He wasn’t much interested in food himself, though the sturgeon at the café was good. His appreciation for coffee as a substance was mostly limited to the amount of caffeine it could provide him—which was why he liked the Turk’s high-powered sludge.

The truth was, Rustem lived much of his time outside of his physical environment, glued to his terminals for hours, lost in the world of his work, coming to with the light through the window gone and his throat parched or his stomach empty.

When he cracked neural networks, he didn’t use VR or 3D models: he hadn’t grown up able to afford that stuff. In his little town of Yelabuga, in the former Republic of Tatarstan (now part of the Ural Commonwealth), he’d done most of his early work on a filthy set of terminals he’d wired together in an ancient pay-by-the-hour web café. The café was in the moldy basement of what had once been Communist Party headquarters, a century or so before he’d been born.

In place of VR, he’d had raw concentration, a skill gained from living in a one-room apartment with parents who were constantly fighting. He had learned to disappear from the world, into worlds of his own creation.

In the pay-by-the-hour café, he had used that skill to build models in his mind that showed him exactly where to find the back door. He’d learned to hack systems while everyone else around him in the web café was blowing each other to smithereens, screaming profanity. Just like home.

And just like home, he went away. Into his neural worlds.

At least as an adult he could work in a quiet place, without distraction, sinking deep, for hours at a time, within the neural patterns, the branches and intersections, the blind alleyways and loops of memory-routine.

Rustem slung his battered leather shoulder bag on the floor and sat down. The waiter was ten seconds behind him with his kahvalti and two cups of coffee on a battered tin platter, along with the obligatory glass of water.

The woman wiped her platinum-stained fingers clean and placed a terminal on the table. Very custom. Very expensive. Very new.

She waited for the waiter to withdraw.

“Two years ago, someone remotely penetrated the network of an autofreighter and caused it to crash into a yacht in the Sea of Marmara, killing one of Moscow’s more obscure but well-connected ultraoligarchs.”

Too bad about the yacht’s crew—and the ultraoligarch’s newest bride. But there had been no way around it—sometimes you had to take a few others along, too.

The voice, burned of any identifiable tone and flatlined of affect by the abglanz, went on: “A year ago, someone caused a maintenance robot in a Qatari high-rise to shove an Iranian businessman over the railing of a staircase onto the porphyry floor thirty meters below.”

Now, that one had been perfect.