Whatever he asked for, Gracious Services invariably produced an answer. Their only failure to date had been confirming whether or not Leopold Armstrong had died the day the PSP was overthrown. They weren't alone. New Conservative inquisitors had drawn a blank. Even the combined ranks of the Mindstar Brigade vets had been stumped. Most people thought he was dead, including the surviving top-rank apparatchiks. Possibly trying to create a martyr, Greg thought, two years was an impossibly long time to remain hidden if he was alive.

There had been very little of Downing Street left after the electron-compression warhead had detonated. The explosion created a deep glass-walled crater one hundred metres across, flattening every building for five hundred metres beyond its rim. Hundreds of silver rivulets scarred its slopes, molten metal which had solidified as it trickled downwards. The only human remnants were individual carbon molecules, mingling with the oily black pall clotting the air overhead.

Some said the warhead was American, others Chinese. Both had denied involvement. But it had to be one of the two superpowers, they were the only nations who had mastered the technology.

Neither had seemed a likely candidate to Greg. There had been talk in Turkey of the Northern European Alliance buying some electron-compression warheads from the Americans. The weapon that would turn the tide, was the squaddies' camp rumour. It could've been deployed to take out entire airfields or tank battalions, megatonnage blasts without the radiation and fallout of fission weapons. Rich man's nuke.

Nothing had ever come of it. So Greg reckoned that if the Americans wouldn't hand them over to the Alliance, they were even more unlikely to give one to the urban predator gang which claimed to have smuggled it into Downing Street. Certainly the New Conservative inquisitors never bothered to find out.

Greg had made his small contribution to the search for Armstrong, but for once not even his intuition could say whether the President had survived, he had no belief one way or the other. He just wished Armstrong dead dead dead; burning in Dante's hell for ever more.

He gazed out of the chalet lounge's window while the unbidden reflections drifted past, bringing the associated emotions back with them, the elation and the suffering. Flames and laughter.

Seventeen minutes after Gracious Services began the search, his terminal's flatscreen came alive again.

GOT HIM FOR YOU, THUNDERCHILD. KENDRIC DI GIROLAMO CURRENTLY ON BOARD HIS YACHT MIRRIAM, DOCKED AT PETERBOROUGH'S NEW EASTFIELD MARINA, BERTH TWENTY-SEVEN.

THANK YOU, WILDACE, Greg typed.

NO PROBLEM. HOTROD HANDLED BLUEPRINCE BURNED HIM FOR YOU. SAYS IF YOU WANT ANOTHER RUN HE'LL BE HAPPY TO OBLIGE, FEE NEGOTIABLE.

I'LL REMEMBER.

PLEASURE TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU, THUNDERCHILD. WILDACE SIGNING OFF.

So Kendric was in Peterborough, was he? Close to the action. How convenient.

Greg made one final call, then headed back to the bedroom.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE