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were voted out, and didn’t want to.
    So if he was flattered by this information, that was because he was supposed to be flattered—or so his more cautious mind declared. And if the end of the story suggested that there was more to come, that was not accidental, was not merely because life continued. It was because the narrative had been constructed to invite ideas of continuance. Frankly, on a professional level, he thought the document a little overdone. It could have been a great deal subtler. It was garish, almost prurient. It invited speculation of the wilder sort, lent itself—spuriously, so far as he knew—to connections to the present day which could not be sustained. It reminded him, in its apparently unmerited confidence, of the now-notorious dossiers which had preceded the invasion of a certain Middle-Eastern nation. There just was no clear reason why anyone involved in the Barikad project would come for Donny Caspian out of the past. Caspian’s dusty secrets were insignificant now. He could have given an interview to
The Times
, and it would have been cleared quite happily and read by almost no one. He had never beennear a nuclear missile, hadn’t known dirty truths about the Casanova sons of foreign dignitaries now themselves ascended to the heights. That wasn’t him. Donny Caspian—odd as it might seem—had been a gunslinger and a daredevil, and for all that that was very laudable, it didn’t make you a target sixty years down the line. The file was hogwash. Throw in a bit of sex, and it would do very nicely as the worser sort of airport novel.
    Tom Rice was new to the secret world, but he was not new to dirty tricks. He had been for several years charged with monitoring the trade in guano on one of Britain’s residual overseas territories, and while this was not overly glamorous, it had been massively educative. Guano might be the slimy product of the digestive systems of birds and mammals, but it was expensive and desirable, which meant people lied, cheated, and occasionally killed for it. Guano was sold in bulk at the international level, often traded on paper several times before it was ever actually shipped. And where there was paper, there was fraud. Warehouses were filled with ordinary mud and topped off with a layer of the good stuff; inspectors were bribed not to use a dipstick, and the presence of the fantasy guano was used to depress the market price so that someone could buy low, then sell high when the fraudulent guano disappeared. Sometimes you turned up to collect your product and found someone else had bribed it out from under you: the forms insisted you had taken delivery, and you’d be out your stake and your sale. And all that was before you even touched the arcane business of gaming the subsidies, which was where it got really bad and the guano trade started to dovetail with drugs and sex slaves. Tom Rice had been provided with a bodyguard of three when he was working the guano desk, and been trained in surviving a kidnapping. He’d had a hot button on a lanyard around his neck at all times, even in the bath.
    All of which had made him just a little more open to ideas of foul play. Perhaps that was why he was here, now. If all this was on the level, that experience was worthwhile in this situation. But sitting in the Copper Kettle, with that infuriating old dear behind him exchanging increasingly barbed apologies with the manageress, he could feel the dead spot between his shoulderblades lighting up, and knew that something, somewhere, was very much awry. But for the life of him, he couldn’t see what it was.
    “Really, Mrs Mandel,” said the old dear, “you shouldn’t use such language, and in front of the young gentleman. He’s terribly shocked.”
    “ ‘Buck up’,” the manageress said icily. “I said ‘buck up’. Not anything else, I’m sure.”
    “Well, no doubt you did. You really won’t let me pay?”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Banister,” Mrs