April 4th

Everybody who is anybody has it marked on their calendar as the event of the season. Forget The Oscars, The Met Gala, the Presidential Ball, mere tedious functions. Tonight is the night that the rich and the beautiful come to spend their youth like pennies.

It is the night when once a year, that shadow across the pages of the gossip columns, that most eligible of eligible bachelors, that eldest son of the third richest man in the world, emerges into the light, so his four – equally rich, equally handsome, equally rambunctious brothers – can throw him a birthday party the world will never forget.

If you're not invited, well darling, I'm afraid you're not anybody.

In previous years it has been in a great, glimmering undersea dome, reached only by bathosphere. It has been held among sparking electrics and luminescent neons in the hull of a great rusted ship. It's been held in full masquerade in a filigree castle in the Swiss Alps, when every guest was flown there personally in an aircraft decked out like a pumpkin carriage.

This year the party is in a house in the Hollywood Hills that once belonged to Douglas Fairbanks, and the theme is Monte Carlo. Everything is the epitome of mid-twentieth century glamour. Girls in tiny gold shorts patrol the floor, handing out caviar in golden foil cigarette boxes. Men in tuxedoes sweep around the room, filling glasses with champagne. There are craps and roulette tables and if you can't drop at least a couple of hundred thousand on them, then what are you doing here? In the room's centrepiece a burlesque artist, in a very tiny green bathing costume, luxuriates in a giant cocktail glass, the olive in a very dirty martini.

Ida Tierney, gossip columnist to the stars, meanders through her natural habitat, soaking up the glitz and the glory. The gold rings on every finger pick up her invisible keystrokes as she composes her column. Her horn-rimmed glasses record film and still shots to accompany her words. Her copy ticker tapes across the lower portion of her lenses.

She looks out onto the terrace where a bronzed young man with an enviable physique is doing a reverse somersault into a diving pool filled to the brim with champagne. He surfaces with a whoop, wrapping an arm around a giggling girl sitting on the edge of the pool, pulling her into the water and his close embrace.

'Baby Brother is Bosom Buddies with Bollywood Beauty,' Ida tries out.

At a blackjack table a slight young man is slurping on a Coke and watching the dealer with a relaxed demeanour that belies the way he seems to be 40 thousand or so up.

"Youngest Tracy Fights Gambling Addiction," types Ida, but quickly scratches this out as a dark-haired knockout in a sequined silver dress, arrives to the table, seizes him by the ear and drags him away from the table.

"Tracy Tryst with Exotic Mysterious Older Woman?" queries Ida.

In a deep-set red velvet booth, a long limbed young man in a truly hideous shirt is reading from a slim tablet, studiously ignoring the advances of the two starlets and one young heartthrob who are all trying to get his attention.

"Second Son Still Boring," writes Ida.

"But what does he do?" A Peruvian supermodel stamps a Manolo Blaniked toe and Ida stops to eavesdrop. "He doesn't just turn up once a year, throw this excessive, insane birthday party and vanish again. He must do something."

"Of course he does," her Texan frenemy bats her eyelashes at her. "He's insanely rich. But he doesn't just do things where anyone can see. You have to be part of the circle."

"I hear he snowboarded off Everest last year," says a diamond heiress.

"I hear he's building a palace. On the moon. And that's where he spends all his time," says an up and coming jazz singer.

"I hear he spends the rest of the year on an island in the Pacific writing poetry so sad no one can be allowed to read it," says a blossoming movie star. All the girls sigh.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter what he does," says the Texan supermodel. "It's enough that he's insanely rich and hot. Last year, he bought all the female guests diamond necklaces."

"The year before he swung in on a jungle vine," says the jazz singer.

"And I heard once he rescued all the homeless puppies in America and named them after himself," says the actress.

"But where is he?" asks the first model. "If he's so rich and gorgeous and amazing, why isn't he at his own party? Where is Scott Tracy?"

"Virgil Tracy!"

Virgil can be quite light on his feet when he needs to be, and long experience facing down danger on a daily basis has given him good instincts. He knows the voice of Death when he hears it.

He puts a tower of champagne coupes between himself and Lady Penelope.

"Hey, Lady P," says Virgil, trying to convey the impression that he is tipsy and helpful and helpless and small. None of which he is. None of which will save him. "Are you enjoying the party?"

"Am. I. Enjoying. The. Party?" Every word is a shard of diamond dropped into a still pool. Lady Penelope is stunning in off-the-shoulder peacock blue. Her hair is swept back in a faultless chignon. Her expression could melt through steel like butter.

"Virgil, there waits in the next room, an 18-tiered cake baked personally by Monsieur Herme of La Pâtisserie des Rêves. Within that cake are three exotic dancers and a live snake. Their delightful and unexpected appearance from within said cake is merely the opening gambit in a production that has taken weeks to plan. There will be wiggling. There will be gyrating. There will be timed explosions. There will be a spectacle of such erotic, sensual spectacle that afterwards most of these so-called epicureans will have to go lie down in a quiet room with a moist towel across their brow."

"Um…" says Virgil and is glad that Brains is at home, tucked up in bed, trying to solve the Jacobean Conjecture.

"However, in order for them to be able to leap whimsically from the cake, to the delight and amusement of the birthday boy, therefore triggering off this painstakingly and elaborately choreographed production they will require one thing. Do you suppose you can tell me what that one thing is?"

"The birthday boy?"

She claps her hands together in mock delight and her voice is sweet as spun sugar. "Very good. So, why, pray tell me, is it that birthday boy not here? Year after year, you have asked me to construct this fiction of a dim, self-aggrandising playboy to cover your family's peculiarities."

"Our peculiarities?"

"Which I have done with great forbearance."

"With considerable satisfaction."

She glares at him. "With saintly forbearance and this is how you repay me? Tell me, Virgil, How am I supposed to give the people a dim playboy-lifestyle without a dim playboy birthday boy?"

"I'm sure he'll be here," Virgil says. He tugs at the collar of his suit, vintage Armani, picked out by this same Valkyrie when his own tux had been declared, 'oh, darling, too modish for words," and straightens his bowtie, plays for time. "And hey, if he doesn't, it plays into the mythology of the whole thing, right? Like he's too feckless to attend his own party."

Lady Penelope fixes him with a gimlet gleam. It's the sort of gleam that reminds him that while his ancestors were happily learning how best to farm cabbage and parsnip, hers were chopping Vikings to pieces with broadswords. "Virgil, do you know what it takes to fit a live anaconda into a coconut cake?"

"Er… no?"

"Do you care to find out?"

"Definitely no."

"Then where is Scott Tracy?"

Dr Rosalind Elion is dying. She knows this. She has been exposed to 20 mCi of polonium-210, over 100 times the lethal dose. Death is certain, soon and most likely to be rather painful. It's all rather an inconvenience.

Still, could be worse. She managed to contain the reactor before it went critical. And, with the help of the polite young man sitting next to her, her team were safely evacuated, even Mittens, whom Yang had zipped into her suit before being airlifted out. The work will go on, which is the important thing, and everyone will be safe. It's just a pity that the Nobel committee didn't get around to nominating her before this year.

And at least the young man had deferred to her wishes. He had wanted to transport her to the trauma centre in Bern, but when she had pointed out that there was nothing they could do for her anyway and that she would rather die looking at the stars than at the formica ceiling tiles of the hospital's ICU, he had nodded and helped her to climb to the top of the observatory.

He's sitting in the grass beside her now. On the ground next to him is an emergency pack, for if the worst should come. It's loaded up with fentanyl and blessed, blessed morphine. But she doesn't need it yet. Not yet.

"Clear skies, lots of stars. Good night for flying," he says, gazing at the indigo night.

She sighs. "Don't be trite, young man," she says.

His eyes crinkle as his mouth turns up in a slow-burning grin. "Sorry, Ma'am," he says. "Force of habit."

He's a handsome young devil. Clear eyes, strong jaw, long-limbs, a face to set pulses fluttering. He's also brave, because he dived into the reactor room with barely a hesitation, flipping the breakers one-by-one and cutting off the chain reaction. He's clever, because the things he rescued from the containment room were Mittens, but also the data of two decades worth of study with the core, her life's work. And he's kind, because he could have condemned her to a death surrounded by well-meaning strangers in hazmat suits in the isolation suite at Bern, and instead he brought her here.

And he's sad, because a face so young shouldn't have such eyes.

"What are you doing out here, anyway?" she demands to know. "A good-looking young fella' like you? Aren't their girls you should be dancing with?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Some lucky lady pining for you?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Don't you have somewhere you'd like to be, then?"

"Yes, Ma'am," he looks out at the black. "I'd like to be just right here," says Scott Tracy.

A light goes by overhead. Both of them know it's just a high-flying plane, but for a moment both of them can pretend it's a shooting star.