As most of those around him fled towards the exit ramps, Saul headed towards the stairs, while unshouldering his backpack and converting it back into a holdall, then discarding his jacket. Three floors up, he stepped out into a much cleaner level of car park, with strip lights functioning and security cameras hanging from the ceiling. The Hydron SUV, with its mirrored windows, was parked over to his left – still gleaming and, as far as he could tell, untouched. As he approached, it unlocked itself, responding to the implant embedded in his forearm. He climbed into the driver’s seat, dumping the holdall beside him.

‘Secure,’ he said, and locks clonked shut all around him.

A traffic jam slowed his departure from the car park, until he tried the executive exit, where two Inspectorate enforcers waved him out under the loom of a shepherd. Obviously the theft of this government vehicle had not yet been reported, but then its usual driver, a bureaucrat working for the Water Authority, wasn’t in any condition to report it, since he currently lay at the bottom of a reservoir with a slab of carbocrete roped to his chest.

Saul drove slowly and carefully out on to the highway, and only when the last shepherd was out of sight did Janus direct him to a cam deadspot where he could pull over, climb into the spacious rear of the vehicle, and set to work.

After placing Coran’s head down on a plastic sheet, Saul removed the man’s fones and put them to one side. Then, opening the vehicle’s tool compartment beside him, he folded up a flat screen above a plasfactor specially designed for the theatrical profession, and set it running. He first cleaned Coran’s face of blood, then sprayed a quick-setting sealant around his neck to prevent further leakage. Next he ran a scanner from the dead man’s forehead down to his chin, then down each side of Coran’s face, then over his hair; the head’s three-dimensional image appeared on the screen. Next he clicked the screen stylus against the image of Coran’s hair to get the required dye mix, which the plasfactor provided for him as a spray. After that, he instructed it to run the template, as he converted his own white hair to Coran’s dark brown.