IT IS 2020 and only two years since the dollar was cancelled. Anna Moore, Inland Revenue Inspector (A2 Grade), must investigate John Law, quadrillionaire inventor of Soft Gold, the first electronic currency. Despite his enormous wealth, the man known as the Cryptographer has been engaged in a prosaic fiddle, apparently to mask an undeclared deposit box containing gold and platinum for his son. Why has he not buried his fraud in his unbreakable code? Why has only an A2-grade inspector been put on the case?

The younger sibling from a hctured family, Moore is thirty-six, childless and lonely. Inclined to watch rather than participate in life, she is gifted at trufig out other people's wants in order to unearth their covert financial arrangements. When the Cryptographer confesses all at the first interview and immediately settles