I'm exuding banality, the bored global traveller between flights. I look, maybe, like a middle level management type, off duty: Nike knit shirt and generic cotton tie-slacks, suede Levi slip-ons, and Kok micro-shades. The Koks are the new ones with enhanced motion detection, which is as technical as I get, in visuals at least. I sprawl across grey vinyl that smells of industrial cleaner, scanning a tennis glossy at four in the morning in the departure lounge of Sir Charles Court International Airport , Perth , Western Australia , the last place on earth.

This is the hard part, the waiting. Unfortunately, it makes up a cool ninety percent of my job. Most of the other ten percent is spent on the net, sitting in front of a screen or a holo somewhere putting things together. Little statistical things that add up to the other, say, one percent of my time; occasions for a certain amount of unpleasantness, one way or another. There must be half a dozen guys in my league in the business and they've all been at it longer than me, but I have an edge. I can really concentrate.

The next flight arrives, five minutes late, and my eyes slide past action shots of the latest lithe wonder to emerge from the Rio tennis farms to casually comb the faces of the red-eyed incoming. I think about my partner Berenski who keeps telling me such eyes on is a waste of time and that I could do with a template ID system. Just plug it into the world's airport security cameras and wait. You can even do it personally, he says, fit neatly into a pair of Koks.

The target, the mark, is not on the four thirty flight. So I continue to wait. Perhaps the next one. I buy another magazine, settle in again.

It is some hours later, another set of passengers is just coming through and I try to concentrate. But a kid of indeterminate sex a couple of seats down from me is making an insistent noise - "Mummy!

Mummy!" - that comes out of the grill in the faceplate of the dinky little bright blue environment suit it has on. As if this was Karachi or something. Mummy, in a white Swatch suit that is everything but vacuum sealed, responds with a "There, there," and pats its arm, much as mothers must have done on the veldt so many millennia ago when the mites bit. Then the kid arches back and throws up onto the faceplate. Daddy, busy chatting on the integral phone in his own matching Swatch, looks horrified through the faceplate. I'm so amused watching Mr and Ms Clean panic that I almost miss my date.

Fucking Berenski, what would he know. My spot is wearing some kind of frame that bulks him out another good thirty to forty per cent. Must be one of the new organo-plastics since it doesn't register on the security X-ray. And he is further disguised, make up, some facial hair, usual stuff. More creatively, he has altered his walk, not an easy thing to do. This Jerab is really quite talented.

It's a well-documented fact that when you spend a lot of time studying someone, you get involved. I've profiled my man, followed his movements electronically and physically, for over three months. So when I see this guy, well, frankly, it's almost like I'm spotting my lover, someone genuinely, personally significant to me. And that's it, why they can't fool you with the cosmetics - it's like you can see into the inner them, the human core. And no soft, however fuzzy, can match that.

Yeah. My lover, my actual lover. One time, not all that long ago really, I was waiting for her at another airport. We were hot - I loved her like love was about to be proscribed and you'd better get all you could. There'd been a major glitch in the comsat system and we hadn't been in touch for over a week. My juices were flowing.

My girl, last I saw her going down the Departure tunnel at that same airport, was six feet tall, sort of shape they used to describe

as statuesque, and a smile like the sun. This time, emerging from Arrivals they wheeled her out of the exit door looking like some ancient Egyptian relic, frail and papery. In the week since I'd last vidded her, standing outside a grass hut in that empty west African village holding a very skinny kid in her strong arms, she'd contracted something. A superbug generated by the fertile interaction of resolutely Third World poverty and a careless global culture that had turned her body into a micro-war zone. It was a war she'd lost.

Nevertheless, at first glance I knew this parched and frail form bracketed by grim-faced paramedics as my own true love. But what she was, and what I'd been expecting, could hardly have been more different, on the surface.

I believe, on reflection, it was about then I embarked on the winding trail that led to me being the top flypaper boy for the Emerald Dragon Group. I sort of thought, as I watched over the next few weeks my nobly intentioned baby turn into a kind of human smorgasbord for microbes, and the mega-rich specialists shake their perfectly coiffed heads in a professionally distancing way, well... I thought, who cares? This was her tragedy and mine, but there was no greater meaning. There are, I decided then, no ultimate rules, no transcendental paybacks, no moral frameworks or immutable equations of justice.

So get technical, I resolved. Corner the market in something, and fuck it senseless. Become a material man, a hard heart.

And so I recognised old Jerab, fugitive from the unforgiving clutches of the Emerald Dragon Group, as he came through Arrivals, whereas some computer program that didn't love him wouldn't have.

Emerald Dragon are this financial products bunch based in Shanghai , very fast, very tight. At least until Jerab went missing. He was a quant worked for the Dragon, scheming up soft that made them

fastest in the picosecond contest, buying and selling futures of futures of futures, etcetera, in the world's multi-trillion a day, non-stop financial tele-markets. Watching the zeros add up for his employers every time one of his new programs hit the markets, Jerab eventually decided to go into business for himself. He must have decided he had enough credit to cover his tracks, or maybe he expected help from some quarter interested in the wares tucked away in his brain; either way, he'd taken the chance. There are some legal niceties involved, but the biggest problem he faced was avoiding the Dragon's bloodhounds. He'd done that for a full month when the Dragon got serious and contracted the job out to me.

Jerab was tricky, unusually practical for a quant, who tend to be the opposite. He successfully avoided me on five continents and several dozen independent islands, always one step ahead. But I was homing in, and he was running out of places to go. So we eventually wind up, he and I, in Perth , and this time I'm ahead of him.

Perth is a funny place. For years an out-sized country town run by the good old boys of mining, more lately it's been taken over by white South African and Asian money. It's neat and clean and spreads along the coast like a virulent Club Med operation, fine if you've got the credit. And the Dragon does, of course. I don't expect any trouble from the locals, even if I was to hang Jerab's corpse from the top of their tallest building, which happens, these days, to be a ferro- plastic and glass needle owned by Hongshai Bank, a Green Dragon subsidiary.

She was so pure of form, my baby, like something you'd see under an electron microscope. She walked into the club like it was her living room and the countless admiring looks were wallpaper.

"Monica Ja," Toto, an associate at Jab, said to me then, "steepest of the Stonefruit rising stars."

"Aha," I said, rising to my feet. Ten steps took me to her, waiting serenely as her companion bought her a drink at the bar.

"Jonathan Pretorius," I said, just a fraction of time after she turned to see me. "Production. Jab."

The eyes flashed, and a glimpse of that smile: Jab - always does it. A name like Jab, global recognition factor of seventy eight percent, is the closet thing to a magic charm in the material world. And for someone like her, a hungry denizen of the media jungle, it was the ultimate. "How are you, Mr Pretorius," she said. "Perhaps we share a home town."

"Capetown?"

"Snap. And to come all this way to meet." The smile was gently but definitely lethal.

"Babe," said the companion, back from the bar, unhappy.

"Rudy, can you go back and get Mr Pretorius something?" she said, and he went. We talked. Turned out her maternal aunt used to clean our house.

Jerab collected his baggage, stuck it in a locker and headed into a bar. Standing behind him - he does not know me - I heard him order a Bloody Mary. Then, "Stuff it," he said to the girl behind the bar, "make it two." I got a light beer and sat a couple of tables away.

The bar was made up like some interior decorator's idea of a commercial pilot's rest room circa 1935: fake unpainted weather-board walls covered in cork-boards and blackboards with beaten up card tables and metal chairs to sit on. Black and white photographs of intrepid leather-capped aviators sat over the bar. Like I said, I'd spent some time in out of the way airports. They were always renovating the bars, never able to get it just right. This one, I guessed, was fresh from the decorator's ministrations or about to undergo them. I figured it had more to do with the dynamics of mid level managerial career trajectories than consumer taste - no one made a rep by maintaining business as usual.

Jerab, just a little unsteady, got up and ordered another drink. Clearly, the tension was getting to him, and he was tired. More relevantly for me, soon he'd have to take a piss.

Fifteen minutes later, as it turned out. I was thirty seconds behind him and he made it easy for me by going into a stall. Sidling up behind him - "Huh?" was all he said - I smacked the derm onto the back of his head and held him up as the mixture hit him.

Someone came in and I made "tut tut" noises between whispering instructions into his right ear. The drug mixture, I was told by the boys at Kenji Chemicals, an Emerald Dragon Group subsidiary, had much the same effect as six months under a sleep deprivation and mild torture regime. The mark became super susceptible to suggestion, and so I gave him some very specific suggestions.

Arm around his shoulder I led him past the nervous Japanese tourist at the urinal and sat him back at his table. I instructed him to play with his drink, but not drink any more. Then I went off to pick up some tickets.

I'm not sure just what made Monica turn from Jab Media Service's star front woman to go and work for a shitbox public affairs media collective. The obvious thing was her South African background, because she'd had it tough back there before her looks caught the eye of someone useful. But for that year and a half while we both worked for Jab she lapped it up as much as anyone I'd ever seen. We worked week on, week off, and spent our off time wherever we wanted. As Jab media stars, me behind the camera, her in front, we had it all.

Jerab, when I got back, was gone. I'd only been away maybe five minutes...

I recalled the Japanese tourist in the toilets and would have slapped my forehead if I hadn't been busy punching a little used function into my wristwatch. A three sixty frame with a pulsing icon that told me he was travelling due west came on. The car park. I took off in pursuit.

The Jap guy would have removed the derm, of course, but the needlepoint sliver of metal that it injected into his neck would have taken minor surgery. I followed the signal and caught up with them just as they were pulling on seat belts, Jerab rather slowly.

I hurried over and opened the door for my boy to get out. The Jap didn't move to stop me - there is a professional etiquette thing at work here. We do not squabble. If he'd got him away somewhere, okay it would have been a real coup for him; but he didn't, and so Jerab was mine again. He did look disappointed though.

We stayed a week in Capetown, Monica visiting relatives. She never asked me to come, never brought anyone back to the hotel room. I'd told her that all mine were dead.

Monica was in the hotel lobby when a bomb went off outside - the anniversary of Mandela's death was sometimes a difficult time in South Africa . She returned to our room two hours later, covered in blood. She'd been helping comfort the less seriously injured. Three weeks later she quit Jab and went to work for the New Jersey People's Media Collective.

Enplaned, I relaxed a little. Jerab was dozing in the window seat, I sat next to him, and the aisle seat, as I'd arranged, was empty. So far, okay. We were to stop over in Singapore , and then head on to Hong Kong . Asleep, Jerab looked like he couldn't program his house climate, let alone nearly wreck a bank. His bottom lip jutted out a good centimetre, and a tiny string of saliva fell to his lap.

She had good medical insurance, a perk from Jab, but the doctors shook their heads and recommended cryo storage. So she lies in a tank in a cool, quiet building upstate, comatose.

Then I went out and spent my life's savings, which included a sizeable lump sum pay out from Jab, on buying half share in a fugitive recovery agency. I did it because fugitive recovery was about the most loathsome job I could imagine that didn't actually include regularly killing people. Catching people who escaped corporate bondage, it really stank. It was like giving the finger to good causes, to altruism, because that's what had done for my girl.

Turned out there were a lot of skills I brought from media work, and my attitude was just right. I had this knack, I could concentrate. I was focused. I didn't care about anything but my job.

In Singapore , I buy us a decent meal in the airport McDonald's franchise. Jerab is resigned, I can sense it, and I give him no more medication. But he also wants to talk, and talking, justifying his escape really, I suppose, he says something that slides me right out of my self-imposed moral exile.

"Oh no," he is saying, "it wasn't the money. It was what I found out. Banks, they're like the controllers of capitalism. They allocate funds, decide who succeeds, who fails, make strategic decisions for whole industries. Emerald Dragon concentrates on pharmaceuticals...” and he goes into this long story that suddenly gets interesting when he mentions a disease that happens to the have the same name the doctors used when they explained to me what had happened to Monica in Africa. I almost choked on my crableg.

"Wait a minute," I say around a mouthful of dead crustacean, "you're telling me Emerald Dragon vetoed production of drugs that could cure this disease?"

Jerab, ugly wide-eyed little gnome with a brilliant head for writing microcode, and, of course, hacking, nods vigorously. "Millions," he says over a plate of lettuce and chive salad, "millions of lives could be saved if they'd manufacture that drug. But there is no profit in it, see. Better to invest in some new weight control drug or blood pressure drug for the wealthy. They pay good money."

I swallow the crabmeat, and with it I swallow my old life. Or my recently acquired new life, to be accurate. "You got proof of this?" I ask.

"Of course. That's why they sent you after me."

"What sort of proof?"

"Video of the trial experiments, reports, the whole thing. Hundred per cent cure rate. I got the stuff on a minidisc."

"I have friends at Jab," I tell him, without a second thought.

He stares at me a long time. "Get real, man," Jerab says at last, somehow disappointed in me. "Emerald Dragon owns a big chunk of Jab. They own a big chunk of all the major media groups. It's basic spin control."

"Okay, point taken. I also know people at this shoestring operation in New Jersey ."

"Oh?" he says around a piece of lettuce.

There and then, I pull out my phone and start punching numbers.

"I don't get it," Jerab says, fork hovering over a sliver of carrot, "I thought you were the type didn't give a shit..."

End