Lestrange.

“Now, don’t worry, colonel,” he said soothingly. “Repairing a body is just like repairing a car. A mite more pernickety, that’s all.” He spread out his hands. “Anyway, it was great to have a chance to try out all that beautiful equipment.”

Lestrange felt suddenly very weary.

“What happened?”

“The guy with the beard—their leader—booby-trapped himself. Very fanatical. I might have guessed he’d pull a trick like that.” Alfonsin cocked his head to one side and smiled wryly. “I’m sorry, colonel, but I was dazed—knocked on the head. You know, you saved me,” he said, pointing at Lestrange to emphasise he considered that a matter of importance. “You pushed me through the door and took the blast. Pity about your sergeant. Not to mention the basket cases.”

“They’re all dead?”

Alfonsin nodded.

Lestrange looked around him. They seemed to be in some kind of airport lounge.

“This was the officers’ mess of the USAF base at Wiesbaden,” said Alfonsin, as if he had read Lestrange’s thoughts.

The shelf behind the bar was askew. The odd bottles of booze, some lying on their sides, underlined the desolation. The place had been abandoned in haste. Lestrange had not realised the extent or character of the Nato withdrawal. But then he had not had much time for satellite television, the best source of information for an officer in the field those days.

Dr Alfonsin filled two glasses.

“Your men must love you, colonel,” he said as he strolled back to where Lestrange was lying. “I told them the mission was aborted. You were unconscious, and I was the only other officer present. I was sure that’s what you would have told them yourself. I told them you had lost an ear and a foot, but that I could save you if I operated immediately. It would, however, mean delaying their departure for many hours. The Krauts might attack, damage the plane, and make retreat impossible. Who knows?”

He handed Lestrange one of the glasses.

“Cheers, colonel. It’s good Kentucky bourbon. And do you know what they said—those two enlisted men? ‘Carry on, sir!’ And I ain’t seen them since.”

“Sounds like desertion.”

“Actually, there’s been a whole lot of small arms fire. Something must’ve happened.”

The bourbon was not alleviating Lestrange’s pain. He needed the distraction of talk.

“What are you doing here? Your people are supposed to have pulled out.”

“You know how it is, colonel. Things can get a little untidy in this kind of situation. I should’ve been on that last plane, but I missed the flight. You wanna hear some music?”

“Music? I’m dying!”

Dr Alfonsin sauntered over to the dusty mess piano, swaying his hips like some faggot jazz musician.

“Not dying, Colonel. Not any more than the rest of us. Not yet.” And Alfonsin started out on some soothing improvisation.

“What did you mean, when you said we were like the new Roman army?” Lestrange asked as a distraction from the pain.

Dr Alfonsin shut the lid of the piano and slowly pirouetted on the piano stool, laughed, and pirouetted again.

“Look what the world has come to, colonel—in just a few lousy months. Money is worthless everywhere. The police have abdicated because nobody’s paying them. The gangs are taking over, because economics has regressed to barter, and the gangs understand that control of society lies in control of the market for goods. The value system’s broken down. We have a new order that fosters a kind of old-fashioned community spirit. Whole populations are forgetting national allegiances and embracing the nearness principle. Individual loyalty is focused on the church, the district, the gang ... Everywhere the common man is reverting to the long-lost values of the Middle Ages.”

Dr Alfonsin spun round on the stool one last time, lifted the piano lid, and bashed out a few resounding chords of what sounded like early Beethoven.

“Look what happened here, colonel ... You know what happened here? A German mob that didn’t realise that the Americans had left almost to a man, me being the man, attacked this base. As it happened, the remnants of a British regiment, on the way home from the Mid-East, had to make an emergency landing and found their transport under attack by a bunch of drunks and teenage delinquents.

“The British, having suffered a few casualties and not receiving support or succour from the German authorities, either civil or military, decided they had a war on their hands and proceeded to wipe out their attackers, and then a large band of mostly unarmed rioters, and finally a number of ordinary civilians unfortunate enough to be enjoying the privacy of their homes near the base.”

“What’s that got to do with the Roman army?”

Dr Alfonsin bounded from his chair, and began to pace the room. He seemed quite agitated, punching the air like an evangelist.

“The Romans,” he said, “recruited their troops from all over the Empire, but a soldier never served among his own people. They sent Britons to Germany and Germans to Spain. It was a key element in their strategy of suppression.

“Your guys were like Romans. They didn’t relate to the local people. They didn’t care who they shot. It would have been a brilliant piece of planning if they hadn’t been here by accident.

“They actually restored peace and discipline to this community,” Alfonsin continued. “They were thirty guys who couldn’t leave until their transport was fixed and refuelled. I was counting on a lift out of here with all the interesting narcotics. I was even prepared to split the profits fifty-fifty.”

“Thirty men, you say? Where are they?”

“Burned! Frizzled! Flame-throwers! The ten grunts in the ward were the only survivors, except for me. I was a non-combatant.”

Lestrange lifted an incredulous eyebrow.

“The Krauts laced the hospital water supply with some kind of hallucinogen. Your guys were freaked out when the counter-attack came. They didn’t stand a chance.”

“And you?”

“I only ever drink coca cola. Honest! No tea like your guys. No coffee. It was me who sent the message.”

The specialist at the military hospital looked bemused. He and a shifting band of cohorts had been examining Lestrange for the best part of a day—with probes, with x-rays, with ultrasonic devices, with machinery of burnished steel and cool polymer. They had even exerted nano-engineered exploratory insects under his skin—modern ones, microscopic silicone chips with electronic eyes and primitive, but effective, means of locomotion.

“Your army career’s over, of course,” said the specialist at length, almost in an aside as though it did not matter. “But it’s a brilliant bit of surgery, given the circumstances. Quite amazing, really.”

“Dr Alfonsin put it all down to the equipment,” Lestrange said, feeling he had to give some sort of explanation for still being in one piece and in any kind of working order.

“That’s as may be,” said the specialist, “but what we’ve been trying to find out all day is how he actually did it. His technique is unbelievable.”

The specialist stuffed his stethoscope into his pocket with a sigh.

When he was studying medicine, Eugenio Pedro Lopez de Alfonsin, who had enrolled under the name Eugene Alfonsin out of deference to the many of his fellow students who were rednecks, had been drawn into the orbit of a Russian professor who believed that it was high time humankind took a hand in its own further evolution—under the professor’s guidance, of course.