He nearly started to say no again, but there wasn't a logical argument against her going. Besides, he could see Julia wasn't going to be moved. Philip Evans wasn't the only one she could wrap around her little finger. "All right, but you get Walshaw to make the travel arrangements, and turn up around midnight prepared for a long wait."

"Do you want the company security hardliners to help you?"

"No. I'm not familiar with their capabilities. I do know all about the people I'm going to be using."

"What people? Tekmercs?" she asked with frank curiosity.

"Tell you sometime."

She gave him a timid smile. "That's a date."

Greg turned the jammer off, and Julia opened her door. "Julia."

She froze with her legs out of the car.

"Don't try so hard, girl. You're not exactly a frump, you know."

Her smile widened, becoming coquettish. "And Adrian isn't just a lump of muscle, either. He's very bright, and kind. And I like him a lot."

"Then I'm happy for you. See you later."

He didn't rate a wave this time; she simply stood watching him drive off, looking small and sad. He folded the rear-view mirror's image up and tucked it away in a corner of his mind. The last thing he needed now was any more guilt rattling round inside his skull.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Greg drove into Peterborough. under a sky which the sun had transformed into a bitter saffron hemisphere raked with the occasional static pillar of cloud. He turned up the windscreen's opacity, muting its eye-smarting intensity. There was a taut thread of pain running through his cortex, the neurohormones' legacy.

It wasn't helped by wondering how he was going to square what he was doing with his promise to Eleanor. And then there was tonight's snatch looming large. Another unforeseen. Events were ganging up on him, dictating his actions.

The conspiracy was unnerving, tenaciously eroding any sensation of control over his life. He was a squaddie back in Turkey, utterly dependent on the wisdom of hidden enigmatic generals and the throw of God's dice. Never again, he'd sworn. Easy to say.

He blended the Duo into the arterial flux of traffic flowing through Peterborough's outlying suburbs; a dawn-to-dusk convoy hauling the city's lifeblood of goods from the industrial sectors to the port and the railway marshalling yard.

Hendaly Street was the same as all the rest in New Eastfield, a long straight gorge of white buildings with grand arched entrances, wide balconies, dark windows, and ranks of flags fluttering on high. Pagoda trees thrust up out of the pavements in the centre of brick tubs; people sat on the benches round them, pensioners soaking up the sun, youngsters with VR bands plugged into gamer decks. Eleanor would enjoy living here.

He had to stamp hard on the brake as the red light came on ahead of the Duo. Its meaning had almost been lost down the years. Working traffic lights, by God!