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the desired outcome or you tell me to stop. My fee is 20,000 kroner per day, plus reimbursement of my expenses for other expert assistance, bribes, travel, food and accommodation. We won’t sign a contract and I won’t provide you with any receipts, you’ll just have to trust me. I’ll give you the number of my accountant’s client account and he’ll report the payments to the tax office. Is that acceptable?’
    ‘What does the small print say?’ she wanted to know.
    ‘Not very much. I don’t perform serious criminal acts if they go against my view of right and wrong. I decide how far I’m prepared to go on a case-by-case basis.’
    ‘Regardless of the size of your fee?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘So why are you so incredibly hard to find?’
    ‘I’m picky,’ he said.
    His wife sometimes asked him the same question. You wouldn’t find Michael Sander’s one-man consultancy anywhere on the Internet. Stubborn individuals might find the latest version of the firm’s homepage somewhere in the Dark Web, the basement of the Internet, which wasn’t accessible to search engines like Google or AltaVista, but only to specialized,vertical robots such as technorati.com. It was possible he lost out on clients by being so exclusive, but this was how he liked it. He knew of a beautiful, Danish escort girl in London whose intimate services cost as much as the Greek budget deficit, and she used the same method. It was a question of her and her daughter’s safety, she said.
    His homepage was brief and basic. It stated that Michael Sander was an ex-soldier and former police officer, and that he had worked as a security consultant for ten years for Shepherd & Wilkins Ltd, a well-known British security company. His remit had included personal security, hostage negotiations, financial investigations and so on. His contact details gave only a mobile phone number, which was replaced at least once a month, usually more often.
    ‘What do you know about me?’ she asked.
    ‘I know that you’re the only child of Flemming and Klara Caspersen,’ he said. ‘I know that your father originally trained to be a radio mechanic and later studied civil engineering. I know that in the 1980s he took out a series of ground-breaking patents for what later became known as the ultrasound Doppler, miniature sonar and laser rangefinders, used in virtually all military weapon systems from submarines to fighter planes, but also in civilian meteorological early warning systems. Quite simply, it’s the core technology behind modern range calculation and target identification. The technology is crucial and has never been surpassed. Your father founded Sonartek in 1987 with auniversity friend, Victor Schmidt, and the rest, as they say, is Danish corporate history. A success story.’
    ‘One evening in Frederiksberg he heard an ambulance siren and spent the rest of the night sitting on a bench pondering how the siren’s echo told him the exact location of the ambulance. That was the start. Then he started studying dolphins, bats and the then fairly elementary Doppler technology. He improved and developed it.’
    ‘As far as I’m aware, only Sonartek’s research and development department remains in Denmark, while production and distribution have been …’
    ‘Outsourced to China, India, Poland and Estonia,’ she said. ‘It was a business decision.’
    ‘And, finally, I know that your father suffered a heart attack and died a couple of months ago,’ he said.
    ‘He had run a marathon only two days before. In just over three hours,’ she said. ‘He was seventy-two years old, but in really good shape. I don’t think he ever took a pill in his life. He always said that genes were the only thing that really mattered.’
    She got up and walked over to the windows. The dog’s inconsolable howling could be heard from the garden. Michael didn’t stir and he said nothing.
    Elizabeth Caspersen dried her eyes and turned