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others spoke of a portfolio – suspect, nefarious – put together over a period of twenty years; there was also a wildly implausible story in which he’d gained access to Marcos’s legendary cache of Japanese gold. None of these rumours had any basis in truth.
    As for his origins, he always said he came from the obscure Californian town of San Luis Obispo, but he’d never been near the place, never seen pictures of it. In the end he was a mystery.
    And that was precisely the way he wanted it.
    He turned away from the photographs and unlocked the door of a small antechamber, a chilly space. An electronic world map, surrounded by a dozen clocks showing the time in different parts of the planet, was located on one wall. Here and there red, yellow and green cursors blinked. These indicated the status of any project at a given time; red was the colour for a dubious area, green represented a situation already in hand, yellow stood for those places where negotiations were under way. On the surfaces of the oceans white cursors tracked the movement of ships; presently one was located off the coast of Madagascar, another in the Caribbean a hundred miles from Cuba, still another in the Baltic, about seventy miles from Tallinn. A fourth was cruising the Adriatic. The direction of land traffic – trains, trucks – was indicated by orange cursors, which flickered in such places as South Africa, Guatemala, Angola and Afghanistan.
    Shelves were lined with computer equipment, video consoles, a couple of laser printers, three fax machines. He had rooms similar to this in all his other properties; machines interfaced with other machines, as if in some form of electronic polygamy. Barron’s world was wired, and the wires carried all manner of information. He looked at the messages that had come in over the faxes.
    These fell into four broad categories. Some were detailed accounts of incidents in various parts of the world – a mass grave of women and children freshly dug up in Bosnia, the resurgence of the Communist party in various parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, a bloody uprising of the People’s Army in the southern Philippines, the deaths of seventeen blacks at the hands of right-wing extremists in Durban, two hundred dead during ethnic violence in eastern Zaire: these reports might have come from an exceptionally well-informed wire service, except that the correspondents were not employed by Reuters or Associated Press. They were not from journalists accredited in any sense of the word.
    The second category consisted of analyses created by experts paid by Barron; computer-generated predictions concerning the possible outcomes of crises in places like Georgia, Nigeria, the Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Northern Ireland. Key figures involved in these disputes – politicians, dictators, potentates, warlords, gangsters and miscellaneous scum – were meticulously profiled. Barron always read these reports carefully.
    The third category of message were requests for assistance, sometimes in the form of money. The final classification, no less important than the others, concerned logistics, the movement of trains and trucks and ships, timetables.
    Barron regarded all these messages for a while. As he did so, he was struck by the range of human dreams and aspirations. He considered his own role a moment. He was the man who provided the fuel for dreams. What did the nature of the dreams themselves matter? He saw himself sometimes as an illusionist, a magician whose art lay in imbuing dreams with substance, a shaper of other people’s worlds. It was as if he were at the centre of some enormous board-game whose rules he had devised himself. He brooded over this board, shifted this or that piece, studied the consequences of each move; unlike other games, there were no black or white pieces, no forces set in opposition to each other, no sides he favoured.
    He turned off the light, locked the