He nodded. ‘Yes. He is my second here. A good man. Now, do you have any idea who Cesky is using? Does he have his own men or just contractors?’

‘Cut-outs, I’m sure,’ she replied as they swept onto the ring road that encircled New Town. The crowd on the edge of the red-light district was heaving now, spilling out on the road. ‘The guys who tried to take us in New York were hired out of Mexico. Or, you know, what was left of Mexico. That freakish Commando Barbie chick who saved our arses said they were hitters from one of the old cartels. In Galveston it was a couple of cashiered army guys, and the chap who tried to shiv me in Sydney last week was a Romanian. A nobody, really. Just some hard man providing muscle for the Russian maf down there.’

‘Not so hard now, however?’

‘No. Not so much. Dumb, and dead mostly. What about the guys who tried to hit you, Mr Shah? Any luck tracing them?’

He frowned. ‘I am afraid the men who planted the bomb at my home did not survive their incompetence. One died on the spot, the other in hospital. Not by my hand, I assure you. I wished very much to talk with them, but they were under guard. I assumed a business rival hired them, perhaps even a PMC – Sandline or one of Blackwater’s franchise operators. They have been pressuring smaller security firms like myself to fold our business into theirs. There has been violence, but nothing on this scale. I do not think the police would stand for it, even as powerful as the private contractors are. Until you contacted me, Miss Julianne, I would never have considered this Cesky character. To be truthful. I had forgotten him. After all, he did not make the voyage with us from Acapulco.’

‘And that’s his issue,’ said Jules. ‘Hard to believe a bloke who’s done so well out of the last few years would faff around like this just to settle an old score. But that’s his nature as I understand it and . . .’ She paused, wondering how best to put this.

‘Yes?’

The Land Rover grunted as Ganesh took them onto the Stuart Highway, heading north, and picked up speed as they passed the headquarters of the Free Port Development Authority, the real power in the city. A huge, soaring structure of blue and gold glass that was somehow narrower at the base than up on its top floors, it reminded Jules of a rolled-up newspaper.

‘He lost a daughter,’ Jules began. ‘She didn’t make it to Seattle.’

‘I see,’ said Shah, his face unreadable. ‘Did she die in Acapulco, in the collapse?’