“And I would have turned it down,” said Petrovitch. “It’s more honorable this way.”

“A good word for a virtue that is in short supply. Sayonara, Petrovitch-san.”

When he’d gone, when Petrovitch had waited for five minutes and Hijo hadn’t leaped into the room to behead him with a katana, he fell across his desk, limp and useless.

He’d gotten away with it. Again. He’d ridden his luck so hard, so far, that surely it had to be spent by now.

Coffee. He boiled up some more water, and shoveled granules into the dregs of the previous brew. Then he sat back down and couldn’t quite believe he was still alive.

There was work to do, though: he had to have something to show Pif when she came back in, even though he knew from experience that when she chose to sleep, she could be out for the best part of a day. In the current circumstances, with everything that was at stake, he guessed she’d catnap. A couple of hours and she’d return, running on adrenaline, caffeine and sugar. Much like himself.

He looked at what he’d done that morning, and wondered if he’d made a mistake copying out the original equations of state. Pif would beat him with the stupid stick if he had, so he wheeled himself around to her desk, nudging the other chair aside.

He checked every symbol with exaggerated care, finally coming to the conclusion that his errors were entirely of his own devising.

Then he spotted it, stuck to the desktop under Pif’s papers, in plain sight to anyone who looked. A bug, the same size and shape as the one he’d found in his shoe. Just like the one Marchenkho’s hired killers had used to find him.

“Sooksin,” he breathed.

It wasn’t Marchenkho. The one Sorenson had picked up had been Chain’s. And this one, slipped under Pif’s working-out when he’d fiddled with it, was Chain’s. Which probably meant that the first one had been his, too. He’d been tricked.

Then the awful realization struck him. Not that Harry Chain had let him believe that Marchenkho had bugged him, but that he was still bugged.

No, not that either. Why would Chain make an attempt to plant another device on Pif’s desk? Because the first one had gone wrong. He took off his jacket and pulled it inside out, searching every seam, folding back the collar, examining every pocket. Then his T-shirt.

Then his trousers, again turned street-side in, and his socks, damn it. Even the waistband of his pants, though he was sure he’d have noticed Chain rummaging around in there while he was still wearing them.