“No!” Kuwale scowled; I was missing the point. “Sarah told me what happened with SeeNet. You pulled a few strings … and all the work she’d done counted for nothing. She was angry, but she wasn’t surprised. She said that’s what the networks were like. And she bore you no real grudge; she said she was ready to pass on everything she knew, if you agreed to refund her costs out of your research budget, and maintain confidentiality—”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

“I gave her the okay to tell you everything she knew about AC. Why do you think I made such a fool of myself, at the airport? If I’d known you were still in the dark, do you think I would have approached you like that?”

“No.” That much, at least, made sense. “But why would she tell you she was going to brief me, and then change her mind? I haven’t heard a word from her. She doesn’t answer my calls—”

Kuwale fixed vis eyes on me, sad and ashamed, but suddenly, painfully, honest.

“And she doesn’t answer mine.”

#

We left the tram, at a stop on the outskirts of a small industrial complex, then walked south-east. If we were under professional surveillance, all of this incessant motion would change nothing – but if Kuwale believed it made it safe for us to talk more freely, I was willing to tag along.

I didn’t accept for a moment that anything had happened to Sarah; she had every reason to wish both of us out of her life – a wish which a few words to her communications software could have granted. She might have had a brief, magnanimous fantasy about putting me in the picture, in spite of what I’d done to her, out of sheer journalistic solidarity – all of us pulling together for the sake of Mosala’s history-making story-which-must-be-told, ra ra – but then felt differently in the morning, once the chemical solace had worn off.

What’s more, I was beginning to have second thoughts about the threat to Mosala herself.

I turned to Kuwale. “If biotech interests ever did assassinate Violet Mosala, she’d be an instant martyr for technolibération . And as a corpse, she’d be just as good a mascot, just as good an excuse for the South African government to lead an anti-boycott revolt in the UN.”

“Maybe,” ve conceded. “If the headlines told the right story.”

“How could the story fail to get out? Mosala’s backers would hardly stay silent.”

Kuwale smiled grimly. “Do you know who owns most of the media?”

“Yes, I do, so don’t give me that paranoid bullshit. A hundred different groups, a thousand different people—”

“A hundred different groups – most of which also own large biotech concerns. A thousand different people – most of them on the boards of at least one major player, from AgroGenesis to VivoTech.”