He headed south, slipping up on the arterial before heading back down again and driving into the gilt-zones. The towers got taller, more illuminated, attended to by flocks of surveillance monitors. He saw frontages that he was more recently familiar with from holofields, now drenched and dripping, rearing up like drowned monuments in the dark. He didn’t go too fast, but stuck to the main masses of traffic, tracing a reasonably direct route to the place he’d isolated on the remote cartograph.

Eventually, he slowed up, pulling to a halt in a loading bay on the far side of a wide square. Habitation Tower 34637, other­wise called Imperial Garden Complex VII, jutted upwards on the far side. It was a brutal building, all squat pillars and granite piers, lit by those vertical flood-lumens that now swirled and shimmered with flecks of rain.

He killed the Zalamar’s lights, shuffled lower in the driver’s seat, and trained his iris on the distant entrance lobby. He got a clear view, and fixed the scene with a basic motion-detect alert. Then he took a good look around him, checking the landscape. The square was still busy, filled with traffic and bedraggled pedest­rians. A more-than-usually diligent ­missionary had installed himself at the far end and was bellowing something into the storm, though even with vox-enhancers it was impossible to hear just what. As befitted the status of the habclave, high-end groundcars drew up outside many of the grand towers, depositing or collecting their owners.

He tried to make himself comfortable. He had no real expectation that Udmil would move any time soon. It would probably be dawn before anything took place. The loading bay he was in would not be required until the diurnus-shift, and so there was nothing to do but wait, and eat, and keep stocked up with caffeine. He checked on the scanner to see if Draj had moved yet, and saw that he’d managed to procure a Bulwark. The riot-wagon had made its way out of the depot and was heading up towards the main exit transitway leading west. Its tracker was already slowing as Draj hunted for a place to wait. A Bulwark was harder to conceal than an unmarked vehicle, though fewer people were likely to investigate why one was sitting unlit in the shadows.