Washington, D.C.
Number One Observatory Circle
Official Residence of the Vice President of the United States.
Edward Benjamin Quinn wiped his hand on a towel and stood back to survey the damage.
The woman on the floor had a slight pulse and was still breathing, but with a slow, jerked rhythm. Soft brown hair fanned in a dark halo around her contorted face.
Irreparable.
He knew a thousand ways he could have killed her outright, and so he must have decided he was going to let her live a little longer. The question was why, of course. He and Beth-Anne hadn't argued. He wasn't drunk, he didn't feel crazy, he wasn't even upset-and he didn't think he had been drugged.
He felt fine, better than fine; he felt strong, justified, square with the big-all world. Without guilt, you learn the quality of your soul. Cross that border and you learn what you are really capable of.
There would be consequences, of course.
Outside, the president was still in the hospital, recovering from three bullets. It had happened in Dallas, of all places. Fortunately she was out of the woods-out of the hospital and out of Dallas -and able to make decisions, but for eight hours Eddie Quinn had been president. Under the circumstances he did not enjoy that honor, but nothing had gone so wrong that he needed to do this.
He couldn't feel the love or the excitement he and Beth-Anne had once known, but that didn't seem reason enough, either.
He walked into the bathroom and inspected the folds of his robe for blood. After washing his hands, he returned to pick up the towel and toss it into the laundry hamper. While he was making this circuit, Beth-Anne stopped breathing. For that he was grateful.
"You're one screwed-up bastard, Eddie," he said.
If this had happened during the eight hours he had been president…
"Whoa."
A full-length mirror hung on the back on the bathroom door. He let his robe fall around his broad shoulders and looked at himself as if for the first time. His was still a strong body, with thick, strong arms and short, powerful legs. A paunch had settled over his stomach, from years on the campaign trail and sitting rather than pumping iron and running. Hairs curled around his back, forested his arms, and almost hid the long, coiled scar that stretched from his neck down his right arm. A nice bit of needlework, that. A good stitch. A man's blast-sharpened rib had once stuck out of his chest, just below the clavicle. The hair on his abdomen pointed toward midline and navel, monkey's fur silky and thick. Another scar coiled there, pink and bald, like a burrowing pink centipede. He could almost imagine it creeping under his flesh. It was that vivid, almost pleasant to think about. More pleasant than remembering how the scar got there. The suicide bomber had actually bitten him. Fragments of exploded mandible. Hard to forget things like that, very hard: but he had gotten treatment and it had worked, hadn't it?
Then why this?
He tied the robe shut and sat on the edge of the antique maple-frame bed where he and Beth-Anne had made their last child, Jacob: now nine months old, asleep down the hall in the bedroom that he shared with his sister Carina. It was the nanny's night off.
Carina, eight years old, adored her new brother. In a few minutes, Edward would go in and read her a bedtime story.
On the nightstand, his security badge beeped. The house monitored it all. The children's clothing, furniture, and bedding were tagged with small sensors, but he and his wife had chosen to keep their privacy-except when wearing the badges. Still, the house knew something bad had happened. The Secret Service would be here in a few minutes.
One thing at a time.
He walked slowly down the hall to the children's bedroom, arms out like a bird, face creased by a quizzical frown. Pushing open the heavy wooden door, he smiled at Carina where she sat in the outer nimbus of her ceramic moon-glow lamp. He leaned over the crib to check on Jacob-mostly asleep and beautiful-then stooped to pick up The House on Pooh Corner and resume where they had left off the night before.
A lovely peace descended upon Eddie Quinn. The promise of Mariposa held true even now-no guilt, no borders, the past wiped away.
It was so rare that he had time to spend with his family.
FBI Academy
Quantico, Virginia
William Griffin walked across the concrete to the Jefferson building, footsteps echoing in the eerie morning quiet. The air smelled sweet and cool. A few green-brown leaves whispered past in a gritty swirl between the towers.
The sun cast a long, flicking shadow.
The old FBI Academy in Quantico-the Q-was practically empty. Just a few administrative offices remained, everything else boarded up, mothballed, or on the move to Alameda, where the jewel in Hoover's tarnished tiara was supposedly being reanimated-if congress approved a massive appropriation. Twenty-five billion dollars. But that was looking less and less likely, stalling the Bureau's transfer indefinitely.
For the moment, that was its name-simply the Bureau.
The Academy buildings had suffered neglect: peeling paint and cracked concrete, patchy brown lawns on the surrounding low slopes, varmint mounds and runnels everywhere. Last year, movers had hauled away the monuments to 9/11 and 10/4, the simple black stone replica of New York's twin towers, rising from a Pentagon base, and a donut of twisted steel from the Seattle ferry Duwamish. The Duwamish had been blown up not by Muslim terrorists but by a demented creep from Missouri, infuriated by gay marriage.
All the old signs had been covered with plastic or pulled out, leaving pits in the walls.
For now, the Bureau was divided like the Roman Empire of old into East and West: two competing directors, two budgets, and next to no money.
Another day older and deeper in debt.
A tall, graying security guard unlocked the heavy glass door as he approached. "You know where to go, Agent Griffin," the guard said. "Don't get lost. Mr. Hoover's still spookin' around. I hear he's been getting the goods on a few devils, kicking butt and takin' names."
William chuckled. "What's he got on you, Clarence?"
"The ladies, my man." Clarence winked. "Sleek, smart ladies in tight-fittin' power suits. Black or white, Hispanic or Asian, I love 'em all."
"And they love you."
"No time, and still I wish they was more!" Clarence called after him.
While the investigative divisions of other agencies-ATF, Homeland Security, Diplomatic Security, Treasury, even the IRS and the Postal Service-had been happy to suck up some high-profile, high-publicity cases, none had the forensic expertise or the laboratory throughput, and crime never slept.
Nobody knew how that song would end.
Much of top FBI management had evacuated to sunnier positions, leaving behind a few dedicated souls and some spectacular incompetents. William was fortunate that his boss, Alicia Kunsler, fell into the first category.
He hung a left past the broad conversation pit, empty but for two upended couches and rolls of old carpet, and walked along a hallway now bereft of J. Edgar Hoover's favorite pastoral prints. Just a long row of rectangles on a sunned and peeling wall.
Kunsler kept her lonely office at the end of an empty corridor. The overhead lights had been dimmed or removed, but the glow from her half open door guided him around an abandoned desk, a few old gray steel swivel chairs, a tied stack of cardboard, and a bin filled with newspaper clippings someone had deemed unnecessary.
William wondered how much history had already been lost.
Brain transplant. That's what the fetch bloggers called the move to Alameda. Zombie Bureau. Shoot it in the head and put it out of its misery. Serve it right for surveilling Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, the Dalai Lama, and, of course-at the request of a former Attorney General, now serving time in Cumberland federal prison-for keeping extensive "Patriot" files on the current president of the United States, the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, and six ranking senators.
Burn the old FBI, then jolt it back to life on the operating table of national bankruptcy.
William knocked lightly on the jamb. Kunsler saw his shadow in the doorway, held up a long, thin index finger, then crooked it-come in-and resumed typing in the empty air over her desk. An angular, black-haired woman of forty-one with a hook nose, big hands, and small, dark, intelligent eyes, she sat behind an old avocado-green steel desk, staring through a pair of projector glasses-her spex-and air-typing on a virtual keyboard, fingers jabbing two inches above the antique blotter.
William sat.
Kunsler had proved herself a master at gathering power and influence in a vacuum. After the firing of four directors in the last two years, she had assumed the task of deputy director of the Bureau in Transition East, or BITE, and had moved into this old, stripped-down room in a deserted, musty building filled with unhappy ghosts.
Not the sort of woman-nor the sort of agency, now-that William had thought would have the balls to conduct a months-long, clandestine investigation into the doings of one of the most powerful and secretive men on the planet.
She finished tapping her line, pulled off her spex, and focused full attention on him. "Tell me something cheerful," she said in a small, precise voice.
William sat. "The president has relieved her Secret Service detail."
"Do you blame her?" Kunsler asked.
"She's considering hiring Talos executive security to protect her."
Kunsler sniffed. "I've asked to meet with her twice-and been refused both times."
"Daniel Haze went to congress asking them to override the hire. They can't, of course."
Haze was director of the Secret Service-one of the branches competing with the Bureau for funding and cases.
"The fox will be in the cluck house," Kunsler said. "I'm not feeling the cheer, Agent Griffin. Price's octopus arms are slithering through every branch of government, and I know that bastard is about to make his move. I just wish I knew what it was."
"What about Nabokov?"
This was the code-name for an agent who had already spent a year in Lion City, infiltrated into Talos. Kunsler told William what she thought he needed to know, and nothing more.
"On schedule. He's going to have to act fast, though. Someone's spreading manure. Price hires a lot of retired agents."
Kunsler took a zip page out of her desk drawer and passed it across. "I'd like you to look into this personally," she said. "Keep you busy until we know what's up with Nabokov. It's a long shot, but it feels hinky.
"Price put four million dollars into the research of a scientist named Plover-some kind of pharmaceutical wizard. Plover started with cancer drugs, then expanded into a new field called EGCT-epigenetic glial cell therapy. Does that mean Price or someone near him has cancer? If so, they're shit out of luck. Plover's foundation in Baltimore reported he left the premises last week with two and a half million in grant money… They have no idea where he absconded to. I like that word, absconded, don't you?"
"Fine word," William agreed.
"We know where he is, of course-he may be a genius, but he's not used to acting like a bad guy. His wife bought a house in Boise four months ago. She's still using her old credit cards. I'd like you to fly to Idaho and pay them a visit."
"Just me?"
"For now. Maybe Plover's just tired of being a genius. If he can tell us something useful about Price, we can offer immunity and protection. If he's got nothing, take him into custody. Flight at 0600 tomorrow morning from Reagan. Hope this doesn't interfere with your social life."
"Not a problem," William said. "Haven't had a date in two months."
"Some lucky cowgirl will come along and find her buckaroo," Kunsler said, stone-faced.
William broke into laughter. "They pulled down nearly all the posters around here," he said. "But they left the ones on alcohol and domestic abuse. What's that tell you about the private life of an agent?"
Kunsler waved that away and looked unconcerned. "Let me be your matchmaker," she said. "It'll happen."
The secure phone on her desk chimed. She picked it up and listened. Her eyes wandered around the room, met William's.
"Oh my God," she said, then hung up. For a moment, she could not speak. Her eyes welled up with tears. She looked down and rearranged some loose papers. "Does the shit never stop?"
"What is it? The president?"
"She's fine." Kunsler's voice cracked. "It's Beth-Anne Quinn. The vice president just murdered his wife."
The Ziggurat
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Nathaniel Trace walked slowly to the condo window and stared out over Dubai Creek. A few dhows, pleasure boats, and light freighters plied their trade, far below.
From his perspective-six hundred feet up the side of the Ziggurat, a huge steel and glass pyramid-the morning sun burned like a blowtorch on the horizon. The twelve lanes of the Ras al Khor Bridge, mostly empty, cut through the waterway's blinding shimmer.
The strangest feeling pushed through his entire body, as if he were a giant skyscraper and all the light switches were being turned on-or off-in quick succession.
Windows bright, windows dark.
How appropriate, here in Dubai, home of ten thousand audacious, half empty monuments to the world-class architecture of a failing oil empire.
An incredibly rich city fallen on hard times, where Nathaniel had lived and worked for six months now, interacting with part of the most sophisticated computer system on Earth-and filling his accounts with cash. His work was all but finished. He would be called up if they needed him for a few last details-but that was unlikely.
No, Jones was in control now, buried somewhere in the mountains of Switzerland.
He examined his naked reflection in the glass. Pale, lumpy body. Brush of disheveled ginger hair. Round face with a bump of nose-thin bridge, bulbous tip, flaring nostrils. Smooth, round cheeks. Generous lips that had once tended to a boyish smile.
Now he looked more like a bewildered Irish car salesman.
Nathaniel shivered and refocused his eyes. He could stare and stare at the sun without blinking and it didn't hurt a bit. If he chose, he could destroy his eyes and not even feel it.
He chose not to.
Something similar had happened a year before. Like the flip of a switch-all the misery, gone. Back then, it had been the pain from a nasty run-in with the wicked old world of the Middle East. Relief from worry and torment might explain his current round of mental pyrotechnics.
But this time, it felt very different.
You will experience liberation.
That's what the doctor had told him. All his old fears and traumas wouldn't just be managed, just painted over-they would be gone. He would remember them at any level of detail he willed, like tracing scars with a finger, but the scars would mean nothing emotionally.
Freedom from all his blunders, his mistakes… freedom from guilt.
That was what Mariposa was supposed to do. Better men, better fighters-everything better. And the doctor's promises had come true.
But now, his recovery and all his personal progress were twisting into something truly weird. Maybe what he was feeling had nothing to do with what had happened in Arabia Deserta, or with Mariposa.
Maybe it was unique to him.
But he didn't think so. His thoughts jumbled, tumbled all over each other like acrobats or hyperactive children. He felt great but he could not think straight. The confusion did not cause him actual pain but it scared him.
He felt great but he was scared to death.
He loved being scared to death.
Stop it.
The fear went away-but only for a moment.
A bank of dust blowing up from the south obscured the brilliant morning sun. It was going to be a murky day in Dubai. All the glittering steel and glass, and yet the desert still ruled.
Nathaniel felt a sudden urge to test himself, test this new awareness and see how physically in control and adaptable he was.
Get away from the luxury and the air-conditioning. Walk out into the desert. Feel the hot sand on his bare feet. Strip off his clothes and directly face the sun's rays. See if his skin grew a new silvery layer and his nose became broad to radiate heat.
Probably not a good plan, he told himself-the desert would leach him in an hour. He had been incredibly thirsty of late, drinking gallons of Masafi well water and peeing like a race horse.
Yesterday the pee was tinted purple. Then it turned bright yellow and opaque-like paint. Who knew what would happen to him under the pounding glare and the wind-blown grit.
Still…
Baby steps.
He let the curtain drop and closed his eyes. Before he lost his last lick of sense-before he decided to actually leave the city and walk out into the desert-he decided he should ride out this part unconscious. This part of whatever was happening to him. But it was all so fascinating. He didn't want to miss a thing.
This new person he was becoming might be human or might not-but he promised more real adventure and change and fun than anything Nathaniel had ever experienced.
He consciously willed his heart to speed up-then slowed it down.
Good.
More!
He picked up a long brass bird sculpture from the desktop near the window and, with a slight grunt, bent it double. The effort popped two of his knuckles and strained a ligament in his right arm, but there it was-the sculpture twisted into a pretzel. Something he could never have done before-at least not consciously.
He had read that in an emergency, people can increase their strength tenfold. A frightened mother can lift a car off her injured child. Drugs can have the same effect.
Nathaniel no longer needed the excuse of an emergency-nor drugs.
The needs of the body no longer ruled.
He gripped the two fingers and popped one back into place, then the other. The arm would have to take care of itself-he didn't mind the pain.
I have a cosmic mind, he told himself. He could make himself believe every word-and then smile in perfect awareness that this was crazy. That he was going insane.
But whatever-I am bringing a lot more systems online and under my conscious control than is humanly possible.
He took the sedative with another glass of water-the water tasted like pink platinum, whatever that might be-and lay down on the bed in the condo's coolness, privacy, and extraordinary luxury.
Leased through the efforts of that poor blown-up, beaten-down, guilt-ridden son of a bitch who was being paid, along with the rest of the Turing Seven, to corrupt the world's finances-but couldn't hear a motorbike rip past without breaking into a rank sweat.
His past self.
There was still plenty of money left. The Quiet Man had trained them well. Millions of dollars in hidden bank accounts, just in case. However this turned out, he would soon be leaving it all behind-United Arab Emirates, the Middle East, the desert.
All but the money.
He would make his way back to America. There, with what he knew, and this new sense of liberation, maybe he would finally be able to do something different.
Meet important people outside the usual circles.
Spill the beans. Tell the world what he had been up to. Tell them all about the incredible nastiness that was in the works.
Do some good for a change.
Although doing more evil would certainly be exciting.
14 DAYS
Spider/Argus
Tyson's Corner, Virginia
Jane Rowland climbed down from the humming blue-and-green bus and walked with three colleagues, known to her only by their badge numbers, across a walkway through plantings of young trees and turf-squared grass, around a small fountain, to her home away from home.
Under a gray canopy of moody humidity, the new headquarters of Spider/Argus blended with all the other blandly efficient buildings of Tyson's Corner: gray modern architecture both blocky and tidy.
Hotels and malls and restaurants spread throughout the small city catered to some of the most powerful and anonymous people on the planet.
Typically Jane worked the nightshift. Her personal monitor bots were even now preparing reports that only she would see-until she passed them along to her director, who had permanently commissioned her last year to do what she did best.
Spider/Argus had been conceived twenty years ago as a supplement to the National Security Agency, which had proved slow to transition from SigInt-Signals Intelligence: landlines, satellites, cell phones, radio-into the dataflow age of Internet Everywhere.
In the eight years since its creation, S/A had budded off completely from its parent, taking on not just Internet and Web-based research and intelligence, but defensive CPI: counterintelligence, prevention, intervention.
Letting a highly trained watchdog off its leash.
Spider/Argus was not even its official name. Jane knew of just a small fraction of its operations.
Security barricades surrounded all. Nobody approached the building without clearance at the highest levels. Hidden sonic disrupter and microwave heat and pain projectors had been installed at all entrances and in undisclosed locations around the grounds-capable of incapacitating attackers at a distance of several hundred yards.
Lethal force was authorized inside the barbed-wire flanked corridors, patrolled by roller bots and dogs and soldiers. The tunnels of wire that covered nearby freeway overpasses were monitored by thousands of bug-eye cameras.
At regular intervals along all the local freeways and access roads, concrete arches hid.50 caliber, high-speed, radar-guided gun mounts, similar to those used to shoot down missiles and capable of cutting cars and trucks-even armored, military-style trucks-to hamburger-filled scrap within seconds.
Jane passed through the automatic steel and glass doors and submitted her badge and arm chip at the two security gates beyond.
"You'll need a code refresh by tomorrow evening," the female guard told her in a droop-eyed monotone.
For the guards, this had to be one of the most boring jobs in the greater DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Nobody interesting passed their way. Nobody spoke to them other than brief pleasantries.
Not even sports or weather could be discussed.
But the droop eyes stayed alert and sharp.
Jane waited for her assigned elevator at the automated station, then rose to the third floor. No music and no smell-clean, cool, purified air. Elevators carried singles at all times. Conversation in other than work areas was not just discouraged, it was tracked and fined. Posted lists of recent fines glowed from monitors over the elevator doors-though of course with no names or numbers attached.
There was fun to be had, of course. Floors and divisions with the highest levels of fines had to buy Christmas gifts for charities in the DC metro area. Top analysts with the highest fines had to spring for hallway treat tables.
No holiday parties, however.
Those guilty of prohibited violations spent three months in "time-out" at comfortable locations in the Adirondacks, until their cases were processed. Most did not return.
Jane did not find any of this exceptional. Her new office was far more comfortable than the one at the old Naval station on the banks of the Potomac.
The security was no worse, and definitely more effective.
At the end of each work period-usually in the small hours of the morning-she returned to her apartment and her daughter, dismissed the government-provided nanny, a woman with excellent bodyguard credentials, and assumed her favorite role-devoted single mom.
She was very good at everything she did.
Jane approached the door to her office. Beside the door, a black sign with silver letters warned that this was a "Faraday Room."
The room snitch checked her security codes one last time, unlocked the door, and opened access to the banks of office computers, clearing her for work.
Her machines never shut down.
She watched as wide ranks of rectangular displays brightened, switching from low-power mode.
Results of the day's searches started cascading down the line like flipped cards in solitaire. She sat in her special chair-the one item she had brought with her from the old Potomac building-and flexed her fingers before highlighting with airy gestures the top items on her evening work chart.
The room swiftly interpreted her motions either as writing, drawing, or command and control.
On the small bulletin board hung to the left of her monitors, ten months ago-while preparing for her current operation-she had tacked a printout from a Congressional Budget Office report.
Many nations, coming out of a long financial downturn, and having acquired assets such as at-risk real estate from beleaguered banks and other institutions, find themselves asset rich but increasingly cash poor. The United States, with debts on the order of fifty trillion dollars and an unfortunate habit of triggering recessions, is thought by a majority of nations to be the greatest threat to financial stability in the world.
Investor and debt-holding institutions fear that a disruption similar to that of 2008-2009 will push the world economy over the edge, bringing on yet another worldwide crisis, this one of dire proportions.
Created in 2009, the International Financial Protection Corporation (IFPC) is an international fund that contains and controls a cumulative 85% of U.S. debt through all of its participants and investors.
The United States has agreed to certain strict conditions, contingent to obtain necessary further loans from IFPC. Those conditions have not been revealed to the public.
Below that, she had pinned a second printout framed top and bottom with blue scribbles from her boss.
The following internal warning from the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury has never been released to the public and, god willing, never will be.
In order to qualify for all necessary further loans from IFPC, the United States executive branch, with the agreement of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and three congressional committees, has agreed to a special troubled nation loan protocol.
Certain national assets are valued and offered up as collateral. Central authority is ultimately invested in an automated system known as MSARC-Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control-which can trigger massive reallocations and call in loans, effectively putting a debtor nation into instant receivership.
Should MSARC decide to act, collateral assets guaranteed under the loan agreements will immediately be transferred to IFPC.
Financial corporations and investment funds around the world can then call the political shots through a Reallocation Committee.
If MSARC so decides, for the first time in our history, foreigners will hold almost complete economic and political control of-and so they will own-the United States of America.
MSARC poses the greatest threat to this nation since the Cold War-maybe greater.
And it's our own damned fault. We do hate paying taxes, and we do love all our precious government services. Squealing piggies at the trough.
Her boss was prone to expressing himself vividly. Nevertheless, she read the posted pages before beginning her work every evening. They neatly bookended the current plight of the United States.
The monitor on her far right-smallest and most antique, losing pixels and fading in the corners to autumn gold-was devoted to displaying a simple digital clock.
The clock counted backward, second by second.
It now read 14 days 13 hours 5 minutes.
The amount of time left before MSARC began formally judging America.
MSARC was allowed access to information that once would have been considered closely-held national secrets. Its central computer banks in Geneva relied on a network surveillance capability that in two years had come to rival many in her own agency.
MSARC also had access to the records of major corporations with government contracts-all but Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas, one of the biggest holders of U.S. government contracts. That exemption had been passed by congress with hardly a ripple, so many members were beholden to Talos CEO Axel Price. Price had taken a particular interest in MSARC some years back, even serving on a fully briefed government advisory committee.
The first item on Jane's evening agenda was following up on a list of MSARC queries. Stopping or interfering with those queries-or even tracking them-violated the loan agreements, so Jane was discreet, using the full range of search and masking capabilities available to Spider/Argus.
This evening, the list included only thirty queries, concentrating on the Federal Reserve and a number of major software corporations.
The latter might be of interest to other analysts. She copied them to a separate office that evaluated long-term patterns of foreign interest in private business.
More sobering still, MSARC's command center in Geneva was only now ramping up to full capacity-the moment of truth tracked by her backward-counting clock.
No one knew how extensive and powerful those systems were. It was possible Spider/Argus would be completely shut out by a superior program.
Whenever Jane conducted surveys on that particular question, her web "helpers"-thousands of subroutines running in machines everywhere from Cheyenne Conserve to Iron Mountain to right here in Tyson's Corner-came back with results that gave her the spooky feeling she-Jane Rowland herself-was being closely watched by something with almost preternatural instincts.
Human or machine, she could not even begin to guess.
There was evidence this presence was working on behalf of MSARC.
There was also evidence that MSARC was not even aware of its existence.
That contradiction intrigued Jane.
She loved this sort of puzzle.
The second item for this evening was the most important. She was arranging for a brief but powerful ripple of net inactivity-amounting to a thirty-second denial of service-spreading across hundreds of server farms in the northwest and the southeast, with the ultimate goal of helping an agent infiltrated into Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas.
His code name was Nabokov.
Jane knew almost everything about how the Talos computers accessed the outside world, and how they protected themselves against being accessed. Nabokov was poised to take advantage of a maintenance hole in Talos's infranet to download data crucial to a joint investigation, a rare instance of S/A cooperation with an outside agency-in this case, Alicia Kunsler at Bureau East.
Killing a few minutes time, Jane pushed her wheeled chair over to her relaxation station-a hot plate, sink, small refrigerator, and rack of cups-and made herself a cup of her favorite, white tea.
Cup in hand, she rolled back.
One-handed, she used a keyboard to type in a warning of the impending system-wide interruption, alerting national security masters throughout Tyson's Corner that this was not the beginning of a foreign assault.
She then paused her finger over the ENTER key, waiting for the precise second…
Now or never.
Lion City, Texas
Talos Corporate Campus
Footsteps echoed hollowly down the Buckeye main hallway to the central instructor lounge. Fouad Al-Husam was alone. The building seemed deserted.
He had finished his afternoon class teaching regional Farsi and Arabic to a select team of Haitian troops destined to serve as mercenaries in Middle Eastern theaters.
Normally, at the end of each day he returned to his apartment in Lion City and ate dinner alone. His free time he mostly spent reading or watching Islamic history on cable, hungry for another place, another time.
Remembering his strange return to the hot, pure air of the Hejaz-his visit to Mecca.
This evening, he had reserved the central computer annex for half an hour to conduct academic research over the Talos infranet.
The Haitians had surprised Fouad with their intelligence and devotion. Talos was paying for their education. They sent more money home to their families each month than many in Haiti earned in a lifetime.
They reminded Fouad of the Janissaries he had commanded in Turkey, it seemed an age ago-but was just two years.
Two eventful, deceitful years.
It could be said about Axel Price that he was a powerful man, a strange man, even perhaps a corrupt man, but he paid generous wages and maintained strict military discipline in his company and his people.
Fouad was ten times better paid now than he had ever been as an agent.
The Buckeye main lounge surrounding the annex was also empty. Evening classes resumed at eight.
The annex-a smoked glass hexagon on the north side of the lounge-served both faculty and advanced students. It gave access to online instructional materials and teacher/adviser briefings, as well as a host of information services equal or superior to anything available to CEOs of other major American corporations.
Of course, all searches were logged.
The classrooms in Buckeye radiated in eight spokes from a central rotunda, forming a wagon wheel. Three similar wheels in other quarters of the campus were devoted to particular collections of Talos customers.
Each was named after a regional butterfly.
Axel Price loved butterflies. He had the largest collection in the world-hundreds of sealed glass cases, so it was said-but showed it to no one.
Price's other hobby was collecting rare antique cars. They were kept in a huge garage near the Smoky, his ranch and principal residence.
Fouad's fingerprint and arm chip logged him into the annex. The lock took a small DNA sample from his skin oils. Micro-PCR and pore sequencing technology within the lock took less than ten seconds to confirm his genetic identity and compare it with the information on the chip.
The annex's glass and steel door unlocked with a smooth click and slid open. Had he been denied, alarms would have sounded throughout the building.
The chip also enabled Talos to track him anywhere on the ten thousand acre campus. Every few feet, the chip was queried by sensors imbedded in walls and sidewalks, grass, and asphalt. Millions more sensors were scattered over the training fields and surrounding lawns, gardens, and tracks, maintaining a tightly woven net of constant surveillance.
Around Lion City, planes and helicopters had dropped enough sensors to saturate the entire area with the thin disks, two centimeters in diameter-one or two per square yard.
All in the interest, so it was said, of preventing illegal Mexicans from causing trouble.
Fouad carried ice in a cup from the cafeteria to cool his hands. He applied it briefly to his forehead. Within any of the campus buildings, Talos security could record his heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature for face, hands, and feet. The ice in the cup reduced his blood flow and brought his stress profile more in line with normal activity.
The hexagonal space was equipped with three chairs. There were no tables or monitors. The entire room served as a display. The neutral gray walls were equipped with hundreds of tiny lasers.
Fouad sat in the middle chair.
In a few minutes, a general ripple in the dataflow would pulse through selected servers regularly utilized by the Talos infranet. That would cause no damage, but it might give him a few minutes of deep, unfettered access into the corporate goody bag-without the access being logged.
The ganglion of Talos's network had a specific pattern of behaviors outside of its recorded design specs-what Jane Rowland called "excess personality." During a universal dropout and reacquisition of external servers, the Talos library would likely suffer a "momentary lapse of confidence," as Jane had described it, and-like an infant looking around to see where Momma was-it might open a point of entry for a technician to check up on all systems.
This point of entry would be brief, but it would require neither an identifier nor a password other than the original programmer's-which was known to Spider/Argus but not to anyone at Talos.
That password was "Nick72TuringHorta."
The original programmers had created and then concealed such portals, perhaps to allow them to make last-second upgrades and improve their chances of getting the rich Talos contract. Or perhaps because they did not trust Talos any more than the Bureau did.
The blip would be brief and the system would easily recover, so no technician would come calling, but Fouad would be there, ready and equipped with a new way to steal and export data.
He sipped from the melting ice and waited.
Spider/Argus
Tyson's Corner, Virginia
Jane pressed ENTER.
The ripple began to run its course. For the next ten seconds, Talos servers would try to access their familiar gateways, and fail.
She sipped her white tea and noted with satisfaction that Nabokov now had an opening-a receptive command node in the Talos infranet, awaiting instructions from a local programmer.
Jane could not get information out of that portal-no one she knew of could breach the Talos firewalls from outside-but if Nabokov was in place, for the next five minutes, the campus servers just might become an open book for him.
The infranet returned a simple bit acknowledgment it was being inspected.
Technician on duty.
Then a little gong went off-a simple oriental chang.
Jane sat upright.
That spooky presence again, in a place it definitely did not belong. She swiftly drew a number in the air, then a slash, initiating her visual dialer.
"Give it a miss," she murmured. "Don't go in."
The Spider/Argus call center connected her to Alicia Kunsler in Quantico.
Kunsler picked up on the first droning buzz. "Hey, Jane. He's in?"
"He's in, but here's a hash query search-a patch on the portal. He may be tagged. Something else strange-an analog signal has been laid over the feed, available through the firewall-which would be doubly peculiar, but not really, because it isn't coming from Texas. It's coming from a source I can't trace."
It's coming from that watcher who always knows where I am and what I'm doing.
"Analog? Who in hell sends analog?"
Jane looked over the diagnostics and pathways. Names popped up, hypotheticals:
San Luis Obispo.
San Francisco.
Corpus Christi.
Pendleton Reserve.
"Could be random garbage from a discontinued coastal junction," she said. "A ghost from a TV show or something. It's just odd it popped up now. I don't like it. I think they've made him."
"Recommendations?"
"Yank him, whether he's got what he came for or not."
"Shit. You know there's no way I can reach him. Can you?"
"No," Jane said.
"Then he takes the risk."
Kunsler hung up.
Jane's machines automatically extracted the analog signal, cleaned it up, and played it through her earpiece.
It sounded like a young boy weeping.
Her hands went cold. She cradled the tea mug for warmth.
When she suddenly felt she was about to get dizzy, she let out her breath with a low, agonized whoosh.
Talos Campus
Fouad leaned back in the chair.
He had carefully planned his masking search-downloading updates to Yemeni academic and literary e-journals, accessing slow, ancient university servers half a world away.
He had been watching the friendly, scampering images of network busyness flow around him. The incongruity of manic cartoon characters in full battle gear was not lost on him.
The images flickered and froze.
A black rectangle appeared, seeming to hover about a foot from his face. A simple green cursor blinked on its upper left side.
Fouad reached into his shirt pocket and removed the four-pronged connector in its plastic packet. To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a thumbtack.
He stripped off the plastic and shoved the tiny prongs under the cap into his forearm. Then he clamped a digital sensor to the plug, raised his arm to eye level, returned his attention to the screen, and keyed in the six-number technician identifier.
Almost immediately, without knowing whether he was in or not, he ran his true thirty-line search code, memorized months ago under Jane's tutelage.
The figures began to scamper again. They sped up-and then the records he sought floated into view in ranked folios.
The folios opened and pages began to flip. He caught a few frames as they flew past-financial records for accounts in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China; transactions with federal employees in Virginia; payments to anonymous vendors in Idaho, California, Iran, Iraq, the new state of Arabia Deserta.
Then, lists of Web news organizations and other media, accompanied by figures that seemed to represent the amount of corporate debt owed to offshore institutions.
Fouad could get only a general impression of all the corporate and international connections: banks, holding companies, big investors-many of whom worked for the oil cartels-and several chairmen and CEOs of the International Financial Protection Organization, organized a few years ago to oversee the distribution of the huge U.S. debt.
More lists followed: heads of state and government ministers from the Middle East, Singapore, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Beijing; lobbyists, lawyers, and licensed foreign representatives working for China and Russia.
They comprised just a few of the hundred or more names that had apparently received a direct invitation from Axel Price himself.
Three retired generals, an admiral, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve were also invited.
Joining them would be political agents from nearly every nation that used Talos services or held American debt. Conspicuously absent was Israel-which seemed more than odd, given Talos's many past contracts there.
A line of question marks was followed by the designation: "HR undecideds." Fouad could not pause the flow; HR might refer to the House of Representatives, members of congress.
Many of the modern masters of world finance, politicians, world leaders, and even a few prominent military figures were about to come together at Price's call, a gathering of eagles and moles-and weasels.
But where and when?
Fouad tried to pick out the location and date, and then realized he already knew.
Price was sponsoring a big gathering in Lion City in two weeks. Ostensibly he would be showing off the Talos Campus and hawking his wares: reviewing cadres of mercenaries, along with spectacular displays of new security and military equipment in which Price had made substantial investments.
Something else flick-paged by-a cluster of references to MSARC. Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control. The central MSARC computers were supposedly buried deep inside mountains in Switzerland.
All part of the new world economic order.
The acronym seemed to him reminiscent of Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the working strategy of the decades-long nuclear stalemate during the Cold War.
Perhaps it was meant to be. Just as the split-second decision whether to launch nuclear weapons was once regarded as too important to hand over to mere humans, the challenges of international finance were now too fast, too big, and far too complicated to entrust to flesh-and-blood managers.
The tipping point for another, even deeper decline might occur in hundredths of a second.
More flickering pages, then multiple references to "Jones," either a man or a network possibly linked to MSARC.
All throughout, like obsessive-compulsive little fruit flies, buzzed sections of text from a rambling treatise by Price himself about "fiat" currency and its strategic disadvantages.
Fiat currency-currency defined by a government rather than backed by physical assets-was a pejorative among believers in the gold standard.
The area around his spiky interface began to grow warm. Terabytes of data were now flooding from the open Talos servers into Fouad's arm.
Too long a connection might actually sear a blood vessel, but this was important.
Axel Price was not the man Fouad would ever visualize at the center of a high-powered conference on international finance. He was not trusted in Europe. His connections to Israel had long since grown stale, mirroring the return of a general disenchantment with Jews inside the extreme American right.
Any connection between Price and MSARC would be very interesting in some circles.
The button was causing pain.
The dataflow abruptly ended with a cartoon grunt face-a Talos security guard in full armor and regalia raising night-vision gogs, spinning his assault rifle, and winking.
Done!
The black square of the maintenance window closed.
Records of Fouad's access instantly vanished.
All the data-the reason for his entire mission-now suffused through his blood, downloaded at the source of the plug into thousands of microscopic data stores, amalgams of protein and silicon called prochines. The prochines would spend the next hour exchanging data with their blood-borne fellows, performing a kind of bio-backup, until millions of copies spread throughout his body.
Security at Talos was comprehensive and superb, but so far, nobody knew about prochines, nor, had they known, would they have been able to detect them without drawing and analyzing enough blood to kill him.
Fouad needed to get this information out of Lion City quickly. Given the conditions of constant surveillance and the county-wide blanket of sensor chips, and given that his contract did not allow for vacations or travel outside of the campus, the original plan had been for him to be informed of a family emergency within the next few weeks-the timing to be widely separated from this intrusion, in the unlikely event it were ever detected.
But the conference was scheduled to begin in fourteen days. He needed to communicate with his handlers immediately.
And there was only one way he might succeed at doing that, undetected-something almost as antiquated as carrier pigeons, of which he had none.
Fouad left the cage, which locked its door behind him with a confident, steely chunk.
Dubai
The hours passed. The dust storm blew over and the color outside the window blinds went golden, then dark.
Nathaniel Trace flew in and out of a hypnogogic fantasy… Trees and roads all around, wind in his hair, and then a chingaling in one ear, like chimes, pretty but not at all soothing.
His phone telling him he had a call.
Interrupting the lazy flow.
He scrunched his lids tight, then opened them wide.
Dark in the room.
Dark outside.
Tree patterns painted on dark walls, windows, furniture. He pushed back against the visuals. He had taken the sedative hours ago. It hadn't knocked him out-not completely.
Now the chemistry was conflicting with whatever else was happening in his body. He was starting to feel really bad. Afraid, and not excited about it. The fear was real. The evil was here, right beside him, right here on the bed, a dark, writhing tangle of tree limbs-he could feel them scrape and poke but he couldn't see them, not now.
The room lights came up to dim gold in response to his movement. He rolled over and stared at the empty, creased sheets. Bunched pillows filled with leering ghost faces.
The blinds were drawn. Airplane warning lights on skyscrapers blinked red between the cracks in the blinds.
Chimes again.
He grabbed the phone, an expensive EPR unit. His fingerprint confirmed him and the phone completed the connection. "Yeah," he croaked. "It's me. I think."
The screen demanded another answer code. He fumbled with the keypad projected from the phone's base onto the gray sheets.
Concealed number, but he knew the voice-slightly husked, soft and deep. Despite his discomfort, he sat up in bed and cleared his throat.
This was the boss of the Turing Seven-director of Mind Design and the genius behind Jones. They called him the Quiet Man. His real name was Chan Herbert, but they rarely used it.
Nathaniel had met him in person three times back in La Jolla, California. He was reclusive and cautious to a fault-hence the EPR phones, which could always detect someone unauthorized listening in.
"Where are you?" the Quiet Man asked. "Still in Dubai?"
"Yes sir. Way up in the sky. The Ziggurat."
"You sound drunk."
"I'm trying to get some sleep."
The Quiet Man produced a short, guttural hm. "Anybody from Talos call in the last twelve hours? Anybody asking about your health?" He sounded anxious. He did not much like people and rarely betrayed emotion.
"No." Nathaniel tried to keep a drowsy mirth out of his voice.
"Have you heard from Nick?"
"We've closed up shop. I think he's back in Texas."
"He called. He was weeping. Are you sure you're okay?"
"I feel great. Better than great."
"Don't bullshit me."
"A little loopy, that's all. Decompression from months of work."
Tell him: I think I'm taking control of my body, all the automatic bits. It sounds crazy but sometimes it feels wonderful. Sometimes…
"Nathaniel… "
"No, really."
"Talos knows where you are?"
"Probably," Nathaniel admitted, combing his ginger brush of hair with his fingers. "I'm off the clock and off the rez, but they know my habits."
He laid a hand over the bulge of his stomach. Too much luxury. Good food at the Galaxy Club-served by lovely Indonesian and Thai beauties.
Maybe I'll straighten out my morals.
Lose weight fast.
"Jones says something bad is heading our way. He's tied into both Talos's and MSARC's secure nets, but he won't tell me what's up until he's sure. That damned truth function-your work, if I remember correctly. I'm ordering everyone back to California."
"What's the hurry?" Nathaniel asked, stretching.
"Pay attention, Nathaniel. Since you're feeling strange-"
"What makes you say that?"
"-And Nick is feeling strange, it's probably something to do with Mariposa."
"Well, we did what we were told. What if it's not bad, but good?"
A pause. Then, with a real edge, "Do you have any idea how deep this is? How important the seven of you are-and how complicit? Price made us wealthy men. If he even suspects we can't be trusted, we're dead men. Get out now. Come to LA and call in secure when you arrive."
The connection was cut at the source.
Nathaniel fell back on the bed, tingling throughout his body.
Back to base camp. Back to LA.
He should start packing. He tried with all his might to lift his arms.
Nothing.
"I can't," he said to the wall.
A delayed effect. It might last seconds, minutes-or hours. He stared at the long shadows on the ceiling. Started to giggle, then stopped.
"What the hell have you done, you idiot?"
How much control did he really have of his formerly autonomous functions? Getting his blood moving faster, for example-as if he were running and not lying down.
Flushing the last of those sedatives through his liver. They should be down to minimum concentrations by now, anyway.
Could he actually control his liver?
He lay still for a while.
One of the shadows moved.
Someone was in his room.
He swiveled his eyes until his vision went muzzy.
A short, robed silhouette stood in the lighted doorway. A woman's voice murmured, "Excuse me. For morning house cleaning, inshallah-on time, sir?… Sir?"
She would probably call for assistance if he didn't answer-the Ziggurat emergency medical team, best in Dubai.
His jaw wouldn't move.
"Are you awake?"
"I'm fine," he finally croaked between clenched teeth. "Just the flu. Leave me alone. Get out."
The silhouette faded into all the other shadows.
The door closed. Maybe he had imagined it, like the trees in his bed. Maybe it had never been there.
Then: a steady inner voice. The same voice he had created soon after the slaughter in Arabia Deserta as a kind of psychic baseline-in remembrance of his former broken self.
Time to get moving, Mr. Trace. They have a lot of influence here. Very long fingers.
He had not heard from that voice in months.
He had presumed Mariposa had killed it off.
If, as the Quiet Man supposes, they want to find you, if they need to find you… This is the place. The desert across the water is wide and the sands are deep. They can do whatever they want here and no one would ever know.
His body jerked and then convulsed. He bounced himself off the bed, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the nightstand.
Slowly twitching on the cold wood floor, he regained control. Finally he could move again, but his fingers felt numb. He got up on wobbly legs and stumbled into the bathroom, into the walk-in shower, where he stared groggily at the water selection nobs.
He chose desalinated, hot-hotter than hell.
Treading on art glass tiles set in the fish mosaic floor, he tolerated the scalding water until he just had to scream-then jumped out and toweled himself down.
Much better. The numbness had faded. Now his skin felt cool and electric.
Still naked, Nathaniel picked up his bag. Hardly anything here was important enough to pack. A few clothes. Toiletries. He could leave the rest without regret, as if it belonged to a different man.
He dressed slowly, luxuriating in the feel of fine linen on his arm hairs.
The fabric brushed his scars.
The condo intercom wheedled. The security system that watched over his class of people in the Ziggurat asked him if he would like to receive visitors-and displayed a picture of three men and a well-dressed, attractive woman.
They were waiting in the spacious lobby, hundreds of feet below.
He did not recognize any of them, and so he did not give permission for them to rise to his unit.
In the lobby, as he watched, the group split up.
Best to find an unobvious way out.
The Ziggurat's security system was accustomed to arranging for exits after dubious late night activities, or drinking in the many bars.
Talos Campus
Fouad emerged from the annex, put on his spex, and stood stiffly upright in the lounge-a slight heat pulsing through his torso. The prochines in his blood had never felt like much of anything before. Now, actively bumping up against each other-chock full of distributed data-they seemed to be coming up on the radar of his body's immune system.
A fever at this point might attract attention. Axel Price was almost psychic in his ability to sniff out actions contrary to his plans. Fouad did not want to stay at the building's hub any longer than necessary.
Something was wrong with the building's network; his spex flashed two small yellow antenna symbols, out of range. He walked clockwise around the lounge, glancing north along one of the long Buckeye corridors, lined with classrooms.
Two men in gray shirts and black pants ran in from a garden entrance. Their boots squeaked on the linoleum-armor vests, campus security. For a moment, Fouad thought they were aiming right for him and his stomach muscles tensed.
Armor was unusual on the campus, except in training.
"Need any help?" Fouad called.
"Get the hell out of here!" the larger of the two shouted as the pair aimed for the next radius corridor-one of the spokes-their faces red with adrenaline rush.
Then the big guard slowed, lowered his chin into his bull neck-and spun about. He marched back toward Fouad-crown sporting brown fuzz, broad face, wide rectangular mouth sucking air and showing brownish teeth.
Big Guard. Happy to keep things secure-even happier to be aggressive.
The second guard stopped, shook his head, and reversed to join his partner. This one was slighter and shorter but wiry, with small black eyes, a plump face and butch-cut blond hair.
Little Guard. Happy to follow. He matched his wide stance with Big Guard but curved around to Fouad's left.
"We don't know exactly where the problem is. Network's down, teacher." Big Guard tapped his spex. "Any clues what's going on?"
Big Guard was a bigot. Fouad was being targeted based on skin color and appearance-in his experience, rare at Talos. Bad for discipline.
The pair rushed him in parallel and shoved him against the wall. His back pressed painfully against the corner of a framed poster of one of the nations in which Talos had operations-Nigeria.
Against his first instinct, Fouad let his muscles relax and said nothing. He did not frown, did not smile-did nothing to provoke. Perhaps he had tripped a silent alarm system inside the annex. Perhaps the network had shut down after sensing an unexpected intrusion.
He had to buy time.
"Are your spex working?" Big Guard asked, fingers pinching for Fouad's eyes. Another hand came up high and flat to slap him if he resisted.
Little Guard stroked the black knob of his electric baton. The men were starting to grin. Their eyes took on a focused vacancy, getting ready for resistance.
They had found the problem-the problem was a brown man.
Wild, high-pitched shouts echoed from the end of the radius. Big Guard lifted his nose, and Little Guard did likewise-pack dogs scenting other, bigger prey.
Fouad pushed them away-gently.
"Down there, perhaps?" he suggested, eyebrows lifted.
Big Guard and Little Guard smirked, cocked their heads, and again shoved him into the wall-their version of an apology, thanks for wasting our time. They backed off, reversed, and sprinted toward the shouting, louder and more frenetic.
A growing number of men made unhappy.
The pair reached the end of the radius, a hundred feet off, pulled out their electric batons-serious weapons, very painful-and swung left.
Fouad nudged out from the wall. The poster rattled. It was hard to imagine what the difficulty might be. The personnel most likely to engage in fistfights were off at the mess hall-young foreign soldiers and fresh security in training. Perhaps Big Guard and Little Guard belonged to that group. Perhaps a general alarm had brought them over to Buckeye.
He curled his lip in disgust, caught between two impulses.
The only people in Buckeye who stuck around through the dinner hour were software engineers, whose work never seemed to end.
Fouad shrugged to unruck the sleeves and shoulders of his coat. Then he fell back into a crouch at the sound of two rapid pops like champagne corks, followed by staccato slaps, softer echoes, explosive grunts from punches.
More swearing-then sizzling snaps, puppy-like whimpers, sharp cries of pain.
Everyone wore side arms in Talos-Price's mandate-but nobody would be letting off rounds on campus outside of the ranges and training village-nobody who was not in serious trouble. All the side arms were keyed to fingerprints or chips in the gun bearer's hands; shots fired were accounted for at the armory every two days.
Another series of champagne pops. Dust and chips blew out from a wall. Fouad lined up behind the heavy frame of a security door.
Odd that the doors were not closing…
Discretion told him to allow the trouble to come to him, but that was not the Talos way. Like dedicated warrior ants, Talos employees were trained to move in fast, whatever the danger. Trouble was to be immediately reported and taken care of-not avoided. Clearing out of the building-even at the forceful suggestion of security-would arouse another set of suspicions.
Good minions-excellent henchmen. All of us expendable.
And of course, as a brown man with an accent, his behavior would be judged by even higher standards.
He loped down the hall, past long windows looking into empty classrooms-flush to the wall, broken-jogging side to side, SIG-Sauer 380 presented at drop angle, finger off trigger… He caught himself and raised the barrel, finger back on the trigger-standard Talos training.
Talos operated in parts of the world where accidental shootings were preferable to responding a split-second slow, letting soulless attackers get the drop on you.
It might just be a disgruntled student taking out his anger on a wall or the ceiling. But students were issued weapons that fired only in training.
Disgruntled employees were rare in Talos. Most were dedicated, well paid. Price had learned his lesson with out-of-control contract security in Iraq. There, Talos employees had been caught pumping up on steroids, snorting cocaine, even shooting heroin to get through the grueling, dangerous days escorting officials, generals, diplomats, though the hell of Iraqi cities.
Fouad slowed as he came to the end of the hall, the outer circumference of this side of Buckeye. All he heard now was harsh, husky breathing and moaning-four or five men down, wounded or in pain.
A bullet had pocked the cinderblock on his right.
Another had gouged the linoleum floor, interrupting the golden reflection of the outer windows.
He darted a look to the left, around the corner, along the rim of the wagon wheel. In the warm afternoon light, Big Guard and Little Guard were trying to subdue a tall, skinny man and doing a bad job of it. The skinny man wore a green shirt and gray pants-engineering and programming-and jerked this way and that, loose jointed, like a puppet tugged by an idiot. Three other guards had been tossed back like dolls, belts and holsters empty-guns and batons thrown out of reach along the circumference.
Big Guard and Little Guard maneuvered like wrestlers, trying to grab the skinny engineer, but he escaped as if made of smoke.
For an instant, Fouad thought he was witnessing someone out of his head but very strong-on meth or PCP. Clearly the skinny man was not following any formal martial arts training, yet his movements were brilliantly unexpected and effective. He pranced rings around the guards, laughing as if at a dry joke. Big Guard and Little Guard were tiring.
Fouad was sure they were about to make serious mistakes.
He could not make sense out of any of this. Talos tested for drugs a dozen different ways each day. The air was swept regularly for traces and metabolites.
Big Guard had had enough. He gathered up all his remaining energy, yelled, and rushed in with arms spread-while his partner feinted to draw the skinny man his direction.
This time, the maneuver seemed to work. Big Guard took hold of the skinny man's arm, but he reversed and tugged hard-hard enough to pull the arm out of its socket, with an audible pop. Without any sign of distress, the engineer slammed his other fist back, chopping his assailant squarely on the bridge of his nose.
Big Guard fell to his knees like a stunned ox, then toppled, head cracking on the floor.
Fouad trained his SIG but the line was bad-he might hit Little Guard.
"Shoot the bastard!" Little Guard shouted, frantically kicking and sidling away.
The engineer spun like a dancing clown, his injured arm dangling outward, limp. He had to be on drugs, yet his movements had an improvised genius; a wiry, high-speed ballet of showy blows and dodges.
Little Guard was up again, wobbling but still trying to be game. The engineer executed one final move that Fouad could not follow-a backward run, good hand delivering a blind blow from a position of perfect but unlikely balance-force focused all wrong, more self-injury almost certain-but the blow connected.
Little Guard rocked his head back, wobbled, and slumped. The engineer pranced and watched him fall sideways.
He twisted and landed flat on his face.
Another painful crack.
Now the engineer turned on Fouad.
"I heard you coming down the hall!" he shouted. "My God, you're louder than an elephant!"
Fouad could have fired his SIG-certainly preferred that option over trying to physically restrain the man-but there wasn't much more damage that could be done, for the moment, and more guards would be coming.
"You're injured," Fouad said, his voice light, calm, as if speaking to a child.
"I'm not the one shooting up the place. Too freaking fast for bullets. They're trained to kill-I'm just a geek. Where are they? Send more cops!" He laughed like a loon. "What's fucking keeping them?"
"I am here," Fouad said.
"You're a teacher. Languages, right? Jesus, look at this mess!"
The skinny man was breathing slow and steady, deep, solid. No bullet wounds, only spots of blood on the floor-broken noses, perhaps. Judging by the way the he leaned, he had cracked ribs as well as a dislocated arm. The man was a wreck, but still utterly confident and not in the least concerned by the SIG.
"Doesn't your arm hurt?" Fouad asked.
The engineer stared into Fouad's eyes. "Maybe. I don't know. Trying out new moves, I guess."
There were no audible security alarms in Talos buildings. Guards and other first responders were alerted through earpieces or spex. Strange then that Fouad's own spex still showed no warnings-just two blinking yellow antennas indicating he was still out of range.
"No signal, right? I've cut the network all over the campus," the engineer said. "You look strong. Bring it over here."
"What's your name?" Fouad asked.
"Hey, don't think I'm crazy," the man said. "I'm scared-more scared than you, maybe. But it feels great to be scared! Come on. I don't have a gun."
"It wouldn't be a fair fight," Fouad said, keying in to the engineer's manic rhythm. "I might get hurt."
The man laughed. "You know it, man. You're trained to kill-I can hear it in your voice. All I do is talk to computers. Geek versus killer. You know you can take me."
Fouad stepped to the middle of the hall, gun centered on the programmer's chest.
The five sprawled guards were starting to move. The programmer paid them no obvious attention. One guard had fallen over his Glock-it skittered as he pushed up, a few centimeters from his outstretched hand. His fingers twitched.
Without a backward look, the engineer jumped and horse-kicked the gun down the hall, twisted his foot around, and tapped the guard with his heel.
The guard collapsed with a truncated whimper.
Here was total awareness of environment, more like a martial-arts master than a mouse pusher. All judgments off. Nothing could be trusted.
"You know self-defense," Fouad said. "All Talos employees are so trained."
"Yeah, but I flunked." The programmer raised his good arm, the left arm, and waggled his fingers. "Maybe I can deflect bullets with my thoughts. Anything's possible. Let's try it. Use your pop gun. Shoot me."
Fouad lowered the pistol. "No fighting. We should talk. You're more interesting than anything else around here."
The programmer looked disappointed. He shrugged, then put his hand on his limp arm, testing it. Despite what must have been incredible pain, he wobbled and tugged at the joint, trying to reset it, his attention off Fouad… and yet, almost certainly not. He seemed to have a greater sensory bubble of awareness, a heightened sense of space and position. Again, like a martial arts master.
"I popped it bad. Bet I could take you with one arm…"
"Let's just talk. Tell me what you're feeling."
The engineer laughed. "Ever see combat?"
"Yes," Fouad said.
"Me too. In Arabia. I was never supposed to fight, I'm important, you know-a software designer, a programmer, an essential asset. But the driver screwed up. He took seven of us down Death Alley by mistake and insurgents blew us all to shit. The driver's head ended up in my lap. My fucking lap! Dead school kids outside the truck-spread out like raspberry jam. Do you have nightmares, sweats, that sort of thing?"
"Sometimes," Fouad said.
"Interfere with your work?"
"Not much," Fouad said. "I pray. Allah forgives all His children."
"You're a Muslim!"
"Yes," Fouad said.
"A Muslim in Texas. That has got to be fun. These bastards-" He swung his good arm at the prone men. "They're hard enough on geeks. Guess I showed them something new, huh?"
"You should come with me. I'll take you to a doctor. Your mind is strong but your body is weak. Have mercy. You can't learn your potential if someone here shoots you."
This finally seemed to make sense. The programmer was pale as a sheet and starting to shiver. He rubbed his temple. "My head really hurts. What's your name?"
"Fouad. I'm an instructor… in languages, as you guessed. What's yours?"
"Nick. I'm pretty important. Systems about to come on line. Back in Texas to check it out, the last details-then, wow! I get my own internal Krell brain boost. Do you know Axel Price? If you see him, tell him the treatment worked-I'm better than ever."
"I will," Fouad said.
A full squad of guards rushed clockwise along the circumference behind Fouad. From the other direction, behind the fallen guards and the programmer, ten more gathered, assault weapons drawn-pointing at Fouad as well as the skinny man.
They were well trained, not trigger-happy-for which he was grateful.
Fouad waved them back. "He's unarmed and he's injured. He's prepared to surrender."
The guards moved in, assault rifles at ready, unconvinced. Three of the five on the floor were again trying to get up.
"Shoot the bastards! Shoot 'em both!" Big Guard shouted, but his hand slipped in his own sweat and he fell and cracked his jaw. That was it for him.
Fouad secretly enjoyed this. For a moment, his sympathies were with the programmer-with Nick.
A short, blocky man in a dark red shirt-senior staff, chief of security-joined the group gathering beside Fouad.
Three of the guards pulled steel flashlights with big flat heads from their belts. The programmer yelped with delight. "Try it! Try me!"
The three circled at the maximum distance the hall allowed and swept him with super-dazzling flashes of light, brighter than a dozen suns. Nick yelped and covered his face, too late. The brilliance flooded his retinas, stunned the nerves behind his eyes, temporarily locked his brain in something like paralysis.
Helpless, off balance, he stumbled and fell. The guards swarmed him like ants over a grasshopper. In seconds the programmer was strung up like a roped steer.
The chief lifted one gloved hand, game over, then gave him Fouad a knowing wink, one warrior to another. "Some show, huh? We'll take care of him from here. Get back to whatever you were doing-and not a word to anybody."
Fouad agreed that would be best.
Lion City
Sunset painted the empty land like a sheet of flame, oranges and reds on the horizon, blazing gold overhead. Dusty late summer days in Texas were bookended by wind-blown glimpses of hell. In the morning, the hell began yellow and pink and nearly silent; before nightfall, the sky gates opened, fierce and fiery.
South and east of Lion City, the main campus of Talos Corporation-classrooms, barracks, dining halls, mock towns, firing ranges-sprawled over ten thousand acres, larger than Lion City itself, and prouder, as well. Proud and remote.
The walled, moated, razor-wired campus lay quiet under the hot dusk sky, divided into four compounds like a gigantic cross carved into the west Texas flatland. Each compound was devoted to an aspect of Talos's overall mission: to train the world's police and armies in special tactics.
The gunshots, cannon fire, and explosions of the morning and afternoon had stopped. A couple of helicopters still hovered like lost dragonflies, dropping searchlight beams. The beams danced in the ascending heat. Hours would pass before the Earth cooled enough to kill all the shimmers and dust devils, the djinn of mirages.
Fouad was glad to be driving away from this day. He needed to communicate with his handlers and tell them he had what they wanted.
He pulled up to the lonely blockhouse at the Monarch gate, rolling slowly between three pairs of arched silvery wands, fringed like moth antennae. A guard scanned his iris, then swept batons over his arm chip and the windshield, while another ran mirrors and sensors on low carriages under the frame. Nothing broke this routine, unless they did not want to let you pass.
The guards pulled back the trolleys and mirrors and grimly waved him through. Nobody at the gates ever smiled. Their attitude was always, you made it through this time, but we're waiting for you to slip up big time.
Even after years in America, to Fouad, many English phrases still seemed wonderfully colorful, both cryptic and visual.
The chief of security back in Buckeye had not detained him. So perhaps he had not slipped up big time, after all.
He drove in sinusoid arcs around the concrete and steel barriers, then down the long, straight black access road that led to Old Tejano Trail, the main north-south artery of Lion County.
Fouad smiled and bared his teeth. Air rushed dry and hot through the open car window. He hung his arm out the door and waved his hand in the oven breeze. In the rearview mirror, his skin glowed and his eyes glittered like a demon's.
Only now did he allow himself to reflect on what had happened back in Buckeye. He had not dared to do so earlier, since one's thoughts were often reflected in one's features, and guards were trained to be alert to such.
As for the programmer, Nick-given his superhuman strength, skill, and startling speed-madness seemed out of the question.
Lion City had received its name from the color of the surrounding land-tawny brown-gold, like a lion's pelt. It was no more than a midsize town, laid out respectably on a square grid, with two big parallel streets lined with shops topped by apartments whose windows looked out over square overhangs and faded awnings.
Nine or ten longer, narrower streets cut crosswise like railroad ties, lined with Chinkapin oaks and modest but neatly kept homes fronted by dying lawns.
Bumped up around them came a scatter of outlying neighborhoods, more industrial, less reputable. People who did not work for Talos Corporation lived out in those neighborhoods, and for them, these were hard times.
Fouad's stomach growled, but he never stopped at the eateries and truck stops that serviced local traffic and the Talos day and night shifts. All they offered was beef or pork and potatoes. Some had salad bars, but he had become superstitious of late about cross-contamination, perhaps because of long acquaintance with the American manner of fixing and eating food: their was a world ingeniously designed to frustrate any Muslim's attempt at keeping to halal.
Though no doubt the prochines within him were also haram-forbidden.
Still, these were good people, mostly; hard-working and religious, roughly pious, all of the same God, (there is no God but Allah), but Fouad rarely spoke of religion.
For twenty years, Talos's biggest contractor had been the Pentagon, whose officers and troops were trained in the Monarch compound. In the past five years, however, the U.S. military presence at Talos had been reduced to a minimum.
Expansion of the mercenary training program-mostly Haitians-had filled the gap, filling both Buckeye and Monarch.
The second largest bloc of contracts had traditionally come from security agencies of the U.S. government; they had once occupied Swallowtail. Those numbers had been reduced as well of late.
The third largest, considered as a cluster-police from states and municipalities around the United States-took up Birdwing. Several hundred were still in residence, receiving local antiterror (and anti-illegal immigrant) training.
The fourth largest-foreign police and security forces-had expanded in the last two years, and now helped fill the barracks and grounds of Buckeye. Buckeye was also the home of the Talos security and computer system.
Fouad had worked in all four compounds, training forces both foreign and domestic in Islamic languages and culture, with a side emphasis on special tactics in Middle Eastern war zones.
Talos had been pleased with his performance, awarding him two substantial bonuses.
A mile from the campus, Fouad switched on the radio and listened to the news. Food prices were up. They rose each month as more nations cut food exports, preferring to focus on feeding their own.
Bloody civil war finally raged in Burma, as did yet another drug-fueled insurrection in northern Mexico; three assassinations in Russia in the past twenty-four hours; oil prices falling to levels not seen since 2010.
America was finally on a course to energy independence from the Middle East and South America, thereby threatening economic instability in both regions.
As he drove, apartment buildings and condos and gated housing developments popped up like forts on the bare Texas land.
New slender black roads linked them all to Old Tejano.
He switched off the radio, turned west, and swung into the apartment complex that served as home, away from the instructor dorms.
He had spent more time here a few months ago while dating, but that relationship ended and the woman went back to her family, of old Mexican descent; they had not approved of Fouad. No risk-good for his cover. Talos encouraged and expected roots in the community, like Alexander in the east.
Fouad climbed the steps by the enclosed garage and opened the door with a brass key, then stood for a moment on the first floor, in the stuffy, air-conditioned darkness, peering into shadows, checking corners.
The blinds were drawn on the windows and the rear patio door.
He switched on lights in random sequence-never the same. A quick tour showed that nothing had been searched, nothing moved or rearranged except perhaps with micrometer precision.
He assumed the apartment was wired and that sensors were embedded in the paint, the furniture, the carpet. Elsewhere, computers would assemble amorphous streams of visual data into crystal-clear pictures, like so many virtual lenses.
Being watched was a perpetual assumption for anyone who worked for Price. Best not to bet otherwise.
Fouad opened the refrigerator and removed a Coca-Cola. He then climbed the narrow apartment stairs and sat in an armchair by the small den window, sipping with eyes closed, wondering if he should read or watch television. Act as if relaxing.
Settling in from hard day's work and of course the incident in the circumference hall.
After a few minutes he got up and walked into the bedroom to retrieve from his nightstand a yellow-jacketed university press paperback of Ibn Khaldun. His father had given it to him in Cairo many years ago. He had so few things from his father. It contained a small sample of elegant Arabic script, translated into English with square, precise roman letters:
Allegiance to God above all. But don't tell that to the kings, generals, and tyrants.
He returned to the den to read and think for a few minutes.
He had what he had come here to get. It was time to arrange for his discreet extraction. He could not just drive or walk away. He would likely be intercepted before he reached the county line, either by the Lion City sheriff or by Talos security.
Detectors around Talos used natural dust in the air to reveal and pinpoint laser communications from the ground. Radio and microwave transmissions were detected by other sensors, which quickly triangulated sources.
All unknown transmissions were investigated.
Internet traffic was tightly controlled by Talos as a public service to the Lion County area, to prevent "foreign hackers" from causing trouble and to protect locals from downloading or viewing material of a questionable political nature-or pornography.
Price very likely had access to quantum decrypt, which could crack almost any transmitted cipher in hours.
Talos had once offered a class on breaking foreign encryption, limited to U.S. military and government agents with high security clearances… That work had been okayed as a favor to Price back in the days of the Bush administration, when significant aspects of nearly everything about security and defense had been outsourced to corporations like Talos.
In truth, a potentially nasty security breach had spurred the investigation in the first place-the discovery that people beholding to Price had accessed top secret research documents in the NDI and NSA.
There were still over twenty retired generals-and several former CIA and NSA officials-on Price's payroll.
With communications in and out of Lion City closely monitored by people and agencies who either worked for sympathized with Axel Price, there was only one channel left open for what Fouad needed to do: an old method, though not as antiquated as smoke signals and less traceable.
Somewhere within a ten mile radius of Fouad's apartment complex, a private home had been rented by the Bureau and equipped with a hidden earth current transceiver-capable of receiving and transmitting high-voltage, 700-hertz DC signals sent through the dirt itself. An agent was posted there at all times.
Earth current telephony had a long history but was mostly known to history buffs and a few ham radio amateurs. Fouad's own unit was disguised as an antique Grundig radio receiver. Even this had a cover story. It had originally been purchased by his father in Egypt. He kept it for sentimental reasons.
Through a hole drilled by hand in the concrete floor of the garage-where he was relatively certain there was no surveillance-Fouad had sunk two copper spikes deep into the stony soil, disguising the arrangement as an ordinary ground wire for a gas pipe. The device's maximum range was likely less than twelve miles. When atmospherics were wrong-during the frequent thunderstorms that lashed this part of the world-sending or receiving a signal would be difficult or impossible. Lightning surging through the Earth overwhelmed any other transmission. But the weather today had been calm all across Texas.
No lightning strikes for hundreds of miles.
Trailing two runs of lamp cord, Fouad descended the steps from the first floor into the garage. One cord was attached to the radio speaker. All he needed to do to send a signal was tap the other cord against the twisted cable. The return signal would come as a series of clicks over the speaker, above the murmuring crackle of natural noise.
Under clear conditions, voice communication was theoretically possible, and even painfully slow data transmission, but clicks were more difficult to distinguish from background noise: air conditioners and refrigerators switching on and off, motors starting everywhere.
Just in case Talos kept an electronic ear to the dry Texas ground.
Fouad laid a small foam exercise mat on the concrete floor, squatted, and sent his brief message. Within ten seconds, someone at the opposite end began to respond.
He pulled the wires away and coiled them in the cardboard box with the old radio. Then he went upstairs, opened his closet, removed laundry from his small suitcase, took a quick shower, and changed clothes. After, he looked through the almost empty cupboards, contemplating what he might have for supper. Canned fava beens imported from the United Arab Emirates looked likely, mixed with canned chicken and onion and dried vegetable flakes.
This was simmering in a pot on the stove when he heard military vehicles in the parking lot outside. He went to the window and peered down through the open ironwork of the balcony rail. Two armored Torq-Vees-high-riding armored personnel carriers, originally designed for the deep mud roads of Afghanistan-had rumbled into the lot and blocked both exits. The closest Torq-Vee lurched a few yards forward, bumping the garage door, and three helmeted security personnel in black assault gear dropped from the open hatches.
Their boots send heavy thumps and rattles up the stairs and around the apartment.
Frowning, Fouad met them at the open door, bowl of beans steaming in one hand, spoon raised in the other. This was it, he thought. He would be interrogated while still hungry.
"May I help you?" he asked.
The lead, a trim thirtyish man with jet-black hair and pale skin-eyes hidden behind darkened spex-approached the door as his team flanked the steps.
"Mr. Al-Husam, Mr. Price has requested a meeting. We've had communication problems-phones are out. Apologies for the show of force." The guard was smiling but by little movements of his head, Fouad could tell his eyes were scanning Fouad's face and the apartment behind him. "We should get going, sir, if you're going to make your appointment."
"Of course," Fouad said, and replaced his frown with a smile. It was always a privilege to meet with Mr. Price-bragging rights would be his. "Lead on."
Dubai
Two hours later, haggard and somber, Nathaniel took a limo to Dubai Airport.
The Quiet Man had always been aware they might face difficulties. As a precaution, Jones had reached out and created false identities for all of the Turing Seven. So many fingers in so many pies around the planet.
Jones was that good.
The people in the Ziggurat lobby… He did not know just how they would have disposed of him when they were finished.
The desert, vast and empty.
In the packed airport mall, under the shade of a gigantic hammered-brass palm tree, Nathaniel used one of his assigned IDs to link up with a pilot who flew oil and architecture execs from Jiddah and Dubai back to the states. The pilot arranged for him to hitch an anonymous ride on a MedPetro jet to London.
There, using a new passport-traveling as Robert Sangstrom-he would pay for a ticket to the United States.
He would arrive in Los Angeles just in time to greet the California dawn. Nathaniel had made up his mind. Novelty was the game of the hour.
For now, and just for starters, he would try doing some good, just to see how it felt.
Talos Campus
The wide window of the Talos command center looked out over forty acres of calf-high, swaying grass, dazzling green beneath high banks of football lights. The field had been planted at Price's orders to replicate the original Texas tallgrass prairie that had once covered twenty million acres.
Indiangrass and Little Bluestem flowed up to the window, lush and deceptive.
Axel Price was a tough man to see, even when he was doing the summoning. Fouad was increasingly certain his cover was blown. There were many sympathetic to Price even within the Bureau. He wondered which would come first: his meeting or security police dangling handcuffs.
With the slow, painful decline of oil prices in the second decade of the twenty-first century-and the living death of the local cattle industry after three major outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease-Talos Corporation was now the only thing that enabled anyone to make a living in this part of Texas. It supported almost a quarter of the state; it might even elevate Axel Price to governor-or emperor, Fouad mused, if the state legislature finished cutting itself away from the feds.
This time, there would be no Abraham Lincoln to stand in their way.
The receptionist-a slender brunette in a tight brown skirt and white blouse, mincing on shiny black high heels-opened the door to his left and tapped across the slate floor. Her glasses were shaped like cat's eyes, with small wings on their outer tips, as if they wanted to fly away.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Al-Husam," she said. "Mr. Price was here a few minutes ago, but a helicopter came and took him out to the Smoky. He told me you should hop a shuttle and meet him there."
"Thank you," Fouad said.
Even more privilege. The Smoky was Price's private ranch, four hundred acres on the northern edge of the Talos Campus. He did not raise cattle or horses but kept antique cars, helicopters, and armored vehicles in hangars and garages nearby-along with a sophisticated fighter jet, a two-seat Sukhoi Su-27 that he sometimes flew out of the Lion City airport, with the help of a professional pilot.
"I've called the van," she continued, "and it'll be here in five minutes. Terribly inconvenient, but he says it's important."
"I will wait out front," Fouad said.
"You do that! It'll be here in a jiff."
He left the reception area and stood on the porch beside the parking lot. Crickets sang in the dark heat. He wondered where they found their moisture. His own lips were dry. Of course, crickets did not have or need lips. Cartoons from television again came to mind: they spat black juice and played guitars.
Or perhaps those were grasshoppers or locusts.
The security team was nowhere in sight.
Other than the timing, there was no good reason to believe he had been discovered. He had been exceptionally careful and Jane Rowland had trained him well.
Still, Talos was a place of unexpected eyes and ears. Price's dictum was that since he trusted everyone, no one should mind being closely watched. "We're all family here-partners in a big effort. I'm watched, we're all watched. It's no big deal."
Price had nothing to hide. Of course, reports of his activities ultimately ended up on his own desk.
Fouad did not know what to make of what he had seen of the information that now passed through the tiny machines in his blood. Banks, corporations, international holding companies, names-nations.
He was grateful he was merely a vessel and not an analyst.
Even so, as he waited under the Texas night-the stars bleached from the sky by the banks of lights-he made a few surmises, put together a few educated guesses.
It did not look good.
The Bureau had been right to send him here.
A shuttle pulled up to the curb, a long, broad black van with twelve seats, all empty. The door swung open. The driver was a young, muscular black with short hair. He wore a gray jumpsuit with red stripes on the sleeves and pants legs, as did all support service workers on the campus. He smiled at Fouad as he climbed up the steps and took a front seat, facing the windshield.
"Dry, hot night," the driver said. "Straight to the Smoky, Mr. Al-Husam. Good time to see the ranch. They had choppers up doing practice runs last time I was out there, a couple hours ago. Might still be putting on a show. Real fine."
The shuttle drove through darkness along straight smooth roads, better maintained than the city streets or highways. The headlights painted in brilliant white the occasional jackrabbit, one possum, one artichoke-no, armadillo. Like little armored rats, armadillos were common around here, unsightly and unclean beasts-or so Fouad surmised. They were frequently seen ruptured and ugly, squashed by passing cars. It was said the treatment for leprosy had been found in the pads of armadillo feet. No Muslim could have made that discovery-nor even come close to touching such a prehistoric curiosity.
Yes, definitely unclean.
The driver delivered him to the gate house for the Smoky, and from there, another driver used an open cart to take Fouad half a mile to the main house, around to a side entrance, and dropped him off at the door.
At no point did this seem to be anything alarming or out of the ordinary.
Yet the network on the campus had gone out. Or so they said.
Price's private office was simple but elegant, the very best money could buy, but without much in the way of ostentation or even artwork, and comparatively small-barely twenty feet on a side.
A modest low bay window looked out over another plot of tall grass and beyond that, a set of gray hangars lined the horizon.
As Fouad watched, the lights surrounding these buildings dimmed, then shut off.
The side windows were open and a clean, grassy night breeze blew into the room, prickling the hairs on his neck.
A curved bank of monitors covered the eastern wall of the office, providing a panoramic view of a broad, distant gray ocean-sunrise or sunset, Fouad could not tell. In the middle monitor, jerky video of a large cargo ship marked "HKA" was apparently being shot from the vantage of a small boat crossing choppy water.
The view swooped to the left to show three other boats bouncing and skimming: trim, fast, purple inflatables known as Starfish.
The CEO of Talos rose from a stool in front of the monitors, took a sharp step forward, and offered his hand to Fouad.
Axel Price would have been difficult to describe to a sketch artist, yet once you saw him, you never forgot him. Beneath neatly trimmed brown hair, his clean, planed face was at once handsome and unmemorable. He had a narrow, knowing smile and observant but not penetrating blue eyes. Very small lines around the corners of his lips could just as easily have been traces of cruelty or humor. Just above his collar line, Fouad saw reddened scars, which he guessed would extend down his back-a case of acne rosacea, perhaps, in Price's impoverished adolescence.
Price stood two inches taller but did not outweigh him. Fouad had put on a little weight in the past year and Price was in top condition though slender, with just the beginning of a stoop.
"I've heard a lot about you," he said as he walked around Fouad to close the door. "You've done a great job for us."
"Always a pleasure serving Talos, sir."
Price returned to the stool and sat with one leg raised, brown Oxford wedged on a cross bar. "I was impressed by how you performed at Buckeye. Sorry you had to be exposed to that silliness. What do you suppose tipped the poor guy"
"I have no idea," Fouad said. "He is not known to me."
"Not really known to anyone, apparently. Big mistake, hiring those guys. All of them. Scattered all over the planet now, ticking time bombs, waiting to explode." Price waited for a reaction.
Fouad lowered one eyebrow, truly uninformed.
"Well, you handled him better than my guards. A magnificent job of defusing. I'm grateful."
"Is the programmer well?" Fouad asked.
He wondered why programmers as a group would be waiting to explode.
Price lifted one shoulder and grimaced. "No longer your concern."
He pointed to the rightmost monitor. A fast patrol ship in purple and green-Talos colors-was standing off from the cargo vessel.
"Gulf of Aden. You'd think I wanted to be Pompey the Great, with all the pirates my boys discourage and all the ships I recover. Started that business five years ago. When foreign countries want military assistance, they don't go to the U.S. government anymore-they come to me. I sell protective systems to ship owners, but they're slow to spend what they cost-so I charge them for recovery, ten times more expensive. It's hard, dangerous work. Never underestimate what a little boredom and a lot of poverty can do to a bunch of fishermen.
"A few years ago, when our snipers started blowing their brains out, the Somalis acquired a taste for blood as well as treasure." He grinned with a touch of boyish wickedness. "It's an old story-but they're getting tougher and meaner and more desperate every year, poor bastards. So we conduct our raids the same way they do. Surprise, speed, and ass-kicking violence."
Fouad could see no guns on the patrol ship, but recognized a prickly array of LED blinders-bigger versions of the light used on Nick in Buckeye-as well as seizure-inducing strobes, acoustic blasters, and even conical microwave pain projectors, mounted on the bow.
"My team commander has just given the pirates five minutes to abandon the vessel and leave the crew unharmed," Price said. "If they aren't away by then, he'll go in with a pulsed sound and light show-sends anyone topside into fits, and they don't even have to face the strobes. Backscatter does the trick most of the time. Anybody inside is going to have their sphincters open right up-the crew will be inconvenienced, but Hershey shorts are better than dying. Hell of a sensation. All my guys go through it, though not the strobe fits-too many side effects.
"But we get the ships back, 100 percent, and if the pirates harm anyone-or if any of the crew is severely affected by our recovery operations-then we hunt the pirates down on the open water and blast them to fish food. They never get home to squeeze their kids and kiss the missus."
"And if they depart the vessel as ordered?" Fouad asked.
"We let ' em go. Catch and release. They're one of our biggest centers of profit-fees plus 30 percent of assessed ship and cargo. You trained a few of these Starfish boys in Arabic and Aramaic a few months back. They seem proficient.
"You're very good at what you do, Mr. Al-Husam. All that you do."
"Thank you," Fouad said. His neck hairs had not stopped prickling since he entered the office.
The starfish had come within a few hundred yards of the cargo ship, which now switched on its working lights, lighting up like it was in port and waiting to offload.
Men with assault rifles scampered along the gunwales, as seen through a telephoto camera on the lead starfish.
Muzzle flare sparked from several points on the facing port side.
Price humphed. He slid off the stool and approached the monitors. "Getting tired of me, are you, aren't you, you skinny sons of oola-oola-oola black bitches?" He glanced at Fouad again, eyes sharp. "Watch this."
The camera lens was blocked by men erecting black foam barriers like curtains around the inflatable.
Bullets splashed in the last visible stretch of water.
"Curtains protect our crew from the worst of it. But all my Starfish team members wear diapers, just in case."
The camera winked out and another view took its place on the central monitor-from the bridge of the patrol ship.
Starfish bobbed like lumps of coal in the water, hundreds of yards from the cargo ship.
"Love this, just love this," Price murmured, rapt.
Blinker strobes lit up the ocean. Even through the monitor, Fouad could imagine the dazzle of the rapid-fire flashes of white and blue light, the laser beams drawing red squiggles along the vessel's upper works.
"Here it comes," Price said, folding his arms.
The first big pulse of sound from the bow of the fast patrol ship feathered the ocean like an invisible broom. Fouad could see the hull plates on the cargo ship actually ripple with the impact.
Men flew back like matchsticks.
Their ears would bleed-perforated ear drums, great pain.
Not visible at all were the microwave pain projectors. On deck, the men would feel their skin burn as if bathed in hot oil. The effects were temporary but felt mortal.
Next, through the speakers came a greatly reduced and muffled thum-thum-thum, rapid as the flashes of light. Fouad knew the frequencies of both sound and strobes-had witnessed them in training at the Academy, and after, when studying crowd control. Less than lethal, usually, but painful and disturbing.
The deck was soon clear of standing figures.
"That's it," Price said. "They won't abandon ship. We've pushed them too far. Now we board and take them out one by one-lots of skinny black corpses."
Price snapped his fingers and the monitors shut off. "That concludes tonight's show. We'll do the accounting and send off the bills tomorrow."
He focused his attention on Fouad.
"John tells me you're the best we've got with dialects. He's already seeing results with his Haitian boys in the field in Algeria and Libya."
One of Price's three senior partners, a former South African army colonel named John Yardley, was in charge of Talos's Special Forces Training division. The mercenary troops Yardley trained-mostly Haitians-called him "Colonel Sir."
"Your students are highly motivated," Fouad said. "I take pleasure in working with them."
"Good pay, great benefits, terrific prospects," Price said, nodding approval. "Uncle Sam has a moth or two in his pockets and not much more. We're paying our overseas contractors about eight times the average government salary, twelve times the typical military starting pay grade. Causes a bit of a stir."
Price walked to the window. Outside, a very large insect buzzed past. It wasn't an insect, of course.
"I'd like to move you up a notch," he said. "As you know, we've got a big conference in a couple of weeks. I've asked the campus supervisors who's best at translating Arabic dialects-and they all tell me it's you, hands down. You're also well-versed in Texan, I hear." Price chuckled. "Not easy to get a handle on how we talk around here. The food alone… well, Muslims aren't big fans of some of our favorite dishes."
Fouad remained smiling.
"We'll be hiding billboards and such that might offend some of our Muslim guests as they limo in from the airport. I've asked restaurant owners to cover up the pink neon pigs, that sort of thing. They're happy to oblige-they know how important this is to Lion City. But once our guests are here, I'd like a fellow I can trust to provide a running commentary, delivered straight to me, on how they're thinking, what they're saying, and maybe pitch in and correct misunderstandings, as need be. I'd like you to be that fellow."
Price gestured to a well-upholstered blue leather chair on one side of the desk, near the window.
"Take a seat, Mr. Al-Husam."
Fouad sat. This was not at all what he had expected. Best to show surprise and quiet pride. "I am honored," he said.
Price beamed. "I pick my people well."
The man could be charming. Many here could be charming and yet hold the most untoward views.
"Tell me what you think that sort of work would require, Fouad… if we can go on a first-name basis. And please, call me Axel."
Price's pronunciation was good. He spoke sound but rudimentary Arabic, from the years when he had directed security and other contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
"I could be attached to delegations as a back-up translator," Fouad said. "The guests will rely on their own translators, but they will not be offended if you also position someone with expertise, to listen."
"My thoughts exactly. You can't cover all the conversations-hell, I'll probably only be able to drop by for about a third of the sessions myself. But if I'm there… you'll be there. I'd be pleased if we could make that sort of arrangement. Keep you around a while, at a much higher pay grade than a teacher, of course."
"It would be my pleasure, Mr. Price-Axel," Fouad said. "My contract, however, is soon ended, and I have other commitments I would have to adjust."
Price bowed his head and threw up his hand, showing this was not his concern.
"I'm sure you can work it out," he said. "Start now. I might need you in a snap, so we'll put you up in a guest house. Real nice place. Deluxe. You'll sleep out there tonight. My logistics team will move your stuff from Lion City. You'll need a chip upgrade, of course-deep, deep security."
"Thank you," Fouad said, but his heart was not with him. This familiarity felt too convenient. Trust meant nothing to Axel Price-caution was his hallmark.
"The conference is coming up fast," Price said. "Private jets from all over are coming into Lion City airport. About two hundred guests, fifty or sixty from the Emirates, Qatar, Arabia Deserta, Yemen, Jordan-plus retinues. You'll get all the docs and prep you need, plus a finger-key transcriber." He held out his hand and waggled his fingers. "You know how to use it-like a court steno?"
Fouad nodded. It was standard for secure translators.
"Good. FBI trained you well. Any regrets about heading for greener pastures while the Bureau's in limbo?"
"Of course," Fouad said. "But it was inevitable."
"Moving them out of D.C. and Virginia-that's a hoot. Our beltway masters seem to think they need to squeeze everything good out of the South-or squeeze the South out of everything. As if the war never ended."
Price shook his head in wonder at this effrontery. "Be up and dressed by 0700. Prep team will meet you in the cook shack.
"Welcome to the ranch!"
Los Angeles, California
The bar was a long, shadowed cave with highlights of blue and gold. The angled glass window beyond the stools and tall tables overlooked a themed restaurant laid out like a 1930s train station. Three dining cars waited beside a wooden platform, sleek roofs lacquered black, sides painted tan and hunter green. Waiters in white jackets and trim black pants and red caps showed customers to their tables while diners watched through half dropped windows.
The restaurant was called The Roundhouse and Rebecca Rose had come here at the invitation of a navy captain. They were in town attending the COPES domestic security conference and had unexpectedly run into each other while registering in the convention center lobby.
His name was Peter Periglas, Captain, USN, retired. It had been two years since they last met-on a ship in the Red Sea.
Two years since Mecca.
She sipped her vodka martini. She didn't like themed restaurants. Worse, the captain was late.
The bartender was a waxen, seen-it-all mannequin with toned shoulders and silicone breasts, eyes dulled by self-doubt and too many boyfriends. She asked Rebecca if she wanted a refill.
"I'm good."
Rebecca was about to get off her stool and return to the hotel when she saw a tall man with black hair enter through heavy glass doors at the far end of the bar.
He caught her eye and waved.
She quirked her lips and waved back.
"Sorry," Periglas said, approaching with a sheepish grin. "My handlers are giving me grief about my speech tomorrow. I seem to be a little stiff."
"I was surprised to see you in the exhibit hall," Rebecca said. "When did you get out of the Navy?"
"Last year. Took the rank-they offered it out of rotation-and then retired. Too many secrets, I guess. You?"
"Not really retired-just on extended leave. Furlough."
"So what are you doing?"
"Consulting, traveling. Enjoying life."
"I need a beer," the captain said.
The bartender was occupied by three raucous young men at the far end of the bar.
"How long with the FBI, total?" Periglas asked.
"Eighteen years. And you, the navy?"
"Twenty-three. Enough of the wine-dark sea. Dry land looks good. I'd like to become a private investigator. I could set up a downtown office," Periglas said. "Inland Empire Investigations. Keep a.38 in a drawer. Stare out the window, harass the pigeons, suck on a bottle of hooch and let the California sun bake me through the flyspecked window while I bask in a big oak swivel chair."
"You've given it some thought," Rebecca said. "Sounds pretty good."
She had dealt with navy men before. All the pulling up of roots made them a little too quick, a little too eager, but this time, she didn't mind.
"You could protect all the pretty WAVEs when they come to you with their problems. Sensible shoes, tight skirts, pert little… caps."
Even before Periglas had invited her to the bar, Rebecca had checked his right hand. The impressed shadow of a ring.
"My wife-my ex-wife-can't stand me enjoying anything. She was why I knew I would never make admiral. Hates Washington." The captain grinned a what-can-you-do grin. "Do we order bar food or descend to the dining cars?" he asked. "Cost no object. I'm buying."
Rebecca gave a passing thought to dropping her shields. It was about time. He seemed pleasant and smart, a little out-of-breath but not nervous. He might not bite. She might not bite. She felt remarkably strong.
All better now.
"Did you make reservations?" she asked.
"Nope," Periglas said.
"Tail o' the Pup for us, then," Rebecca said, leaning across the bar to get the waxy woman's attention.
No joy.
"That was over on San Vicente," Periglas said. "I'm a native Angeleno. My father might have eaten at the Pup. I never did. It's been gone for years."
He lifted his arm and the bartender gave him a frown and a nod but kept arguing with the young men.
When she finally minced down behind the long bar to their seats, her eyes were like flints and her cheeks flushed cherry.
"We need another war, to filter out pricks like that," she said. "What can I get you?"
Periglas's breath hitched. Sharp lines framed his mouth.
"Nothing," he said. He rose from the stool and leaned toward the bartender, practically in her face. "I've watched young pricks like that get filtered," he said. "I'll put up with happy bullshit any day."
He swung around and marched toward the exit.
Rebecca grabbed her purse and followed. She watched him with a fascinated grin, which she tucked away when he looked back at her, replaced with polite interest.
"Apologies, Rebecca. I usually don't show my bitter card until the second date. Let's stalk the evening like wolves," he said, arms swinging. His looseness came from dissipating anger, but also from self-assurance. He was happy to be here, expected nothing in particular, happy to be with her-happy in his own skin.
Not manic, not nervous, not showing off in the least.
He was just that way.
He glanced aside like an embarrassed boy as they came out under the cobalt sky. "So-let's find a little, out-of-the-way bistro and gorge on tiny plates of overpriced food."
Rebecca focused on what she could see of his face and smiled again, this time openly-she smiled a lot around Periglas. This was what she could expect: good talk from a decent man. Some of his stories were doubtless more interesting than hers.
Life at sea, camaraderie and discipline, engines and weather-anything but the creeps and monsters she had had to pursue, capture, help convict-and make miserable-throughout her entire career.
And yet there were always more.
She still kept three pictures in her wallet of a few of the worst that got away. Murderers and rapists-portraits of monsters rather than children.
Perhaps the monsters were her children.
"Forget the bistro," she said. "Let's get room service."
Periglas appeared genuinely surprised. For a terrible moment, Rebecca felt like a teenager pushing too far, too fast.
"All right," he said.
"We're civilians, mostly," she said. "They owe us time away from the world."
"No explanation necessary," Periglas said. "Lead on."
Rebecca's phone wheedled. She looked at the number. This was a call she had to take.
"My room," Rebecca said, and passed him a hotel key folder without the key.
Periglas drew his hand over his eyes, fingers spread. "I am beguiled," he said.
"Give me ten minutes," she said.
Rebecca closed the door to the room and set her purse on the nightstand. Biting her lip, more nervous than she had been in months-she returned the call she had been hoping would come.
A recorded voice answered. "Central California Adoption Services. Our offices are closed for the day-"
She punched in the code for Dr. Benvenista. The doctor's high, musical voice came through after the third chime.
"Hello, Rebecca. How's Los Angeles?"
"Nice," Rebecca said, her throat full. She wasn't used to being so scared. "Busy."
"Fresno is scalding. We have great news. You've passed the third round. Though I do wish you had a good man in your life. We could sail you right through."
"I'm working on it," Rebecca said, embarrassed and hopeful enough to stretch the truth.
"Mary is doing quite well. One inspector expressed lingering concern about the race issue, but I think that is not a major objection at this point. You are a stable person and well-motivated, and you are certainly qualified, and I have said so to the committee. Who better to protect a little child than a mommy who's an FBI agent?"
Bureau. On furlough.
"Thank you."
"There will be more news tomorrow, and perhaps the paperwork will clear by the end of the week. Until then, please keep in touch."
Rebecca expressed her thanks and relief, said goodbye, and closed the phone-just as she heard a polite rap on the room door. She opened it, her chest tight, stomach a-flutter. Too much all at once.
Tough to keep up her game face.
Periglas entered as she finished dabbing her eyes with her coat sleeve.
"I don't often have that effect on women," he said, his voice soft, wondering.
"It's not you," Rebecca said, and took his outstretched hand. "Not just you, I mean. It's everything. I think I'm becoming a human being again. It's been so goddamned long…"
She looked up, across two inches of difference in height, and searched his face.
Her lower lip trembled. She bit it, but did not stop checking out his forehead, his cheeks, his nose, then his eyes.
His eyes were slightly moist, reflecting hers.
"Damn," she whispered.
Periglas put his hands on her shoulders and leaned toward her, as if about to lead her into a dance.
"Dinner first?" he asked.
She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed, frightened and incredibly hungry-ravenous, but not for food.
For a home. A place to rest and arms to rest in.
Hungry for all the glories and sins flesh was heir to.
Maybe you're finally cured.
"Dinner after," she said.
Sherman Oaks, California
Nathaniel Trace had arrived in California in a state of rolling nausea and hunger. He could not find the proper foods to eat.
He cabbed from LAX up the 405 to Ventura Boulevard, then checked into a back room in a sprawling old hotel-and locked himself in.
The hotel was seventy-two years old. It had two hundred and fifteen rooms.
He lay down for a two hours but could not sleep.
Rising from the rumpled bed, he shook his head to get rid of the dizzies-they came in late morning and sometimes late evening-and drew back the opaque curtains.
There was blood on his hand. It smeared on the rod and a drop or two fell on the carpet. A trail to the bed.
He had bitten his hand.
That made him chuckle.
Extra tip for the maid.
Through the white veil of the inner curtain, glancing at the parking lot, he instantly counted sixty-two cars. Fourteen trees, none of them very tall. Thirteen people walking, four drivers trying to park. Sixty-three buildings visible between nadir and horizon. Five hundred and sixty-four windows. No doors visible from his vantage point, except twenty-four car doors-six opening, one closing.
"Today, in the state where I was born, I am thirty-six years old," Nathaniel said. Numbers were important. If he thought hard enough, counted long enough, they would all add up-like a combination lock.
"I'm turning into fucking Rain Man," he whispered. "Jesus H. Christ. Nobody hires card counters."
He wiped his hand on the curtain, then thought again: time to stop acting like a bloody animal and recharge the old social programming. He went into the bathroom to wash out the bite. Could his own bite be septic? He used soap. There were marks on both hands. He'd have to stop that or wear gloves.
Already today he had cycled through seven different hells and seven different heavens.
When he realized that this was entirely up to him, or some part of him-that some or other will controlled his mood-it scared him. For a few moments there, floating in a disconnected and emotionless void, looking at the wallpaper and feeling like a fish flying through the air, he had for a couple of hours forgotten his real name.
"I should move into a creepy old house," he told the mirror, then looked hard at his reflection and smiled. He had finally found something he could not count: the thick mat of gingery hairs on his head.
Too confused.
My tire chocks have been pulled and I'm rolling free. My emergency brake is busted. It was a lovely feeling for a while.
Now, not so much.
But who the hell am I? If Mariposa is coming undone, then the others must feel the same way-wherever they are.
What if somehow his fingers could hold supremacy over his brain? What if central control was now up to his arm, his foot-his liver, his bowels?
He had found several days ago that he could make his vision turn purple, or shade it into the pink-and then push it back to something like normal.
Not even a baby is born this clear.
Everything is possible.
When he believed he was capable of interacting with the public again on some minimal level, Nathaniel dressed, left the room, and forced himself to walk around the hotel grounds, then up and down Ventura Boulevard.
The sun peeking between clouds actually made his skin vibrate. That felt good-good and healthy.
So perhaps this was still just a boost phase and he had not yet achieved a stable orbit, and what then, old cosmic mind?
Nathaniel returned to the room and crept into bed. He wiped his hands on the sheets. After a few minutes of studying his palms, frowning deeply, he picked up his disposable cell and slipped in a new quantum card.
Then he typed in a key code and called a dummy transponder in Nicaragua.
The dummy flashed his call to a number none of them knew, which passed it on-again through a quantum EPR cell-to yet another number.
It took several seconds to connect with the Quiet Man.
"Checkpoint Turing." The low voice at the other end sounded calm but exhausted.
"Nathaniel here. I'm in LA."
"You're late. Hugh and Jerry have checked in but nobody's heard from Nick in two days. Have you heard about the vice president?"
"Saw it on a reader headline in the hotel lobby. Wild. What does Jones say?"
"I think he knew about it before the public announcement. He called it a 'potential triggering event.' But he won't say if it was planned."
"So what was it, a coincidence?"
"Unknown."
Nathaniel felt a little sting of mortal practicality-followed by irritation. "We were supposed to be free and clear before the shit hit the fan. Any luck with the new covering IDs?"
"They're in place, twenty-one of them. Better than federal grade. I've kept them away from Jones, so he doesn't feel any conflict. His attitude is fairly even and smooth. I'd like to keep it that way.
"I got a call from Dr. Plover, of all people," the Quiet Man continued. "None of you has had any contact with him for over a year, right?"
"I certainly haven't."
"He sounds unhappy. Says he wants to meet. He asked for you in particular."
"Do we owe him anything?"
"No. But he may have something for us. He's being cagey-seems to be caught between professional responsibility and complete paranoia."
"Maybe he should take some of his own medicine."
"He's staying somewhere in downtown LA, near the convention center-there's a security conference there, COPES, C-O-P-E-S. He was scheduled to give a presentation on Mariposa, but withdrew."
"Was he going to use me as an exhibit?"
"Unknown. I suggest that you meet with him. It's only a suggestion, of course."
Nathaniel thought this over, looked down at his hand. "I'm not all that presentable," he said.
The Quiet Man took one of his long pauses. Nathaniel could hear him breathing-soft, regular. It sounded almost artificial, like a machine.
"He wanted me specifically? Not the others in town?"
"Just you. I shipped him an EPR phone. Here's the number." The Quiet Man read it out to him. It was no problem to memorize the sixty-four digits. And Nathaniel was certain he would not forget.
"Get back to me with whatever you learn."
"What if I don't go?" Nathaniel asked, but the connection had already been cut.
He removed the card from the cell and cracked it in half. Code dust leaked out onto the floor. He scuffed the small mound with his bare foot, grinding the tiny polygons into the carpet.
Now no one could ever trace anything, no matter how hard they tried.
Nathaniel lay back on the bed and stared at the blank ceiling, just to quell his overwhelming urge to count. It didn't work. He started up again with the ghostly floaters drifting through his field of vision.
Closed his eyes.
Counted the speckles in the reddish dark.
Another hour passed.
The voice of interior reason spoke.
Why just you? Better call the others. Besides, don't you want to learn how they're getting along?
Let's surprise the old head poker.
He picked up his cell, inserted another card, and made three calls.
The last was to Dr. Plover.
Boise, Idaho
William Griffin stood in the middle of the wet street and turned full circle, surrounded by fire trucks, canvas hoses, water streaming into the gutters, backing up behind dams of slushy ash, scraps of black shingle, sopping pink insulation-
And the blackened skeletons of twelve suburban homes.
Everything smelled of deadly sweet smoke. His gray suit would reek on the flight back to Washington.
He walked around the hulk of a compact electric Toyota, formerly cherry red, one side now scorched and melted, the rear end twisted and blown out by exploding batteries. The car was still hooked up by a big yellow cable to the driveway plug stand.
The flames had begun in one house-this one, the residence of Maddy and Howard Plumber, now a low black pile and still smoking. High winds from the west had ignited ten other houses. Then the winds had reversed and thrown burning debris over the rest of the neighborhood on the cul-de-sac, skipping only two homes, which now poked from the ashes like healthy molars in a sick jaw.
In the first house, the firemen had found a charred body-female, identified by the coroner through DNA as Madeline Paris, formerly of Bethesda, Maryland. William knew a little about her: a doctor specializing in hormonal and astrocyte disorders.
Her husband, Dr. Terence Plover, aka Howard Plumber, was missing. He might be buried deeper in the smoldering debris, or he might not have been in the house at all. None of the neighbors seemed to know much about them. They had moved in just a couple of weeks ago and weren't very social.
An unmarked Boise police cruiser drew up beside William. A large, square head with a stub of mustache and short bristly brown hair poked out of the driver's window. One hand flipped open a silver badge. "Boise CID. They told me Griff's pup was out here sniffing around. You don't look like your dad, except maybe the eyes."
William turned to squint through his spex at the driver, a detective old enough to have known William Griffin Sr.-known to his friends and colleagues as Griff-an agent who had always been more popular and more accomplished than his son, back in the FBI's better days.
"I take after my mother's side," William said.
"Sorry to hear about your old man," the detective said. He stopped the car in the middle of the street and got out, then leaned on the car door-a bulky, muscular man with a craggy, critical face.
Sharp eyes, sees everything.
"Back in the day, we'd have welcomed Griff's attention. Can't say we feel the same now. Times change, Agent Griffin. Which is it-FBI, or just the Bureau?"
"Bureau," William said.
"That's right. FBI kaput. Draw the blinds, turn out the lights-make sure to flush before you leave." He turned to take in the destruction. "Fire Department has already ruled out arson. Electrical in origin-bad install for a solar power unit. We've got Ada County Crime Analysis, and of course, my people… I suppose we'd call ATF if we thought we needed federal help, but we don't. What interests the Bureau? Going after ecoterrorists again?"
William pointed at the white-flagged debris. "I came to interview Howard Plumber."
"What about?"
"Not at liberty."
"Well, either flash your sparks downtown and get a hall pass or move on, Agent Griffin. Feds don't pay their bills. Idaho is happy to take care of its own. Obviously you won't be talking to Plumber today."
William grimaced, half in amusement. "The Ada County coroner's office and fire department have expressed a willingness to share what they know."
"At whose sufferance?"
"Governor Kinchley," William said.
"Fucking dyke," the CID detective said. "Her term's about up. You can tell her I said so."
"I will. Your name, detective?"
"Johnny Carson, Jonathan Bitch-hater Carson. Boise CID. She knows me."
"I'll bet she does."
"I'll be on this street watching until you move along, Agent Griffin." Carson climbed back into the cruiser. "Your dad would have sniffed the wind and left it to the locals."
"I'll tell him you paid your respects," William said.
That dropped Carson's smug grin into blank uncertainty.
"Next time I visit him in Arlington," William added. "He died for his country. A great big country. All you have is Boise-and maybe Green Idaho."
"Fuck you," Carson said.
William stood his ground, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets.
Carson shook his head in disgust and drove down the street a hundred feet or so, then swerved left and parked diagonally, gifting William with a glare.
William ignored him.
The Green Idaho secessionist movement was growing in political power in Ada County and Boise, as well as the rural counties. It freighted a weird mix of ecology, high-tech savvy, rural bigotry, and rugged libertarian individualism. As far as they were concerned, feds, big lumber, big oil and gas, industrialists, and all rich out-of-state landowners could fuck off and vacate, pronto.
Like most secessionists, Green Idaho was comprised mostly of white guys: anti-tax, failed geeks, anarchists-and a fine crop of bigots.
If this was a Green Idaho reprisal, blown out of control by an unexpected wind storm, then it stood to reason that Detective Johnny Carson would stand guard over the ashes and make excuses until the coast was clear.
A light blinked in the corner of William's spex. He took out his phone and answered the call.
"What's new in Idaho?" Deputy Director Kunsler asked.
Carson watched like a hawk hovering over a mouse.
William turned his back. "Dr. Plover has gone missing. His wife is dead. Looks as if his place was professionally torched-with her in it. But they haven't found his body-so they say."
"Staged?" Kunsler asked.
"Completely," William said. "Green Idaho is all over the scene. They want me out of here-tar and feathers would be too good for me."
"Nabokov sent a short message. He has the goods. But we haven't heard anything more. Get back to the Q."
"I'm on a plane out of Boise at midnight."
"No need. There'll be a jet waiting for you. Something big is in the air, so we're getting an extra drip of cash. Sounds like none of us is going to be getting much sleep. What do you know about Little Jamey?"
"Enough," William said. Everyone in law enforcement knew about Little Jamey. It had been injury on top of insult for the Bureau-and one of several events that had focused attention on Talos. "Is that a leading question?"
"Very. You'll get a full briefing at the Q."
William took a deep breath.
"Ah-my little bitty inbox is filling up with messages," Kunsler said. "Complaints from the locals. Pull out gracefully. Don't ruffle any feathers."
"Too late," William said. "There's one old buzzard I'd love to strangle."
"Tsk. See you bright and early tomorrow-I'll bring coffee. Come home safe, Agent Griffin."
Los Angeles, California
Nathaniel strolled along the indoor length of train track, then stopped and rose up on tiptoes to peer through the windows of a dining car. If he closed his eyes and listened to the recorded sounds, he could almost complete the illusion of a 1930s train station.
Steam puffed from under the sleek silvery locomotive, cut in half and butted up against a mural on the far wall.
He hadn't felt so much pure delight since childhood.
Everything was delightful and vivid. He made it more so, savoring the surreal illusion of a streamliner waiting for passengers, complete with red-capped conductors, leading guests through the waiting area-a Pullman lounge-to three dining cars.
At any moment, Nathaniel could play back something he had just experienced with complete fidelity. His memory was an open book through which he could page at will-making himself his own toy, his own diversion.
At the same time, he heard all the real sounds-people talking, dressed out of character, he thought-cell phones, restaurant pagers dinging, boisterous children talking about the latest games.
Nathaniel was caught between fascination with the children-so like him, unfettered, bold-and the illusion he was finding almost dangerously fascinating.
The colors around the train intensified until he rubbed his eyes and blinked them back. Bee vision, he called that-but he was pretty sure he couldn't actually see UV or infrared. Just a trick of the optical processors, like an LSD trip without the drug. Neon intensity, etched detail, a vibrant fringing around objects of particular interest; followed by sharp disappointment and an acute awareness, almost painful, of the inaccuracies in the restaurant's design.
Gas lanterns, for example. Not at all right.
For a moment, Nathaniel subdued the urge to count everything: people (too late), boards, beams, wheels on the dining car, windows, people again… Pushed it back as if swallowing a lump in his brain.
A hand tapped his shoulder. "Hey, Trace."
Pleasant tenor, sweet North Carolina accent-Nathaniel swung around with a toothy smile, looking up to the red, puffy, bristle-beard features of Humphrey Camp. Camp was taller than Nathaniel by four inches and heavier by more than fifty pounds, broad-shouldered and pepper-bearded. He did not look happy or healthy.
Camp coughed into his fist. "This shit seems to be agreeing with you. Not so much for me. Where's Plover?"
"Not here yet," Nathaniel said.
"This place seems a little obvious." Camp scuffed his feet. "Did you look inside? Maybe he's already seated."
"Plover told me to meet him here. That's all I know."
Camp squeezed his nose, then sneezed. "Maybe he can tell me why I feel like shit."
"Do you? I feel excellent." The downturn of the morning seemed less than a dream. Nathaniel didn't actually care how Camp felt, though they had once been good friends-had met at Stanford. He studied the big man closely, as he would an animal in a zoo.
"Fucking hurray," Camp said, then glanced over Nathaniel's shoulder. "Here's Lee."
Jerry Lee was the youngest of the Turing Seven, a dapper-looking man of thirty-one, dressed in his signature black coat, black T-shirt, black jeans. To the other members Lee had always been an enigma. He had come out of the Arabia Deserta attack with the worst physical scars-a divot down the side of his head and his cheek, burns and shrapnel marks down his left torso and rear shoulder.
He had never said much and said even less during their two weeks of treatment in Baltimore.
Lee nodded at Nathaniel but ignored Camp. His coolness and poise contrasted sharply with Camp's bulky fidgets. Lee had been the first to finish his work in Dubai and return to Los Angeles. He was also the only member of the Turing group-besides Nathaniel-who had actually visited the inner recesses of Mind Design in La Jolla and met the Quiet Man in person.
Lee pointed. "Here's our savior," he said.
Carrying a small box, the old head poker himself stepped delicately down the entrance ramp to the siding-Dr. Terence Plover, architect of their exodus from the psychological wounds of war, designer of the Mariposa treatment and now, apparently, a man who did not want to be recognized. He had dyed his hair to silver-gray and looked more like a sixty-something retiree than a well-to-do middle-aged researcher and entrepreneur.
At the sight of three of his former patients-rather than just Nathaniel-Plover looked as if he might turn and flee. But he squared his shoulders, nervously approached, and exchanged quick, formal greetings, looking each in the face with a curt nod, but did not shake-kept his free hand in his pocket.
"Only three?" he asked ironically. He looked up and down the mock station. "Where's Bork? Where's Nick Elder?"
He seemed to assume, as always, that he was in charge, and now behaved as if Nathaniel had violated both his authority and his trust.
Mariposa had been run with a firm hand, Dr. Plover always the sad, gentle tyrant awaiting their arrival to his island of calm and freedom from fear.
"Nick's in Texas," Camp said.
"We don't know that," Lee said.
Plover stroked his chin like a would-be wise man. All he lacked was a goatee and a pipe. Nathaniel subdued an urge to laugh, but a small chuckle escaped.
Plover frowned. "I think we should avoid attracting attention," he said. "Can we please do that, gentlemen?"
"This place was your choice," Nathaniel reminded him.
Plover gave him a pained look. "I did not ask all of you to come."
"And now we are four," Camp said.
Harry Bork strode onto the platform and joined them, tipping his hand to his forehead. Bork's role in the Turing Seven had always been mediation and negotiation. He had close-set blue eyes and a monkish fringe of blond hair embracing a noble, Nordic square skull, darker brows hovering over a squib of nose and a belligerent jaw.
"Great restaurant," he said. "Best prime rib in LA. Food tastes wonderful, Doc. Better than ever."
"Let's get on with it," Plover said. "We shouldn't be together any longer than necessary."
He unexpectedly leaned into Camp, who held up his arms in support. Plover's eyes fluttered. Catching himself, he straightened and waved them away.
"Apologies. Sleepless for two days," he murmured.
"Let's find our table and order drinks," Bork suggested. "I'm famished."
The waiter-a tall, slouched man with a thick hood of black hair and a long nose, more concerned about their appearance and demeanor than their number-escorted them away from the windows to a room in the back, paneled with dark wood.
A sparkling white cloth lay over a long, narrow table, set with stamped silver and peacock-fold napkins. Above the table hung two antique gas lamps, orange flames surrounded by hot pink auras-at least, in Nathaniel's bee vision.
"We all look daft," Bork said when they had settled in. It was apparent they could feel the awkwardness. They had worked together for months at a time in luxury but also in primitive conditions, had survived hell together-subcontractors for Axel Price and Talos Corporation for six years-yet none of them knew how to react to a reunion, and this caused Camp distress.
"Fuck this shit," he growled.
The four took up their menus and studied them.
Plover sat silent.
"How about the rest of you?" Bork asked. "Don't you feel it? Isn't food terrific?"
"My stomach's killing me," Camp said. "I'm losing weight and I pee purple." He thumped down his menu, winced, and blinked at the lanterns. "Ugly light," he said. "Hurts my eyes."
"Please!" Plover shouted.
Lee scowled.
Camp leaned in. "Quiet, Doc. Like you said, no cops. And no security guards, for Christ's sake."
Plover seemed to shrink in his chair, then rose again to a level of assertion-but kept his voice down. "I invited Mr. Trace to meet with me, exclusively, but now that we're here, I owe all of you an apology. Can you bring yourselves to some place of… cooperation, of agreement, so that we can talk sensibly?"
They nodded, all but Camp, and he continued.
"I've canceled my talk at the convention. I'll be leaving Los Angeles this afternoon. Things could hardly get any worse. I've been traveling…" He covered his mouth with one hand, cheeks working behind his fingers, as if trying to refit loose dentures.
Then he started to sob.
After a moment, Camp was the first to speak up. "All right. We're your bright boys, Doc, and we've gone wrong," he said. "Why is that?"
Plover managed to recover and straighten as the waiter brought in a tray with their drinks, then took their food orders. That went surprisingly well.
Plover's distress had had an impact. All of them made their choices like properly trained children. Then Bork told the waiter what the final tab would be, to the penny, with a stingy tip.
The waiter gave him a tight look, thanked them all, slouched out, and closed the sliding panel door.
The anachronistic gas lamps flickered and threw long shadows.
"We look like poker playing dogs," Lee said, and touched his forehead as if to adjust a green eyeshade.
"To Mariposa." Nathaniel lifted his red wine in toast. "How many did you cure, Doc? How many are we?" The colors even in this subdued room-even in the flickering, totally wrong gaslight-were amazing.
Plover looked around the table. He dabbed his eyes with his napkin and fixed his gaze on Lee. "You seem the best adapted," he murmured.
Lee lifted the corners of his lips. "I doubt it," he said. "That would be Bork, I think."
"Don't put that load on me," Bork said. "We're all pretty spooky. I hardly recognize some of you. We all move different now, did you notice that?"
"I see it," Lee said.
"Finish your drink and tell us something useful, Doc," Camp said.
"None of you should drink," Plover said, his voice shaky.
"Well hell, then, cheers," Camp said, hoisting his mug of Budweiser and swallowing half. He slammed the heavy glass on the table. "I'm a mess. You're a mess. We're all freaks. What the fuck have you done to us, Doc?"
Plover's hand shook as he drank his water. "I've had a terrible week. I left Maryland… moved my wife to a secret location. Now I can't reach her. I'm very worried about her."
"Let's be honest," Bork said. "We were a mess when you took us in. We couldn't get our work done. Two weeks later, we went back to work. You cured us."
"Too good to be true," Camp said.
Plover steeled himself. "I would like to know what you gentlemen were doing, to cause me and my wife so many difficulties."
They all sat quiet. Camp fidgeted with a knife, tapping the tablecloth.
"You don't want to know," Bork said.
"I knew you were important," Plover persisted dryly. "I'm just now beginning to understand how important."
"What about the Quiet Man?" Camp asked. "What does he know?"
They all looked at Lee.
"A secret international project with a huge bankroll," Lee said. "The Turing Seven were crucial. Then-we were injured. Our wounds healed. Our heads did not. Dr. Plover came to Price with interesting research. He gave you full financing, plus a large bonus, and promised that all his soldiers and personnel who suffered from post-traumatic stress would be funneled through Mariposa. You could have become a rich man."
"What changed that?" Bork asked. "What changed us?"
"Not boozing, I'm going to bet," Camp said, and finished his beer.
"You're all reacting differently," Plover said. "There may be similarities… I can't know for sure. I could do blood work, but I no longer have a clinic." He swallowed and shook his head, getting the words out with difficulty. "Harvey Belton called my private line last week. I don't know how he got the number… it's new. He was hysterical. I heard a shot. The call ended. Stanley Parker called the same number and said he was flying to Fiji, so that he could be in a place where it was quiet. The world was too loud and too bright. Nick Elder… I do not know what happened to Nick."
"He's in Texas," Bork said. "At least, he was a few days ago."
The waiter and a busboy brought their food: plates clacking, maneuvering in the narrow space, the waiter's nervous reappraisal of who ordered what.
He backed out and closed the door.
Camp thumped the table once more. "Question not answered!" he said in a harsh voice. "What did you do to us? What the hell is Mariposa?"
Lee frowned and put his hands over his ears.
Plover touched the rim of his water glass with a finger. "I was working with my wife at the National Cancer Institute in Atlanta," he said. "We had what looked like an effective treatment for astrocytomas. Brain tumors. We were in clinical trials-very promising-when I noticed that our test patients often experienced a significant change in affect. In mood.
"One was a veteran from the first Gulf War. He had suffered from PTSD since his late twenties. That suffering stopped. Crime victims, those who had survived rape or domestic abuse-even patients with unrelated psychological disorders-responded positively as well. I altered the focus and expanded the program."
"So you fix cancer and make people happy, at the same time. How?" Bork asked.
"The body-the brain-relies on the genome not only for form but for broad patterns of behavior. But genes are not expressed continually. They are controlled by a marvelous system of checks and balances-including overlays to the actual genetic sequences, epigenetic tags or stops that regulate and even prevent certain genes from being expressed. As in a music box, an activated gene sticks up and plays a note, an inactivated gene falls into a gap and is silent.
"In our childhood and adolescence, tunes emerge and become more or less fixed-the working versions of you and me, better prepared for our environment. However, throughout our lives, our bodies still make changes. As we live, we acquire a few more notes. Our tunes become richer. Little pathways-personality, habits-are worn into our behaviors."
"What's that got to do with cancer?" Lee asked.
"Cells too are educated and trained. If they are continually stressed or traumatized-bathed in toxic chemicals, for example-they reach a crisis and a point of decision. Life isn't good. The bargain they made long ago to be part of a larger body isn't working out. So they may try to become independent, paying no attention to the body's needs. Usually the stubbornly independent cells are killed by the immune system. In some cases, they evade destruction, and tumors grow."
"You're saying we're tumors?" Camp seemed perversely amused.
"No. Perhaps. I don't know… These matters are complicated."
"What's Mariposa doing to us now?" Bork asked.
Lee laid his hand on Plover's arm-not in reassurance.
Plover looked down at the tightening fingers. His brow furrowed. "Stress," he said. "Long-term pressure and pain wear deep, dysfunctional ruts, which become fixed by epigenetic tags in our brains-perhaps in astrocytic cells themselves. We respond with heightened sensitivity to less and less stimulus. Brain and body, working in unison, acquire hair triggers. Our behaviors become inappropriate, erratic. Deep down, we think we are still in whatever situation caused our pain to begin with.
"Our tune changes for the worse, sometimes drastically. Sour notes, screeches-anxiety, fear. Panic."
"We weren't in combat for more than a few hours," Nathaniel said.
"A single major traumatic event-pain, destruction, friends killed, imminent threat to life-mere minutes can cause tremendous stress. The persistent drips and trickles of stress that ordinarily shape our lives and thoughts become a sudden flood. Old patterns are swept away. New channels form, deep and devious. Mariposa works by removing the stops we acquire during traumatic events. The genes are set free from the bad habits they acquired under duress. The world seems less threatening. A kind of balance is restored."
Plover's face took on that messianic light Nathaniel remembered from his two weeks in Baltimore, in the clinic-when Plover had been the one who had made them feel human again.
"Balance?" Camp said. "Shit. I'm not in any sort of balance."
"Your pain went away," Plover asserted, defiant. "You all agreed… back then."
"Not now," Bork said. "I feel like Proteus in his cave-scary. Maybe we can be anything."
"I have no idea what I want to be," Lee said.
"The drug is removing too many controls," Plover said. "We did not see that in animal trials."
"And that means…?" Camp asked.
"Our talents and abilities are patterned to fit the needs of a larger group. Best for human society… But perhaps more control is now being returned to you as individuals. You have become like newborns, in a way. If too many controls are removed-then you either won't feel the need to serve society at all, or you will do so purely on your own terms."
The table fell quiet. Only Bork and Lee had touched their food. Camp stopped tapping his fork and set it down on his rumpled napkin.
"That's the definition of a sociopath," Bork said thoughtfully.
Lee let go of Plover's arm. "I've started torturing animals," he said. "I'm seriously thinking about hurting people."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hyde," Camp said, tossing Lee a salute.
"Anyone else?" Nathaniel asked, fascinated.
Bork took a bite of rare prime rib and lifted his fork. "Only for a day," he said, chewing. "Then it stopped being fun."
"Did you actually butcher someone, you son of a bitch?" Camp asked with a manic grin.
Bork looked back at Camp as if the question were rude-or meaningless.
"Price loves butterflies," Lee said. "Did he suggest you name your program Mariposa? All the soldiers, all his employees, psychologically damaged by combat… You said you could restore them, make them bright and shiny again. And we became your test subjects… You gave him your guarantee. Didn't you?"
Plover nodded like a bobble-head doll with a stick shoved up one side of its neck. "In a nutshell," he said.
"It's hell to be a baby again, Doc," Camp said.
Plover looked down at his plate.
"The vice president," Nathaniel said. "Was he one of your patients?"
Plover jerked as if stung. "That's privileged," he said, and tried reasserting some last shred of authority. "It's privileged-and dangerous!"
"Bingo," Bork said, marking a scored point with his finger in the air. "You're already smarter than you used to be, Nathaniel."
Plover's cell phone buzzed. He fumbled it out of his pocket, dropped it on the table, then retrieved it and answered, "Hello?"
Nathaniel noted this was not an EPR unit; hence, the caller was not the Quiet Man.
"Doc, you shouldn't be talking on those things," Camp said. "Microwaves can ruin your brain."
As Plover listened, his face lost the rest of its color. "Are you sure?"
He shut the phone, closed his eyes. "I have to leave now," he said, struggling to regain whatever was left of his composure. "Mr. Trace, we need to speak in private, as agreed."
"You and the doctor run along," Bork said. "The rest of us will sit here and chitchat."
In the crowded lobby, Nathaniel took Plover's trembling arm and aimed him to the mall restroom. Through the big fire doors, the hall beyond was empty.
Plover handed his package to Nathaniel.
"The Quiet Man mentioned someone named Jones, some sort of expert-you seem to know him. Jones suggested I give this material to you, and that you find a woman named Rebecca Rose. She is in law enforcement, I presume."
Nathaniel listened with interest, enjoying the patterns of blood flow in Plover's face and hands. He could almost feel the heat. Plover was definitely a candidate for a heart attack.
Bee vision.
"Jones might know something," Nathaniel admitted as he opened the package. The doctor watched him closely while he pulled out a reddish-purple dragon about two inches long, printed on a sheet of pliable plastic. The package also contained a badge on a black braided lanyard and a photo of a woman with medium-long hair.
"These are my credentials for the COPES conference, across the street," Plover said. "They'll get you past most of the outer security. The dragon is a skin computer. A dattoo. People put it on their arms and exchange personal data. I've preloaded this one with crucial information. She'll be wearing a dattoo as well. Cross arms, like this." He demonstrated by hooking his arm around Nathaniel's. "It works through clothing."
Nathaniel was amused. He rolled up his sleeve and peeled the dattoo from its plastic sheet. It laid down easily on his inner forearm and conformed to the skin, stretching a little.
"Remember this about Axel Price," Plover said. "He rarely does anything without having two excellent reasons. That's the secret of his success. The seven of you were in a bad way-and there was my research. He needed you healthy, and he saw a way to make huge profits from treating PTSD. Relieving human misery never much concerned him. It's not part of his worldview."
Plover took back the box, threw it into a trash receptacle, and looked around for an exit. "The convention is closed for the day. Try tomorrow morning. Be careful. I've set the dattoo to download only once, and then it will wipe its contents.
"We won't meet again. Good luck, Mr. Trace."
He shuffled toward the exit, clutching one shoulder.
Nathaniel pulled down his sleeve and buttoned it. He wondered who Rebecca Rose was, that she would attract the attention of the Quiet Man-or Plover, or Jones.
And why they chose him as a vector.
All the more interesting.
Rebecca shoved the pillow up under her cheek, slowly rising like a swimmer from a dream of birds on a wave-washed beach.
Her body felt relaxed, loose, catlike. She stretched one leg but did not want to open her eyes and come fully awake, the sensation of light and warmth and relaxation was so wonderful-so rare.
Coffee.
She opened one eye.
A black hotel mug floated back and forth in front of her face. Not alone. Her body tensed, then relaxed again.
Captain Peter Periglas took shape beyond the mug.
"Good morning," he said.
The relaxed feeling came from having someone beside her all night. She pushed her mouth off the pillow, then wiped the corner of her lips to make sure it was dry.
"Morning. Late."
"No, we have indulged wonderfully, but we are not teenagers. We got a good night's sleep and it is now seven-thirty."
"I feel too good," Rebecca said, sitting up and taking the mug.
"Blame me," Periglas said. He was wearing a hotel bathrobe, open to reveal his slender chest, not quite Apollonian-a thin patch of graying hair.
"I will," Rebecca promised.
"Fake cream, sugar?"
"No thanks." She looked at him accusingly over the mug. "You got up first to make sure I wasn't drooling."
"I did not, but you certainly were. We are both droolers."
"Oh my."
The first couple of sips of hot black liquid were equally wonderful. She couldn't remember feeling so happy in years-maybe ten years. Since…
But no need to let the past cloud things.
Two room service trays still rested on the dresser, stacked steel covers, napkins, water glasses, tilting wine glasses.
Two empty bottles of red wine and she didn't feel even a touch hung over.
"Are you sure we're not teenagers?" she asked, lowering the mug to her naked breasts. She rolled the smooth heat on her skin, holding his gaze as a challenge, don't look down.
Periglas failed and let out a long sigh.
"Damn," he said, and untied his robe.
Los Angeles, California
The winter sky over downtown Los Angeles had a blued-steel sheen like the glint off an old revolver.
Inside the stark white western atrium of the convention center, under high panes of bathwater green glass, all was clearly illuminated as if by a cool, distant star. Nothing and no one cast shadows.
Rebecca ascended a wide flight of steps, counting ten, eleven, twelve. Her thoughts jostled in a caffeinated queue. She was enjoying lovely aches: aches from the night's activities, plus half an hour of exercise at the hotel gym, plus the soft, professional embrace of new pumps.
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.
Day two of impressing the troops, promoting her new prospective employer, and hanging with people who understood the life, yet knew nothing of why she was here and not back in Quantico or Washington. That was one story she would not be sharing at the ninth annual Consumer Protection and Education Symposium: COPES.
Four thousand salesmen, entrepreneurs, and professional security and law enforcement types, educated, entertained, fed, and watered each evening while hovered over by honchos from Homeland Security, the Bureau, the FDA, ATF, and a dozen other three-letter acronyms from a government that somehow managed to grow great bushy branches despite a crushing load of debt and the worst recession in over eighty years.
Which was the same as not calling it a depression.
She glanced up at the snowy horizontal pipes and beams that transported the building's stresses. They made sure the heaviest lifting was handed over to parts that could stand the pressure, a lot like people passing the buck.
At least you've got the prospect of real work, six months out from the rocky coast of the FBI.
Under her breath, forty-one, forty-two…
Two years after Mecca. A year after almost going under. Count your blessings. You're alive, you've just met a nice man; maybe you'll even have a daughter.
People to live with and actually love.
As she approached the level of the main exhibition hall, a vague sense of bulk shifted her attention left and she saw a brush of ginger hair, a gray overcoat, a convention badge, and hovering vaguely above them a shy, almost boyish smile in a broad face otherwise made for radio.
Instinct.
Her attention focused. The man stepped forward. She felt her neck muscles tense into cords.
"Ms. Rose. Looking forward to your presentation."
Rebecca paused, refusing to give ground despite the man's odd penetration of her space. Her spex outlined his face with a red circle. In the lower right corner, a cursor blinked: the spex data monkey said he was in her personal facial database. No name came up. She had been getting so many of these notices at the convention she had switched off automatic identification.
She lifted one ankle to adjust her shoe. The face was memorable-small scars around his mouth and under his eyes, a broader beardless pink patch on the left temple from hairline to cheekbone; one eye slightly skewed. Still pleasant enough-but more rugged than she liked. Not actually threatening but not dressed very well-not one of the federal honchos or minions and probably not a cop, with that unkempt hair.
His badge had flipped on its lanyard. She couldn't read his name.
"Do I know you?" she asked.
The man's smile flashed to ten. "Nathaniel Trace. Old FBI, ma'am, seconded to Food and Drug. A great admirer. We were on a panel together in Orlando-International Association of Food Protectors."
Rebecca had indeed served on such a panel, just before her furlough went through. Odd she did not remember. "Good to see you, Agent Trace."
"I've retired," he said. "Actually, they booted me."
"Ah."
"I cooperated. Like you, I assume. The Rout."
She hated that word. "No, Mr. Trace, I did not cooperate and I was not booted."
"Well, it's all history. Pardon my intrusion, Ms. Rose, but we should talk, sooner rather than later." He had a look she could not define: not crazy, but not all in one place, like a man divided and then punched back together again. "Sorry to impede the flow. Let's trade."
He pulled back his sleeve and revealed a dattoo.
"You can get back to me if you we need to talk."
"Fine," Rebecca said, eager to move on.
Does the word buzz kill mean anything to you, Agent Trace?
She held her arm down but splayed her fingers like knives. No harm-dattoos couldn't mess with each other, simply exchange data. They crossed arms, not actually touching. She felt her skin briefly warm-as if he had just downloaded a lot more than his name and associations.
Trace broke the touch.
Now she was sure he was lying about where they had met, but he did not exhibit the tells of a liar. In that odd mental realm where instinct was indistinguishable from fantasy, where her expertise trapped passing impressions and examined them over and over, before they became actual theories, she wondered if he could convince himself to believe anything he said.
"I've got to be in the hall in twenty seconds," she told him by way of warning. "Four thousand stalwarts to feed and entertain, and we still get to rub elbows with heroes."
The ginger-haired man had the gall to keep pace with her as she moved along. Rebecca felt her neck hairs rise. She did not like this one bit.
"You should be listening closely," he said and put on an intense look, accompanied by a rictus of effort. "You should come away from here… with me. I mean it. I don't think it's safe. I've got lots of money stashed away. You're important… to somebody who knows. You could be safe-away from here. Let's go outside and get some lunch or dinner and talk about things."
After the night with her captain, and with a busy day coming up, this was the one thing she did not need, would not put up with, here of all places: a crazy former cop or some sadsack salesman, playing the dattoo card and then hitting on her.
Rebecca got up into his face-he was about an inch taller-and tapped his chest firmly with her finger, emphasizing, "Stay…the fuck…away from me."
"Right," Trace said, and rewarded her with a delighted grin. He backed up and did a swashbuckling sweep with one arm, bowing, clearing her path.
"Thanks." Rebecca stepped away before he could say more and walked swiftly on. Her face was red; she could feel it. She wanted to scratch the dattoo, scrub it off. Creepy.
Screw this. Now I'm down-almost.
She pushed by the signs with arrows that read, Exhibit Hall. All bags subject to inspection. One pump already squeaked; the new shoes were a bust.
Damn.
She made sure her badge was face out and veered left by the sparsely populated food court. Lifting her wrist, she brushed the dattoo along an ID post, faced the camera to have her picture taken-
Trace never made it this far. No picture, no record.
– then raced past the bored-looking security guards.
The exhibit hall filled an acre under a broad high roof. On the far side of the hall, windows to the next-level conference rooms looked out over the crowded expanse. Most of the windows were covered by vertical blinds: sessions in progress. But in one, a photographer, tiny at this distance, poked his camera through and was attempting to capture the whole scene from on high.
The scene was worth it. Hundreds of booths lined double-sided aisles, showcasing the latest in professional, business, and home protection. The aisles gradually funneled attendees to open spaces with larger displays.
A family-size bomb shelter offered level 4 filters, whatever that implied. In another open circle, an autonomous DHS/ICE Whisper Bird took center stage, broad wide rotors folded, guns and rocket pods red-capped and tagged, empty.
Nearby, LAPD Gross Threat Response had brought in two super-sophisticated bomb trucks, brutes big and shiny as city fire trucks but black all over. Each carried, in rear deck and side garages, three midsize tractor bots and twenty cat-size insect-carriage bots, all black with yellow stripes. Small boxes mounted within the garages were filled with roller bots, like little wheeled dumbbells with video cameras and other sensors, that could be tossed or rolled into almost any situation.
A large group of admiring men and a few women took in a demonstration of small bot prowess.
A public defense tech talking like a circus barker had the city's machines performing Fred Astaire dance routines to music. The midsize bots were light on their feet, but their real talent lay in chemical sensors that could detect any kind of explosive from ten feet away. Pulse-mike sonic arrays could read the internals of a suspect device with a single high-frequency chirp.
Smarter and lighter than ever, the new bots could approach a bomb quiet as a weasel and shut it down with old-fashioned lead shot, a high-powered slug of water, or quick-set polycarbonate.
Techs in bomb suits would soon be ancient history, along with their sniffer dogs.
Rebecca moved on to the crowded aisles.
The Total Team Safety booth boasted a 50K six-by-three meter flex display, bright and crisp-though the fabric rippled under a downdraft. The display revealed the schematic of a skyscraper, filled with glowing stars, showing how a tactical security show-runner could monitor up to three thousand personnel in any situation from inside, or from any point on the globe via dedicated satlink.
Much better than the old FBI Lynx system, though that was still in wide use.
Peacock Net Communications offered a whole new lifestyle for both cops and civilians. A skinny young man with a shiny face was extolling the company virtues: "A complete record of your life. Fifteen button cameras, front and rear-full circle, fish-eye if you switch on the shoulder cams. The CPU stitches it all together and stores up to twelve hours of 4K-def video. Best tool law enforcement ever had-but it's also available to citizens, so police departments need to keep their cops cool, well-trained, and polite. No more ticking time bombs on the street. And of course our prowler unit records all the basics, plus video and sound-GPS, speed, nearby vehicles, officer RFID, weather, even vitals if the individual department so desires-heart rate, cortisol, body temp, emotional state. Soon we'll be able to tie in and corroborate our video with brain-scan analysis. No secrets. Foolproof in court-it's all ten-twelve secure-coded to an inviolate chip. Congress is about to set FISA standards for Homeland Security taps into personal networks. It's a new age for law enforcement. Peacock Net. Open society, complete records, total protection."
Rebecca had been linked and recorded many times before, but never so thoroughly.
The Homeland Security Science and Technology booth featured a single-box, universal DNA/RNA identification system, tied in to international criminal and citizen database files. A moist swab of almost any surface within a scene of interest, indoors or outdoors, could yield a comprehensive list of the names and records of individuals who had walked through in the last few years, dropping sweat, skin flakes, fingerprints, whatever-as well as plants, animals, and potential pathogens. The system was known as eDNA, or Edna.
Practically in the shadow of DHS and Edna's bright lights, a tiny startup calling itself DYNA-Forensics was drawing an impressive crowd. Their little gray box promised to provide courtroom-quality certification that DNA evidence was not manufactured, forged, or planted-or, conversely, that it was. With polymerase chain reaction technology capable of creating huge volumes of DNA from even the tiniest source, and several high-profile cases of law enforcement databases being misused to manufacture counterfeit DNA evidence from scratch, this had become a big issue in recent years.
Soon, nobody would be getting away with anything, anywhere. She had to sniff in wonder. Brave new world-lousy old cliché.
Just two booths down, scanners from a company called Rainbow Life Forensics guaranteed to analyze and predict the intent of strangers through their Kirlian Auras.
Something old, something new, something weird.
"Rebecca!"
At the end of the leftmost aisle, Rebecca swiveled and saw Karl Oster leaning from a booth. "How's our favorite Rolodex expert?" he called. A big banner behind him proclaimed NCAP: National Council of Protection Agencies-an NGO trade group.
She swung left and shook his hand.
"Hey, Karl. Most of these youngsters don't even know what a Rolodex is." She pulled back her cuff to reveal the dattoo. "Want to mate?"
Oster smirked, pulled up his sleeve, unbuttoned his cuff, and showed his own dattoo. They crossed arms.
"Don't scratch it," he warned.
"They do itch," Rebecca said. "Congrats."
"Screw that," he said with a grin.
Oster had been portrayed by Johnny Depp in a movie about Waylon Parks, the Karaoke Butcher. Parks had kidnapped twenty-one children in two states, burying them with a backhoe in old shipping containers. Each container had a battery backup unit that powered a small Karaoke machine that ran videos of Parks singing David Bowie songs. Gary Oldman, of course, had portrayed Parks.
"It's bullshit," Oster said. "They should have made a movie about you."
"Fat chance," Rebecca said.
"What irritates the hell out of me is the way these bastards are portrayed by smart, charming actors. We know different. They're broken toys. When you finally catch 'em, they look dead inside."
Karl and Rebecca had gone out for dinner a few times in Washington and stayed friends thereafter, exchanging calls now and then. Karl, a perennial bachelor, had never pushed. She almost wished he had.
But now of course there was her captain. Odd that she was the one feeling fast and possessive.
"Agents love their movies, Karl. Yours wasn't too bad. How's San Francisco?"
"Office is trés chic," Oster said, the standing joke.
Rebecca had appointments to keep. She waved and moved on.
Nathaniel lingered at the food court for half an hour, uncertain what to do next or where to go. He had run out of instructions, external or internal.
He ordered a tuna sandwich and observed the people coming and going. Mostly reps or salespeople, a few politicians, a fair number of law enforcement officers in plain clothes-and of course security guards.
Watching them all move and mingle was relaxing, like watching an ant farm.
He slowly and meticulously played back Plover's words and actions during and after their dinner the night before. The memory was sharp. With some concentration, he could make it even sharper-until it pushed aside the real world.
It wasn't exactly like living the events again; the replay assumed its own rearranged logic, edited by his brain into a better story, and some parts were already in the process of degradation… de-selected, de-rezzed…
Interesting to actually watch that happening.
Rebecca Rose had been apprehensive. He thought perhaps she recognized him, but not consciously. Had they met before? His work had absorbed all his attention, even when he was in Baltimore, undergoing Mariposa. He might not have noticed her.
Work-and terror. Terror-and work. All he was, all he had. Back then, if he forgot something, it was likely to stay forgotten. Now…
Everybody interested him to some degree. Faces were important. He truly was like a baby-a baby savant.
He had read Rebecca Rose like a book. She had been in a hurry-and not just to get into the hall. She wanted to get away from extraneous thoughts and forces impinging on her life. To move toward pleasant things and away from unpleasant or worrisome things-like him.
Pretty standard palm reader bullshit, so far.
Nathaniel moved forward in memory-time and caught up with the food court, the conference, the amusing ant farm. This was good. This was exhilarating. The old Nathaniel Trace had not liked mysteries.
Now, not having all the answers was like the beginning of an all-absorbing game, a combination of Philip Marlowe and poker. In due time, with patience-something he was trying hard to nurture-facts would come his way. But he could also put himself in the way of facts.
(That patience thing was a work in progress, along with attention span, reining in bee vision, and not biting his hands.)
This convention was turning into a freeway cloverleaf of discovery-a maze of onramps and exits. The longer he stayed, the more he might learn.
He belched tuna sour-food still not agreeing with him-and pushed away the mostly uneaten sandwich. He walked toward the escalators, the high atrium, and the exit, at medium speed, not to attract attention.
Stopped for water at a fountain.
Things playing around in his head. Thoughts seemed to have their own shapes, and now he could see how they might fit together.
Make a picture.
Axel Price's plans involved disruption. Nathaniel had always wondered how it would happen, after the Turing group finished their international wire work. They weren't supposed to know the real purpose of that work, of course. But now it seemed obvious.
He could bring it all up from his subconscious, where it had just fallen into its proper place.
The vice president had put himself in the news. Plover had practically confirmed that Quinn was one of his patients. Plover was beholden to Axel Price.
Something was going wrong with Mariposa.
Because of that, and for other reasons, Price's plans might be in jeopardy. Something in which the vice president was going to play a major role.
The Quiet Man seemed to think so.
Tipping event.
Plover was in danger, trying to hide and not being smart about it. He was a scientist, not a spy. Who would have the strongest reason to want the doctor silenced?
Who would be powerful enough to cause concern for the Quiet Man?
Jerry Lee is torturing animals. Bork…
You might all become killers. Get in the news.
Like the vice president.
And then you'd spill the beans. You know you've been thinking about it.
This tickled Nathaniel. He laughed, then covered his mouth like a Japanese girl. His skin flushed-all but the scar.
The Turing Seven had become untrustworthy-Price was upset with them as well. All might come unraveled, so Price was angry. Pieces well-shaped, fitting nicely so far. Obvious.
Plover said that Price always had two reasons for doing anything. That was the secret of his success. Here, gathered in the convention center, were two and possibly even three reasons. Another tipping event-this one deliberate and planned. Something big, anonymous-destabilizing.
Dress rehearsal.
Prep for the grand finale.
Visions bright and scary flashed in his visual centers, like a waking dream. A whiff of burned metal flitted through his olfactory circuits. Something primal told him to get the hell out of this place. The call in the restaurant had upset the doctor. Perhaps someone had died. Someone he knew and loved and had tried to protect.
His wife.
Nathaniel had warned Rebecca Rose-but why? What was he anticipating?
Once outside the convention center, he considered hiring a taxi, but decided instead to study the nearby construction. He assumed the happiest of attitudes. He felt relaxed and at ease, unlike the day before.
Everything was delightfully potential.
You need to keep a sense of proportion, the wise old voice told him. What is it you really see-what do you need to see-what is it you want to see?
"I'm just waiting for something to happen," he said.
Passersby didn't look at him funny. He might be talking on a phone… but he wasn't. He was a certifiable crazy person.
"Something interesting is coming," he told himself. "Something dangerous."
You can't know that. But how much are you willing to risk by staying here, where it seems to be most dangerous?
"I'll stand over there, then."
Nathaniel crossed three parking lots and stood on Flower Street, where he turned to watch the passing cars, goggle at the buildings, lift squinted eyes to the sapphire sky. He liked making his long coat swirl. Grinning, he felt the scar on his cheek tug. Just walking in the sunshine felt great.
His face warmed everywhere but the scar.
He couldn't get Rebecca Rose out of his thoughts. He did not want her out of his thoughts. She was a fascinating part of the puzzle-the next piece to fall into place.
The whole area along Flower Street had undergone a kind of renaissance after years of major down time. A huge new Sofitel was just opening. Workers were pulling away tape and plastic riprap and moving equipment to make way for guests. Too expensive for most of the people at the convention center. That meant the hotel was relatively safe. He should stay here for a while. The hotel lobby looked interesting.
There was a huge crystal chandelier suspended above a beautiful travertine marble floor. Inside, Nathaniel looked up at the chandelier, giggling. A bellman and the concierge behind her desk watched him. Nathaniel dropped his shoulders.
His sense of time slowed. Safe.
The next thing that happened was intense.
The crystal chandelier jumped and sang with a thousand brilliant high notes. He felt it, saw it-
The puzzle came alive.
"That's an explosion," he whispered.
Glass was breaking and falling everywhere-behind him, a shower of prisms pinged and exploded against the marble floor. Eruptions of diamond pebbles water-falled out of the tall front windows, exposing the interior to a shockwave of warm air.
He was visualizing a distant explosion in clinical detail-analyzing the frequencies of the vibrations, the directions in which the walls of the hotel would move-periodicity, amplitude, the layout of the building and the surrounding streets, the way taller buildings would absorb the shock.
As he walked out of the hotel, the walls still seemed to shake. Staying on his feet as the ground heaved was easy enough-like dancing to a syncopated, swaying tune.
The convention center puffed huge white and gray clouds.
Enough.
He thwacked himself on the temple with the palm of his hand.
Nathaniel stood trembling outside, away from the Sofitel lobby, across the street and back in sunshine. The hotel's windows were intact, the chandelier-visible through the windows-still suspended above the marble floor.
He let out a half frightened, entirely delighted whistle. This was utterly cool. The cloverleaf of discovery had just changed in a most intriguing way. The whole world had become his chess board. He could see millions of moves in advance… keyed in, of course, to the kings and queens, the power players.
His head hurt so bad his entire body was throbbing. But he felt no sense of danger, only a deep conviction that he was not wrong.
His metabolism had become that of a humming bird. Time for a sugary drink.
Time to return to the convention center.
Walking through the exhibit hall, Rebecca felt like Alice down the high-tech rabbit hole. The moral equivalent of Hitler under the old lady's bed had become huge business since 9/11 and 10/4.
COPES cut right through the body politic and revealed a cross-section of American nightmares. The long aisles were lined with pipe-and-curtain booths promoting aids to justice and anodynes to fear, from the specific and timely to the shapeless and eternal, all put together with businesslike style and just enough color.
Men in dark suits and women in gray or pastel suits casually conversed with retailers and cops about public protection, crime and detection, less-than-lethal takedown, and the tools they all needed to buy that elusive sense of security from, and justice for, all the bad guys.
Some tools could be lethal by happenstance, of course. A mock-up cutaway of an armored Ford Crown Victoria revealed dark layers of "C-ERA," electromagnetic reactive armor packed with carbon fiber nanotubes-good protection for you, inside, not so good for the crowds around you, sprayed with pulverized shrapnel. A sign over the somber gray vehicle proclaimed: "This is one ERA you'll ratify!"
"Har," Rebecca said softly.
By and large, male cops were still chauvinists-and probably always would be. Gather male and female law enforcement together-especially the young-and a few of the males always felt it necessary to challenge the females as to credentials, fitness, their place in the cruel masculine world-which was properly staying home and making babies. With their willing assistance, of course.
The captain had exhibited none of that. That could mean he was simply more experienced with women.
Stop it. Enjoy the moment.
D &P-Detection and Protection-systems abounded for radiation and bio-attacks of any kind, personal or large-scale. D &P came in the form of networked phones, bracelets, even radio-alerted chips under the skin.
Be the first on your block to get the hell away from your block… when the bad guys spray it with nerve gas or anthrax.
Rebecca made a face and let out a small puff of breath. She lingered for a few seconds at the FreezeCrime forensics display, a ring in the middle of two aisles, revealing all the latest in sealing and preserving crime scenes: room-size cooling units and rail-mounted bots designed to pick up samples without leaving "cop residue." The bar was being raised on crime scenes. She had often wondered why human techs were allowed to stomp and shed their way through those delicate, information-rich landscapes. And if human investigators had to be there-a case could still be made for that-there were plastic suits designed to protect cops from contamination, and protect the evidence from the dusty, hairy, sweaty presence of cops.
The food square at the back of the hall was fenced by black ropes and guarded by another phalanx of security, perhaps the most impressive and vigilant. Their job was to wave off conventioneers without food privileges: press, day-trippers, salespeople.
She wove through clusters of diners grazing off the buffet-chatting, balancing glasses and plastic plates-then proceeded to the end of the C aisle, where she was scheduled to be a star speaker. Her future boss, Stan Philips, stood under a simple black banner with a company logo printed in silver-gray: BLUE EYES EXECUTIVE SERVICES.
A little platform had been set up to one side of the booth. Within sight of the food. Terrific. She would be competing with steam tables and salad bars.
Stan was with a tall fellow in a dark gray suit. This made Stan look shorter than his five feet eight inches. The tall fellow had thick brown hair; Stan's hair was sallow and wispy. The tall fellow's voice deep and hard to make out over the noise in the hall. Stan, as usual, was mostly listening. Stan seldom expressed his opinions unless pressed. That was one reason he liked Rebecca and she got along with him. She was taciturn but not silent. Stan was often too quiet, and that confused their clients, who seemed to think they were paying for words, not results.
Stan introduced Rebecca to the tall fellow. He was some official or another from some agency or another and he was here at the show hoping to find better employment.
"I'm interested in art security," the man said. "I hear you guys are pretty good at protection and provenance. I did undergrad work in art history at Long Beach State."
Rebecca shut off her ears and locked in her smile. Nodding to the conversational beats, she turned her sharp green eyes to a small group gathered in front of the lectern. Four guys in suits. Small groups made her more nervous than large ones.
She wished she were somewhere else-maybe over by the steam table, picking through the General Tso's chicken, pepper beef and broccoli, green onion pancakes and mu shu sauce. Or sitting in the audience across the exhibit floor, listening to Captain Periglas's presentation.
She sucked in her breath, wanting simply to be with her captain, with her prospective daughter, to be far, far away-in a small house, mortgage paid off, easy to clean, a simple garden.
Maybe the young male agents were right about women after all. It was a lovely vision.
Stan handed the tall man a card and suggested he join the her audience. "Rebecca's got a great take on high-tech security," he said. "Worth hearing."
Rebecca clutched her hands in front of her, waiting for the clock to tick over. In the corner of her eye, she noticed a knot of activity around the no-host bar on the northern side of the catering square. Three young men and two women in black-and-white uniforms were talking and pointing to something behind the bar.
One young man knelt out of sight and then stood, frowning and holding out his hand.
She tried to read his lips.
He might have been saying, It's cold.
She tuned into the louder voice of the female bar tender. "It's just Coke. Maybe it's fizzing."
They seemed more puzzled than worried. But a long line of customers was getting impatient.
Something was not right.
She turned from the tall man, muttered something to Stan, and pushed under the rope to walk toward the bar. One of the security guards arrived three steps ahead of her: short, middle-aged, Hispanic, with a round face and smart black eyes that probably missed nothing.
"Is there a problem?" he asked.
Rebecca stood back respectfully.
"Something weird with our syrup canisters," the male bartender said.
"It's just Coke!" the female bartender insisted.
"It's cycling hot and cold," the male said. "I've never seen it do that." His voice squeaked, and somehow that made it real.
Rebecca met the eyes of the guard and they exchanged a look. The guard knelt behind the bar. He touched stainless steel canister and jerked back his hand.
"Hot," he said.
Six other canisters waited their turn, lined up to the left side of the black-draped bar.
"It's just Coke," the female bartender insisted once more, face pinched. So many tips just lined up and waiting.
The catering supervisor ran with short, quick steps from the rear of the hall-like a small, unhappy dog-and stood aside, chin in hand, as the male bartender filled him in.
The supervisor looked provoked. "There can't possibly be a problem," he announced. "All our supplies go through half a dozen security checkpoints. This is the most secure place in Los Angeles."
The canisters had frosted over-all seven of them.
Rebecca saw it happen.
Cycling.
Had she been a spaniel, she would have gone on point. The guard had the same reaction-not ESP, just a prickle of cop sense.
She stood beside the guard and said in a low voice, "Let's clear the hall."
The catering supervisor listened in dismay and was about to pitch a fit, but the guard nodded agreement with Rebecca and held up a thick strong brown hand-right in the supervisor's face.
Then he pressed a red button on his old-fashioned lapel mike.
"Shit!" the supervisor shouted, throwing up his arms.
An alarm sounded throughout the building.
A loud, female robo-voice echoed under the steel beam roof. "This is an emergency. Leave all personal belongings and evacuate the convention center immediately. Proceed to any exit marked by a flashing green light. Gather at staging areas designated by mall security and await-"
"Get out of here," the guard said to the bartenders and wait staff. Looking pointedly at Rebecca, he added, "You too. Everybody."
The female bartender squeaked "What the fuck?" and then broke into a run. The catering supervisor held his ground, his jaw muscles practically convulsing.
Rebecca swiveled to face the booth and Stan and the five men waiting for her talk. She gestured to Stan-an emphatic, double-handed wave.
"Clear out!" she called, then ran for the far exit.
Her left pump wobbled and the heel snapped.
She kept running.
Something intense going on in those cylinders. Probably nothing. Just Coke. But endothermic, exothermic.
Her broken heel and something like instinct jigged her left and she got the black LAPD bomb truck between her and the bar.
She remembered a cat she had seen as a child, hunkering wide-eyed in the middle of a dirt road just before it was run over by a taxi. Not enough time. A kind of curious, helpless calm.
Rebecca got down on her knees and then fell on the shiny concrete floor, the edge of red carpet.
She drew her arm over her face.
Sound.
No other word for it.
It came as a rocky wall, bigger and hotter than she could have imagined. The windows and meeting rooms and the roof above them lifted and vanished in a gray pall of smoke pierced by white flame.
The big black truck parted the blast wave.
The searing hand of a very bad thing scooped her up and flipped her over like a burger. People, tables, booths to either side simply whisked away.
The last thing Rebecca Rose remembered, before the man with the ginger hair came back to find her, was that huge truck and three or four men in black uniforms flying and twisting over her head.
The truck bent in the middle and fell on her.
Ribs snapped like sticks under a boot.
The pain was unbelievable.
Nathaniel felt the concrete dust sift and settle on his head and shoulders, cake around his eyes. This time he imagined nothing. It had happened for real, almost exactly as he had pictured it-including the puffs from the shattered atrium windows.
Gray and black people rushed past, trying to escape the falling chunks, the wailing sirens and automatic alarm voices.
Nathaniel's senses jammed with observations, like a flood under a bridge carrying sharp, spiky logs. The flood keyed into his innate sense of self-preservation-so many fright bells ringing.
As he walked under the twisted beams, feet crunching through diamonds of glass-and as he climbed the groaning, shuddering escalator and the cracked concrete steps, counting each step, he again felt a surge of deep somatic fear-this time warning against the sharp draining of his physical and mental energy, like a dying battery-as well as the noise and the darkness.
All that imagining had worn him down and might have cost him what needed to stay alive.
I can't stop thinking. There won't be enough blood sugar left to keep my heart pumping.
The roof over the main exhibit hall had collapsed. Fire and rescue teams pushed through the fog of smoke and dust. Nobody was interested in keeping people out. Cordons had not yet been established.
Nathaniel walked steadily toward the center of the chaos. He could see the causal knots loosen, then tighten again. All of it made weird sense. His body screamed outrage that he would have to experience everything awful twice from now on.
But he knew who had done this. He knew who was ultimately responsible.
The Quiet Man-or Jones, if that was possible-had anticipated problems and assigned Nathaniel a task: to pass along something important. He had done so.
But all of it would be futile unless Rebecca Rose was still alive.
Rebecca couldn't take a deep breath without something driving into her chest, like a belt of nails cinched tight.
Water underneath.
Dark behind, light in front.
She had somehow crawled into a cave and got stuck.
Awful noisy, for a cave. Too confused.
She tried to open her eyes but got grit in them, and then keeping them shut hurt as well.
People were banging and turning on big motors and there was lots of yelling and even screaming.
At first, she could not bring her hands up to her face to rub her eyes. She kept wriggling. The scariest noise of all was the sound of metal above groaning like a huge dog.
The belt cinched tighter and she gasped.
All right. She was not getting out of this place-cave or whatever-without assistance. She needed to pull her arm around and push it forward. Someone at the mouth of the cave might see her fingers twitching-they must be close, she could see light.
More motors, engines, very big, and a banshee screech of cut metal. She imagined circular saw blades and sparks flying and then it struck her this couldn't be a cave. Her mind just couldn't fix on where she was, where she had been before, how she had gotten into this fix.
The water was warming. She smelled smoke. A lot of smoke and heat. Okay, definitely not a cave-a roof had collapsed. She had been in her office or maybe her hotel room. She had been in the gym, strapping on her new pumps, the ones that had been comfortable at first, but then the soles had squeaked and the heel had come loose and she had walked in circles to the left…
Los Angeles. She was on the west coast.
Earthquake seemed likely. The floor was still trembling. Big earthquake and a collapsed building. Concrete dust. Heat from a fire.
Periglas. The executive officer of the Robert Heinlein. He had looked nervous, seeing her. Maybe we shouldn't all be in the same place.
Why had he said that? Had he said that?
They had been in the food court of the convention center. She had seen him there for just a few minutes, touched his hand, moved on…
Ended up here.
Flat as a bug.
No. They had got together for dinner. A late dinner. She had placed a call to the adoption center. Everything was on track. She had told Periglas about her wish to adopt-she had spoken of it while they were in bed.
He had looked at her and smiled.
Ah, Christ, she thought. Stupid, stupid!
A hideous noise very close vibrated everything and made her teeth hurt.
BLAM-and then the sound of a saw cutting through rebar. Somewhere, they were using a CIRT pounder to blast a hole through concrete with shotgun shells for hammers. What did CIRT mean?
She couldn't remember.
Controller Impact Rescue Tool.
"Atta girl," she whispered. "Nine thousand acronyms in the naked city. This is just one."
Someone was in worse trouble than she was.
The mass above her lifted a few fractions of an inch, and she could push her arm around and touch her nose, pressed into the concrete, water up one nostril.
She managed to pry open one eye and wipe it with a finger, enough to get the big chunks of grit off her lower lid. Somehow she dipped a finger in the flowing water and washed that eye, not much improvement, but now she could look out to the light and see smoke-hazy shapes moving.
All right.
What next?
Voices over the noise. Someone calling, "Anybody down there? If you can't talk, try to cough. We know it's tough. We're working."
Mary, I know you're out there waiting for me to come and help make a home.
God, I hate bombs.
Okay then. It had been a bomb-a big one. A gigantic Coke bomb, seven cans full, maybe more, first hot, then cold, whatever that meant. She had never heard of anything like it. Maybe she was still squashing memories and images together. A visit to the no-host bar, a peek behind: frost and fire.
"Give us a sign!"
"I'm down here!" she moaned. "Get this shit off of me."
The weight lifted another inch and she turned her head to look straight out at the triangle of light. Where she could manage to focus, she saw a mound of white girders, parts burned gray, and chunks of stuff all different colors.
Red.
Lots of red.
Maybe she had wiped blood and not water on her eye.
Then a different shade of red, blurry and smaller, and below it, a face.
"I know you," said a man's voice, and she saw a well-meaning smile. "You're Rebecca. Say something, Rebecca."
"Ten, nine, eight, seven…" She imagined herself walking backward down the steps, counting, on her way out of the Los Angeles Convention center, about to go home.
"That's it. Keep talking. We're going to get this whopping big truck off of you."
"Truck?"
She remembered more. Flying truck.
The face went away and came back.
Ginger hair, tan coat.
"I know you," she said. "Your name is Trace. Nathaniel Trace."
"Sorry to have frightened you earlier. I'd like to have another word with you, Rebecca. If that's all right. Not right now, but when… you're free."
"Very funny."
Trace's smile was brilliant. He was not an ugly man, even with those scars.
"They're going to get you out," he said. "I see it happening. We'll talk soon."
The scarred face under the ginger hair pulled back and away. The giant blades of a fork lift moved slowly to within six or eight inches of her head. The blades lifted. Someone kicked a wooden block into the growing gap. The blades lifted again. Stuff shifted. The whole thing on top of her screamed and groaned, as if the big old black truck was still alive but trying to die.
Bomb truck.
Another groan, another wooden block, and then scraping cinder blocks. A fireman in a bright yellow rubber coat, face coated with soot, pushed between the blocks and got right up next to her.
They could have kissed.
"I hate bombs," she said.
"Me too, beautiful," he said. "Can you move your legs? Move your legs for me, honey."
She wanted to cry, that sounded so wonderful. Someone still cared. "I'll try."
"There's a lot of blood down here. Are you bleeding?"
"I don't know. I think I busted some ribs."
"You sound strong. Couple of more heaves, then we'll get it stable and I'll come back for you."
"Don't leave!"
The fireman winked and pulled out. Her foot felt like it was on fire. She tried to move her legs and could not. Other firemen moved in and more blocks were positioned.
In a compartment directly over her head, something big and hard fell with a nauseating clang followed by a prolonged, metallic fingernail screech. Rebecca tried not to think how many tons, where it might be balanced, how a robot in its lair-or a bomb tech's broken body-could suddenly lurch and upset the entire balance.
There was commotion beyond the triangle of light. Boots thumped past, raising puffs of acrid gray dust. She blinked rapidly, trying to focus. The bottom curve of a huge tire rolled by, followed by another, and another.
Big truck. Big crane. That made her feel better. How in hell could they get it in through all the debris?
Let them do their work.
She realized she had tensed all over, trying to keep the weight from closing in. That wasn't helpful. The tension of a tiny, trapped blob of protoplasm wasn't going to make any difference.
She relaxed, closed her eyes, let out her breath in a jagged sigh.
It was going to be a long night.
Washington, D.C.
Alicia Kunsler's armored limo pulled away from Reagan National and took an unexpected direction-to Dulles.
William sat beside her in the backseat, watching the Beltway give way to fields and forest land. He knew she had other things on her mind and had met him at the airport to save time.
The news from Spider/Argus had cast a pall. Kunsler had filled him in a little-just enough to both depress him and pique curiosity.
"I had a call yesterday from deputy director Scholes, west coast," she said. "He tells me they have reliable intel that Nabokov is in bed with the enemy. He's playing us. They're working under the assumption that the mission is compromised."
William half closed his eyes and both snorted and shivered. His shoulders seemed to shrug this off, and then he straightened in the seat and stared out the window.
"Credible?" he asked.
"No. Hell, I don't know-we haven't heard anything since Thursday. But the Bureau has two heads, and right now, Alameda is feeling threatened-low men on the funding pole. Scholes is working hard to squash me. This could be his best hammer yet."
"Maybe you should let me know who it is we're trying to save," William said.
"Not relevant."
"If I know him-"
"Not relevant, Agent Griffin. The less you know, the safer your career. If I go down, I can cut you loose with minimal damage."
"After all of this, why would Nabokov give in to Price?" William asked. "What's their theory?"
"They feel the Saudis are working hard to reverse the Arabian revolution-and they're looking for a U.S. connection. A point of leverage. Bureau East has been working on that assumption for a year, against Alameda's steadfast resistance-but now they've flipped. They agree, but they're playing it against us. Price has a long relationship with the royal family. Nabokov is a Muslim."
"Which is how he got into Talos in the first place."
"Yeah. Scholes thinks they've turned him," Kunsler said. "His thinking is clouded, to say the least-Muslim equals traitor. Unfortunately, Scholes has political cover with a senior senator who went to Harvard with the AG, who gets along very well with the Israeli lobby and who, incidentally, hates Muslims-in private, of course. Fortunately, Spider/Argus is still on our side, and they have a lot of influence. We need Nabokov's information-now. We're trying to figure a workaround. Maybe two."
Rain dotted the thick glass. The limo rumbled and hissed over the wet roadway.
Kunsler broke the quiet. "Now listen close. There's something else bad-but also good. You worked with Rebecca Rose, right?"
"I did," William said. "What about her?"
"She survived the convention center bombing."
"Jesus!" William said, with a blunt nerve buzz of genuine shock.
"Two hundred others didn't. I'll be meeting her tomorrow in LA."
William remembered his last days at the FBI Academy in Quantico, coming into the trainee lounge and watching on TV the Washington state blast that had mortally wounded his father. Rebecca Rose had been there, as well, and survived.
He had met her on that case-and they had joined the group that had traveled to Mecca. Everything seemed to be orbiting around the Middle East yet again.
He didn't like that one bit.
He kept his voice flat. "How is she?"
His tone didn't fool Kunsler. "Light concussion. Cracked ribs. Sprained ankle. I'm delivering her new orders-straight from the president. And not without qualms, even though that will chap Scholes's ass-which is always fun. This mess is getting thick as pea soup. But there's nothing we can do until we retrieve Nabokov."
"Give her my regards," William said.
"Don't be stupid," Kunsler said. "Why should I know you from Adam? You're just a lowly agent slogging along with a losing team. The team that's close to being out of a job."
William looked chagrined.
"What do you know about Little Jamey?" she asked.
"Only what was in the news," he said.
Little Jamey Trues was the son of Reggie Trues, Special Agent in Charge of the El Paso Division of the FBI. He had been arrested and charged with first degree murder in Lion City, Texas. He had shot his best friend, the son of Lion City's mayor, with a small pistol, in the friend's bedroom. Both boys had been thirteen at the time.
The mayor was a good friend of Axel Price.
The shooting had been ruled an accident by both the Texas Rangers and the FBI, but the Lion County coroner's office had declared it premeditated homicide.
A Lion City jury of twelve older white men had convicted Little Jamey and sentenced him to death at the Walls Unit in Huntsville. Everybody in the agency had been shocked by the blatant miscarriage of justice-but were powerless to act. The federal government was on borrowed time in that part of Texas, many said. The U.S. of A. couldn't pay its bills.
Alaska, California, and Idaho were already talking seriously about breaking up into separate economic units-New Republics, they hoped to call themselves. The fate of an agent's adolescent son seemed a trivial lump in the awful stew.
"Bad times in a bad town," William said.
Kunsler jammed her eyebrows together. "Well, some in the Bureau haven't been so philosophical. A few agents and former agents in Washington have unofficially arranged for a cockamamie rescue. A real tour de forcemeat. But bold, I'll say that. If it's carried out, I suspect everyone on the ground will end up dead or paraded around in cages down the streets of Lion City.
"I've sequestered the agent who was planning and directing the rescue. I know most of the others, where they're stationed and what stage they're at-just a couple of days from carrying out the plan. I was on the brink of hauling them in and stripping their credentials too, but now…"
She looked up. "I think we might have a use for Little Jamey Trues. Like to hear more?"
William's heart sank. He had suspected for several months now that Nabokov was actually Fouad Al-Husam. Jane Rowland was part of this investigation-he had known that for some time. And now it seemed Kunsler was about to expand William's role in the operation.
They made up three out of the four agents who had taken part in the Mecca operation.
The fourth was Rebecca Rose.
He did not like revisiting the past. Taking a second look at FBI history had ended up killing his father. And of course it was history that had dragged them to Mecca in the first place.
"Okay," he said. "Where do I fit in?"
Long Beach, California
Nathaniel Trace waited inside his childhood home for the next prostitute to show.
He wanted to learn what level of self-control he possessed at this point in his unfolding. That was how he thought of it now; unfolding, pushing through the pupa case and spreading his wings, pumping them until they were broad and stiff, letting them set in the dry air, ready for flight.
Plain to see, the first prostitute-a skinny brunette with a wide, pretty smile and haunted eyes-had been abused since childhood. Nathaniel found he could not engage the proper responses with someone who had such a history. The hooker's counter to his lack of enthusiasm was sadly professional. She suggested an interesting catalog of circumstances and techniques, but Nathaniel had fixated on the fact that she could not-or deliberately would not-share pleasure. Working in the sex trade had made her numb.
It wasn't that professionals rarely enjoyed their work. He recognized her symptoms. She had PTSD.
He tipped her a thousand dollars and she left the house without a backward glance.
Nathaniel would not allow himself to fly if he thought he didn't have the necessary control. Was he like a child, working to acquire new instincts and training-or a passionless demon waiting to explode?
As far as he was concerned, that first encounter had taught him only part of what he needed to know. It was not that he cared about those around him. He did not even much care what happened to himself. But he had set his own ground rules early on, when he realized what he was becoming:
A building without walls. A mountain without rocks. A storm without winds. A drunkboat without a compass.
So far he had not exhibited the psychopathic tendencies Jerry Lee had spoken of, but that did not mean they weren't there. The difficult thing about his present situation was he could not predict his own behavior.
And so he would try one more time.
The house stood on a quiet street in a century-old neighborhood in Long Beach, California. There had been a few changes since his boyhood, but the lineaments were the same. His parents had died in a car crash on their way to ski at Big Bear. The house had been sold and he had moved to Costa Mesa to live with his aunt in a dingy, cramped apartment.
A year ago, while recovering in Baltimore, he had purchased the house outright from its then-owner, without knowing why. The house's history carried no sentiment for him but now that he was here he could, if he wished, unroll his childhood like a spool of film, shining on each frame a precision torch that had little to do with real human needs… See it all in full motion and vivid color, but spotty sound.
The house was teaching him how to access his past more efficiently.
Late last night, he had replayed the convention center blast and tried to rewind his emotions. That triggered another change. Deep ennui rolled in. He cared about nothing. This was probably a delayed effect of smoke and fire and bodies-so much larger than the atrocity in Arabia Deserta, though this time he had not been badly hurt-just a few scratches.
Even so, he could almost feel Mariposa working to separate his echoing emotions into manageable chunks.
Though wide awake, he had hardly moved for several hours. Somewhere in that void was when the Quiet Man called and left a message on his EPR cell.
Coming out of fugue just before dawn, he idly keyed in his ID and retrieved the message. The Quiet Man's voice was steady. "Dr. Plover says he gave you the materials. You invited the others, and that upset the doctor-but it's probably for the best. Be careful with those aliases. They may be using parts of Jones to track us. We have nine days before MSARC kicks in. They already know where I am, of course. Jones will not tell me who was responsible for the convention center bombs, but I suspect he knows-and that means we know. I believe Nick is dead. This is the last time I will call. Good luck, Nathaniel."
Nathaniel shut off the phone and stared through the front window, between the gauze curtains, at the growing light on the quiet street.
Low on cash after his exorbitant tip, he had paid the second escort service in advance-three hundred dollars-using one of three credit cards registered to Robert Sangstrom.
Robert Sangstrom had recently flown from Dubai to Los Angeles-just after Nathaniel Trace skipped out of the unscheduled meeting at the Ziggurat.
Nathaniel could see everything so clearly now.
The next stage of the game was inevitable, and there was scant time to prepare.
Late in the morning, while waiting for the second prostitute to show, he used an old computer in the attic apartment, once rented to students attending Long Beach State. Routing through a skeleton server in Bangladesh, he employed a former Talos student's log-in code for the Survival Education Group-not a heavily secured site-to study online manuals on self-defense and close-in combat. The manuals were part of a mandatory Talos training program.
In the army, he had not done well in martial arts. Talos had tried again to persuade him-and the rest of the Turing group-that everyone must know how to fight hand-to-hand in several different ways. All seven had flunked, but the manuals were clearly illustrated and quite good.
His entire body began to imagine the situations described and depicted. His head hurt again, and then his arms, his legs, his back.
Muscles tensed and relaxed.
He stood and lifted his arms. He could feel the burn-and a weird sense of anger directed at his faltering will. Physical training was a lengthy, focused process involving coordination between brain, nerves, muscles. But Nathaniel was now aware that learning also sacrificed conservative elements-parts of his body that did not wish to learn, that actively objected to learning; perhaps because the learning process would lead to these habits, tissues, neural partnerships and accommodations, being phased out.
Learning was like revolution, and the body hated change.
Aches, throbs, twinges, sharp jabs-all became a sign of success, as long as he didn't get lost in the cycle of regrowth, retraining. Like a horse spurred by its rider until it joyously ran itself to death-or leaped over a cliff.
He closed his eyes and controlled the endorphin rush; otherwise they would wash over him and leave him groggy.
Still, the prostitute did not show.
Lunch consisted of a half cup of shortening, a bowl of pasta without sauce, two candy bars, and a long slug of Gatorade. On that diet he did not piss purple, but for half an hour, he smelled terrible.
Something like ketosis, he suspected.
After thirty minutes and what passed for digestion, he tried out some basic physical moves-bracing, angling, kicking, striking. He would have to be careful not to injure himself. The body already felt too confident.
Mistakenly judging that weeks of intense training had passed, it knew it was ready. In reality, his body learned different things at different rates, The connection between sight-learning, text-learning, and actual physical action was unpredictable. He would not know how much he had absorbed, or how effectively, until the kick-in moment, triggered by real physical stress.
Danger to life and limb.
The prostitute was now two hours late. That was interesting, but not irritating. He could completely control his sense of passing time.
He had put on an exercise suit, black with red trim. Tight clothing bothered him. He preferred going naked, though for some reason did not like looking in mirrors. What he saw seemed inadequate compared to how he felt. His body had too much shape, its proportions were too fixed.
Intellect-the rules of the game-would have to make up for what he now lacked: social instinct, behavioral boundaries. A couple of days ago, he had been worried that everything he had ever been-all his memories, possibly even his physical form-would be erased and his life would become a blank tablet in the hands of an idiot with a big piece of chalk.
But the memories remained. He did not turn into a pile of mush. He just lacked perspective on what to do with what he had, and certainly how to feel about it.
Take Rebecca Rose, for example.
He had risked his life to find her in the collapsed convention center-and not just to make sure Plover's information reached its intended destination.
He had anonymously checked on her in the hospital.
Why?
Three hours late.
More than interesting; intriguing. The first woman had been spot on time.
He sat in on the back porch, face bathed in sunny warmth, eyes closed, muscles twitching.
When dog legs twitch, we think they're dreaming of chasing rabbits. What if they're actually dreaming of being in a big number in a Busby Berkley musical?
Who would ever know?
The doorbell rang.
Nathaniel opened his eyes, got up from the chair, returned to the kitchen, pushed through the swinging door into the dining room, and crossed the maple floor around the heavy oak table. He smiled at the shushing sound his slippered feet made on the wood, and how that was silenced by the oriental carpet in the entry, behind the old Craftsman front door with the three crackle glaze windows.
He unlatched the brass viewport. A woman in her early thirties stood outside, squinting at the afternnon glow over the surrounding houses, filtered through the trees: the famous golden hour.
She was attractive enough, with regular features-but other than that, nothing like the first.
He closed the viewport and took a deep breath.
All wrong.
Looking back at prostitutes he had been with in his youthful Army days and in France, Russia, and in Dubai-again, in full color and full motion, like playing back a video-he saw them frayed like tattered velveteen rabbits, hard-used, eyes haunted, subjected to the worst that men had to offer and too often left out, left behind. They had made themselves into closeted sweatshops of poorly manufactured lust, painted over, shaved, and discouraged. Some had decent acting skills, but the bloom was off their rose and they knew it; they knew their clocks were running out.
The woman waiting on the other side of the door dressed the part but had clear, sure eyes and a quality of skin-pellucid freshness rather than powdered pallor.
More than likely, Nathaniel guessed-though he would not call it guessing-she was ex-military, sleek and confident and fit. He compared her with the woman who had been part of the group in the Ziggurat-on the security camera, requesting entrance to his condo. Likely the same. Talos was expending huge resources to find him.
Nathaniel's next test would be to stay alive for more than a few more minutes.
The day before, he had walked around the yard visually mapping the neighboring houses, counting the windows, the doors-and now they lit up in his mind's eye. He saw the house and its environs as if in an isometric projection.
He shaped avenues of escape.
In the ten seconds since ringing the doorbell, the woman had grown restless. He could see her by listening to her movements.
With a rueful smile, he suggested to the new masters of his body that superpowers would be cool-true X-ray vision, the ears of a bat, the nose of a dog. But nothing against the laws of physics had arrived with the relaxing of his prior limitations.
No avoiding a fight. Here it was.
Nathaniel opened the door. The woman swung her head to look at him but held her body sideways like a fencer-keeping a line of fire open.
Someone was drawing a bead from across the street.
"Mr. Sangstrom?" she asked.
She had killed before. She was used to killing.
"That's me," he said, and opened the screen door.
They were roughly of a height, to his advantage. He kept his center axis aligned with hers to discourage an easy shot.
"I've never done this sort of thing," he said.
"Of course not." She smiled brightly, eyes measuring relevant distances with saccadic micro-movements. "May I come in?"
She wore a coat over a short red dress. Sensible walking shoes, no high heels or pumps. "I took a bus and then walked," she said. "Good for the legs." She lifted her bag, catching the hem of the coat and revealing fit calves. "I brought high heels. If you want, I can put them on."
"I am putty in your hands," Nathaniel said.
Her eyes turned sharp, like a cat about to leap.
Crazy confidence flooded him. At the last instant, he decided nobody would die. He would escape, they would have no idea where he had gone, and the team they had assigned to catch or kill him would survive-mostly intact. He could see it, almost experience it-run it through on a loop.
Edit the mistakes.
Just for fun. But there's something else, isn't there? You're free of every human emotion but two: pride-and curiosity.
The woman stepped around the screen door with the quick grace of a dancer-or a trained Navy Seal.
"Hold on a moment," he said. "That's my phone."
He let the screen door go and it started to swing shut.
She dropped her bag, blocking it. Her left hand flew toward the bridge of his nose. He feinted. Her right hand, edge on, came around to wedge him in the throat or fist him behind his jaw-or failing that, drop and hit him just below the sternum.
She missed.
Time slowed-nothing new. He had seen it before in in Iraq and Arabia Deserta. What astonished him was how much slower time seemed now, slower even than it had been at the LA Convention Center -and how much more it hurt at a deep level as he almost instantly burned through the ATP in his brain, the energy in his nerves.
He increased his heart rate to replenish blood flow.
The woman avoided his first rounding kick, which would easily have knocked her legs out from under her-but not the higher, faster second. His slippered foot took her under her raised arm, emptying her lungs with a whoosh and slamming her into the left doorframe.
She slumped like a sack.
His groin muscles wanted to spasm. He didn't allow it.
He was now exposed to the street, but jumped back and to his right. A bullet shnizzed just under his extended arm and blew a tan puff of splinters from a beam.
He kept going.
The white curtains drawn across the front windows covered his movement, but the sniper followed a probable trajectory and sent three more shots through the glass.
Close, very close. But seeing it all as if in film previews, Nathaniel had dropped to the floor-so fast he almost dislocated his hip.
He could feel his arm muscles start to rip.
No brakes.
His internal narration-the amused, wise old professional voice said, He lands in a crouch, drops, and slithers into the dining room, away from the backdoor, where others now enter.
The large bay window in the dining room reached over the walkway on the left side of the house. He lifted aside a chair, silent as a snake, and crawled under the heavy table.
One man's denim-clad legs appeared in the swinging door to the kitchen. The man pushed the door wide with one hand. The other hand no doubt held a gun-a pistol.
Nathaniel heard quiet movement down the middle hall-coming in on another route from the back porch. Heavier footsteps sent quivers along the wooden floor boards.
These two would form a pincer.
He squatted, braced, and shouldered the entire table like Atlas, tilting and shoving it into six rapid pistol shots from the man in the kitchen door-one of which penetrated the table's dense wood and grazed his shoulder.
The table pressed the shooter's arm against the door frame, bending it until it snapped it like a tree branch. Pinned, the man would not move-certainly not for the next few seconds.
Nathaniel was now exposed from the rear, but the man in the hall had not yet reached the living room-no doubt taking a couple of crucial seconds to assess the condition of his female colleague outside.
Nathaniel moved flat along the wall that paralleled the middle hall and retrieved an iron elephant bookend from the top of the built-in cupboard. With a bent grin, he watched the assailant's hand come into view, guessed the height of his head, and round-housed the bookend not into the man's face-no fatalities-but level with the jaw and the neck.
The man was fast but the elephant dropped him like a brick.
By now, the sniper and other team members would be up on the front porch.
Nathaniel returned to the dining room, lifted the oak table by its central pillar-ignoring another blaze of pain-rotated the three hundred pounds, easy-peasy, and heaved it through the bay window.
Broken arm released, the pinned man fell with a scream. The kitchen door swished back and hit his head.
He grunted and stopped screaming.
Nathaniel jumped after the table, through the shattered panes of glass. Table and body landed in the side oleanders in a painful tangle. He extricated himself and lurched to the right, around the back-behind other houses, through other yards.
One last bullet cracked, a wild shot inside the house.
Some blocks away, limping toward Long Beach Boulevard and a city bus or taxi, Nathaniel assessed the damage.
Not good.
He was thirty-seven years old, not in prime condition, and this was going to hurt like hell for days, maybe weeks. Nothing broken, however, and no bullet holes-just a few cuts in his forehead and arms and a graze that had already caked over.
He stopped by a curb and leaned on a signpost and started to laugh. The laugh sounded like a leopard's cough in a bad jungle night.
No ordinary humor-not even satisfaction at having survived an attempt on his life. A man who took no heed of pain or fear was in real danger.
He had to find a place to lie low and recuperate.
Los Angeles, California
"Rebecca!"
Rebecca swung into her hospital room on new crutches.
Three men and a woman stood by her empty bed. She knew Hiram Newsome, former director of the FBI and her onetime rabbi and mentor in the Bureau.
His friends had always called him News, even during his tenure as director.
She recognized Deputy Director Alicia Kunsler from their earlier days in the FBI, when they had worked together several times. Kunsler looked mannish and frumpy-short-cut dark hair, pale skin, small, discerning eyes, square in all her angles.
The short, long-armed and short-legged forty-something male was Ruben Scholes, Deputy Director of the Bureau in Transition West. His friends reportedly called him Monk, but a slippery grasp on power was losing him most of those friends.
The true-blue grapevine-backed by an extensive series of articles in NYT Online-told of bad blood between the Scholes and Kunsler, not surprising, since they were jockeying for ultimate control of the Bureau.
The second woman, a thin-faced, aquiline blond in her early thirties, wore a green pantsuit and pale gray shoes. Behind her thin and impressive nose followed a sharply attractive face.
They had never met and Rebecca did not recognize her.
News stepped forward and hugged Rebecca gingerly. She pulled in her crutches, looking in puzzlement over his shoulder at Kunsler.
"You're on God's payroll now, Rebecca," News said. "I hear a truck flipped over on you."
"And part of a roof," the blond said.
"I'm okay," Rebecca said. "Just a few cracked ribs and a sprained ankle."
News pulled back. "I don't believe you've met Shawna Prouse, JTTF Los Angeles, SAC of the convention center bombing investigation." SAC-he pronounced it letter by letter-meant Special Agent in Charge. "Agent Prouse, Rebecca Rose. You know our east and west coast directors."
"Pleasure," Rebecca said. "I wasn't expecting a reception committee. They serve Jell-O in fifteen minutes."
"Not much in the way of visible damage," Scholes said, touching his own left cheek.
Rebecca started to lift a hand, then stopped herself. "They're removing the specks this afternoon," she said. "The burn marks should fade."
"Can't imagine," Scholes said. "I'd need counseling, at the very least."
Rebecca swallowed and looked plaintively at News. His hound-jowled expression told him he could not save her.
"News has been kind enough to fly in from Virginia for this meeting," Kunsler said.
"At Deputy Director Kunsler's request," Scholes added as if that was important.
"This is a meeting?" Rebecca asked, little-girl innocent. She crutched past them and sat on the bed, propping her braced and bandaged leg on a plastic stool. "It's great to see News again, but I've been debriefed half a dozen times-at least four times by your own people, Agent Prouse. I'm squeezed dry."
"This time, I'm here to give you information," Prouse said. "Let's start with the bombs." She laid her slate on the bed. "We've got an early report. What took the roof off the Los Angeles Convention Center was a device made of sugar, nitrogen, and a load of phosphate."
"Coke syrup?" Rebecca asked.
"With something new mixed in," Prouse said. "It's called a synthobe. A small, minimum genome synthetic microbe tailored to carry out specific chemical reactions. Used for industrial applications, mostly. Not really alive-can't reproduce. The synthobe kills itself, or deactivates, after getting the job done."
Rebecca felt an angry flush creep up her face. The burned patch on her jaw and cheek started to throb. "Some job," she said.
"Turns out twenty-eight of the canisters brought in for the convention by the catering company were inoculated with synthobes. The sealed canisters compounded the effect. Pressurized with nitrogen. The synthobes converted nitrogen, sugar, a trace of phosphate, and certain additives into a highly explosive gel. Security didn't detect any of this because this kind of bomb doesn't contain an explosive until all the ingredients are combined.
"The gel is heavier than water and it sinks to the bottom of the canister. It rises in temperature just before the explosion. Becomes as sensitive as old nitro. When it goes off, it instantly superheats the water to steam and compounds the force.
"We don't have a chain of possession established, but we're working on it," Prouse finished.
Rebecca looked out the window. "Any idea who's that clever?"
"Half a dozen going concerns, most of them in Belarus or North Korea," Prouse said. "A few more in Russia. One, very likely, in Haiti or the Dominican Republic."
Scholes looked concerned, as he would be expected to.
News and Kunsler were stone-faced.
Scholes said, "You mentioned before the blast, a self-proclaimed former agent met you outside the exhibition hall, and that he helped rescue you after."
"Ginger-haired fellow," Newsome said. He was obviously here as her advocate. That meant she was either in trouble or something strange was in the wind. "Dumpy, disheveled. You didn't think he looked FBI."
"Bureau," Scholes corrected.
"I only remember a little," Rebecca said, massaging her upper calf. "What about him?"
"You said he called himself Trace. Nathaniel Trace. There's never been an agent with that name," Scholes said. "And he wasn't registered at the convention. He must have been using someone else's badge."
News was getting irritated. "This is all well away from our mission."
"You were at COPES about to give a presentation, when the bombs went off," Prouse said. "You had clearance from the Bureau."
"Yes."
"From Deputy Director Kunsler?"
"From the former director, actually-before he resigned," Rebecca said.
"What's your current status, Ms. Rose?" Scholes asked.
"She's on indefinite furlough," Kunsler said. "Rebecca checked into the Los Angeles office before attending COPES and cleared her speech with your people. You have that on record, I'm sure."
"You've been out of action for eleven months," Scholes said. "What was your speech about, Ms. Rose?"
"Surveillance technologies."
Scholes took Prouse's notes and looked them over with pursed lips, then passed the slate to Kunsler. Rebecca saw she was being tag-teamed, almost-but not quite-as if she were a suspect.
"You met up with Captain Peter Periglas the night before. Drinks and dinner?" Scholes asked.
"We met up," Rebecca said.
"And he accompanied you to your room."
Rebecca did not blink. "He did," she said.
"You were involved in the clandestine Mecca operation. Both of you."
"I can only-"
Scholes's dark eyes flashed. "I am here to background an executive request. Did you and Periglas publicly discuss your work in Mecca?"
"Just by allusion," Rebecca said.
"What's that mean?" Scholes asked.
"We alluded to it indirectly. Peter-Captain Periglas-said that maybe we shouldn't be seen together." Rebecca bit the inside of her cheek. The "executive request" remark puzzled her. They were saving something for last.
Kunsler might be sympathetic, but Rebecca had never felt comfortable with FBI management-except News. "Did Captain Periglas say he had been approached by anyone regarding Mecca?" Kunsler asked.
"No."
"Why was he at COPES?"
"Representing a security consulting firm with navy contracts."
"Building better brigs?" Scholes said.
"Goddammit," News said. "Agent Rose has been through hell."
Scholes glared. "Everybody wants to protect everybody else. I'm here to protect the bureau."
"I appreciate that," Kunsler said. "But the executive request went through Bureau East. We're not here to grill Agent Rose about her personal contacts. In light of-"
Scholes held up his hand. "Agent Rose, you're on high-level furlough, but nobody told Bureau West until last week, and I've yet to figure out what all that means."
"Extended leave without pay, with the option to return to active duty," Newsome said.
Kunsler held up her own hand and waggled her fingers until Scholes looked her way. "Agent Rose is looking at early retirement. She has interviewed with other government agencies as well as private security firms."
"That seems unusual," Scholes said.
"Half the FBI has been furloughed or let go," News said. "Something of a stampede."
"Agent Rose, what about your contacts in the private sector? Tell us about the last six months."
"I've talked with half a dozen companies that offer executive protection, forensic accounting-art investigation for rich collectors," Rebecca said. "I also interviewed for permanent positions with Diplomatic Security, EPA, Border Security, IRS. They turned me down."
"And who's most likely to utilize your expertise, do you think?"
"Blue Eyes Executive Services."
"Sounds like a call girl ring," Scholes said.
Newsome's cheeks pinked, but Rebecca ignored that. "Private investigations," she said. "Courtroom rehearsal and prep for law enforcement. Art forgery investigations as a sideline."
Stan had survived-barely. He was down the hall, fresh out of intensive care and looking like a Borg nightmare-but all in white, not black.
"They have any advantages over other outfits?" Kunsler asked.
"Keeps me local."
"You suffered from PTSD-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Was that behind your rejection by the other agencies?"
The change of atmosphere was electric-and so sudden that Rebecca felt another barb of apprehension.
"Not your concern, Ruben," Kunsler said.
"It seems particularly relevant to the executive request," Scholes said.
"We're aware of it," Kunsler said. "It isn't relevant to Bureau East."
"Upon diagnosis, I volunteered for treatment," Rebecca said. "A clinic came recommended by folks at the marine base in Quantico."
Scholes gave News the kind of look you might expect from a prosecuting attorney about to nail a conviction. "Hiram, did you arrange for that recommendation? Upon your own evaluation of Ms. Rose?"
"I haven't heard about this until now," Newsome said.
Rebecca had told no one other than her FBI-appointed psychiatrist and personal physician. It didn't seem to be anybody's business but hers. At the time, she had already been furloughed.
For her, Mecca had screwed up everything royally, within the agency and personally.
"I feel fine, if that's your question," Rebecca said.
Scholes shrugged. "No judgment, no onus. But I suspect that might have played a role in your being refused by so many agencies."
"It was supposed to be confidential."
Newsome shook his head with a look that Rebecca new well-dismay at the ways of this silly, wicked world.
Now Kunsler sprang the reason for all of them being here. "President Larsen has asked for you to lead a White House investigation."
"The Bureau needs to be sure that won't backfire on all of us," Scholes added.
Rebecca was taken aback. She glanced at Prouse. "To work with you?"
Prouse shook her head. "I'd be proud to have you on our team-but, no."
"The Quinn homicide," Kunsler said. "The president seems to trust you. She enjoyed working with you-the last time."
Rebecca was suddenly tired and irritated and nervous, all at once. Her ribs ached abominably, as they always did around this time of day.
"The president has requested a personal meeting," Kunsler said. "She isn't asking for anyone's approval. You're being vetted by people outside the Bureau. You extend us a courtesy by answering our questions."
"Terrific." Rebecca looked aside at News, crinkling one eye.
Scholes sighed, petulant. "It should be said, despite my concerns, that I do believe you were one of our finest assets, Ms. Rose. I'm sincerely sorry about Captain Periglas."
News cringed. Kunsler looked hard at Scholes.
"I haven't had a chance to talk to Peter," Rebecca said. "If you debriefed him-"
"You haven't heard?" Scholes asked.
Prouse looked away and said, "Everyone wanted to make sure she was physically strong."
Rebecca sucked in her breath, like a half sob or hiccup, before she could catch herself.
"He was in an elevator in the parking garage," Prouse said. "He never made it down to the convention floor. The whole structure collapsed."
"It goes a lot deeper than that," Scholes said, trying to recover lost ground. "Informants in Arabia Deserta tell us there's a connection with your operation in Mecca. We think you and Captain Periglas may have been targeted."
"Someone blew up the entire building-to kill two people?"
"Under those circumstances," Scholes said, despite a warning glance from Prouse and News, and a wide roll of Kunsler's eyes, "I would assume your time with the president is going to be brief, tightly controlled-and secret."
"They're drawing a connection with the assassination attempt?" Rebecca asked. She turned to Kunsler. "Is this legit?"
"So far, it's pure speculation," Kunsler said, but Scholes would not be deterred.
"Solid intel," he insisted. "Probably financed by the same group. If they are who we think they are, they've been kicked out of Arabia Deserta, but they have plenty of money and international connections-and they still think it's their mission to protect Mecca from infidels. President Larsen gave the orders authorizing your incursion. She would be an obvious target."
Rebecca looked out the window. There it went-not that she had ever had much hope. No normal life, ever again; no child, no man, no escape.
No waking up from the nightmare.
"When does the president want to see me?" she asked, voice barely a whisper.
"Tomorrow," Kunsler said. "You're under the executive branch from this point on. White House chief of staff is making the arrangements. One more thing… we need to download your dattoo. We think we might be able to recover the data."
Rebecca lifted her sleeve and looked down at the cracked and smeared dragon that had been the conference symbol.
"Indeed," Scholes said, though it was obvious this was the first he had heard about it.
Kunsler waved and a technician with a briefcase entered the room.
Rebecca lifted her arm as the technician unrolled a cuff. He wrapped the cuff around the dattoo. A few minutes later, he looked up with a frown. "Has anyone else accessed this? It's blank."
Rebecca looked back at him, guileless. She had already called upon a talented colleague to perform this task, but did not feel any need to reveal that fact. She was no longer an agent.
They didn't tell me about Peter until now.
"I was unconscious for several hours," she said. "It's pretty badly scuffed."
The technician packed up his equipment and left the room.
Kunsler nodded to Prouse and News-and then, with a small sound in her throat, as if clearing some phlegm, to Scholes. "My game from here, thank you," she said.
News gave her a backward glance of sympathy and warning as he followed Prouse and Scholes out of the room.
Rebecca offered the single chair. Kunsler seated herself with a heavy sigh. "I'm sitting here with a tough lady who represents everything I admire about the old Bureau… and it's my duty to tell her I can't protect her. Not that I was ever that effective in that regard… She needs to watch her ass like a hawk."
Rebecca snorted. "Third person hawk," she said.
"No kidding," Kunsler said. "The president is in the middle of the biggest mess of her administration. Her approval ratings are in the single digits. She got a bump from the assassination attempt… the public always tips a hat to a politico who's just been shot. Up to 20 percent approval. But it doesn't last. Not in times like this. The vice president's insanity is probably the least of her worries. Fourteen counties in three states are setting up free economic zones-that means they're going to garnish all federal tax revenues. That might once have been called secession.
"The whole country is hurting."
Rebecca rearranged herself on the bed and looked through the room's east-facing window at a row of brown and gray buildings. "If I report to the president, I report only to her. I can't serve two mistresses."
"Understood," Kunsler said. "I'm making your furlough permanent. You're officially out of the Bureau. The president doesn't trust anyone right now-least of all us."
Kunsler got up from the chair. "To keep lines open, we're working the White House through contacts in the attorney general's office. When you're settled in DC, I'm going to have someone I know look in on you-with the president's permission, of course. I hope we'll stay in touch. Get stronger, Rebecca. I mean it. We all think the world's a better place with you in it."
7 DAYS
Costa Mesa
The nursery was quiet this time of the afternoon. Rebecca took a straight-backed chair and set it aside from the sunlight, then settled into it with a sigh, arranging her left leg so that the foot did not hurt so much. Her lip quivered.
She wiped her eyes quickly with a handkerchief from her small black purse.
Sun cut a warm golden square on the blue and red flower carpet. The air held the faintest dodge of disinfectant and baby powder.
Throughout the morning, prospective parents auditioned for the privilege of taking home little Latin babies orphaned by the ten-year southern drought: Mexicans, Central Americans, Peruvians. From noon to three, more couples came to see if Miss Wickham (she of the upswept blaze of curly brown hair) would approve them for a fine crop of Burmese infants, or Filipinos, or Ethiopians, orphaned by war and politics.
At three, the nursery closed until after dinner, and then more couples, more interviews, more babies on parade; more babies almost than anyone could imagine, brought to the United States not because it was the richest nation on Earth, which it wasn't-not anymore, not after decades of economic waste and political stubbornness-but because it was the last major power that accepted orphans of any color, any heritage, and almost any health issue.
The nursery walls were pasted with colorful posters and stickers of balloons and farm animals and giraffes, big silver airplanes, and along the north wall, a hand-painted mural of a fairy tale castle, done by a volunteer with some talent.
The square of sun moved to a worn green couch.
Miss Wickham had approved the adoption last week, despite the news of the Los Angeles bomb attack; Miss Wickham was tough as nails and hard to sway once her mind was settled, and she had settled on Rebecca as being a decent parent for little Mary, whatever the world delivered along the way.
Rebecca had spent six months in interviews and record searches and corralling testimonials to get to this point, and yesterday, her request over the phone from the hospital had been met with several seconds of stony silence; Rebecca could easily imagine the extra width and extension of Wickham's pop eyes, the tap of her pencil on the steel top of the office desk.
"You'll have to tell her in person, Ms. Rose," Miss Wickham had said. "She's got her own set of hopes. She already knows you. You'll have to explain this yourself."
"She's two years old," Rebecca whispered to herself in the silent nursery. "She'll get over it."
But Rebecca never would. This was her last chance.
The door opened on the far side of the nursery and Miss Wickham's young assistant entered. Rebecca tried to remember her name; a faded slip of a girl in her late twenties, with large eyes, gentle hands, and a gently anemic smile. The sort of girl who took care of damaged animals and lost children and dreamed at night of de-balling the cruel bastards who caused all this loss and pain. Not that she would ever reveal that to anyone, certainly not to Miss Wickham.
The girl sidestepped the square of sun and stood before Rebecca, carrying a wireless freepad in one hand. "Mary's just finished her nap. She'll be here in a moment."
Rebecca nodded.
"It's not good to wait this far into the process," the girl said.
Rebecca nodded again, and for no good reason stared intently at her until the girl turned away with lips set in irritation, even anger; who could tell the difference?
Sometimes the saints of the world…
Miss Wickham entered, holding little Mary's hand. Mary saw Rebecca and her round face and beautiful black eyes all came together in the sweetest, shyest smile.
I am not going to blubber. I'll cry in front of Miss Wickham if I have to, but not this bleached-out killer saint.
"We'll leave you two to talk," Miss Wickham said, and let go of Mary's hand just in front of Rebecca.
She and the killer saint left the nursery.
Five minutes. That was all they had left. No lifetime of love and watching this tiny, silky creature grow into young womanhood. Just a few words and a few minutes, all because Rebecca's life had come to a brick wall she had to climb alone.
Mary walked to Rebecca and Rebecca picked her up and hugged her. She was beginning to speak a few words of English. She came from Hong Kong, Miss Wickham said, or perhaps from Shanghai; there was no way of knowing. She had been found on a small island where the female infants of the daughters of wealthy, politically connected Chinese were often left to the care of patient, inured villagers.
Fishermen a hungry civilization had left with nothing to catch but abandoned children.
"I see you," Mary said.
She stood on Rebecca's lap and wrapped her skinny arms around Rebecca's neck. Rebecca let her cling for a few minutes, then gently pulled her back and sat her down.
Smoothed her hair, soft and fine.
What could they say to each other?
"I've been away in a hospital," Rebecca began her rehearsed speech.
Mary looked up and interpreted her expression, then imitated it, eyes narrow, lips sad. "Why?"
"I'm going to have to go away. I love you more than anything, but we can't live together like I planned. I still want to, it's nothing you've done…"
Some people want me dead. I won't put you in danger. No way to explain.
Mary could not understand.
"You're the loveliest, sweetest little girl in the world, but we can't live together. I have to go away."
Mary's face froze, but she was no longer looking directly at Rebecca.
Her gaze wandered to the window.
She played with Rebecca's sleeve. "No more," she said.
"Someone wonderful will love you just as much as I do, I know that."
"So sorry," Mary said.
Rebecca touched Mary's arm and stroked the smooth skin.
Miss Wickham returned.
"Mary, we have to go back. Say goodbye to Ms. Rose."
Mary just let go and slid off her lap. She did not look at Rebecca. Only at the window.
"We'll sign your release in the office," Miss Wickham told Rebecca, and hoisted Mary to her shoulder.
Rebecca watched Mary's little face withdraw down the long, bright hallway.
In the office, Miss Wickham settled back in her desk chair with a sigh. "I think I'm a good enough judge of people to know you have your reasons. Care to share?"
Rebecca shook her head. It would sound crazy.
"But you have a very good reason."
"I do."
"You're ill, something like that. Something I can put down on the forms, other than…"
"That'll work," Rebecca said.
Miss Wickham wrote for a minute, then passed a photo across the desk to Rebecca.
"We usually try to place our children with someone of their own heritage, but I believed this was a good match. I stuck my neck out and overruled procedure. Luckily, I've got another couple lined up. They're older, they're Asian-Chinese, in fact. Los Angeles couple, not wealthy, but solid family. No children. Their name is Choy. Her name will be Mary Choy-pretty, don't you think?"
Rebecca did not believe it was policy to reveal the names of adoptive parents. This was either Miss Wickham's special gift, to allay her fears that Mary would never find a home-or a kind of revenge.
She looked down at the man and woman in the photo. They looked bland and serious.
"Lovely name," she said.
"Sign here and we're done."
Back in her rental car, Rebecca looked through her spex at a list of messages. There was one she needed to return right away. She double-blinked to connect.
"Tom here," came the answer.
"Rebecca. Anything interesting?"
"Probably. It's a proprietary encryption, but I think I know where the PAR numbers are, and I think there's enough so I can reconstruct the rest of the memory."
"Great," Rebecca said. "Get it to me quick. No other copy. And bill my personal account."
"No cost," Tom said, his voice far away. "This one's for Captain Periglas."