Elina’s testimony had always made it possible that Udmil had been having an affair, and this footage now made it certain. But the affair wasn’t with the dark-suited man – he was a functionary by his bearing, perhaps very highly placed, but a man who followed orders rather than gave them. No, there was someone else – Zidarov doubted that Udmil was the kind of woman to wait around for a host.

So then. Udmil Terashova was meeting someone in that building, someone powerful, someone rich, someone whose major-domo also happened to be present in a warehouse up at the suborbitals crammed with bleeders. Things were ­coming together.

Zidarov turned to the occupancy search. As expected, the records for such a tower were not easy to interpret. The owners were hidden behind a series of faceless shells and ghost entities, although the compilers of the Bastion archives had done their best to cross-reference with known beneficial owners. One name stood out – Galanta Holdings. This was a trade house front wholly owned by a woman named Alida Bronza. Zidarov had come across the name before, and knew that it was a pseudonym. He ran a check on it, and the true identity emerged from the Bastion’s records – Avro Lascile.

He felt his heart sink. He knew who Avro Lascile was. Everybody knew who Avro Lascile was. For as long as anyone could remember, Avro Lascile had been the power behind the Jazc Corporation, the behemoth that straddled a dozen major commercial sectors, from heavy-lift cargo transit to cosmetics. Few entities in Urgeyena could rival the Terashovas for heft, but Jazc eclipsed even them.

He turned his attention to the picts he’d taken in the warehouse. These were of correspondence, written in cipher. Low-level stuff, most probably, though they’d chosen to use parchment, which meant that it was something they didn’t trust to put over the comm-grid. He pulled up a keyboard and entered a few of the phrases into the cogitator’s storage, then ran some analysis. Nothing came back, which wasn’t a surprise – a cipher wasn’t much good if it had been cracked.

He persevered. The last scrap of parchment looked slightly different from the others. As he peered more closely, he could see indentations at the top, very faint, as if made by a stamp on top of an enclosing sheet of parchment or plastek – perhaps a protective envelope. He zoomed in, trying to make out what the mark signified. He couldn’t get it all, and it also looked to be numbers rather than legible words. He entered some characters from it, and got a green lumen-blink from the cogitator. Something had matched with a reference in its storage. He pushed for the match, and a single line of text scrolled across the lens.

> Standard location ident / physical good transit batch processing: Habitation Tower 34637.