"Good, see you," his partner responded, and was gone.

  John rubbed his eyes, then, starting with the first of fifteen sheets, began to read carefully through the names, wondering if he might pick up any clues about the V6rn Bank. Cr(dit Suisse. First Boston. IBM. P&O. Glaxo Welcome. Dai Ichy Kany. Espirito Santo. AOL.

  By the time he was half-way down the twelfth page, he had begun to skim and almost missed the name: CYPRESS PALISADES CLINIC.

  His eyes jumped back to it in surprise, and he read it again to make sure he wasn't mistaken. The ledger showed that the V6m Bank had acquired one hundred percent of the shares in the Cypress Palisades Clinic on 7 September last year.

  He read it through yet again, then thought, carefully, trying to make double sure he wasn't getting this wrong. CYPRESS PALISADES CLINIC. NO, he wasn't mistaken, he knew the name too well, he'd been there himself, many times. Nerves began to stir uneasily inside him.

  It was the clinic that Susan's kid sister, Casey, was in.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Unsmiling faces. Rows of eyes. A massive, dazzling light.

  The pain.

  It felt like two people were trying to tear her in half by twisting her. The twisting hardened, the pain roared like a furnace inside her and she rose up, crying out pitifully, thrashing, delirious, trying to get away from it. Firm but gentle hands pushed her down. Drool ran out of the corner of" her mouth.

  Then another wave of this pain smashed through her, and with a sudden burst of energy, she screamed out for help, for anything. She didn't care if she died, anything, anything would be better than this pain.

  And suddenly she heard a voice she recognised. "Try to relax, Susan. We're going to give you an anaesthetic that will put you out, and when you come round, the pain will have gone."

  English, she thought, clawing ragged bundles of thoughts out of her memory. English. An English accent. She found the face where the voice had come from, locked on to it, thinking. Large eyes. Calm, suave voice. I know you. And then it came back. Of course. She recognised these large eyes now, and finally, with a squirm of terror, she connected the face to the voice.

  Miles Van Rhoe.

  No no no no no no no. Miles Van Rhoe. Nooooooooooooooo.

  The obstetrician was standing over her, as if it was perfectly normal for him to be seeing her in California.

  She shook her head, yammering with fear, pleading with her eyes at the other faces. Help me. You have to help me.

  Then another surge of pain, and with it a gagging bout of nausea, and all she could do was wait until it passed.

  "Please!" she gasped. "Someone must listen to me! This man is going to take my baby, he's going to sacrifice it, he's going to use it for one of his rituals, he does black magic, satanism, please, someone believe me! He has a record with the police, with Scotland Yard in England, phone them, someone, please, phone them, you must believe me!"

  Van Rhoe smiled at her, with a hurt expression. "Susan, you're a little delirious and you really don't know what you're saying. We're not going to harm your baby. Your baby is special. It's going to be the most special baby that has ever been born and you're going to be such a proud mother!"

  "Don't believe him!" she said, avoiding his stare. "Please, someone," she said, looking at each of the other faces in turn. "Call the police, don't let him!"

  They all stared back, watching her with concern, like medical students grouped around some freak case. One of the faces belonged to a woman she had seen recently, but she could not work out how recently or where. A badge. This woman had been wearing a lapel badge, she remembered suddenly, and now she could attach a name to the face. Pat Caulk. Yes, the badge on her lapel, standing over her in Casey's room, PAT CAULK. SNR NIGHT NURSE.

  "Where am I?" Susan said.

  "You are in the Cypress Palisades Clinic, Susan," Van Rhoe told her. "You're in a very fine place, you're a fortunate young woman. If you'd collapsed somewhere else, you might not still be with us now."

  "Casey? How - how is -?" Then another wave pain drowned everything.

  Through the haze of agony she saw a needle. Felt a prick in her wrist, then saw sticking plaster. She was being cannulated. She heard Van Rhoe say, quietly, "We must wait for him, he doesn't want to miss this." John? Was it John they were waiting for?

  The pain was subsiding, and her terror grew. She tried again, looking at everyone except Van Rhoe. "Please, someone believe me! He's going to hand my baby over to Mr. Sarotzini. They're all in league. They're satanists, they really are, I know it sounds incredible, but they really do do these things. They sacrifice babies."

  They were looking at her, but they weren't reacting. Didn't they hear her? Didn't they hear what she had just said?

  Something was going into her arm, she could feel the pressure of the fluid.

  What are you all? Shop-window dummies? Hello? Hello?

  Then, suddenly, she felt calmer. Tiredness was seeping through her. She fixed each of them in turn with her eyes. You don't care? OK, fine. You don't have a problem with what Mr. Sarotzini wants to do with my baby? OK, that's fine by me, do it, have it on your conscience, it's not my problem. It isn't.

  She smiled at them but they didn't smile back.

  Morons, she thought. Stuffed dummies. Do you know how sh- sh-shilly you all, you A voice asked quietly, "How much longer will she survive?"

  Another, also quietly, said, "We have to keep her alive, somehow, until he gets here."

  Then silence.

  John arrived home in mental turmoil. The V6rn Bank had bought the Cypress Palisades Clinic in September. Why?

  Why?

  What the hell did they want with a clinic in California? There was only, one possible reason - and that was that they wanted the clinic because Casey was there. To think it was merely chance that she was there would be stretching coincidence way beyond the bounds that he was prepared to accept.

  But why did they want or need to own the clinic where Casey was? It made no sense to him, and yet he knew there must be a reason. Mr. Sarotzini would do nothing without a reason.

  He checked the phone for messages and also scrutinized the house, looking for some sign that Susan had been back, if only to collect something, but could see nothing.

  He poured himself a whisky, sat down in the kitchen and lit a cigarette. Either Susan had gone into hiding somewhere, maybe with a friend who wasn't telling him. Or... Then he had a thought. Hurriedly, he changed into his grubbiest jeans and an old sweatshirt, took the step-ladder and a torch out of the garage and carried them upstairs. He set up the ladder beneath the ceiling hatch, then clambered into the loft.

  Using the flashlight and the meagre throw of the loft light for guidance, he squeezed past the chimney breast and into the right-hand side of the roof space where Susan had brought him just a couple of days ago, and where he in turn had brought the policeman, Detective Sergeant Rice. Some creature, a mouse, probably, scurried away into the shadows.

  The beam struck the strips of roofing felt that hung down like sleeping bats, and he eyed again, with revulsion, the occult symbols painted on each exposed panel. He lowered the beam to the joists, and it illuminated more of the symbols that lay exposed where the insulation had been lifted away.

  He checked out the small metal box, that Susan had thought was a ringing converter. It was about four inches long, with Telecom markings, and a cluster of wires ran out of it. They were thin and looked, to his untrained eyes, like telephone wires. He followed them across to the eaves where they entered a plastic junction box of a kind he had seen many times before.

  Ignoring it, he returned to the area where the joists had been exposed, knelt, set down the torch carefully, and began, methodically, to rip away more of the insulation.

  After five minutes of exertion, his hands prickling with fibreglass splinters, he nearly missed the wire. It was pressed down neatly, covered in black tape, which itself was camouflaged by a coating of mastic to make it look like an innocent sealant.

  He tried to lift it, but it would not budge. It had been laid expertly, nestling into a tiny channel that had been cut for it and held firm by staples. Someone had gone to enormous trouble to lay this wire, he realised, as he tracked its course through meticulously drilled holes in each joist, until he reached its destination, a small plastic-cased object, recessed into the ceiling, directly above, he calculated, their bedroom.

  He went downstairs and returned with a set of screwdrivers, a pair of insulated pliers, and insulating tape. First he cut through the wire, and wound insulating tape around the ends. Then he set about unscrewing the fixing plate that held the plastic object and, finally, after some moments of struggling, he eased out the dome-shaped object.

  It was heavy for its size, no more than a couple of inches across, and from the tiny glass lens, less than a quarter of a millimetre wide, its function was immediately evident. He stared at it in shock. He'd reckoned on finding a bugging device up here but not a video camera.

  He went down into their bedroom, switched on the light and stared up at the ceiling. It was easy to see why he had never noticed it: the hole above the bed was scarcely larger than a pin prick, and concealed within what appeared to be a natural crack.

  Back up in the loft, he traced the wire along in the opposite direction, pulling away the loft insulation as he went, and after a few minutes, arrived at its destination: a shiny black metal casing, about a foot long, eight inches wide and four inches deep, recessed snugly between the joists and carefully camouflaged by two pieces of grubby hardwood bonded around it.

  There were no clues as to what it was, although he had a good idea. Ignoring it for now, he began the laborious task of tracing the end of each of the other eleven wires than ran off the device. He found a second camera above the room that Susan had decorated for the baby, and further cameras above each of the other spare rooms, then all but one of the rest of the wires disappeared into a wall channel that appeared to drop down towards the next floor. No doubt there were cameras watching every downstairs room also.

  The last remaining wire was more heavily insulated than the rest and connected, he discovered, into the house's mains electricity supply.

  When John climbed down onto the landing, holding the heavy metal box under one arm, he was shaking with anger, outraged at this invasion of his privacy but at the same time deeply disturbed. He rang Gareth Noyce's home number and got his answering machine. Then he tried his mobile, figuring he would probably be in his local pub in Camden Town.

  From the background hubbub when Gareth answered, John knew he'd" guessed right. "Gareth, where are you? In the Duke's?"

  Gareth sounded giggly. "They,"re having a regional ales night. I'm just drinking something called Dead Pig. It's eight percent proof, for Chrissake!"

  "Listen, drink it slowly. I need you to look at something for me - wait till I get to you before you get pissed, OK?"

  "Well, you'd better hurry," his partner said.

  John got in his car, and started the arduous journey to North London, hoping, desperately, Gareth would still be compos mentis when he got there.

  Focusing with some difficulty, Gareth removed one panel of the outer casing of the box with a screwdriver purloined from the publican.

  He squinted at the innards, screwing up his eyes against the trail of smoke from his cigarette, then beamed with delight. "Yes. Wow! Gosh, there's an 851, I'm surprised about that. Oh, this is interesting," he said. "Yes, brilliant, that's really clever!"

  John waited. Gareth continued his examination and running commentary. "This is powerful, I mean, like, there's more power than you're going to need here. Know how these work?"

  "No, that's why I'm here," John said patiently. He sipped the pint of Dead Pig real ale his partner had insisted on buying him even though he was driving.

  "It's the first generation that doesn't need a wok," Gareth said.

  "A wok?"

  "A satellite dish. This is an Iridium, right? So it doesn't need a satellite dish!"

  John frowned.

  "It sends signals digitally up to one of seventeen low-orbit satellites."

  "What kind of signals?"

  "Anything - audio, video, e-mail. They can be picked up by anyone who has a base station, anywhere in the world. The system's brilliant! I've been reading about them but this is the first one I've seen. I was going to suggest to you that we ought to have these ourselves - they're really just very sophisticated mobile phones."

  Gareth probed around further with his screwdriver, like a child with a new toy,. scarcely aware of his partner's silence.

  An hour and a half later, when John arrived home, the protective haze of alcohol was wearing off, and he was now very frightened. If Mr. Sarotzini was behind this bugging of their house he would have known everything that was going on. Had Harvey noticed something in his examination of Susan that he wasn't supposed to have seen? But what? And if he had noticed anything untoward, why hadn't he told them then and there?

  Fergus had died the night after he had been to see Susan and had put all the occult thoughts in her head. Why? Had he angered Mr. Sarotzini - or frightened him? And now Susan had disappeared. Maybe she had gone into hiding. Or, which was more likely considering what he now knew, Mr. Sarotzini had become concerned and kidnapped her.

  The sheet of paper on which Detective Sergeant Rice had written his phone number hung from a hook on the dresser. He pulled it down, then removed the cordless phone from its cradle. As he switched it on, the tone indicated that a message was waiting. With unsteady fingers he stabbed out the number to retrieve it.

  It was from his father-in-law in Los Angeles, and he was sounding very distressed.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Susan opened her eyes and the room was empty. There had been people all around her and now they'd gone. Or had she imagined them?

  No, they had been real. She panicked. The baby? Have I had the baby? Have they taken -?

  Bump's hands pressed hard against the inside of her abdomen and her anxiety subsided. "I'm not going to let them," she whispered. "I'm promised you, they won't take you, Bump, I'm not going -"

  The wave of pain caught her unawares - it happened so fast she didn't even feel it coming. Oh, sweet Jesus. She gritted her teeth, determined not to shriek. She was going to ride this one out, oh, Christ, oh, you bastard, oh, you, shitcreepfuckyoufuckyoufuckyou pain, oh, no, please, please, please stop. NOW! STOP!

  She was gasping for air; she could taste amalgam in her mouth, and blood; tears were streaming down her face. But the pain had STOPPED!

  And the room was empty. There was no one in it. Nothing! Just medical apparatus, shelves stacked with boxes of hypodermics, vials, surgical gloves, disposable wipes.

  She tried to swing herself off this bed - this thing, this trolley - she was on, but her legs wouldn't work, the signals from her brain didn't seem to be reaching them. She pulled at the edge of the trolley with her hands, hauled herself painfully over to her left. For an instant she was aware of air beneath her, then she was toppling, head first. She flung out one arm to brace herself and the other she curled protectively around her abdomen as she crashed, with a cry of shock, on to the hard terrazzo-tiled floor.

  Her left arm was suspended awkwardly in the air above her face, and she thought for a moment she had broken it. Then she realised that the drip line was holding her like a foul-hooked fish.

  She ripped the line out of the cannula, then put both her hands on her abdomen to check on the baby. Bump was moving around, he was fine. Relieved, she crawled on to her knees and, holding the edge of the troller, hauled herself up. But as soon as she let go, her legs gave way and she crashed back to the floor. "Sorry," she whispered to Bump. "I'm sorry." Desperately, she started crawling on her hands and knees towards the door. "Get you out of here, Bump, going to get you out of here, somehow going to get you out of here."

  The door was closed. She grabbed the handle, pulled, and it swung open. Outside was a corridor, and a sign on the far side saying THEATER 6. People were approaching. She could hear rapid footsteps and a trundling sound. Before she had time to close the door, two orderlies wheeled someone past on a gurney but they didn't see her.

  She made a determined effort once more to get up. This time her legs held, just. She gripped the side of the trolley for several seconds, until she felt confident enough to let go. Her heart was thrashing, or maybe it was the baby's heart, she didn't know. She was only thinking about one thing, and that was getting out of here.

  Then she saw that all she was wearing was a hospital gown, and that she was barefoot.

  How long have I been here?

  She looked at her wrist, but her watch had been removed. Across the corridor was an observation window into Theater 6. Checking the corridor both ways, she padded unsteadily over to it, praying for her legs to hold. The clock on the wall said two twenty.

  Confused, her brain leapt between time zones, trying to figure it out. It had been around four in the morning that she'd got here, and now it was two twenty? It must be afternoon now, she reasoned, unless she'd been here even longer than that.

  Another wave of pain was starting. And voices were approaching. She looked, frantically, for an escape route. The corridor stretched into the distance in both directions with operating theatres all the way down. She ran, stumbling and swaying, in the opposite direction to the voices. The pain was worsening, but she didn't care, she had to fight it. She ran past a window where an operation was in progress, glimpsed a sea of green cloth, bright yellow light, a patch of bare human flesh.

  Crossing a junction, she saw a door marked CHANGING ROOM, and burst in through it. To her relief it was empty. There were racks of surgical gowns, open lockers filled with white clogs, and several suit jackets hanging on pegs. Then, before she could do anything, a blowtorch fired up inside her.

  Stifling a cry, Susan sank, doubled up and drooling, on to a bench. Don't scream not going to scream. Teeth grinding, eyes bulging, nails digging into her palms, she fought back. Her insides were on fire, and the flame of the blowtorch was being turned up stronger and stronger. The pain was going to win this bout, she was swaying, she was going to black out. Got to keep conscious.