“Oh I think I will, indeed I do.” She headed back to the office, leaving Roger wrestling a ten-kilogram lump of very high-grade rock wool onto his workbench.

The day passed in a blur. Miriam had rigged a travel transformer for her laptop, which she kept in a locked drawer in the office along with an inkjet printer and a small digitizer tablet. The CAD software was a pain to use with such a small screen, but far better than the huge draftsman’s board and ink pens in the far corner of the room. Between calls she lost herself in an extruded 3D model of a brake assembly—one of her own invention, crude but recognizable as the ancestor of late twentieth-century disk brakes. Another file awaited her attention—steel radial bands for reinforcing tires. The idea was sound, but she kept having to divert into her physics and engineering textbooks. Her calculus was rustier than she was willing to admit, and she was finding some of the work extremely hard.

But perfection didn’t matter. Getting there first mattered. Get there first and just-good-enough and you could buy the specialists to polish the design to perfection later. This was the lesson Miriam had learned from watching over the shoulders of her Silicon Valley colleagues, and from watching a myriad of biotech companies rise and fall—and it was the lesson she intended to shove up New Britain’s industrialists so hard it made them squeak.

One o’clock. Miriam blinked, suddenly dizzy. Her buttocks ached from the hard stool, she was hungry, and she needed the lavatory. She stood up and put the notebook PC away, then headed for the toilet—an outhouse in the backyard. Afterwards she slipped out the front door in search of lunch. Of such elements were a working day made.

In the public environment of the hotel, or the lab, she cut an eccentric, possibly scandalous figure. On the streets she was just another woman, better dressed than most, hurrying about her errands. Anonymity of a kind: Treasure it while you can, she told herself as she lined up at a street corner where a baker’s boy had set up a stand to sell hot bacon rolls. It won’t last.

She returned to the office and had been busy for an hour—phoning her lawyer, then calling a commercial agent at what passed for a recruiting house—when there was a peremptory knock on the side window. “Who’s there?” she demanded, standing up to open it.

“Police. Inspector Smith at your service.” A bushy moustache and a suspicious, beefy face stood behind an imposing warrant card with a crown and heraldic beasts cavorting atop it chased her in through the open window.

“Homeland Defense Bureau. Are you Mrs. Fletcher?”

“Uh, yes.” Flustered, Miriam tried to pull herself together. “How can I be of service?”

“I’d like a word with you if I may.”