"Hey, what am I, your confessor?"

"No, this is about the blitz." She knew he'd changed, hardening somehow. It was like she'd spoken a codeword, switching his mind from levity to total attention.

She started to tell him about Kendric, the buyout, her threat; speaking rationally, without rancour. And doing it that way made her mortified by how petty she sounded. What was it Kendric had said? Schoolgirl temper-tantrum.

"I couldn't let him go unpunished," she said. "He set out to destroy everything Grandpa spent fifty years of his life building, not to mention my future."

Greg looked troubled, staring at one of the Turner landscapes without seeing it.

"Do you think I was right?" she asked nervously.

"Yeah, probably. I'd have done the same, I think."

"So the blitz might have been Kendric's vendetta against Grandpa and me? Nothing to do with the giga-conductor."

"Could be. But I think it's reasonable to assume Kendric is involved up to his neck; he's certainly my first choice. This possible mole implicates him directly."

"You keep calling him 'possible'."

"Yeah. It's almost too easy to write everything off on to one master-spy. But the evidence is pretty strong. Who knows? And now I think about it, this whole giga-conductor thing adds a new dimension to the memox-spoiler operation. Kendric was more than likely after the patent the whole while, that was the asset he really wanted to strip."

"That's what I thought. But I couldn't tell you at the time. Sorry."

"No problem. I didn't need to know. Tell me, exactly when did Dr. Ranasfari crack the giga-conductor?"

"Tenth of November." She didn't have to query the nodes, the date was ingrained. The last time she'd seen Grandpa really happy.

He sat slowly on an old monk's bench, thinking hard. She hovered, agitated. Wanting to know what he was mulling over, unwilling to interrupt. The hall's silence amplified every sound as she fidgeted.

"Halfway through the memox spoiler," Greg mused. "So it had already been working for a few months. The thing is, if the mole, or whoever, had already breached the security cordon around Ranasfari, then it's odds on that it was Kendric, or Kendric got word of it. Pirate data traffic is his speciality, after all. Tell me, would he have known in advance that Ranasfari was going to crack the giga-conductor? What I mean is, was the breakthrough sudden?"

"Not really. Ranasfari has been working on the project for a decade, he was confident of a positive result for almost a year beforehand. Then he produced a cryogenic giga-conductor last May. A room-temperature version was only a matter of time after that; a lightware cruncher problem, solving the chemical make-up, rather than any revelation in fundamental physics."