"No, no, we don't go around beating confessions out of people here. There are much simpler methods. But understand one thing, Mandel, you are going to die. Just as soon as you have provided me with every byte I require. How you die will be decided by your behaviour. The old easy way or the hard way; you can have a bullet through the head, quick and clean. Alternatively, you can be dumped into the old river bed, alive and kicking."

"It doesn't make one fuck of a lot of difference in the end, does it?"

Armstrong picked up a cybofax from the coffee-table and sat in the last remaining leather chair. "Think about it," he said knowingly. "Dwell on it. You might find your attitude adjusting. Neville, we'll begin now."

Turner opened a drawer in the rose-teak desk and extracted a spaghetti tangle of nylon straps and optical fibres. "Take off your shirt," he told Greg with a doctor's examining-room impartiality.

Greg thought about it. Refusing would be a rather trivial token, the shirt would only be cut or ripped off. Besides, he was thinking of being slung into that bottomless mud. God curse Armstrong. He shrugged out of the jacket and began on the shirt buttons. Flakes of dried blood wedged under his fingernails.

"Good," Armstrong said. "Quite an ironic twist for you, Mr. Mandel, I imagine. On the receiving end of a lie detector for once."

Turner Velcroed a strap around each of Greg's wrists. They prickled, minute needle-tipped sensors probing into his skin, tasting salinity, heat, conductivity, heart-rate. The St. Christopher was flicked to one side and another strap went round his neck, tightening noose-style.

Leopold Armstrong's fingers drummed on his cybofax. "I have a number of queries. And you'll answer each one honestly. For every lie you make we'll break a bone in Miss Thompson's body. The bigger the lie, the bigger the bone. Understand?" Again, there was no malice, Leopold Armstrong was just telling it the way it was.

"Yeah," Greg replied, as a tiara band was placed on his head. Turner pressed an infuser against his arm. There was a bee-sting of pain, turning to an ice-spot.

"Relaxant," Turner said, and began plugging the optical cables into a gear module which was already interfaced with the Olivetti deck. The cube lit with scrawling sine waves. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and began typing. Data rolled down an LCD display. "Name?" he asked.

The correlation went on for what seemed an age to Greg. The relaxant acted like a gentle influx of rosé wine, pleasantly inebriating, amplifying sounds like squeaking leather and rustling clothes, turning the air warm, drying his throat. Of course, he could still concentrate. If he wanted to.

They seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of his life stored in the Olivetti. Stuff he could barely remember: