The flatscreen darkened as he rose from the chair, curtains swishing across it; he had to push hard with his bandy arms to lift himself. "How did you get in?" he asked.

"Door was open," Greg said.

"You're lying. What do you want?"

"Data."

His expression was thunderstruck. "How did you know? Nobody knows I deal in data."

Greg gave him a lopsided apologetic smile. "Somebody does. Cover him."

Ellis swayed backwards as Victor produced his Lucas pistol. "No violence, no violence." It was almost a mantra.

Greg walked across the room and looked down on the Castlewood's dark blue diving pool. The lounge was on the corner of the building, two sides of it were glass. The balcony ran all the way round, one-third of it under the condominium's weather-resistant covering.

"Whoever you are, you're an idiot," Ellis said, "You have absolutely no conception of what you've gone and walked into. The kind of people I associate with can tread you back into the mire that gave you birth."

Greg smiled right back at him, baring his teeth. "I know. That's why we came, for your top-rank friends."

Whatever Ellis was going to say died on his tongue.

"Wolf," Greg said. Naked alarm rocked Charles Ellis's already fraught mind. "Medeor." It produced the same response. "Tentimes."

"Never heard of them."

"Wrong. I'm psychic, you see."

Ellis's face hardened, forestalling the onrush of fear and suspicion kindling behind his eyes.

"In fact, you are Wolf, aren't you?"

True, the mind before him blurted helplessly.

"Thank you," said Greg.

Ellis looked at him with revulsion and hatred.

"Do you know what these are?" Greg asked Victor casually. He rested a hand on one of the three grey football-sized globes that were sitting on a leather-topped Edwardian writing desk. A Hitachi terminal was plugged into each of them with flat rainbow ribbons of optical cable. "They're Cray hologram memories. You can store half of the British library in one of these."

Greg tapped the Hitachi's power stud. LCDs flipped to black across its pale-brown surface, forming a standard alphanumeric keyboard. The cube lit with the Crays' data storage management menu. "You'll note that they're kept in isolation, not plugged into the English Telecom grid. So nobody can hack in. After all, bytes are money, especially when you know how to market them as well as Medeor here."

"What are you going to do?" Ellis's voice was a grizzled rasp coming from the back of his throat.

"Whatever I have to." Greg read the menu codes and accessed the first Cray. "Sixty-two per cent capacity used up," he observed. "That's one fuck of a lot of data. Now I could go through a whole list of names I'm interested in and see which your mind flinches at, but that would be very time-consuming. So I'm just going to ask you to tell me instead. Who paid you to organise the blitz on the Event Horizon datanet?"