The man came down the steps of the Hotel d'Alsace. He was alone.

He came straight across the sidewalk to his car without looking around him. There was another car standing in front of his, and a Pakistan Airlines minibus behind. There was nobody near him; nobody nearer, at least, than fifteen or twenty feet.

It was early morning, not long after first light, judging by the length of the shadows across the pink marble wall of the hotel.

The man reached his car and opened the door. and got in and the blast blew the roof off and the light was dazzling for a second or two and then there was a lot of redness in the middle of things and one of the man's arms went sailing across the sidewalk and a long shiny red tendril began streaming out of what was left of his body — presumably the large intestine — as he went on flying upwards, a leg coming off and starting to fall, turning over and over. Then the main part of his body came down too, and the smoke began clearing.

'Run it again,' Shatner said.

The man at the VCR put it into fast rewind and we waited.

Shatner was sitting on my left in a rickety deck-chair, not smoking but smelling of stale nicotine. The only other man in here apart from Shatner and the one working the VCR was Holmes. He hadn't said anything since we'd come in here, but then Holmes never says much anyway. Shatner was fidgeting with a pencil, wishing he could light up, I suppose, but in the screening room it's strictly verboten.

I still didn't know what they wanted me here for.

The tape hit the stop and began playing again, and the man came down the steps of the Hotel d'Alsace without looking around him.

'We want you to tell us,' Shatner said, 'if you think any of these other people in the picture look as if they're surveilling the DIF.'