She shouldn’t have been surprised when Shah’s man Granger turned up to drive her to the hospital. But she was, just a little. She’d become so used to the idea of her invisible security blanket that there were times when she wondered whether they were there at all.

‘Nah, you’re stuck with us now, mate,’ Granger told her.

‘But how did you even know to come and get me? I just called the switchboard.’

‘Magic!’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘So your mate’s over at the Coonawarra, is he? Fuckin’ swish. It’s where I’d want to be if I got my arse blown up.’

Granger put the car into drive and pulled out, heading back towards the city centre.

Jules, still holding the phone in her hand, was surprised to see the screen light up, displaying a Microsoft Where 2 map. A blue dot moved slowly along the representation of the street they were driving down. The stupid-looking paperclip with the big cartoon eyes was back, though, jumping up and down and pointing at the dot. A speech bubble appeared next to it. I see you are travelling to your destination, it read. Would you like directions?

‘What the fuck . . .’

Granger looked over and down at the handset in her lap. ‘Oh, not fucking Clippy,’ he grunted. ‘Do you mind?’

She passed the phone over to him. A series of quick, bewildering thumb gestures later and the Australian handed it back, without the animated paperclip.

‘Fucking Microsoft,’ he said. ‘If only the Wave had been just a little bit bigger. Used to be an Apple man myself. Fucking sad, eh?’

For the next few minutes they drove north, as if heading out to Shah’s compound. Granger explained that the hospital, like so much of the city, was new. It had been built over the bones of an old naval base, eccentrically located some distance inland. Like the army, Australia’s senior service had been persuaded to give up a piece of valuable real estate by the promise of a massive new facility, including the docks currently being built to home-port the Combined Fleet not far from her motel.

‘Had to happen,’ added Granger, as they slipped past the turn-off near the airport that would have taken them on to Shah’s. ‘There were so many new people in town, the place was bursting at the seams. They needed to build new everything – roads, houses, bloody hospitals. There was plenty of land, but not everybody wants to live next to a military base. They’re noisy. Things go boom all the time.’