Culham and Colombo, Sri Lanka

Miss Morley has left the bank of screens and walked to the door at the head of the stairs that Mr Greaves ran down a few minutes previously.  This means that she does not see Judy arrive at the side gate.  Nor do she or Greaves hear Judy's involuntary cry of despair as she sees, from the corner of the perimeter fence where she has stopped to regain her breath, a thick-set man emerge from a door and roughly seize Guilietta, dragging her into the building.

Judy shakes the fence making it rattle metallically, but doing no good.  It can't have been Will.  Even if he was angry with her for running off, he wouldn't treat Guili like that.

'Will, Mary!  Someone's taken Guili inside!  It wasn't you, was it?'

'No Judy.  Wait there.  We'll try to work out what to do.'

Guilietta is taken by the man and dragged upstairs to the Security room, kicking, biting and screaming out loud 'Carlo, Carlo!'  He is strong and brutal, and ignores the girl's struggles until her incessant shouting finally gets on his nerves.  He is not good with children.

Mr Greaves slaps Guilietta hard on the side of her face, reddening her cheek and making her head ring.  'Shut it, you stupid little bitch!  Or you'll get another one.'

Still fighting and wriggling in Mr Greaves' grip, Guilietta looks up, her face contorted with pain.  'What have you done to Carlo?'

Miss Morley smiles down to her.  'Nothing yet.'

It's all going terribly, horribly wrong.  And it's my fault.

Kir!  Get back here now!  There's someone else here and they've got Guili!

Coming.

Will forces himself to be calm and think hard.  There is little that the angel Remiel can do to help them.  There are just Giancarlo and him, plus Kirjava.  His daemon can team up with Giancarlo and they can search the building for Guilietta in two teams, Kirjava providing the link they need.  They can use the Knife to move through the complex and escape if they need to.  But only if they stay on the ground floor.  The green-skied world's ground is at the same level as here – that is why they chose it.  And, of course, only the Knife-bearer can cut a window.  If Will is caught by himself, he will be in serious trouble.  How many of them are there?  Judy saw one man, but they might be many more.  Who is it?  The caretaker?  If so, they might be able to talk their way out of this situation.  At the very least there would be an embarrassing interview with the police, but he could say he was called out to a patient and made a mistake with the address.  Being a doctor does have its benefits.

'That won't wash, not in a secure building!'  Kirjava is back.

'Carlo, we're going to have to search this place.  You take Kirjava with you, and take the ground floor.  Use the Knife if you have to.  I'll go upstairs.  Kirjava will tell me if you find anything.  Then…'

Will's voice is interrupted by a loud click from the Tannoy speaker mounted on the wall above them.  A woman's voice, harshly distorted by the public address system, speaks to them.

'Doctor Parry.  I know you can hear me.  We would like to talk to you.'

Will and Giancarlo listen, horrified.  They can hear, muffled in the background, Guilietta's crying:  'Carlo!  Doctor Will!'

'As you can probably hear, we have somebody else with us already.  I am sure she would like to see you.

'Please follow my instructions exactly…'

Mary realises that she is thumping her clenched fists on the top of the TV.  She sits back on the bed of her hotel room and makes an effort to relax and speak steadily into her phone.  'Will, Judy, don't forget I'm here too.'

For all the good that will do.

Over the Tannoy, Miss Morley directs Will and Giancarlo down the long, gloss-painted and linoleum-floored corridors of the JET building, following their progress on the monitors.  They pass through locked doors, whose catches spring open as they approach.  The ceiling lights turn on ahead of them and off again behind, when they are no longer needed.  Will's heart is sinking fast.  Giancarlo and he are completely out of their depth.  How could he have been so stupid as to think that they could simply walk into a secure high-tech facility and roam freely around inside it, completely undetected?

It was the Knife.  It betrayed us.  It made us overconfident.  We thought we could do anything we liked so long as we had it.

Another thought is nagging at Will.  How did they know we'd be here?  We told nobody else.  Nobody else at all.

Judy sits on the ground by the fence outside the complex.  Like Mary, she has heard everything that has happened on her phone.  Like her, she feels angry and fearful; frustrated that she can do nothing to help.

But I'm here, not thousands of miles away in Sri Lanka.  I must be able to do something.

She stands up and looks around.  The public road stretches moonlit up and down past the entrance.  She could flag down a passing car and ask for help.  She could call the police.

That's an idea!  We'd be in trouble, but it couldn't be any worse than what we're in already.  No, she realises sickeningly, she can't do that.  Carlo and Guili do not belong in this world.  They have no ID, no NHS number; they exist on no public databases.  The police would ask too many questions to which there could be no answers.

She walks back along the fence, risking, although she does not appreciate it, detection by the security cameras.  Turning the right angle at the corner, she approaches, as far as the fence will let her, the door through which Guilietta was taken.

It is slightly open.  Guilietta must have kicked at it as she was pulled through and prevented it from closing properly.

'Will!  I can see a way in!'

'No, Judy.  Stay outside.  This is bad enough already, without any more of us getting involved.'

Look after this one for me, Staff.  How is the patient today, Staff?  Suddenly, Judy has had enough of being ordered around by doctors.  She looks up at the fence.  If a little girl like Guili can climb it, so can she. 

Judy takes hold of the fence by a support post and raises her right leg, sticking her toe into the mesh, grateful that she is wearing sensible shoes.  Damn this skirt!  I knew I should have worn trousers!

This is no time for modesty.  Judy hitches her skirt up around her waist and climbs the fence, taking great care with the barbed wire at the top, but laddering a perfectly good pair of tights just the same.

'Well done, Doctor Parry.  Now I want you and your companion – Carlo, is it? – to go through the first door to the left.  That's it – the one with the Geodesics sign on the glass.  You will find a large room with a table to your right and a couple of chairs next to it.  Do make yourselves comfortable.  We will be with you in a few minutes.'

Will, Kirjava and Giancarlo do as they are told.  The room is certainly large; about twenty metres long by fifteen metres wide and brilliantly illuminated by fluorescent tubes hanging from the five metre high ceiling.  There is another door set in the opposite wall and around the laboratory's walls are an assortment of bookshelves and benches; some stacked with electronic equipment, some loaded down with chemical glassware – retorts, test tubes and beakers – and, against the wall on the left, a row of expensive-looking SGI 4D workstations in gaudy purple and cream.

However, this flashy high-end computing hardware is not the most interesting thing in what is clearly a very well-endowed laboratory.  In the centre of the floor is a test stand; made up of two metal benches about a metre apart, each with a vertical pole fixed to the end.  The two poles appear to form the two uprights of a letter H, an impression confirmed by the crosspiece which runs between them, a little more than a metre from the floor.  Wires run from both sides of the H to a rack of equipment which rests on the right-hand bench.

'Give me a close-up of that rack, would you?  The one on the right.'

Mary examines carefully the shaky picture of the electronics rack that Will's phone sends her.  A 150KV power supply, a distribution panel, what looks like a shelf of old-fashioned HP blade servers, and…

My word.  We have got a lot of money to throw around, haven't we?  A Bruel and Kjaer isochronic transphase generator!  B&K sell only two or three ITGs a year, built to order, and they require a certified third party, such as one of the larger Swiss banks, to guarantee the transaction, so enormous are the sums involved.  Mary has only ever seen one ITG before in her life, and that was attached to the supercollider at CERN…

CERN!  An ITG.  And buckythread.  There is an almost audible click in Mary's head as she makes the mental connections.

'Will!  I think I know what they're trying to do here…'

Mr Greaves has had to slap Guilietta on the other cheek, and it still hasn't stopped the hideous brat yelling her head off.

'Leave off, won't you?  You'll only make her worse.'

'Can't help it.  She's getting on my tits.'

Guilietta is tiring and fighting less hard now.  She allows herself to be dragged along the corridor, feet trailing behind her, by Mr Greaves.  After passing through a series of hallways and bumping painfully down an open staircase, Miss Morley unlocks a heavy metal door and they enter the laboratory on the opposite side from where Will, Kirjava and Giancarlo are waiting for them.  Carlo sees Guilietta's tear-streaked face and pink cheeks and rises to his feet with a cry of rage.

'Sit down.  Or I'll ask my friend here to see to the child.  Properly.'

Will tugs at Giancarlo's sleeve.  'It's going to be OK, mio amico.  Let's just listen to what they have to say.'  The young man reluctantly sits down.

Will has recognised the man and woman from their appearances at the John Radcliffe Hospital's A&E department.  Now, Mary supplies the mental jolt he needs to remember their names.

'Will!  The woman!  I know her.  She very nearly crippled me, ten years ago when I was at The Grove, with your mother.'  She's well out of this.  'She used to be known as Miss Morley.' 

The Grove!  Then the man must be Greaves, the faithful servant of Henry Latrom, who died before he could be returned to his own world.  Lyra's world.  Lizzie's world.

It's all starting to knit together and make sense.  Time to take back the initiative.  Will calmly drops his bombshell.

'So; Mr Greaves, Miss Morley.  How long have you been trying to cut a window through to the world of the Boreals?'

Mr Greaves gasps audibly, but Miss Morley is made of something altogether more icy, and she keeps her cool.

'We made our first breakthrough in summer 2004.  That's nearly six years ago.'

'Thank you, Miss Morley.  I can count the years perfectly well for myself.  Let me guess, you've hit problems since in your attempts to open and maintain a window.  Have you had trouble making enough buckythread?'

'There have been some issues, yes.  We have overcome them.'

'As Jack Farrell discovered.'

'Farrell is a bloody fool who ought to look where he's going.'

'Very bright, but no common sense?  I've met dozens like him.  Is he in The Grove now?  Or somewhere a little less expensive?'

'Geodesics looks after its employees, Doctor Parry.'

'I'm very glad to hear it.  That rig's interesting.  What are you using to insulate the buckythread from the supports?  Teflon?'

'Ceramic stand-offs.  They resist the heat better.'

Mr Greaves has had enough.  What does this stupid woman think she is doing, wasting time having a technical discussion with Parry?  He spots something which he has not noticed before.  He has been too focussed on the Knife, and he has not seen Parry face-to-face this evening, only via TV monitors.

'Stop!  Can't he see?  He's got a phone!  In his top pocket!'

'Oh yes.  So he has.  How very clever of you, Doctor Parry.  You're running video over that, I suppose?'

Damn!  Keep cool!  'High resolution, thirty-two bit colour.  International call, too.  I'm not going to enjoy my next phone bill.  Not at all.'

'Oh dear me.  I must ask you to finish your call, remove the phone from your pocket – very slowly – and put it on the table.  Ah, and that headset as well, if you don't mind.  Thank you.

'Also, I understand that you have a daemon, in what we both understand to be the full sense of the word.  I must warn you that that if she – I presume it is a she – tries to interfere with our, how shall I put it, negotiations, we shall have to take various unpleasant and messy measures which we would rather avoid.

'Involving the girl.  You have already seen what the Thread can do.  Do I need to spell it out to you?  Would you like to see a demonstration now, on one of her fingers or toes, maybe?'

Guilietta is still held securely in Mr Greaves' grip.  She does not understand what is being said about her, or why she cannot join her brother and Doctor Will.

Will puts his hand on Giancarlo's shoulder.  He can feel it shaking, with anger, fear, or both, under his palm.  'Be patient, Carlo.  We must see what we can do.'

To Miss Morley:  'You wouldn't have taken Guilietta hostage or be trying to use her to bargain with us if we didn't have something you want.  Why don't you tell us what it is?'

'The Knife, you tosser!' the short-fused Mr Greaves bellows.  'We want the fucking Knife!'

'Quite so, Doctor Parry.  We want, as my colleague so eloquently puts it, the fucking Knife.  And we want the fucking Knife-bearer too.  And if we get both of them, we may not harm the girl.'

'You'll give her back to us?'

'Oh no, that would not be a good idea.  And please don't get some silly idea about rescuing her, or something else equally melodramatic and futile.  We'll hang on to her, as an earnest of your good faith.

'You see, we want our window back.  We want our business back.  And when it comes to business, I never let anything stand in my way.'

'You know she'll die if you keep her here, don't you?  She'll die in two years or less, if she doesn't return to her home world.'

'That's true.'  Miss Morley appears to ponder this for a few moments.  'And then I'd have no leverage against you would I?

'So you'll have to cut a window for us, won't you?  If you want to see her live.'  Miss Morley twists Guilietta's head around so she can see her face.  'Pretty child, isn't she?  I'm sure she'll grow up to be a beautiful adult.

'If you let her.  It's up to you, really, isn't it?'

Will has never seen a smile so utterly lacking in humour.