Li emerged from the Mercedes, a dark object not much bigger than a cigarette pack in his hand. He seemed to be prodding it with his finger and then listening to it. It was a moment or two before she realised what it was, and she leaped from the cab and sprinted the twenty-odd yards to the car. She snatched it from him breathlessly and checked the display. “We’ve got a signal,” she said.

He nodded. “The battery’s very low.”

She looked at him. “Who do we call?” And even as she asked she saw the cable trailing in his other hand, and beyond him, on the back seat of the Mercedes, Johnny Ren’s Apple Powerbook computer. She thrust the phone back into Li’s hand and slipped into the seat, opening the laptop on her knees. It took several infuriating minutes for the operating system to load before the screen presented her with its options. She hardly dared look. But there it was. The Internet Explorer icon. “Jesus . . .” She looked up at Li’s perplexed face framed in the doorway. “We don’t need to call anyone. We can go on-line. We can put the entire goddamn story on the Internet and the whole world’s going to know about Grogan Industries and Pang and RXV.”

Li understood at once the implications of what she was saying. “Do you know how?” he asked anxiously.

“I think so.” She tapped a few keys and opened up a document template on which she could type up their story. “It’s crazy,” she gasped, her face shining with excitement. “We’re just about as far from anywhere as we can be . . .” She glanced out of the window at the endless expanse of grass and desert. “. . . and yet we can talk to anyone in the world—several millions of them simultaneously.”

The computer beeped and she froze.

Li leaned in, troubled by her consternation. “What’s wrong?”

“Battery’s low on this, too.” A box on the screen told her she had less than fifteen minutes computing time left. “God, how can I write it all in fifteen minutes?” She starting tapping furiously on the keyboard.

Li could do nothing but wait and watch, anxious and frustrated. He walked around the car, avoiding looking back in the direction of the pick-up. He still couldn’t bring himself to think about Yongli, never mind look at his friend’s body lying in the dirt. The incessant tap, tap of the computer keys punctuated the gentle whine of the wind. He saw, through the windscreen, the concentration on Margaret’s face, the tension there. He heard the computer beep again and saw her despair.