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could be out that sliding door and out of the building before anyone could stop her. But that would leave Bob to be the fall guy.
    â€˜All done, ma’am,’ she heard Bob say at last, rather too loudly. Swan replied, but Peri couldn’t make out what she was saying. They spoke for a few moments; she got the impression Bob was stalling, not sure where the hell Peri was or what she was going to do. She had no choice but to stay hidden until she saw Bob wheel the empty carton out of the compute centre, a stony-faced Swan at his heels.
    She waited five minutes and then sauntered out of the compute centre. She took the stairwell by the lifts down to the basement, and walked out a side door into the parking lot. Bobwas waiting in the van across the street, craning his neck, looking for her. She forced herself to stroll across the road instead of bolting.
    What she didn’t know was:
    Sarah Swan stood behind a venetian blind on the second floor of the TLA building, the lens of her camera wedged between two of the slats. She adjusted the zoom. There. The young man was getting into his car – and here came a second overalled figure, apparently out of the TLA building, crossing the street and joining him.
    They exchanged a few words, and then took off. Sarah’s camera clicked rapidly as she tried to grab an image of their numberplate. Any number would do – a phone number, a social security number. Once Sarah had it, she had your fingerprints. She could find you, find out anything she wanted to know about you.
    Sarah waited a few minutes, but the young couple had had a good scare: they wouldn’t be back. She went downstairs. ‘Back in half an hour, Alice,’ she told the receptionist. ‘I just have to take some film to the lab.’

20
One
    TRINA TOLD ME all about it at the bar that night. She’s an English girl with a fetching lisp and even more fetching hips. We had been dating on and off for a couple of years, ever since I wrote a report on data-diddling by one of Keyworth’s employees. ‘Hey, Chickpea,’ she said on the phone, ‘Buy me a couple of drinks to help celebrate not losing my job, and I’ll tell you all about it. Could be a good story.’
    I’d come to the States five years ago after a magazine job in Sydney went sour. Two years in LA, not so far from home. Then that little incident that sent me running for the east coast. I’d been in Washington DC ever since, and I liked it there.
    Washington is a beautiful bad apple, pretty and fresh on the outside, but when you bite into it, rotten at the core. It’s a cesspool of poverty, crime, and drugs surrounded by green suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, the two worlds separated by the giant loop of the Beltway. I’ve seen a grown man nearly panic when a wrong turn took us into a ‘bad area’ of town. When I first moved into a house in Virginia, my next-door neighbour confided that he kept a shotgun in case – pardon my language – niggers came from the city to steal his stuff.
    I prefer the grid of streets at DC’s core to the Disneyland of strip malls and bloated houses in the burbs. So did Trina, who had grown up in Cowgate. I fell in love with her the night I saw her wallop a Hell’s Angel for making a mess of the bar she was tending. The guy was too dazed and embarrassed to doanything but stumble out to his bike. The next day, Trina applied for the receptionist’s job at Keyworth. ‘I’m getting too old for this shit,’ she told me. She was twenty-two.
    We got a couple of steaks and a lot of Fosters and she gave me the story. When the courier didn’t arrive, Trina quickly realised something was wrong, and she called TLA to find out what was going on. Swan checked up on the mystery delivery right away –
and
insisted on paying for the delivered and installed equipment. TLA would investigate the matter, she said. Keyworth should forget it ever