He now headed over to the personnel lift, called it and waited, head bowed, then stepped inside as soon as it arrived. The moment the doors had closed, he dropped the holdall, stripped off his jacket and turned it inside-out to present its blue lining, then took a matching baseball cap out of his pocket and jammed it on his head. Next he took up the holdall, stripped off its outer layer of plastic, which he scrunched up and shoved in his pocket, then inverted the handles to turn it into a backpack, and shrugged that on to his shoulders. Shortly afterwards he exited the lift on the ground floor and departed the gene bank, his appearance now somewhat different from the one the satellites would have recorded up on the roof.

‘They will almost certainly obtain samples of your DNA,’ Janus noted.

‘Well, that’ll be interesting,’ Saul replied, as he turned left and headed away from the car park towards the personnel gate in the razormesh fence.

‘Perhaps your DNA is retained in some hidden file?’

‘In that case keep watch and see what you can find.’

Only a few months after he’d escaped the Calais incinerator, he’d managed to turn his own DNA into data, then got Janus to penetrate the Inspectorate database to run a search. He wasn’t recorded there, which seemed odd considering how the Inspectorate had obviously taken such an interest in him.

Now it was time to further lose any satellite tracking because, despite transforming his appearance, and despite Janus shafting all the cam images and generally trashing all monitoring systems within the gene bank as he left, once investigators finally realized Coran was missing, they would use recognition programs on recorded data to track everyone leaving the building today. He needed now to head somewhere crowded and chaotic, which pretty well defined most places on Earth, but even then, without certain preparations, he would have had problems with the numerous ‘community safety’ cameras and other forms of surveillance. This was why Janus’s next destination, and his own, lay about half a mile up the road: the MegaMall SuperPlex.

‘Who put me in that crate?’ Saul had asked Janus, desperately wanting to attach a name to the hatchet-sharp features of his erstwhile interrogator.

His new friend didn’t know, but certainly did know who had delivered the crate for disposal.

The incinerator complex wasn’t high-security, since big dumper trucks loaded with waste were constantly in and out, and many outsiders were sorting through the mounds of rubbish either for something to sell or something to eat. However, as with everywhere else, cams were sited throughout the area, like black eyeballs impaled on narrow posts.