The man took my hand in his, and bent his visor down to examine the bracelet. ‘I’ve never seen anything exactly like it. I’d say Eleventh, maybe Twelfth . . . but I wouldn’t put quoins on it. What does it do, since it obviously isn’t jewellery?’

‘It’s a tracking system. The man who put it on told me that it had a coded lock.’

‘And this man has the key?’

I held my silence until he had raised his visor and was looking me in the face.

‘Yes.’

‘And I suppose there are good reasons why you want it removed.’

I thumped the bag of quoins down onto his counter. ‘Get it off me quickly – say in the next five minutes – and there’s a three-bar quoin in it for you.’

‘You’re in a hurry, then.’ He shot a watchful eye in the direction of Paladin, then bent down to open drawers concealed behind the counter. He came out with a fistful of probes, connected to cables, and with little lights in them. He set an angled device on the counter, like a small cash register, and plugged the probes into it. Then he tapped them against my bracelet and watched as the device made tiny little clicks.

‘There is a lock, and it is electromagnetically encoded,’ he said in a low, thoughtful voice. ‘Never seen anything exactly like this before, though. Seems to be a ten-parameter key . . . octal encoding. There’s a tamper circuit, so . . .’

Something in the bracelet went clunk.

‘What?’

‘I think I just tripped the tamper circuit.’

Paladin said: ‘The bracelet has begun to emit a location pulse. I do not have the means to jam it.’

I looked up at the man with the visor. ‘Your sign says no mechanism or combination too complicated. Which part of that did I misunderstand?’

The man tapped the probes against the bracelet again. ‘The lock has reset itself. You’d need something more than an electromagnetic code to open this now. Some kind of master bypass. I don’t have anything like that.’

‘Then you’re going to have to get it off me by some other means. You must have to open safes or drill through locks, when the keys get jammed.’

‘This is fixed around your wrist.’

‘And I want if off.’ I thought of the location pulse, already alerting constables. It wouldn’t take them long to narrow my location down to Neural Alley.

He bent down, slid open drawers, rattled through tools. He came out with a tiny pick, and tried to scratch a mark across the casing of the bracelet. ‘It doesn’t even touch it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘If that doesn’t, none of my cutters will. Whoever put this on you really didn’t want anyone removing it.’

‘Do you have energy tools? Effector batteries? Coherence beams?’ Paladin asked.