“This is the sole piece of evidence. There are cameras outside this room. I’ve got the floorplan: no windows, only one way out. No sign of this person entering or exiting. Just this. Which begs the question…”

Not “How did they get in?” but…“Why do we even have this record?”

“Because nobody’s perfect?” Alison threw up her hands theatrically. “The really scary thing is, there was one super-diligent filing clerk working on Op Moraybleak. They’d been on Hertzelectric too and had a really good memory for, let’s agree, some pretty memorable faces. They searched around and unearthed these cases here. However, there might be another dozen related cases that haven’t been cross-referenced, just sitting there in our filing system. And other than including members of this ‘group,’ none of these cases link together—oh, there’s a focus on the DST. Yet until that clerk put two and two together, they were all completely separate, just like Glassknife would have been. Except now we have…the Plug-uglies, who seem awfully interested in some of our scientists. Who may now have Khan.”

Julian drained his glass. “And working for whom, exactly? Or do you think freelancers, highest bidder? How can we not know about these clowns?”

“Because they’re not clowns.” She had the Belgian importer’s jolly laugh up on both screens. The joke’s been on us for at least ten years.

“Even so,” he managed. “Look at them. You’d not have much problem picking them out of an ID parade, would you?”

Alison had all the faces lined up across the paired screens: the corpse, the importer, the photofit, a still from the lab, another from the camera outside Khan’s place—zoomed in to clip out Elsinore Mallory. For a long while the two of them stared at their rogue’s gallery.

“You want to hear something really crazy?” Alison asked at last.

“I really, really want to say no,” Julian said. “I’ve had my quota for one night. Is this evidenced crazy or the purely speculative kind?”

“Oh, speculative—the most speculative, born of bad data and guesswork,” she said gaily, and he realized she must be at least a glass ahead of him. “And I’m not an ethnographer or anything, perish the thought. But look.” She circled the cursor about two of her screens like a heat-drugged fly. “Look here, at, say, the cheekbones—his, then look at hers. And here’s our chap from the lab. He has a broader face, even broader. Photofit guy…okay, a bad example, but you can see how Dead-ugly’s leaner, hollower.”

“They all look pretty similar to me,” Julian said. “What’s your point?”

“Maybe I don’t have one,” she said, her confidence collapsing abruptly. “Forget it. Stupid idea anyway.”

“Go on, Matchbox, what was it?”