The afternoon rain had lowered the temperature appreciably, but sleep was impossible. Intuition was running riot inside his cranium, even though he'd ended the gland's secretions. Swirling random thoughts clumped together, producing an image. It didn't matter how many times he told himself to forget it, the image just kept reforming. The same one, over and over.

Eleanor let out a soft hum, and wriggled slightly. He hoped he featured in that dream.

No good. He wasn't going to sleep.

Greg went through the usual mincing motions as he slid gingerly out of bed, making far more noise than if he'd just done it properly. Eleanor sighed again. He pulled the duvet up round her bare shoulders, then put on his towelling robe and went into the lounge.

Through the chalet's front windows he could see the moonlight painting the checkerboard pattern of Hambleton peninsula's meadows and orange groves in mezzotint contrasts. Silent and serene. Strange how remote it seemed from the kind of global-class corporate battles fought only a few kilometres away in Peterborough. He sometimes wondered if a day would come when he wouldn't be able to leave, giving up on the external world and all its conflicts. And who would really be hurt if he did let go? Certainly not Eleanor.

Greg closed his eyes, but instead of Rutland Water's landscape there was only the taunting image.

Not this time, then.

He disconnected the Event Horizon terminal's voice input, opting for the silence of the touchpad keyboard so Eleanor wouldn't be woken. That done, he began to set up a link to Gracious Services.

Even Royan wasn't clear on where the circuit's name originated, but under its auspices England's hackers would pull data from any 'ware memory core on the planet—for a price.

Greg logged into Leicester University's mainframe and entered a cut-off program that'd disengage the instant anyone tried to backtrack his call. Royan had written it for him years ago. He couldn't afford to be anything but ultra-circumspect dealing with Gracious Services. He didn't want any of its members uncovering his own identity and selling the information in turn—the ultimate irony. The average hacker had a moral code which made an alley tomcat a paragon of virtue by comparison. After confirming the cut-off's validity he routed the link through another cut-off in the Ministry of Agriculture on to the Dessotbank in Switzerland, crediting it with a straight ten thousand pounds New Sterling direct from Event Horizon's central account.

After that it was just a question of establishing two more cut-offs, one in Bristol city council's finance mainframe, then on through the CAA flight control in Farnborough, and dialling the magic number.

Gracious Services had a nonsense number, there was no phone on the end of it. But every English Telecom exchange computer in the country had been infiltrated with a catchment program that would slot the caller directly into the circuit.