Klindz tried to send back a signal of gratitude. Mr. Sarotzini had taught him that it was possible to transmit thoughts, and even, if you concentrated hard enough, to influence other people's minds.

  He wondered if the signal had reached Mr. Sarotzini. He wondered if Mr. Sarotzini was close to Susan Carter and if he could smell her. Then he picked up his book, Homer's Iliad in Greek - Mr. Sarotzini had taught him that one should always read a book in its original language, never in translation - and began to read.

  This was something else he missed in London: his books. The vast library in Mr. Sarotzini's house had been his starting point where, under Mr. Sarotzini's tutelage, he had read every volume on its shelves. His own apartment was overflowing with books, which he had regretted having to leave behind. He valued them far more than he valued the company of people, for they presented interpretations of the world, past, present and future, from which he was able to form his own understandings.

  Sometimes he interpreted his understandings with the intricate drawings he made with his airbrush. He was a fine artist; Mr. Sarotzini had often praised his work, and that made him proud.

  He missed the gym, too, where he did his daily workout, and the special muesli with blueberries in the konditorei on Rue de la Conflagration where he had his breakfast, and the cool breezes off the lake, and his black Mercedes SL600 - but he understood that that was too conspicuous, and in London he needed to blend into his surroundings.

  And he missed his wardrobe. He had racks of hand-made suits, in fine wools, silks and linens, shelves stacked with hand-made shirts and handmade shoes laid out in long lines. Mr. Sarotzini had taught him about the value of quality, and detail. Everything that Klindz wore was the best, and the luggage in which he carried them was the best also, beautiful leather with hand-stitching finish, all of the cases matching.

  When he had been alone in Susan Carter's bedroom and had been through the drawers and wardrobes, he had noted that John Carter's suits and shirts were brand names, Boss, Armani, Conran, off-the-peg. It hurt him to think that Susan Carter could be penetrated by a man who bought ready-to-wear clothes. She deserved so much better. The words of the Twenty-third Truth came into his "mind: "Mediocrity recognises nothing higher than itself. Talent instantly recognises genius."

  Many eminent and famous people came as guests to Mr. Sarotzini's chateau from all over the world: heads of state, cabinet ministers, senators, royalty, movie celebrities, scientists, industrialists. Mr. Sarotzini had taught Klindz to imagine each of these people sitting on the lavatory, excreting then wiping their backsides. He wanted to make Klindz realise that title, rank, noble birth or any level of fame only made a human being different from his fellow man in some ways, not all. Susan Carter was different. She was truly different.

  Klindz found himself thinking of Claudie and wondered if Mr. Sarotzini had put this thought into his mind to distract him from Susan Carter. It was hard, sometimes, to differentiate between thoughts that were his own, and those that Mr. Sarotzini planted in his head.

  Claudie. He imagined himself in his apartment with her, doing something dirty with her; she liked to do things that were dirty. Before he had been inside Susan Carter's house, and had stood in Susan Carter's presence and breathed in her smells, he had missed Claudie. But no longer.

  On the small desk beside him was an envelope containing a ticket for a performance of Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne on Sunday. It was a reward from Mr. Sarotzini for his good work. He wished he could take Susan Carter with him and make love to her afterwards, with the roiling energy of the music bursting through their bodies.

  But that would not be possible.

  "Susan," he whispered quietly.

  Susan stared at him from every wall. Photographs he had taken from the tiny camera concealed behind the badge of his British Telecom uniform those three glorious days when he had been in her house, They were grainy, which irritated him. She was inanimate and that irritated him too. He wanted to see Susan Carter move, he wanted to see her undress, he wanted to see her doing dirty things with her husband.

  He wanted, although he did not need, an excuse to hate her husband even more than he already did.

  He switched to a different channel and listened in to his apartment in Geneva. From the living room he could hear voices, the television. He adjusted a filter and the sound of the television faded. Then he listened for other voices, for any sound that Claudie might have a man in the apartment with her.

  He checked out the bedroom and that was fine. Then he tapped a command on his computer keyboard. The screen came to life. On it appeared a colour image of Claudie, his favourite photograph of her: she was sitting naked on a chair, facing the camera, her legs spread open. He imagined that it was not Claudie, but Susan Carter.

  He picked up the phone and punched a number. Claudie answered. He imagined he was hearing Susan Carter's voice. He asked, "What are you doing?"

  "Watching television."

  "What are you wearing?" Teasing. "Nothing much."

  "What do you smell of?."

  "You," she said.

  "I want to see you," he said.

  "And I want to see you, too."

  He keyed in another command and logged onto the Internet. A new image appeared: an empty chair facing the camera. In a moment, Claudie, naked, moved into the frame and sat in the chair. The technology was not yet perfect. He was watching her now, in real time, but each movement was jerky as if in slow motion, as the images travelled down the cables from Geneva to London.

  He stared at the live image of Claudie, naked, her long brown hair resting on her shoulders. She was looking directly at him and knew he was watching her. But she did not know that in his mind he was no longer seeing her but Susan Carter, "Touch yourself," Klindz said.

  He watched her touching herself. The mierky images added to the sensuality. He watched her pressing her fingers up inside herself He watched the expression on her face change. As she worked her fingers, a certain dreaminess softened her face, and he wondered if this was how it would be with Susan Carter also.

  Then her lips were moving, she was speaking. Yes, speak to me, oh, my Susan, speak to me.

  "Now let me see you," she said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  John felt queasy, tired, and he had a blinding headache. Port always did this to him, and at the dinner last night he had poured it down his throat recklessly.

  On the advice of his accountant, he had been to see an insolvency practitioner, and was talking on the phone to him now. The news he gave John about what he would be able to salvage from the business if the bank pulled the plug wasn't good. If John had seen the writing on the wall a year back, he could have formed a separate company and started transferring business into it. But he hadn't made any such preparations.

  He replaced the receiver, deeply gloomy. His secretary brought him in a second cup of coffee and gave him a strange look, making him wonder whether she'd overheard him. Stella wasn't stupid, she knew something was going on, but in her usual discreet way she hadn't asked.

  She'd been with him right from the start, when he had been operating from a tiny office above a pet shop in Maryland, and Gareth had been moonlighting from his day job in computer graphics at a firm of architects. Stella was a bright, sassy girl, pretty and elegant, with short brown hair, and a tiresome boyfriend she supported, a permanently resting actor with an ego the size of the Atlantic. She'd get another job quickly - anyone in their right mind would snap her up - but losing her was going to be a terrible blow.

  He would have to tell Gareth soon, and all their employees. So far the only person in the company who knew anything was the financial controller, a quiet, efficient, conscientious woman called Janet Penning-ton. She had prepared the figures for John's pitch documents to other banks and institutions, and he knew he could rely on her to say nothing.

  He had just thirteen days left until Clarke's deadline. And last night there had been a slim ray of hope, the Swiss banker with the odd name.

  "How's your headache?" Stella asked.

  "Bad." Headaches had become an almost daily feature of his life but this was the mother of them all.

  "I'll give you two more paracetamol before you go."

  It was a quarter to ten. In an hour's time he would have to leave the office, get home, change into his morning suit and drive with Susan to join Archie's party at Ascot.

  He was glad to be out of the office today - there was no way he'd be able to concentrate on much in his state - and Susan was right: someone there might be willing to take a gamble on DigiTrak. And that banker last night had given him a couple of tips. John had checked the horses in the morning paper and they were both outsiders. He decided he would bang them hard.

  His head took a turn for the worse, and he pressed his knuckles into his temples, trying to ease the pain. Looking lamely up at Stella, he said, "Be an angel and get me a Coke, please."

  "Sure." She smiled sympathetically, knowing from experience that when he asked for a Coke, he must be in bad shape: it was the hangover cure he used as a last resort.

  John fished in his wallet, and found the banker's card. E. Sarotzini. He started to compose a letter in his head, then picked up his dictating machine. As he did so, his telephone warbled. It was Stella: she had a Mr. Sarotzini on the line, did John want to speak to him?

  Mr. Sarotzini sounded polite, but much more formal than he had last night, as if he had moved from party into business mode. "It was very pleasant to make your acquaintance," he said.

  John remembered the man's use of the word pleasant in his rather condescending appraisal of the banqueting hall, and wondered, his heart sinking a little, if in the banker's eyes the same mediocrity applied to himself.

  "Likewise," John said.

  "I may perhaps see you at Ascot today?" It was clear from the way Mr. Sarotzini spoke that this remark was merely a courtesy and not a serious invitation to rendezvous.

  "I'll keep a look-out for you. I've remembered the tips you gave me."

  "Don't put your house on them," Mr. Sarotzini said. "But they are worth a little flutter."

  Something about the way Mr. Sarotzini spoke convinced John that he should bet on these two horses even more heavily than he had already intended.

  There was a brief silence, and then Mr. Sarotzini said, "I have to return to Switzerland at the weekend. I wondered if by any chance you might be free to join me for lunch tomorrow, Mr. Carter?"

  John looked at his diary. Friday, 18 June. Lunch with his accountant was marked in. "Yes," he said. "I have something I could move, I can manage that."

  "I will come to your office at midday."

  "Sure, fine."

  "It would be most helpful if you could have prepared for me the last three years" audited accounts, your forward projections, your cash flow -and a five-year plan?"

  John tried not to give away his excitement in his voice.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Venerable Doctor Euan Freer, Professor of Systematic Theology of the University of London, and Archdeacon Emeritus of Oxford, was the most intelligent and influential clergyman Fergus Donleavy knew.

  Fergus sat, ignoring the broken spring beneath him, in an ancient leather armchair in the sitting room of Fergus's residence at the university. It was a masculine room, with battered furniture, threadbare rags, sagging bookshelves and a small open grate; the sash window was raised and the sweet air of fleshly mown grass filled the room from the communal gardens below.

  He took a bite of a digestive biscuit, and drank some coffee, savouring the cool air in here after the blazing heat of the June sun outside. He and Freer were old friends and they had been trying to work out how many years it was since they had last seen or spoken to each other.

  Fergus bided his time while they caught up on each other's news. He told Freer that the church had kept him looking young (although he did not tell him that he had become rather plump and that his hair had turned alarmingly grey) and Freer, in his black cassock, laughed and told Fergus he wished he looked as fit as him.

  If Freer had not elected this vocation, and the vow of celibacy that went with his Brotherhood, he could have been a devastating womaniser. He was good-looking, in a swarthy Latin way that caused many people, including Fergus, to comment on his resemblance to Robert de Niro.

  Freer asked Fergus about his books, and what he was currently working on. Fergus became a little subdued. "It's Steven Hawking, Brief History of Time territory," he explained. "But it goes a lot further."

  "When's it coming out?"

  Fergus shrugged. He had some rewriting to do, he told Freer, and that was a bitch.

  Freer told him about a book he had published a couple of years back on the history of exorcism in Britain, and the editor who had made him rewrite whole chunks of it. They both agreed that editors were a bitch.

  Fergus dunked a segment of digestive into his coffee, shook off the drips and ate it. "This bloody woman, Susan Carter," he said. "I like her, she's bright, but sometimes she drives me nuts. She doesn't think the general public are as smart as I do - she tries to get me to explain things in baby talk."

  Freer smiled. "But you have faith in her judgement?"

  "Yes, I suppose - yes, of course I do." Fergus shrugged again. "I'm just pissed off, but that's my problem." He pulled out his cigarettes and offered one to the priest.

  Freer shook his head. "I gave up - just smoke my pipe occasionally. There's an ashtray beside you." He settled back in his chair while Fergus lit his cigarette, and watched him with an expectant smile. He knew that this visit was not purely social. "So?" he said.

  Fergus drew deeply on the cigarette, tilted his head and blew the smoke directly up at the ceiling. "Nietzsche said that sometimes when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you."

  Freer nodded, his gentle, alert eyes fixed or Fergus.

  "Have you ever had a bad feeling, Euan, about something?"

  "Like a presentiment? A premonition?"

  "No, it's more than that. I don't know how to explain it. I suppose, I mean, OK, we both agree that the birth of Jesus it did happen in some way - although we come at it from different directions, right?"

  Euan Freer looked at him questioningly, the thread eluding him:

  "The Three Wise Men," Fergus said. "The Magi. They saw the bright light in the sky, right? The star? They knew the messiah had been born. Right?" Freer nodded, unsure where this was going.

  Fergus cut the air in front of him with his hand, smoke trailing from his cigarette like cotton thread. "I happen to believe the "star" was a space craft bringing Jesus from another, smarter civilisation. You happen to believe that the Virgin Birth brought him. But that doesn't matter. This is what is important: how do you think those three wise men felt when they saw that star?"

  "They felt that something quite extraordinary was happening."

  And that whatever it was they sensed was a force of good?"

  Freer smiled. "I wasn't there. But yes, probably, that's one of the things they sensed."

  "And now it's the end of the millennium and a lot of people have a sense that something bad will happen. There's been a raft of predictions about this, going back a long way."

  The cleric poured more coffee. "How far do you want to go back? Nostradamus? The Bible?"

  "Further than that, maybe." Fergus stood up and walked around the room, then leant against the window-sill and peered down into the garden. A man with a ponytail was weeding a bed. "You must believe that I'm being serious, Euan."

  "I always take you seriously, Fergus. I even defended the paper you published in Nature."

  Fergus turned, startled. "You read that? It was about six years ago." "Of course. People's auras. You still believe that we have auras?" "It's not a question of believing, it's proven scientific fact."

  "And you can read people's futures in these auras?"

  "No, I can't do that. It's nothing visual, nothing physical - it's just a sense I get."

  "And how often have you had that sense?"

  "Half a dozen times in my life. The first was before my mother died -that was clear, I kept seeing the car accident in my dreams, and I saw the aura of death around her, and it happened exactly as I saw it."

  "And now you've had it again?"

  Fergus sat down, crushed out his cigarette and told him exactly what he had sensed, and what he felt it meant. Freer listened in silence, without interrupting. When he had finished, Fergus could not tell from his friend's expression whether the priest believed him or not.

  "Tell me, Fergus," Freer asked, "these feelings you get - how many have been accurate?"

  "All of them."

  For what seemed a long time Freer reflected on this. Then he asked, "Do you want to tell this woman?"

  "I don't have an image. I don't have anything to tell her."

  "Shall we pray for her?"

  Fergus had rejected prayer years ago. And yet now, here with Canon Euan Freer, it seemed the right thing to do.

  They knelt and said the Lord's Prayer aloud together. Then Freer said, "Lord, protect this woman."

  And Fergus mouthed silently into his cupped hands: "Susan, whatever it is you are about to do, don't do it. Please don't do it."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The three-pointed star on the radiator of Mr. Sarotzini's elderly black Mercedes Pullman floated with the eerie grace of a gun-sight tracking a target, as the chauffeur robotically helmed the limousine through the London traffic.

  John, tense and anxious, watched the view through the smoked glass of the windscreen. Thirty years ago, this was the kind of vehicle the dictator of an emerging Third World nation might have bought to demonstrate his status. Now, mellowed by age, it had an imposing, rather noble presence.

  The star hovered on a taxi, then on a cyclist in a smog mask, then on a traffic light. A smartly dressed woman crossed the road, a scarf flapping from her shoulders. It was a dry morning but heavily overcast, the darkened glass making it seem even more so, and it had turned cold. With the air-conditioning set uncomfortably low, it felt wintry in the car.