"You were real careful looking down," Leol Reiger was saying. "Went through all Morrell's personnel. But you should've been looking up, maybe got your hotrod to crack a few Johal HF files open. Done that, you'd have found our Faulkner here. Not a perfect specimen of humanity, our Faulkner." Leol Reiger finished his bottle, putting it on the bar.

Sun had to look up at him.

"Five million New Sterling, Suzi. That's what me and my partner are going to get from Johal HF this afternoon when we deliver the ionic streaming data. I paid you out of petty cash." He turned to the barman. "Get the little lady a drink, whatever she wants. My treat."

She watched Leol Reiger walk over to Taylor Faulkner, clap him on the shoulder. The two of them laughed. Fury and helplessness rooted her to the bar stool. That shit Leol Reiger had been right, that was the real source of the pain, not the money. She should've checked, should've ripped Taylor Faulkner a-fucking-part, built a proper profile, not just a poxy ident check.

"What'll it be?" the barman asked.

Suzi picked up Leol Reiger's empty beer bottle and hurled it at the row of optics.

CHAPTER TWO

Monaco at dusk was bathed in thick copper-red light as the dome diffused the last rays of the sun into a homogeneous glow, banishing shadows. Buildings seemed to shine of their own accord.

Charlotte Fielder admired the town's tasteful stone-fronted buildings through the window of the chauffeured Aston Martin. Monaco's architecture was a counterfeit of the late nineteenth century, a blend of French and Spanish; hacienda mansions, apartment blocks with elegant white façades, black railings, red clay tiles, verandas festooned with scarlet-flowering geraniums growing out of pots.