Glancing furtively at the door, he slipped from his desk to the one alongside it, belonging to Oliver Walton. The chair, although the same as his own, felt quite different, and the keyboard, also identical, felt lighter. He entered the log-in command, and when asked for his user name, he typed, using the house style of the company, the man's initial followed by his surname: oalton.

  The computer then requested his password, and Archie had no problem with this: he'd watched Oliver Walton's fingers countless times as he logged on, knew exactly which keys he touched and in which sequence. It had never occurred to him before that there was any point in knowing Oliver Walton's password, but now this little titbit came good.

  He typed:

  And then he wondered, Why ver/iT? But he didn't dwell on it. He was now into Oliver Walton's system. He studied the screen carefully, trying to orient himself with the layout, which was pretty much the same as on his own computer, the standard software package that all employees used. Vertical columns of icons. A row of analogue clock faces horizontally along the top of the screen, covering key time zones across the globe. An organiser on the left of the screen displaying a list of priorities for tomorrow.

  He tried a quick scan through Walton's file headings then, after glancing warily around once more, typed in a search command for the name, V6rn Bank, and pressed the return key.

  Moments later a list of what appeared to be file headings appeared but, to his surprise, they were in a language he could not identify, perhaps Greek, he thought, trying to recall any Greek texts he might have seen in his schooldays. He looked for familiar letters, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Omega, but there were none. Maybe it was a code, except it didn't look like one.

  He moved the egg-timer cursor to the top line and double-clicked on it. There was a brief pause and then the screen filled with data, a mass of numbers, letters, symbols, all completely unintelligible. He laboriously opened each of the other file headings in turn, which all appeared to be encrypted in this same code.

  Glancing anxiously at his Watch, he knew Pila was going to be livid with him for being so late, but he couldn't help that. He turned his attention back to the screen, clicking on each of the icons in turn, in the hope of discovering a program that would translate the code, but without luck.

  Computers had never been his forte; there might be something simple that he needed to do, and maybe if he spoke to John and described the code, he'd be able to tell him what it was. He reached for the phone, then hesitated, thinking about the time again, and had a better idea.

  He started a new file, then opened the first heading and saved the contents off into the new file. Then he copied this file across to one of his own private files, deleted all traces from Walton's screen of what he had done, and logged off.

  Sitting back at his own desk, Archie hastily typed out an e-mail to John, attaching the file. He sent it, then logged off, and phoned Pila to tell her he'd be over to pick her up;in twenty minutes. She yelled a torrent of abuse at him.

  "Hey! Calm down."

  "Calm down? Me - why I calm down? You say half past eight you gone be home. I cook the dinner ready for half past eight - you know the time is now? Huh? Ten o'clock."

  "I've been in hospital. Emergency."

  "Hospital?" Her whole tone changed. "No, oh, no, darling, what happened?"

  "I had emergency surgery to have my nipple reattached."

  There was a moment of silence. For an instant she sounded shocked.

  "No, you -" Then she cottoned on. "You bastard! You make me all worried!"

  "I'll be home in twenty minutes. Get your clothes off!"

  "No sex!" she said. "Food!"

  As he walked back down the corridor to the elevators, with a big grin on his face, he didn't notice that the lights in the dealing room had stayed on. They should have switched off automatically but they hadn't, because someone else had entered the room, from another door.

  Oliver Walton sat down at his desk, and typed a command on his keyboard for a log trace. It took him less than a minute to find what he was looking for. Then he punched out a number on his phone.

  Klindz answered on the first ring. He said, "Yes." And then he said, "Yes," again. He flipped open the lid of the gold Dunhill cigarette lighter he was holding, heard the hiss of escaping gas, then closed the lid and replaced the receiver. He stared at the lighter. The gold casing had a gridded pattern so it was not smooth, it was like frosted glass. The reflection was just shadow, a blur. He flicked open the lid, then closed it again. He liked this action: it was so well engineered, this lighter, it was a real pleasure to open and close the lid.

  He telephoned Mr. Sarotzini at his home number in Switzerland. "I need your energy for a communication," he said.

  "This is early, Stefan. I was not expecting your call until tomorrow morning."

  "This is a different situation, an emergency."

  "You need my energy now and you need it again tomorrow morning?

  You are not leaving me much time to recover my strength."

  "This is necessary," Klindz said.

  "You have in your hand a personal object?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. I am with you now. Can you feel me?"

  "I can feel you."

  And he could, he really could. Klindz concentrated hard and, after only a few moments, he felt the connection between the two of them increasing, getting stronger and stronger until it felt as if Mr. Sarotzini had slipped out of his own body and into Klindz's.

  "Now tune in the object, be gentle with it, let it speak," Mr. Sarotzini said. Klindz did as he was told. He held the lighter gently, cradling it in the palm of his massive hand, and allowed the feelings, the imprint, the vibrations, the memories of this lighter's owner to pour out into his hand. He felt the tiny pulses spread out and upwards through his body. He was a modem now. He was shaking hands with this lighter's owner across the airwaves, they were finding a matching vibration level between them... now they were connecting... they were exchanging signals. Yes... good... this was good... the image was forming.

  Klindz saw an underground car park. A man who needed to lose weight was walking across it. He could smell cigarettes on this man. The car park was almost empty, just six cars. On was a red convertible, and this man had almost reached it.

  Klindz opened the lid of the cigarette lighter with a sharp flick, and heard the click. He shut it again, click. Then he opened it again. Shut it again. Each time a satisfying click. Mechanical excellence.

  He could feel every atom in its owner's body.

  Archie opened the door of his Aston Martin, clambered in, closed it. It shut with a solid thud. It was a hand-made door, hand-fitted, it was beautifully engineered. As he turned the ignition key, there was a click as the electrics came on. And there was another click as the CD powered up. And there was another click, but this was distant, faint, so faint, so deep inside his head that Archie barely noticed it.

  The engine rumbled into life, and it sounded like an orchestra. Archie, the conductor, blipped the accelerator. The tremor of power rocked the Aston Martin and the music of the exhausts filled the car park.

  Archie pressed his left foot down on the clutch, but nothing happened. Puzzled, he tried again. The signal travelled from his brain to his foot, but his foot did not respond. He tried a third time, and still no success. Gone to sleep, he thought! It's gone numb.

  He tried to shift position in his seat, but now his arms wouldn't do what he told them either. This was freaky. He saw the rev counter hovering around the thousand mark, dipping and rising. He could hear the rumble of the engine, the boom of the exhaust, and he had his sense of smell, no problem with that, he could smell the rich aroma of the Connolly hide leather interior.

  He heard another strange click inside his head, much louder than before.

  Someone was tapping on the window. Archie wanted to look round, he knew he must look round, but he couldn't, his head wouldn't rotate.

  A voice - Archie didn't recognise it, it might be the car park attendant. The voice was shouting, "Oi? Oi? Hello in there, hello?"

  Archie wondered if the man wanted a light.

  At half past eleven, the phone rang. John, sitting downstairs in front of the television, snatched up the receiver, hoping it was Susan - it must be Susan, please be Susan.

  It was Pila. She sounded worried, angry, hurt, and a little drunk.

  "Hello, John," she said. "Look I's worried, I sorry it's late but I's really worried. Archie say he was playing squash with you tonight."

  "Uh-huh."

  "He telephone me, I don" know, hour and half ago, he was gone be here in twenty minutes. I try ringing him, no answer his home, his mobile, his office. Where he gone?"

  John told her the truth, that he had left Archie at the club at nine o'clock. But he wasn't going to tell her that Archie had half a dozen girlfriends on the side at any one time, and might well have stopped off for a quick bonk on the way home.

  And he decided not to tell her that Susan wasn't here, because he didn't want this crazy Spanish wildcat jumping to conclusions about Archie and Susan having run off together. He told her not to worry, Archie would turn up, and that if she was really worried she could try the police stations and the hospitals, just in case he'd had an accident.

  After he'd hung up, he poured himself a brandy and finally broke open the pack of cigarettes he'd had in his briefcase for two months.

  Susan had packed and gone somewhere. Now Archie had disappeared. For a wild moment his brain connected the two of them, but he instantly dismissed it. If they were running off together tonight, Archie would hardly have played squash with him first. In any case, Archie was genuinely fond of Pila, far more fond of her than John could remember him being of any previous girlfriend.

  And Susan, nearly eight months pregnant, was not about to run off with anyone. Except Mr. Sarotzini.

  Never.

  Was Archie helping Susan to hide?

  No way. He lit the cigarette and the first puff made him giddy. He took a second and that felt better: the taste was sweet, intoxicating, comforting; he felt as if he'd had a rush of adrenaline to his chest.

  Archie was not involved in this. He wasn't devious. If Susan had asked Archie to help her, Archie would have told him. Archie was his friend, his chum, not Susan's. Archie was off bonking somewhere, simple as that. But Susan?

  Where the hell was Susan?

  As he drew on his cigarette and drank his brandy, he ran through the list of possibilities for the hundredth time tonight.

  It was a pitifully short list.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  "He's been like that for an hour," Ron Wicks said.

  He stood beside Archie's Aston Martin with the two uniformed police officers, who had just arrived. The cat's engine was still running and the air was thick with exhaust fumes.

  One officer opened the door and tapped Archie on the shoulder. "Sir," he said. "Good evening, sir?"

  Archie didn't react. He sat, eyes open under the brightness of the dome light, staring ahead.

  "He's not said anything?" the second policeman asked.

  "Not a word."

  "Catatonic," the first policeman said. "I've seen someone go like that with shock, a father at a car accident when his daughter was decapitated."

  "He might have had a stroke," the other said. "Have you called an ambulance?"

  "No," Ron Wicks replied. "I didn't know what I ought to do."

  "I'll call one." The officer spoke into his radio.

  Archie made a strange upward flicking motion with his thumb.

  "You say he keeps doing this? With his thumb?" the second policeman asked.

  "Yes," Wicks said. "Think he's trying to signal to us?"

  "Dunno," the man said, frowning. "It's odd. Looks more like he's trying to light a cigarette."

  The house sat six blocks back from Venice Beach, but it was more than just a few hundred yards of distance that separated it from the million-dollar homes hunched along the promenade.

  It was small, a humble single storey with a dormer and the warped clapboard was badly in need of the same lick of paint it had been needing for a decade. Once it had been white, now it was the colour of nicotine.

  Beneath the corrugated iron mail-box was a peeling strip of lettering spelling the name Corrigan.

  The vehicles parked outside were in a similar condition. Her father's pick-up had a list to starboard, and her mother's Corolla just looked plain sad. Anyone walking their dog along this neighbourhood could have been forgiven for thinking that a couple of hillbillies lived in here. But they'd have been wrong.

  They'd have been surprised by the back yard, with its immaculate flower-beds and its carefully pruned fruit trees, and they'd have been even more surprised by the interior, elegantly crammed with antiques, books and paintings, many of which - all those of boats and seascapes - were by Susan's father.

  Susan lugged her blue suitcase up to the front porch, then stood, tense, and with a lump in her throat. It felt strange arriving like this, unannounced, a child fleeing home to its parents. Was she coming back to Los Angeles for good? Had her life with John been just a seven-year interlude? Her emotions were in turmoil, and she was exhausted from the flight and the time difference. It was six p.m. here in Los Angeles, two a.m. London time. The pain in her abdomen was terrible, just solid, endless, red-hot-knife pain now and all the time it felt like it was getting steadily Worse.

  She still had a key in her purse, but she decided not to use it. This was not the occasion to waltz in, like some great happy surprise. Instead she pulled open the fly-screen, stepped inside the porch out of the rain, and rang the doorbell.

  Her mother, Gayle, answered it and stood there for several seconds, jaw open. Susan stared back at her, lamely. Her mother was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and slippers, and she'd put on a little more weight since Susan had last seen her, over a year ago. Otherwise she seemed little changed. Perhaps the lines in her face were etched even deeper, as if someone had just gone over them with a charcoal pencil, and her hair, shovelled up and clipped untidily, now had more grey than blonde in it. Her mother has been slim and strikingly beautiful, but since Casey's tragedy she'd put on weight, which had stayed, and she'd let herself go, right down to her red-varnished nails, which used to be neat and were now badly chipped.

  A smell of cooking came out of the door. Her mother was always making casseroles, Susan could never remember a time when the house hadn't smelt of something good cooking, and this now stirred so many memories.

  A whole raft of questions was flooding into those wide blue eyes of her mother's. Your pregnant daughter did not suddenly pitch up on your doorstep with a suitcase, thousands of miles from home, if everything was fine. No way.

  "Hon, what's-?"

  Susan swallowed, managed a smile, then before she could say anything, she started to cry. The next moment she was in her mother's arms and she was a kid again, just a kid who'd fallen over and hurt her knee, and her mom was hugging her, holding her hard in spite of that big bump between them, and everything was going to be better in a minute, it was all going to be better.

  Everything was going to be fine.

  Susan had a shower and a short rest. Then they sat in the family room, Susan on the antique settle, her parents in battered armchairs either side of her. She could remember the day her mother had bought the settle, years back, in a garage sale in Santa Monica. Her father, Dick, with his thin, craggy face, furry eyebrows, alert eyes, wistful Henry Fonda smile, and faded denim overalls that reeked of turpentine, stared at the bottle of beer he was holding in his rough, paint-stained hand, and listened.

  Susan, who had thought she'd become so much stronger than her parents, was feeling even more like the child she'd left behind, oh-so-many years back. She felt as though she was being interrogated over a misdemeanour. "John's in league with them," she said, registering the horror in their faces - except that she wasn't sure whether it was horror or just plain disbelief.

  Her mother said, "Tell us more about what you found in the attic."

  "The loft," Susan corrected. She described the symbols that she could remember, and then the finger. The finger disturbed them.

  "This deal that John did with the bank, what kind of say did you have in it?" her father asked.

  "It was my choice." Susan shrugged. "I went along with it because -" She hesitated.

  "Because you trusted John?" her mother prompted. "Sure you did."

  "I always liked John," her father said, "but he's a hustler. I always felt he put ambition above everything else."

  Susan winced as the pain suddenly became acute. It might have been the baby moving.

  "I think we should get you to a doctor tonight," her mother said, anxiously.

  Susan shook her head. "I'm just very tired. It'll be better tomorrow, after I've had some sleep."

  "I'm getting you seen by a doctor tomorrow. We'll go down to the medical center, get you in to see Dr. Goodman, you'll like him, he's just the nicest doctor you could ever meet."

  Susan sipped her apple juice. The air in the room felt sluggish, and she wondered whether she was dreaming all this. It just seemed so bizarre to be here, sitting alone with her parents like this. The silver clock on the mantelpiece had come out of an old Packard car and ran off a battery tucked away behind it. The clock said seven twenty-five, and she did a calculation. It was three twenty-five a.m. in England.

  She suddenly felt guilty that she hadn't left a note for John and wondered if she should call him to let him know she was all right, and that she was going to stay over here until the baby was born and until it had the protection of the courts.

  But then he would know where she was, and he'd tell Mr. Sarotzini or Van Rhoe.

  And they would come and get her.