Danielle wakes early and nervous. This is it; this is The Day. The sky is still gray with impending dawn, but Laurent is already up, sipping an espresso and reading Le Figaro in the corner of their room. He always rises before dawn, he blames the military for it, and stays up past midnight. Laurent needs less sleep than any other human being Danielle has ever met.

"Morning," he says, seeming a little surprised. "Un café?"

She half-smiles. "I don't think I'll need it today. I'm wide awake." Awake and tense. She wants to throw herself into work, occupy the butterfly farm in her stomach with something productive, but today there is no more work; the mechanism of protest is grinding away, and it is too late to oil any more gears.

"Maybe you need a little physical distraction," he says, his voice inviting.

She shakes her head. "Not today."

He nods.

"I'm sorry," she says, taking it as a faint rebuke. "I know I've been all distant and busy. I never thought I'd turn into one of those women who spends all day at the office and turns down sex because they're too distracted by work. It just happened. But it'll be over tonight."

"Don't worry. It's all right."

And it is, too, she can feel it. On paper, she and Laurent should be a disaster. She moved to a strange new city with him after knowing him for only two weeks of desperate mutual peril. Then Danielle all but disappeared from his life to devote herself to work; in the last six weeks they have spent almost no ambulatory time together, and slept in the same bed only on those three or four nights a week she made it home from the warehouse. By rights they should have drifted apart. Instead she feels, beneath the giddy madness that still comes over her sometimes when she looks at him, a quiet certainty that all will forever be well between them, that the ordinary rules of relationships do not apply, their bond somehow strengthens even when they are apart.

That doesn't mean she wants him to be absent. She aches to spend more time with him like their first week in Paris. Danielle cannot think of a happier week in her life. The others returned to London, Keiran to his job, Angus and Estelle to confer with the foundation, and Laurent and Danielle had this apartment and the city to themselves. That first week here, exploring the city by day and each other by night, going on long walks down streets full of so many gorgeous wonders Danielle does not believe they could ever be stained by ordinariness, staying up for dizzying all-night marathons of sex and conversation until they fell asleep murmuring in each other's arms at dawn, then waking tired but oh so eager for another perfect day to begin – that first week was bliss. For him too, she knows it, she still shivers when she thinks of Laurent's wracked, halting voice when he finally told her about his past, and the way he picked her up and spun her around as if she was a weightless prop later that day, giddy with pleasure, atop the steps of Montmartre, with all Paris stretched out before them like a magic carpet of delights. She has been in love before, but never like this, never so painless, so uncomplicated, so perfect.

What he does today could put him in jail for many years. But somehow this doesn't worry her; somehow she is certain that he and Angus and Keiran will do their jobs perfectly and safely. It is the protest she has orchestrated that makes her nervous. The inside of her skin seems to itch with anxiety. She feels no anticipation. She just wants today to be over without anything going horribly wrong.

** *

Keiran checks into the Sheraton La Défense using his real name. No harm in it. Nothing he does from here will be traceable back to him. LoTek's Law: Always be invisible. He can't get caught unless one of his four co-conspirators turns on him. And no fake ID is likely to help him then.

The bellhop is a little rough with Keiran's duffel bag. Keiran can't blame him, it's full of heavy boxes, but its contents are delicate. He tries to remember his A-level French, to think of the right words – soyez doux perhaps? – but he settles for English. "Be gentle, please. Those are valuable. Tres cher."

The middle-aged bellhop gives him a long-suffering look and, Keiran is sure, deliberately scuffs the bag against the wall as he brings it into the suite. Which is lovely – elegant, stylish, spacious, and with a spectacular view of La Défense, the extraordinary complex of skyscrapers and vast concrete plazas, an almost comic-book cliché of hypermodern Metropolis, on the western outskirts of Paris. Keiran's room is twenty-two stories above Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, the hundred-metre-wide pedestrian walkway three stories above street level that runs for more than a mile, lined by the glass-and-steel spires and arcs of dozens of towering futur- istic buildings, up to the the mindbendingly massive Grande Arche de la Défense. The International Trade Council's annual meeting will begin in four hours, at the hangar-like CNIT building, on the same side as the Sheraton, halfway to the Grande Arche and directly across the Esplanade from the EDF skyscraper.

It takes him the better part of an hour to set up his equipment. The Sheraton has high-speed Internet access, but he sets up a mobile connection as well. Always have backup ranks just behind Always be invisible. Two state-of-the-art laptops connect to four large flat-screen monitors. Keiran opens a secure shell into the La Défense security system, which he spent the better part of last week hacking into. He opens feeds from the security cameras to his monitors, switches among them, ensuring that they all work. Between the access he has, and the distraction of the protest, today's exercise should be as safe and painless as modern dentistry. A good analogy, Keiran decides. Even modern dentistry can get a little bloody.

He wonders if P2, wherever he is, has any idea what Keiran is doing right now. He strongly doubts it. Everything he is doing is secure, encrypted, connected through anonymous cutouts. But P2 more than anything else is what worries him. The police he can handle. But being out-hacked would be the end.

Keiran straps on his telephone headset and clicks a few keys, switching between channels, checking that all the encrypted phone connections are functional and clear. Sitting with the headset on, and four grainy video images flickering before him, he feels like Dr. Strangelove in the War Room, or, he searches for a more flattering analogy, some kind of space pilot, ready to fly his orbiter into action for the first time.

"Well now," he says into the headset, to Angus and Laurent. "In the words of Gary Gilmore in the electric chair, let's get it on."

** *

The crowd looks insignificant set against the skyscraper canyon of the Esplanade. Danielle stands at the back of the stage and tries to count. A cold chill settles into the base of her stomach. A few thousand at most, no more, and that's counting hundreds of curious passersby. It is already one PM, the protest is officially beginning, the ITC meeting kicks off in another hour, and there aren't near enough people. The demonstration looks like a random clump of people in the vast pedestrian plaza that is the Esplanade. The media pit is all but deserted. There are several television cameras, but only one is being manned. Scores of police in riot gear stand behind temporary steel barriers erected between the demonstrators and the CNIT building, looking deeply bored. Her protest is a disaster. Danielle has failed, failed utterly, and her failure endangers Laurent. She wants to cry. Or run away. She doesn't dare to look over at Dr. Sayers or Estelle, both of whom stand amid the other organizers on the temporary stage, arms folded.

Their first speaker, a tall African woman, comes to the microphone and begins. Her French is passionate and heavily amplified. Danielle doesn't understand a word. The speaker's image glows brightly on the thirty-foot-high projection screen behind her, but from Danielle's extreme angle, right next to the lower corner of the screen, all she can see are flickering lights, abstract art.

Francoise comes over. Danielle doesn't want to talk to anyone. She pretends to be engrossed in her copy of the protest agenda.

"She's marvellous," Francoise says, pleased. "She's so powerful. We should have scheduled her for later, when the crowd is full. The cameras would love her."

Danielle turns to look at her, but Francoise is already on her cell phone, talking to someone. Later, when the crowd is full? She looks up again. There are more people on the Esplanade. The crowd is being fuelled by a constant stream of figures emerge from the Metro station below. And there, coming from the east, from the end of the Esplanade – a hundred more, at least, dressed all in white. As they approach a ripple of conversation washes through the crowd, and signs of life appear in the media pit, another camera is brought to life and turned on the hundred men in white – masked men in white – who march into the crowd and assemble in neat rows. The rest of the demonstrators give them plenty of space. The police are suddenly no longer slouching; rather, they too are arrayed in carefully spaced rows, or in furious conversation with their radios.

"Are those who I think they are?" Danielle asks Francoise.

Francoise clips her phone to her belt. "Yes. The Wobblies."

The largest and most organized of the black blocs, despite the ironic colour of their uniforms. Danielle had nothing to do with organizing them; that she left up to Estelle. Who has come through. And more people are coming, hundreds more, dozens every minute. The Esplanade is beginning to fill. And there is another group of fifty masked people, another black bloc, this one uniformed in the appropriate colour, a dark patch clearly visible in the otherwise crazy-quilt crowd. Danielle isn't sure how she feels about that. She hadn't really been concerned by the notion of black-bloc violence. She has never trusted police, and if these gendarmes' decision to serve an unjust system extends to fighting this backlash against that system, then they are responsible for their own fate. She had imagined it as an almost gladiatorial battle, black blocs vs. cops with an audience of peaceful protestors. For the first time she realizes that the battle lines are not so easily demarcated, and ordinary demonstrators might get hurt.

"Starting to get a little crowded out there," Estelle says, approaching, her words fast and thinly voiced, her Southern accent more apparent than usual.

"Yeah. I was getting worried." Danielle tries not to notice that Estelle holds the pages of her speech with trembling hands.

"Fucking stage fright. Crazy, isn't it? Angus might go to jail for the rest of his life today and here I am worried about talking to all those people out there. Half of them won't even understand a word I say before it gets translated."

"Where's Angus?"

"Over there. By that statue."

Danielle squints. By a metal statue in front of the EDF Tower, one of the art installations that dot the Esplanade, she sees two men standing. She is too far away to see their features but recognizes their body language. Angus and Laurent.

"I said yes, by the way."

Danielle looks at her uncomprehendingly. "What?"

"Yes. To his proposal. I'm going to marry him. Even if I have to do it in some jail in Marseille."

"Wow. Wow! That's wonderful!"

The African woman's voice rises to a crescendo, the climax of her speech. The crowd roars its approval.

"I'm glad I'm going early," Estelle says. She looks very pale. "I think I'm going to be sick. Do me a favour, if I puke onstage, turn off the big screen. Please."

"You'll be fine," Danielle assures her, trying to express a conviction she does not feel.

The African woman floats back to the organizers' tables on a wave of raucous applause. Dr. Sayers begins introducing Estelle in fluent French. Danielle is sure her friend is being damned with the faintest of praise. She checks her watch as Estelle steps forward to the microphone as if walking to a firing squad. Half an hour until the first ITC attendees are expected. Estelle is meant to speak for all that half-hour. When she finishes, Keiran's plan will go into motion.

** *

Keiran switches back to the view on the statue. The pixillated but recognizable figures of Laurent and Angus are both dressed in the kind of gray coveralls you might see on a factory worker. Angus' hair is tied back in a relatively respectable ponytail. Both of them wear latex gloves and cellphone earpieces. These, combined with seeing them on a screen, make them look like movie characters, celluloid Secret Service agents. They stand on the periphery of the crowd, where it thins into sparseness. The view is from a high angle, a camera mounted several stories up, and beyond the the crowd Keiran can see the line of gendarmes in riot gear, standing at attention now, ready for something to happen.

Another screen displays the monstrous glass and chrome of the EDF Tower itself, a narrow skyscraper aimed edgewise at the Esplanade like the prow of a massive ship. About halfway down, its front edge tapers into an overhang, like a shard has been excised from the building with a huge curved blade. Ten metres above the ground, a metal disc twenty metres across protrudes horizontally from the tower like a massive steel Frisbee stuck in its side, sheltering the main entrance.

The reason Keiran is here, the real reason the seven thousand people down below have been brought here, is that the Tour EDF's sixty-eighth through seventieth floors are occupied by Kishkinda SNC, the corporation that co-owns the Kishkinda mine along with the Government of India. Kishkinda SNC is a public company, shares traded on the Paris Bourse, but forty per cent and effective control is held, through a bewildering web of interlocking offshore holding companies, by a British mining giant called Terre PLC. The shadowed nature of Terre's arms-length control protects them from any legal responsibility, so long as they can show that management decisions are in fact made on the seventieth floor of the Tour EDF. The truth of this claim is one of the mysteries Keiran hopes to resolve today.

Keiran clicks at his keyboard. One of the monitors flickers to the image of a parking-garage camera, capturing a half-dozen dark sedans as they disappear into the maw of the garage. He connects to Laurent's earpiece and speaks into the headset. "The lambs are nearing the slaughter. I reckon things are about five minutes from heating up."

Laurent acknowledges. Keiran stands, full of nervous excitement, goes to the window and looks down. Before, during the speeches, the crowd looked like iron filings drawn to the magnet of the stage; now it seems a single amorphous organism, pressed against the line of steel and green that is the barricades and the gendarmes. He knows from the security cameras that most of the protestors wear jeans, hemp robes, tie-dye shirts, colourful counterculture garb. But several knots of fifty or more are dressed all in black, and there is one tight group of more than a hundred in white jumpsuits. These patches of uniform colour, clearly visible from twenty-two floors up, are moving through the crowd to the police barriers. The other demonstrators part before them like the Red Sea for Moses. The general mass carries colourful homemade signs and banners supporting an incoherent panoply of causes, from African debt relief to abortion rights to the Palestinian cause; but the black blocs wear gas masks and body armour, and carry clubs and crowbars, and they are nearing the barricades.

Time for the bomb threat. Keiran's laptop screen is full of green-on-black ASCII characters, the colour chosen, tongue in cheek, to echo the Matrix movies. A blinking cursor on the bottom line awaits his next command. Keiran clicks a few keys; a line of text out of all proportion to the number of keystrokes swells across the bottom of his laptop; and all the text on the screen scrolls upwards one line.

The two-digit return code informs Keiran that all went well, that the threat he recorded from Laurent last night has just been conveyed via an untraceable voice-over-IP connection. As far as the French police are concerned, a man with an Arabic accent just phoned them and informed them that a large bomb will level the Tour EDF within the next fifteen minutes.

The police react with impressive speed. La Défense's security systems report that the Tour EDF's fire alarm is triggered less than two minutes after the phone call. When the first of the International Trade Council representatives sets foot onto the plaza of the Esplanade, ready to brave the hundred-metre journey behind police barricades between the parking lot and the CNIT conference center, office workers are already spilling out of the Tour EDF's atrium like water from a ruptured pipe.

The crowd surges towards the barricades. Most of them can't know that the attendees have arrived, but even without sound Keiran can tell from the the pictures, by the protestors' hate-contorted expressions, by the way they shout and shake fists and banners with new intensity, that some kind of vibe, some primal bloodlust, has run through the mob's collective mind, told them that battle is at hand. Even those who would never participate in violence, even those who ordinarily deplore it, are swept up in the collective wave of rage. This, Keiran realizes, is the real secret of the black blocs. If they worked only for themselves, they would be powerless to affect anything; but those armoured men with clubs are the crowd's id, the expression of its dark and secret desire for blood.

The Wobblies strike first, the group in white, best-organized and most violent of the black blocs. They leap the waist-high barriers with military order and precision, attacking the gendarmes all at once. The riot police had only a few seconds' warning before the raging but peaceful protestors suddenly melted into an armed and armoured mass of a hundred organized troops. They bend before the wave. The battle is medieval, clubs and shields, and the tactics medieval as well, it could almost be a scene from Spartacus. As the first blows are struck, the demonstration's background noise of raucous cries and chants swells into full-throated roars and screams, a deafening wave of primal noise from seven thousand throats that carries up twenty-two floors and through the Sheraton's thick windows, so overwhelming that it makes the gendarmes falter.

Then a smaller black bloc hits them, supporting the Wobblies, and the police line breaks, and the black blocs are running loose through overturned barricades, and the battle has degenerated from ranked troops facing one another into swirling knots of violence. Keiran sees onscreen a gendarme wielding his riot shield two-handed, smashing the edge of it onto the helmeted head of an opponent down on one knee. He sees two Wobblies kicking a fallen policeman so hard that blood splashes onto the concrete from his cheek, peeled open by a steel-toed boot. He can hardly believe that what he is watching is actually taking place just twenty-two stories below.

Keiran connects his headset to Laurent again. "The window of opportunity has been smashed open," he says. "Go."