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somewhere. But they could be holding him here.'
    'What's the other thing?'
    'I need a gun. I lost mine.'
    Ji grunted and waved at one of his bodyguards. Ji has a good line in waves: the guard didn't even need to come over to know what he was asking for. He just disappeared straight out the back.
    'Thanks.'
    'No problem. You going to leave me the cube?'
    'Can't. Zenda would kill me.'
    'You still working for her?'
    I pressed the cube, printed out a colour image of Alkland and gave it to Ji.
    'You know me. I'll work for anyone.
    'Especially her.'
    'Especially her.'
    By the time I got back to my apartment it was late. You're not allowed to enter the Centre more than once in one day, so I had to go the long way round, via two other Neighbourhoods. Luckily Ji, cunning old fox of a psychotic that he is, had got hold of some WeaponNegatorz®, so I got the gun back undetected.
    Guns, actually. Ji gave me a Gun, which is my weapon of choice, and also a Furt as an added bonus. The Furt is quite a flash laser device, which doubles as a cutting instrument and is therefore kind of useful. The Gun just fires energy bullets. Crude, but effective, and as it generates the bullets itself you never have to reload, which has saved my life eleven times. It was the same make as my last gun, which I lost on the recent job I still haven't told you about, and it felt very comfortable in my hand. Over a couple more pitchers Ji and I had tried to work out where this left us in the favour stakes. We were both pretty bollocksed by then, but the end result seems to be that he now owes me one more favour than he did before.
    As I sat with a jug of Jahavan coffee, each molecule of which is programmed to pelt round the body kicking the shit out of any alcohol molecules it finds, I considered where to go from here. So far, I didn't have very much to go on. I had established that Ji hadn't been involved in Alkland's abduction, but I'd known that anyway. Ji simply wanted to take over as much of Red as he could and stay alive as long as he could whilst killing as many other people as possible. He was a simple man, with simple needs.
    Whoever had Alkland was into something much more complex. They couldn't be after money, because the Centre didn't have any, but it was unlikely they'd done it for the sheer fun of it. They had to want something that only the Centre could give them. Working out what that might be was going to be important, and I put a memo in my mental file to have a crack at it when I could be bothered. My mental memos are different to my mental notes: I always do something about them eventually, and they're typed so I can read what they say. For example:
    Internal Memo: Who's got Alkland?
    1) Someone with enough togetherness to get people into the Centre to snatch him.
    2) Someone with enough togetherness to know about him in the first place. (The togetherness factor of these guys had to be pretty high. The Centre doesn't widely distribute lists of 'People Doing Really Important Things Who You Might Like To Consider Kidnapping'. I'd never even heard of Alkland before tonight, and I know the Centre pretty well for an outsider.)
    3) Someone who wants something of a kind that only the Centre can give them. (When I knew what that might be, I'd know what kind of people I was dealing with, which would make it easier to predict the way in which they'd operate.) And
    4) Get some batteries for the Gravbenda®,
    See? Very diligent. Zenda would be impressed. Well, not impressed, probably, because I'm sure her mental memos run to 120 pages with graphs, indexes and supporting audio visual material, but pleasantly surprised, maybe. Surprised, anyway.
    I also made another note, which I'm not going to tell you about. It was kind of a surprising idea, and very unlikely: but I stored it away anyway. I'll let you know if it turns out to be relevant.
    By the time I finished the jug I was completely sober. More sober than I wanted to be, in fact: I'd drunk too much