“Well.” She rolled up against him. “First, we’re going to order breakfast from room service. Then you’re going to go and do whatever it is that Angbard expects of you this morning. If you come back here, I’ll probably be gone, because I’ve got some research to do and some stuff to buy. There’s someone I’ve hired—” he raised an eyebrow—“Yes, I’ve established a pattern of drawing out cash against that card, for as long as it’ll hold out. I’m paying a friend who I trust, implicitly, to keep an eye out for me. I’m not going to tell you any more about it because the fewer people who know, the better. But when you come back to this room, even if I’m not here, you’ll find a prepaid new mobile phone. From time to time, I want you to check for voice mail. Only three people will know the number—you, me, and my employee. It’s for emergencies only. There’ll be a single number programmed into it, and that’s for me—again, I’ll only check for voice mail occasionally. I figure if I can’t even hide a mobile phone, there won’t be anything you can do to help.”

“So you’re going away,” he said. “But are you going back to court or are you going underground?”

“I’m going back to face the music,” she replied. “At least for this evening, I need to be seen. But I’m going to hole up on this side at night, at least until I can find a safely doppelgängered room or figure out who’s after me. And then—” she shrugged. “Well, I’ll have to play it by ear. For now, I’m thinking about setting up a new startup venture, in the import/export field.”

“That’s not safe—they’ll kill you if they find out! Clan business ventures are really tightly controlled. If you splinter off, they’ll assume you’re setting up as a rival.”

“Not if I do it right,” she said confidently. “It’s a matter of finding a new business model that hasn’t occurred to any of them. Then get it going and deal the Clan shareholders in before they know what’s happening. If I can finesse it, they’ll have a vested interest in seeing me succeed.”

“But that’s—” Roland was at a loss for words. “A new business? There is no scope for anything new! Nobody’s come up with a new trade since the 1940s, when the drug thing began taking over from gold and hot goods. I was thinking you were going to try and do something like bootstrap reforms on your own estate, not—”