Armageddon Crazy

TWO

Mansard

Charlie Mansard had a killer hangover. The cigarette was all but burning his fingers, and he was on his third cup of coffee. He glowered at his secretary. "I've got to have some speed. I can't do Arlen Proverb at the Garden without speed."

Rita Webb shook her head. "I told you after the last time. I don't get drugs for you anymore."

"I could fire you."

"You won't fire me. I'm the only one who'll tolerate you."

"Damn it, woman, I'm dying here. I need medication."

"The last thing you need is an amphetamine. It turns you into a psychotic, and you're quite likely to have a heart attack."

"How am I supposed to work when everyone is against me?"

"Just go to work. You always feel better once you get started, and anyway, Jimmy Gadd is waiting to talk to you. Proverb's people have sent over a preliminary script, and he wants to go through it with you."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him you'd be ready for him once you'd stopped groaning about your hangover."

"Thanks for covering for me."

"Jimmy knows you as well as I do. What do I need to lie to him for?"

"Seems like everybody knows about me."

"You adhere to a pretty repetitive pattern."

Mansard regarded his secretary with bleary venom. "You don't take any prisoners, do you?"

"Shall I tell Jimmy to come on in?"

Charlie Mansard sighed. "Yeah, wheel him in. Don't worry about my pain."

Jimmy Gadd was Mansard's strong right arm and, along with Rita, he bore the brunt of his boss's erratic and generally self-destructive behavior. In the old days, he had worked for a major rock-and-roll act. Indeed, most of the older technical staff at Miraco Productions had come out of rock and roll. They had the experience of arena special effects, and since rock and roll had been replaced by pop acts that sang about Jesus in stupid chipmunk voices, the technicians had to find work wherever they could. Jimmy Gadd was a short, wiry man with a full beard and unfashionably long hair. The worn blue jeans and nylon bomber jacket were something straight out of the '70s or '80s. He had a bulky, bound printout under his arm.

Mansard raised a weary eyebrow. "So what do we have there? The usual hellfire and blood?"

"The boy seems to be going for broke."

"Oh, yeah?"

"He wants a sky walker."

"Does he, by God?"

"A hundred-foot hologram figure on top of the Garden."

"No shit. What does he want? A figure of himself?"

Jimmy Gadd shook his head. "Uh-uh."

"Not another Jesus?"

"Nope."

"I'm not in any condition to play guessing games."

"He wants us to do the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse charging the Empire State Building."

Mansard whistled. His hangover was temporarily forgotten. "Does Proverb have any idea what something like that is going to cost?"

Gadd nodded. "I checked with Jason, his controller. They seem prepared to go the distance as far as the money is concerned. Proverb seems to have something to prove."

Mansard started making calculations on a pad. "Can we put up an image that big?"

Gadd ran a hand through his hair. "In theory we can, if we get something of an overcast and rent every fog generator in town. The real problem is the multiple imaging. We've only done single figures. This is four horsemen. Count them. Four. Four horsemen and four horses. For all practical purposes, it's eight figures. Nobody's ever attempted anything close to it. Not even Visioninc."

Despite himself, Mansard grinned. "It'd be an all-time coup. Can we do it?"

"If we get the hardware that we need."

"So what would we need?"

"With those new DL-70s from Sony, it'd be a breeze, but we don't have the DL-70s yet."

"I thought that it was all arranged. Didn't we have the tithe barriers beaten?" Mansard asked.

"On paper we did. We had the stuff ordered through a Chilean purchasing agent. It's the usual way of getting around the Japanese embargo. Everyone does it."

"So where are they?"

"Last I heard they were still sitting in a warehouse at Santiago airport. You know what the Chileans are like."

"Can we get them in time?"

"I sure as hell hope so. Marty's on the phone right now."

Mansard started flipping through the script. "The interior effects seem well within our capabilities."

Gadd nodded. "No problem. Although Proverb does seem to be going for the edge."

Mansard continued to examine the script. "He does, doesn't he? But, then again, Arlen Proverb has never been your run-of-the-mill preacher."

Arlen Proverb had never been anything like a run-of-the-mill preacher. In the tight power frame of the theocracy, Arlen Proverb was the rebel, the perennial thorn. Although, for public consumption, it was all brothers in the Lord, there was a deep and hostile gulf between Faithful and his cronies and the flamboyant Proverb. He simply had too big a following for them to off him. Where Faithful and his circle radiated a scrubbed corporate wholesomeness, Proverb ranted and roared and dressed in Nashville spangles. He was a wild man, a throwback to the tent shows and the snake handling of the raging Bible belt, a hunched and brooding figure in a white jumpsuit that could suddenly lash out with an Old Testament fury. He was a throwback, though, who performed in front of a battery of state-of-the-art special effects of such intensity that they were close to psychedelic. He was adored by the unemployed, the blue collar, the marginal, the brought down, and just about anyone who had a head of anger that he wanted to blow off. In that, he was the closest thing the country had to an aboveground political opposition. Unlike Faithful, who expected passive acceptance from his devotees, Proverb encouraged his followers to be an integral part of the show. They stomped and clapped. They had visions and talked in tongues. They even writhed on the floor in convulsive spasms of ecstasy. In fact, ecstasy was what set Proverb apart from the others. He delivered an old-time, holy roller good time, and that made him dangerous.

Mansard stopped at a page in the script. "He's actually going to use 'Love Me Tender'?"

Gadd shrugged. "That's what it says,"

"He's sailing kind of close to the wind, isn't he?"

"He's always attracted Elvi in his crowds."

"But he's never pandered to them before."

The followers of Elvis Presley were another problem that the Faithful orthodoxy had with Arlen Proverb. The Elvi flocked to his shows in droves, out in the open in their scarves and badges, sideburns and sunglasses. There was no doubt that the Elvis cult was a non-Christian belief, and on a number of occasions plans had been hatched at a high level to suppress it. Somehow, though, they had never been acted upon. Elvis was so deep in the psyche of poor white America that even the Fundamentalists were scared to mess with his memory. They seemed to suspect instinctively that they might be dealing with a sleeping giant who, if roused by oppression, might become quite uncontrollable. For Proverb actually to go out of his way to court them was something else entirely, and it would undoubtedly widen the gulf between him and the hierarchy.

Mansard grinned. "Proverb's up to something."

Jimmy Gadd was not smiling. "Do you really think we should be getting involved with him?"

"We've always done Proverb."

"If he's planning on tweaking Faithful's tail by playing up to the Elvi it could be the start of a whole holy nasty. We don't want any of that nastiness to rebound on the company."

"Nothing nasty can rebound on us. We're just the hired whores. Next month we'll be working for Swan. Sublime to ridiculous. We take no sides. They know they need us more than we need them. In the meantime, we'll give Proverb his four horsemen. Maybe they'll all want monster sky walkers after that. We can get rich and go put on rock-and-roll spectaculars in Australia."

Gadd grinned wryly. "That'll be the day." Mansard became professional. "Let's get to it."

"Should I start Manny on the visualization?" Mansard nodded. "Yeah. The sooner we get the master drawings, the sooner we can start on the rig design."

Kline

Cynthia Kline came out of the heavily protected street entrance to the CCC Astor Place complex and discovered that the combination of the bread riot and the bombing and the official response to both had turned the streets to total chaos. The only traffic that seemed to be moving belonged to law enforcement. Police Pharaohs and prowlers, the deacons' Continentals and their sinister buses with the blind windows and cargoes of unfortunate prisoners, came and went at high speed with sirens screaming and lights flashing. Cynthia had originally intended to take a cab home, but that was clearly impossible. The subway offered no better prospects. It was well past the rush hour, and there were still lines of people waiting to get into the Astor Place station, casting nervous glances at all the police activity. A number of uptown lines had failed, and a lot of commuters seemed resigned to the prospect of spending the night on the platforms. The buses were equally bad. The insides were packed, and still more people clung to the sides and the backrails even though they did not seem to be going anywhere.

Cynthia got a tight grip on her shoulder bag and started out in the direction of Third Avenue. Her clerical auxiliary uniform helped to get her through the knots of officers who filled the sidewalk in front of the building. They all seemed so tightly wrapped, so dangerously primed for violence, and she wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. After all her training and even after operating under cover for so long, the proximity of so much armed authority still made her nervous. She would never forget the horrors of '04 and '05 when so many of her friends had vanished.

Things were no better on the corner of Third. Civilian traffic had been waved over to the curb, and even the pedestrians who usually crowded the corners of Third and St. Marks had melted away. She had no more chance of getting a cab than she had of flying in the air. She had to face the fact that she was walking home. As she started north up Third, she wondered how many streets in the twenties would be closed off because of the riot.

"Want a ride, baby?"

Cynthia swung around, ready to tell whomever it was to take a jump. But it was a regular police cruiser that had pulled up at the curb. Two young patrolmen were grinning at her from behind the steel grill, their expressions suggesting that their intentions were less than honorable. They were out to have a little fun.

"Going our way?"

Her instinct was to tell them what they could do with their ride, but at the thought of the long walk to her apartment, she put on an idiotic smile and pushed her voice up half an octave. Experience had taught her that cops were easier to handle if they thought they were dealing with Betty Boop.

"I need to get to Thirty-eighth and Ninth."

"No problem."

"You want to squeeze in the front here with us?"

Cynthia regarded the helmets and riot guns racked and ready between the front seats. Fitting her in was an obvious physical impossibility.

"Too tight a squeeze," she said.

The nearest cop's grin broadened. "You could sit on my lap."

"I think I'll get in the back."

He pretended to be horrified. "A nice girl like you can't sit in there. That's where we put the prisoners."

His partner joined in. "You know? Sinners?"

"We've had all kind of scumbags back there."

"Probably diseased."

Cynthia reached for the rear door handle. "I'll manage."

"Suit yourself."

The lock popped. Cynthia opened the door and climbed inside. There actually were some unpleasant-looking stains on the plastic seat cover.

"You asked for it."

"I'll live with it."

"Hold tight."

"I'm holding."

The cruiser took off in a squeal of laid rubber, the scream of its siren, and a blaze of flashing lights. The boys were showing off. They had those plain, scrubbed, unlined faces that seemed to have become so common in the last few years, as if they were manufactured somewhere out in the Midwest, complete with crewcuts, emotionless eyes, and mouths that seemed designed only to leer and sneer. They roared up Third Avenue at high speed. At Fifteenth Street they all but plowed into a bus.

"Goddamn it."

"Had to be on Fifteenth Street."

As they got underway again, the cop riding shotgun swivelled in his seat. "You know about Fifteenth Street?" His leer was back.

The driver sniggered. "Sure she does. I heard some of these clerical auxiliaries even moonlight back there."

Cynthia Kline did not, in fact, know anything about Fifteenth Street and made the appropriate noises. She was certain that the grinning assholes in the front seat couldn't wait to tell her. She was immediately proved right.

"The dekes have a house on that block. A regular sink of iniquity. It's where they go to have a bit of illicit fun."

"When the strain of being righteous gets too much for them."

The driver laughed. Cynthia found the sound instantly irritating.

"Maybe you shouldn't talk like that in front of the lady. I mean, she's practically one of them."

Shotgun put his face close to the grille that separated the back of the car from the front. "You wouldn't get us into trouble, would you, gorgeous?"

Cynthia shook her head. "I always do my best to avoid trouble."

She was storing away the tidbit of information about Fifteenth Street in the back of her mind. There was no knowing when something like that might come in handy. She might be a damn sight more use moonlighting in a deacon whorehouse than shuffling data on Astor Place. Or maybe not. She could imagine what those repressed bastards might want to have done to them.

The cruiser was still screaming up Third as if it were on its way to an emergency. The two cops kept up a running commentary on individuals on the sidewalk. All of it was abusive and a good percentage was homicidal.

"Look at that big fat bastard. Imagine pumping a hollow point into his fat gut."

There seemed to be nobody that they did not hate. But, Cynthia reflected, it was actually understandable that the younger cops should behave like an occupying army. That was virtually what they were. After the takeover, working on the principle of divide and rule, the NYPD had adopted the same recruiting policy that the deacons used. They went out and hired country boys from the depressed Midwest. The new rookies came as strangers to a town they disliked and distrusted, and they quickly developed a relationship of mutual loathing with its inhabitants.

They hung a tire-wrenching left on Twenty-third Street and started heading west. Cynthia realized that they were driving directly into the riot area.

"Are you going to drop me off, or what?" she asked.

"Thought we'd take a look around first. You want to see what's happening, don't you?"

"I…"She trailed off as she realized that there was no point in answering. She was going to get a tour of the riot scene whether she wanted one or not. She had seen riots before, more than enough, but she was not about to admit that. It hardly fitted with her current identity.

There was a police barricade across Eighth Avenue. A crowd had gathered on the north side of Twenty-third Street. Quiet and sullen, the rubbernecks kept a cautious distance from the line of heavily armed police. There was a smell of gasoline and burned plastic in the air, as well as the bite of lingering tear gas. Gunships circled overhead with their rotors slapping and their spotlights probing the area. As the cruiser nosed up to the barricade, two patrolmen in full riot gear, visors locked down, pulled a pair of sawhorses aside to let them pass. The cruiser had to give way, though, as a paramedic unit came through. The two cops put on their helmets and downlocked their Remingtons. They were noticeably more tense now that they were in the battle line.

"There's been a lot of casualties. St. Vincent's is having quite a problem coping," the driver said.

Shotgun grunted. "Bastards should be left in the street to bleed."

"A lot of them were."

Cynthia wanted nothing more than to be out of there.

Beyond that barrier, the power was out and the streetlamps dark. The only lights came from flickering fires, the searchlights of the slowly turning gunships, and the rotating red and blue of the dozens of police and fire department vehicles. The center of everything was the supermarket at the corner of Twentieth. It had been reduced to nothing but a burned-out skeleton of blackened girders. To the north and east, the lights on the Empire State Building shone bright and clear. Farther north, the Trump Grand Tower gleamed in the night.

"The firemen couldn't get to the blaze until about an hour ago. There were snipers on the rooftops."

"Can't take the guns away from the people." Shotgun sounded bitter. It was one of the major paradoxes of the Faithful regime that although pornography and rock music had been outlawed, it was easier than ever to get a gun. During the campaign of 2000, Larry Faithful had gotten himself so far into hock with the gun lobby that there was no way he could ever institute gun controls. In a situation of almost complete repression, the American people had the inalienable right to arm themselves to the teeth.

They passed a long line of chained and handcuffed people, covered by riot guns while waiting for transport to the lockup. Other huddled shapes draped in black plastic sheeting were obviously bodies. The car crunched over a continuous carpet of broken window glass. There were still flames inside a building across the street from the supermarket. Cynthia peered through the rear window of the cruiser. Despite all that she had seen, part of her still found it hard to believe that such chaos could result from what was really only a minor distribution screwup in the Daily Bread program. She remembered the words of Tom Weber, her political science instructor back at the camp in the woods outside Vancouver. "It's far easier to run an inefficient welfare program that fouls up all the time than just end welfare altogether. You have the advantage of appearing to do something while, at the same time, you are equipped with an ideal tool to manipulate the underclass. Faithful's Daily Bread program is the perfect example. By substituting a crude handout for every other kind of more sophisticated safety-net program, it reduced the recipients to the most degradedly dependent level. Whenever glitches occur in the system, they spark riots. If you start instigating these glitches according to a planned pattern, you are able to use them as an excuse to raze neighborhoods and relocate unwanted populations."

The cops were guffawing.

"Daily Bread."

"Sounds like a newspaper."

"So let the scum eat newspaper."

The neighborhood looked as if it were well on the way to being razed. Cynthia doubted that the A&P would ever be rebuilt. The cardboard box people would be setting up homes in the ruin inside of a week. The police stood around in tight, watchful knots, weapons at the ready, scanning the rooftops. They obviously had the area secured but were still nervous about random sniper fire. House clearing had already started. A brown-skinned teenager was being dragged from a doorway. Two cops were holding his arms, and a third had him by the hair. There was blood on his face, and his eyes were wide with terror. He put up a certain minimal struggle, and immediately the three uniforms laid into him with their nightsticks. The cops in the front of the cruiser shouted encouragement.

"Yeah! Trash that piece of garbage!"

"Beat some manners into the little bastard!"

Cynthia had had quite enough. "I'd really like to get home now."

"Don't worry, gorgeous. We'll get you home."

"It's been a long day and I'm kind of beat."

"Where were you going to? Thirty-fourth and Tenth?"

"Thirty-eighth and Ninth."

"Whatever. We'll take you up there as soon as we take a look around the side streets."

The two young cops exchanged a look that Cynthia did not like at all.

"Don't you have to call in?" she asked.

The driver shrugged. "There's no point. It's chaos back on Astor Place. Ground control's completely jammed."

He switched on the radio to prove his point. There was a babble of unrelated voices. It seemed impossible that Astor Place communication center was so inefficient. The cop had to be doing something with the radio. Cynthia was now quite convinced that they were up to no good. She wanted to get out right there, but she was not about to walk through the aftermath of a riot. The cruiser was rolling slowly through the darkness of Nineteenth Street. Shotgun was squinting into the shadows, looking as though he had been reared on old Clint Eastwood movies. Midpoint on the block they passed two flattened, burned-out buildings that were the legacy of a previous disturbance or isolated arson. Shotgun thought he saw something. He hit a switch, and a spotlight cut in.

"Goddamn deacons get to have heatseekers in their cars."

At first there was nothing – just heaps of blackened brick and broken spars that were already being swallowed up by drifts of garbage. Suddenly four figures cut and ran in among the piles of rubble. Shotgun whooped.

"There they go! They're rabbiting! Let's go get 'em!"

The driver spun the car in a screaming turn. Even though there was a makeshift trail bulldozed through the debris, the car bounced like a bucking horse, and Cynthia's head made painful contact with the roof. Shotgun was hanging half out the window, letting rip with his Remington. One of the runners went down. The cruiser screamed past the others, the driver spinning it again in a sliding 180-degree turn. The fugitives turned and ran back the way they had come.

Cynthia could no longer suppress her outrage. "They're unarmed!"

"They're scum!"

Shotgun took out another runner. The driver slammed on the brakes. Shotgun was out and running, firing as he went. The driver went after him, leaving Cynthia alone in the flashing police car. Bursts of static barked from the radio. She unlocked the rear door and slowly climbed out. There were more shots in the distance and then silence. She was tempted to walk quietly away. Unfortunately, her escape would not be quiet: she would have to do a lot of explaining before she would be allowed out of the sealed riot zone. She realized that she would have to stick with the cops for a while longer.

It was a full minute before they came back into view, breathing hard and carrying their weapons and helmets loosely at their sides. They seemed exceedingly pleased with themselves. The driver had stopped to inspect one of the bodies, but Shotgun was moving straight toward Cynthia. There was nothing at all pleasant about his grin. He seemed to be intoxicated by the violence.

"So you got out to watch the fun, did you?"

Cynthia didn't say anything. He was very close to her. She could smell his breath. He had been chewing gum or eating mints.

"Maybe we can have a little fun of our own?"

"I'm not interested. I just want to get home."

"We're interested." He was reaching for her. "Come on, baby. Nobody's going to hurt you."

"I'll report you."

"You won't report anyone, bitch. You know the score. You'd never survive the scandal. Besides, it'd only be your word against the two of us."

His hands were on the front of her uniform jacket. The driver had finished looking at the body and was coming toward them. He, too, was grinning. Something snapped in Cynthia. It was part revulsion, part anger, and part the conditioned reflexes of her training. Her hands and knee came up as one in a move that she had practiced a hundred times. As Shotgun doubled over in pain, she half turned and flipped him over. He was lying in the dirt with an expression of pure, ugly fury. His hand was creeping toward the pistol on his belt. Already she was down on one knee, scooping up the Remington that Shotgun had dropped. Behind her, the driver was laughing. The gun roared. Shotgun was blown backward. His face was a bloody pulp. The driver's laugh froze in openmouthed horror. He was fumbling with his own gun. The Remington in Cynthia's hands roared again. The driver spun and fell. She lowered the gun, trying hard to control her breathing. Every instinct screamed at her to run. Somebody was bound to be on their way to investigate the gunfire. She fought down the impulse to flee. What had they always told her? Do not react. Think. She leaned into the driver's seat of the cruiser and detached the mike from the radio.

"This is an emergency. Two officers are down."

"Who is this?"

There was no longer chaos on the airwaves. She identified herself and gave her position. It was scarcely a minute before the gunship was overhead and had her in its light. She placed the Remington on top of the police car and raised her hands.

Carlisle

Harry Carlisle let himself into the apartment. It was over a year since Gail had been arrested, but the place still had the air of gaping emptiness each time he walked into it. Gail had been a damned fool. It was not as though her woman's group had actually been doing anything. They had not been planting bombs or robbing banks. They had been little more than a leftover from the abortion protests with a few proscribed books and magazines, a meeting place, and some minimal contacts with the underground railroad and refugee organizations. It was having a regular meeting place that had been their downfall. They had been labeled a coven. At the show trial, there had been talk of Satanic rituals, animal sacrifice, and orgies, but he knew there had been nothing like that. The deacons had wanted something to throw to the media. The public had been getting bored with the dopey kids from the suburbs who dropped belladonna, burned black candles, and collected Led Zeppelin records, and were being hyped as the menace of Satan. A cult of radical lesbian devil worshipers was something that they could finally get their teeth into.

Carlisle had been lucky that he had not been arrested along with them. Gail had always maintained a nominally separate apartment of her own, and that single fact had saved him from cohabitation and consorting charges. As it was, his record had been terminally tarnished. There would be no more promotions. After the trial was over, he had been severely tempted to quit the police department. Friends had advised him against it. There was little future for an ex-cop under a cloud. The deacons would eventually find a way to get him.

When Gail had been in Joshua, he had managed to visit her quite regularly. Seeing her in that place tore him up every time. The drab uniforms, the electric fences, and the obvious brutality filled him with a cold, sick anger, but he knew that she needed the lifeline, and he persevered. After four months she had been transferred to Solomon, the new supercamp outside St. Louis. Her letters had grown fewer and fewer and then stopped altogether. He had used his position to make sure that she was still alive, but all other contact had been lost.

Carlisle checked his answer unit. No one had called. He realized that he was turning into a recluse, but he seemed to have no inclination to do anything about it. He poured himself a stiff drink and dropped into the old leather armchair. It had been a long depressing day. He was weary of the continual madness and worn out by a world that was run by bigoted thugs. There was a frozen dinner in the icebox and dirty dishes in the sink. He also had no inclination to do anything about them. He flicked on the TV. It would be a suitable background to his internal gloom. There was a deacon show on the screen. Handsome, dedicated young dekes kicked down the door of a Hollywood mansion and stormed into the dark interior. There were pentagrams on the purple walls, and the cult that was getting busted consisted, in the main, of well-developed young women in skimpy leather nun habits that showed off a lot of thigh. It was the usual propaganda nonsense that passed for action adventure. Carlisle could remember when detectives had been the heroes of TV fantasy. He sighed and flipped the channel. He needed a girlfriend, but that was yet another thing about which he seemed unable to do anything. Next up was Roone Nelson.

"… so let's us ask ourselves, my friends: Do we want to see a return to those heathen days when our popular entertainment was provided by drug addicts and sexual deviants and our children aped Godless barbarians? Jesus has time and again demonstrated…"

Carlisle quickly flipped again. He did not give a rap what Jesus had time and again demonstrated. He was sick of goddamn preachers. He hit the Ten O'Clock Good News. A family of heretics had been killed by the Border Patrol. A Fort Worth woman's sight had been restored by the direct intervention of God and Larry Faithful. There was some local coverage of the riot on Eighth Avenue. Most of it was patently phony footage of steadfast riot police holding the line against ravening mobs of hideous and diseased inner city subpeople from the depths of some suburban nightmare. He flipped on. Disgust was becoming a way of life. An antique rerun of Little House on the Prairie got short shrift, as did the quiz show Catch It and Keep It. TBS was running an Audie Murphy festival, and he settled on that. The green and magenta of decaying technicolor added a tint of unreality to the TV twilight.

He wanted off this damn case. It was a pain in the ass to have to work so closely with the deacons. He needed to get back to real crime. He would take the robbery detail. Hell, he would even go back on vice. Busting hookers and pillrollers was preferable to the current nonsense. There was too much weirdness attached to terrorism. There was the constantly looming threat of politics, and that brought him right back to the deacons again. Not that anyone was going to let him go anywhere. The hunt for the Lefthand Path was going so badly that it was starting to feel like an albatross he was doomed to carry around his neck for the rest of time. There was something a little spooky about the case itself. Carlisle distrusted the way that this latest bunch of terrorists had come right out of nowhere. There should have been some kind of whisper somewhere, an informant, something. They were efficient and apparently well funded. He was not the kind who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all evils were hatched in the dark Satanic mills of Moscow, Damascus, or, at the very least, Montreal, but it did seem that they might be controlled by a foreign power. Even the name bothered him. Most terrorists went for initials, or else the people's this or the revolutionary that. There was a mystic ring to the name 'Lefthand Path' that smacked of a slick, twenty-first-century magic. It was as though they had given considerable thought to hitting the Fundamentalists right where they lived. It had to be assumed that more of such thinking would come into play if the campaign continued. The official fear was that they would escalate from bombing to political assassination. Privately, he would not have minded that at all. At least cops would not be getting blown up. It might not be a bad idea if politicians and preachers got shot up. It would certainly introduce a measure of reality into their lives.

He got up to pour himself another shot. He spent a moment looking out of the window. A thick fog was descending on the city, smothering the lights and blanketing all life out there in a cloud of gray invisibility. The fog was very fitting to his mood. It was also probably a health hazard. People who believed that Jesus would be along at any minute to put everything to rights did not spend either time or money in protecting the environment. With Judgment Day and the Rapture just around the corner, such heavy industry as still remained was free to pollute to its heart's content. Acid rain had been one of the very first issues that had pushed Canada toward the waiting arms of the Russians. Carlisle shook his head. Was the country never going to wake up to these religious maniacs and put a stop to their antics?

He knew he ought to go to bed. There was no reason to assume that tomorrow would be anything but another bitch of a day. The trouble was that he was in that state of wide-awake exhaustion that made sleep impossible. His shoulder holster was sticking into his ribs. He unhooked the harness and took it off. He paused and looked at the holstered pistol. More than one cop had taken that way out when it had all seemed too much. He half smiled and hung the rig over the back of one of the straight-backed chairs in the dinette. He was not that far gone yet. Maybe after another couple of shots and another half hour of Audie Murphy, he might be ready to doze.

Winters

Winters regarded the phone as if it were a venomous snake. He had only been at his desk for a matter of seconds before it rang. Someone must have been watching the monitors, waiting for him to come in. He nervously picked it up.

"Winters."

"I want you for an internal investigation."

It was Sommerville, his immediate superior. The words made Winters' stomach turn to ice.

"I beg your pardon."

Sommerville laughed. He had the knack of making a laugh sound cold and threatening. "It's not you that's being investigated. Not yet. I want you to help conduct one. This morning. It won't take very long. You'll be able to go back to doing nothing about the Lefthand Path after lunch."

Winters made his voice absolutely neutral. "I understand. Who's the subject of the investigation?"

"A CA called Cynthia Kline. She was apparently riding in a police car last night when it was attacked by rioters. The two officers were killed, but she survived. She claims that she blew away one of the rioters with an officer's guns. I figure she's on the level, but I want you to run her through her story."

Winters could scarcely believe it. He was going to get to interrogate Cynthia Kline. "Am I to conduct this interview on my own?"

"Of course not. Rogers and Thomas will be with you. She's on ice in interview room F. I suggest you access the statement that she gave to the PD last night. Read it and then go talk to her. There's to be no rough stuff. You understand?"

"I understand."

When Winters looked over the statement, he found it to be much as Sommerville had described. Reading between the lines, he guessed that the dead cops had been a couple of damned fools who had gone on a kill spree that had blown up in their faces. The one in the passenger seat had gotten out of the car to chase down some riot suspects. They had jumped him, taken his riot gun, and killed him. They had killed the driver as he got out of the car to help. Kline, who was also out of the car, had managed to grab the driver's shotgun and blast one of them. After that, she had radioed for help. Winters wondered if they had all been drinking.

Rogers and Thomas were waiting for him outside the interview room. Rogers was a fast-track junior deacon who did nothing to conceal the fact that he was on the make. Thomas was older and no high flier. He plodded but rarely stumbled.

Rogers seemed determined to take the point. "So I figure the woman's basically on the up and up, although I very much doubt that they got out of the car the way she tells it."

Winters made an effort to hold his own. "I was wondering if they'd been drinking."

Rogers regarded him coldly. "It's possible, but there were an awful lot of other officers in the area. They'd have to be pretty stupid."

"It's hardly an act of intelligence to get blown away with your own gun." Winters realized that without really intending to he had opened hostilities.

Thomas ignored what was going on between the other two. "Do we have the crime scene report?"

Rogers was way ahead of Winters. "I got it from the PD. Needless to say, they fouled it up. In the excitement, the bodies were moved before the whole thing was put on tape, so there's no hard evidence to either support or break down her story. Two cops are dead, four rioters are dead, and she's alive."

"So what do we do, sweat her on the details and hope she cracks?"

Rogers picked an invisible piece of lint from his suit. "I think we'd be wise to look at the big picture. We can turn up the heat initially, but unless she cracks and confesses that she went to the vacant lot to gang-bang the two officers, I figure we give her a clean bill of health and turn her over to the PR people to make her into a heroine. Jesus knows we could use one."

"Do the media have this yet?"

"There's a freeze on it until we come up with our findings."

Winters wondered if Rogers was laying some kind of elaborate trap. "You're saying that if we don't find something obviously wrong, we make her a media star and all look good in the bargain."

Rogers smiled. "You have something against looking good?"

"Not in the least."

"Then shall we go in and talk to her?"

Cynthia Kline was sitting in an upright wooden chair. She looked a little nervous but was otherwise calm and collected. Her fair hair was twisted back into a tight bun, and her uniform was pressed and neat. She looked more like a job applicant on an interview than a traumatized victim. There were three chairs facing her, already set up for the three deacons. They seated themselves. Thomas started the interrogation.

"We are here to ask you a few questions."

"I realize that."

"If you've been telling the truth up to now you have nothing to worry about."

"I've been telling the truth."

Winters caught himself staring. She was really something. She was like one of those late-show movie idols. He tried to put a name to the face. Did she remind him of Grace Kelly? There was something more earthy about her than Grace Kelly. Kathleen Turner? Of course, Kathleen Turner's earlier films had been proscribed. She had even worked with the heretic Russell. Winters found that he was drifting to the dark fantasies. His mind scrabbled for a question, any question. It came out as a blurt.

"Had you been drinking?"

Rogers and Thompson both looked sharply at Winters. He immediately realized that the question was quite inappropriate. He was behaving like an idiot.

Kline shook her head. "I was on my way home."

Rogers moved in to put things back on course. "Perhaps you'd like to tell the story in your own words."

Nobody interrupted as Kline, slowly and carefully, told her story. It matched exactly with the recorded statement. That bothered Winters. She should not have been that calm. The cornerstone of the official philosophy was that women were to be protected. Kline seemed in no need of any protection whatsoever. His Midwest deacon instinct smelled heresy. He could not however, work out why. He framed his next question more carefully.

"Please go into a little more detail as to how you came to get into a police car when you were on the way home from work."

"As I already said, mass transit was halted because of the emergency. I'd resigned myself to walking when the two officers pulled over and offered me a ride."

"Fuchs and Burger?"

"I didn't know their names until afterward."

"Do you often take rides with PD officers, Auxiliary Kline?"

"This was the first time."

"But you did get into a car with two strange men?"

"It was better than walking nearly forty blocks. It had been a bad day, what with the riot on top of the bombing."

"You didn't feel that you were in any danger?"

"These were peace officers in an armored cruiser. It was a lot safer than being out on the street, on foot, in a riot."

"You trust PD officers?"

"If you can't trust the guardians of a Christian society, who can you trust?"

"We ask the questions here, Kline." The by-the-book innocence just did not fit.

Rogers picked up the ball. "But after you accepted the ride, you decided that it might be fun to see the riot area from the back of a PD cruiser."

"Quite the reverse. I was very tired and wanted to be home as soon as possible. It was the officers who insisted on giving me the tour."

"Why should they do that?"

She hesitated. "I think they were trying to show off their… virility."

"And on this tour you ran into the fatal incident."

"That's right."

Thomas started on a very different course. "You seem to have had alarmingly fast reactions during this incident."

"I don't know. When I saw the two officers go down, I thought they were going to kill me next. I didn't want to die."

"Even in the sure and certain knowledge of the resurrection?"

"I didn't want to die."

"Clerical auxiliaries aren't trained in the use of the Remington Controller, are they?"

"We only train with handguns. Strictly for our own protection."

"How did you manage to fire the officer's riot gun so swiftly if you had never handled one?"

"I had two brothers who were both hunters. They taught me to fire most kinds of weapons."

Rogers was actually smiling. He was clearly imagining her talking about her hunting, shooting brothers on TV. His face fell at Thomas' next question.

"Your brothers owned state-of-the-art riot guns?"

"No, but when I grabbed the gun, I found that it fired just like any autoload."

Thomas leaned back in his chair.' "There are other places that teach people how to fire weapons, sophisticated weapons they'd normally have no reason to know about."

For the first time, Cynthia Kline looked less than confident. She said nothing.

Thomas leaned forward. "Perhaps in a terrorist training camp?"

Kline looked frightened. That response was, however, understandable. The word 'terrorist' could strike fear into the totally blameless. Rogers was looking at Thomas as if he had gone mad. At that moment, the phone on the wall rang. Rogers grabbed for it. He listened for almost a minute with an expression of increasing shock. Finally he nodded and hung up. Winters and Thomas looked at him expectantly. Rogers shook his head.

"Three deacons have just been killed. Right out in broad daylight. Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney."

"From the Zealots?"

"Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney. From the Zealots. We're instructed to term this interview and join our respective teams. It's a redline flap."

"Where did it happen?"

"On First Avenue. Between Fourteenth and Fifteenth. They were taken out with a burst of heatseekers, probably fired from a point-six-oh Mossberg."

"We're the only ones who're supposed to have smart ammunition."

"That's the weird part. "

Thomas sighed. "If they were on Fifteenth and First, we know where they'd been. Probably all night."

Rogers quickly motioned to Kline, indicating that no more should be said in front of her. Winters glanced at him.

"What do we do with her?"

Kline

What were they going to do with her? she wondered. "There's a CA escort coming down for her." Cynthia Kline's mind was in turmoil. She had been a damned fool. She despised the deacons so intensely that she had allowed herself to underestimate them. The older, slow one had only been shooting in the dark, but he had come close enough to the truth to rattle her. Even a dummy like Winters had been plainly disturbed by her attitude. She had talked down to them and made them uncomfortable when she should have come on like a helpless little waif and had them eating out of her hand. It still remained to be seen if her pride was going to hang her. The phone call had temporarily saved her, but it had also brought a new set of questions.

Three deacons shot dead, presumably on their way from their private bordello on Fifteenth, was a major incident. Who was behind it, and was it going to affect her situation? The abrupt removal of her three interrogators had to be cause for some kind of optimism. They couldn't be thinking of her as a dangerous terrorist, if they were prepared to rush off like that.

Her new escort arrived in the form of two burly CA matrons. Cynthia far from liked the look of mem, but to her complete surprise, they seemed quite well disposed toward her.

"Here you greased a couple of the scumsuckers for us. How did you manage that?"

"I was scared out my head, to tell the truth."

Now, after the fact, she was playing it the right way. The nearest matron all but patted her on the head.

"You got 'em though."

"I guess I did."

"You want to watch out, though, getting into a car with those PD bastards. They got just one thing in mind."

"So what happens to me now?"

"We're going to take you up to Directoress Lumet. I figure they've got your case all figured out."

Cynthia did not have to fake the fear. The matrons laughed.

"Don't look so worried. They going to make you a sainted hero, honey."

They took her quickly to the directoress's office on the nineteenth floor. Cynthia was taking it one minute at a time. She was just relieved that they were not taking her to a sub-basement – she had heard too much about what those sadists did to female suspects.

The directoress fancied herself as voluptuous and was fighting a stubborn rearguard action against the ravages of middle age. She wore her hair in the high platinum bouffant of a big-time country singer. Her makeup was thick, her eyelashes were false, her nails were bloodred, and her uniform skirt was cut a little too tightly across her ample hips. She was lounging back in a large leather swivel chair behind an L-shaped combined desk and workstation. The two matrons withdrew and left Cynthia standing in front of the directoress's inspecting gaze.

"So you're our little Dirty Harriet?"

"I think that's putting it a little strongly, ma'am."

"You'll have to get used to it."

"I'm sorry."

"And you can cut out the phony humility. I monitored your interview. You're a tough cookie."

Cynthia stiffened. "Yes, ma'am."

Directoress Lumet stood up and came out from behind the desk. She walked slowly around Cynthia. "I suppose you look the part."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You want to get on in the service?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, you could make it big if you don't foul up on this next assignment we've got for you."

"Yes, ma'am."

"There is no more important backup for an agency like this than a good public image. We are the constant targets of lying Satanist propaganda, and we badly need to show the public the part we play in protecting society from its enemies. A story like yours is just what we need at the moment."

Cynthia blinked. "It is?" What the hell were they up to?

"It's been decided to second you to the PR section. You will report to Deacon Longstreet for initial grooming. As soon as you are ready, you will be subjected to saturation TV coverage. You'll be on every talk show in the eastern area and the covers of all the magazines. You're going to be a nine-hour wonder, Kline. 'Heroic CA slays scum.' "

Cynthia was bewildered. She had never bargained for anything like this. Could she safely go so public? She had to talk to her control, but it seemed as if she was not going to be given the chance. "I don't know what to say."

"Don't screw up. Cooperate with the PR people even if they are a bunch of fags and, above all, don't let it go to your head. We're not making you into a movie star. It's just another facet of law enforcement."

As Lumet finished her speech, another CA stuck her head around the door.

"Lefthand Path just claimed the killings."

Lumet looked up sharply. "Are you sure?"

"Anderson just took the call."

When the other woman was gone, Lumet glanced at Cynthia. "You didn't hear that, right?"

"Right."

"It'll be all over the building soon enough, but I don't want it coming from here first."

"I understand."

"So go to the thirty-fifth floor and report to Longstreet."

"Yes, ma'am."

Anslinger

Maud Anslinger turned off the TV. She could not watch any longer. Satan seemed so close. All but one of the local channels had preempted their regular programming to run live coverage of the terrible murders on First Avenue. Channel 9 was still showing Treasure in Heaven, but she couldn't watch a soap when the presence of Evil was all around. She turned on the Jesus Wave and knelt beside the bed. The lights warmed to a comforting glow, and she clasped her hands.

"Sweet Lord Jesus, please do not forsake us in this time of our testing."

She really felt that God was testing her – her and all the good Christian people in the country. That was the only explanation for all the awful things that were happening. Looking into the lights of the Jesus Wave made her feel a little better, but even with its soothing hypnotic pulse she could not shake the feeling that the storm clouds were gathering all around. It was just as President Faithful had told them last week on Fireside Sunday Night, "Let us pray for America in what may prove to be our finest hour. Dear Jesus, we are a country under siege. A beleaguered enclave of decency in a dark world of pain and iniquity. To the north, we are menaced by the Godless Red Canadians and the Evil Empire of their Soviet slave masters. At the same time, beyond our southern defenses, the brown hordes from the jungles of South America are massing to descend on our pastures like a plague of locusts. Dear Jesus, bless this Fortress America, dedicated in thy name, and strengthen us lest we despair. Let us not forget that thy banner, though torn, is still flying. Make us strong, sweet Jesus. Make us strong."

The text of the prayer had been published in the Post on Monday morning. Maude had cut it out and taped it to the mirror, beside the postcard that her sister Eva had sent her from Holy-world.

Theodore the cat was watching her balefully. She had gone to the store early, but for the second day running there had been no milk delivery. There had been no chicken bits in a week. The cat had been forced to settle for the new generic Petfood with the white label on the can and the funny smell.

Suddenly there were tears running down her face. God had to be testing her.

"Make us strong, sweet Jesus. Make us strong."

Carlisle

Harry Carlisle put on his sunglasses and climbed the steps to the front door of the brownstone. It was a house without a face, the windows having all been replaced by steel sheets. There was a watch camera mounted over the door but, surprisingly, it did not swivel to look at him as he mounted the steps. He motioned to Reeves. "Get ready for a show of force here." Reeves and Donahue braced their legs and raised their Remingtons. They were dressed for The Untouchables in long overcoats and fedoras. Behind them were six of the riot squad's meanest with helmets and armor and leveled M-40s. Carlisle was very much aware that what was about to happen had a lot more to do with theater than with law enforcement. He had given himself the Eliot Ness role. He could not help grinning as he extended an assertive, black-gloved finger to the old-fashioned, polished brass bellpush and pressed. There were a lot of paybacks about to be exacted. In his other hand he clutched a lovingly maintained, long-barreled.375 Magnum that he brought out only on special occasions. After the first ring, nothing happened.

Reeves glanced at Carlisle. "Kick it down?" Carlisle looked up at the black front door with its discreet gold lettering. 555 East Fifteenth Street. He shook his head. "They're probably a little confused in there right now." He pressed the bell again, leaning on it. After about twenty seconds, the door was opened by a junior deacon. He was wearing his dress grays, but his tunic was unbuttoned and his T-shirt was hanging out of his pants. He looked bleary and hung over. "What the hell do you want?"

Carlisle had to give him full marks for blind pig arrogance.

"T7 taskforce. We're here to ask a few questions before the whitewash gets spread too thick."

"Are you crazy?"

Carlisle smiled. "Maybe, but at least I've got my pants buttoned."

"You can't come in here."

"You ready to buck a Suspicion of Terrorism warrant?"

"Where did you get that from?"

"Judge Sawyer signed it just a half hour ago."

"That old fool?"

"A judge is a judge is a judge."

"Forget it."

"We're coming in."

Carlisle moved quickly forward. The others were right behind him. The junior deacon took a fraction of second to realize that an attempt to block Carlisle would be an unwise course. Instead, he turned on his heel and hurried into the building, yelling at the top of his voice.

"It's the PD! The idiots think that they can come in here on an S of T!"

The decor was classic whorehouse, burgundy velvet and dark crystal. Even though Carlisle and his men stormed in like heroes, there was no way to resist a moment of awe. Goddamn deacons really took care of themselves. The main parlor was an impressive, high-ceilinged space with the inevitable staircase running up one wall. A half-dozen, half-dressed deacons had already gathered there. They looked shocked and not a little anxious. They were obviously meeting in response to the news that three of their more notorious co-workers had walked out of the pleasure dome to the in a hail of heatseekers. Seven or eight girls in lingerie or less sat on the couches looking thoroughly frightened. Carlisle went straight for the high ground.

"Nobody move! Don't breathe! Don't even think! This is the real thing, and you are all in a lot of trouble."

Five deacons instinctively froze. The sixth started forward, working up to bluster. But one of the riot squad was right there, and the flashguard of an M-40 was jammed under his chin.

"The lieutenant said freeze, blowhard."

Carlisle raised his tracy to his mouth. "We're secured in here. Send in the investigation team."

More uniforms streamed through the open front door. One squad charged up the stairs. Others fanned out in the parlor. Detectives followed, some carrying electronic search equipment. They were the shake and scan crew. By the time they finished, there wouldn't be anything in and about the house that they wouldn't know. Another particularly hard-faced group would conduct the individual interrogations. Carlisle had picked his team with some care.

There was shouting from the head of the stairs.

"What's the meaning of this? The whole bunch of you are going to end up in a camp!"

A red-faced senior deacon dressed only in longjohns was struggling with the uniforms at the head of the stairs. Carlisle knew him by sight: Booth, a big deal in the midtown CCC. Carlisle, waiting at the foot of the stairs, signaled that Booth should be allowed through.

"I'm executing a lawful S of T warrant."

"Are you out of your minds? You know what this place is."

Booth had obviously only just crawled out of bed. Carlisle realized that the deacon had not yet heard the news.

"Three of your men have just been murdered by the Lefthand Path as they left this building."

Booth looked sharply at the younger deacons. "Is this true?"

They nodded. Carlisle pressed on.

"It is possible that they may have been fingered by someone in here. Accordingly, the place is now sealed and everyone here will be questioned."

"What were the names of the victims?"

"Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney."

"My God."

Booth quickly recovered. He rounded on the nearest women.

"You're right, Lieutenant, and we'll start with the whores. I don't think we need to be too gentle."

Carlisle's reply was soft and cold. Early in his career he had learned the trick of talking quietly and forcing people to listen. "You won't start with anything, Deacon Booth. You're a suspect yourself for the time being. If one of the girls hasn't been passing information to the terrorists, the possibility has to be considered that the deacons have been infiltrated. As of now, this is a T7 case."

"I have to call someone about this."

Carlisle shook his head. Someone in the phone company who owed him a favor had ensured that all communications were cut off to and from the house. "This place is sealed."

Booth looked as if he were going to burst a blood vessel. Carlisle savored the moment. The raid had been his own brainwave. The plan had come to him fully formed immediately after he had heard about the killings, and it had taken him only a matter of minutes to sell the idea to a devilishly gleeful Captain Parnell. Of course, Parnell had protected himself. When the shit finally came down, it would fail directly on Carlisle, but right at that moment, Harry Carlisle was not thinking too much about long-term consequences. He was taking too much delight in sticking it to the deacons. Besides, what could they really do to him? The entire episode was too high profile for them simply to disappear him. The cloud that already hung over him would darken, but that hardly worried him. He was marked already.

Carlisle's team went to work like a well-oiled machine. The deacons' protests were ignored as their IDs, along with those of the women, were verified and individuals were taken into separate rooms for questioning. In fact, it all was running so smoothly that Carlisle found himself standing in the ornate parlor with nothing to do.

Reeves leaned over the bannister at the top of the stairs. "You ought to take a look at this place. They've got it all."

Reeves was not exaggerating. Before the Fundamentalists had taken over, Carlisle had taken Gail to a couple of love motels in New Jersey, but those had not been anywhere near as elaborate as the upper floors of the deacons' private fantasyland. He followed Reeves through the series of sexual playrooms. He saw silk sheets, circular beds, and fur rugs. He looked up at himself in mirrored ceilings and peered through one-way mirrors at hastily vacated love nests. There were no less than three fully equipped dungeons, each with its complement of chrome chains, leather restraints, slings, and pulleys, and its racks of whips, masks, canes, and paddles – and a few devices that Harry did not recognize. Even in their leisure time, the deacons seemed obsessed by the idea of pain and punishment.

"No expense spared."

"You're not kidding."

There was a certain twisted logic to the deacons maintaining their own closed whorehouse. Indeed, it was the same logic of applied hypocrisy that operated on every level of the Faithful regime. They used their thought police to enforce public morality, but at the same time they had to recognize that, among their gestapo, some of the boys would definitely be boys. This recreation facility and, Carlisle assumed, many others across the country, had been provided so that God's strong right arms could sexually unwind with only a minimal risk of scandal. Carlisle was quite proud that he, with a single stroke, had considerably upped the ante on that risk.

"The place is lousy with cameras. They must record everyone's every stroke," Reeves said.

Carlisle sniffed. "It's a system of interlocking blackmail. I know your sins, but you know mine."

"God can never have enough data."

Loud voices floated up from the parlor. The tour was cut short as Carlisle and Reeves hurried to the head of the stairs.

"What's going on down there?"

A new squad of deacons had arrived. They were being held at gunpoint in the parlor by the boys from the riot squad. Their leader was a tall man with a black leather coat draped over his shoulders. His hair was close to white blond and very long for a deacon. His eyes were hidden behind black Raybans.

Reeves whistled under his breath. "Christ, now you're in for it."

Carlisle nodded. "Dreisler. I didn't expect him so soon."

Matthew Dreisler was the head of Deacon Internal Affairs and, as the deacons' chief headhunter, possibly the most feared man in all of New York.

Carlisle hurried down the stairs, angrily demanding answers from the riot squad. "I thought I told you to seal this place!"

"We did."

"So how did these people get in?"

"They brought their own warrants."

Cold black sunglasses were regarding him. When Dreisler spoke, it was a patrician drawl that seemed almost decadent. "You must be Carlisle."

Harry nodded. "I'm Carlisle,"

"And you're the one with the theory. You think someone here is in cahoots with the LPs."

"I find it a little too much of a coincidence that a triple assassination should happen just a stone's throw from this establishment."

"You suspect a direct connection."

"I thought it merited investigation."

Dreisler removed his sunglasses. "Or did you just see a chance for the PD to humiliate the deacons?"

Carlisle did not answer.

Dreisler shrugged. "As it happens, I agree with you. With the first part, that is. That's why I'm taking over this investigation as of now."

Carlisle folded his arms across his chest. "I don't think I can go along with that."

Dreisler's pale eyebrows shot up. "You don't?"

"I'm the officer on the scene here and I've got the authority to keep anyone out if I decide they might compromise the investigation."

Dreisler had a white silk evening scarf draped around his neck. He was slowly twisting one end of it between the ringers of his left hand. "Go on."

"There's the possibility that a deacon has been turned by the terrorists, or that you have an infiltrator among you."

"If anyone fingered those boys, it was more likely one of the girls."

"Sure it is, but until I'm satisfied that it wasn't a deacon, I'm not letting any one of you near this."

Dreisler was smiling as if he admired Carlisle's gall. "Are you always so gung ho on procedure?"

Harry shook his head. "Not usually, but now and then it comes in handy."

"Do you know who I am?"

Carlisle nodded. That was the warning shot that he had been waiting for. "I know who you are, Deacon Dreisler."

"Either you have a lot of balls, or you're plain stupid."

"I'm a New York cop, Deacon Dreisler. Everything mat might imply."

Dreisler laughed as if he were conceding the point. "You have forgotten one thing, though."

Carlisle was instantly on his guard. "What's that?"

"There's been no crime committed here. You're not the officer on the scene because there is no scene."

Carlisle looked bemused. "We're standing in the middle of a functioning brothel."

"In that case you should have brought a vice warrant. We've been talking terrorism, and I don't see a single terrorist on the premises."

"I figure that this is close enough to the shooting to qualify as a secondary investigation point, and I've secured the premises accordingly."

Dreisler sighed as if he were getting weary of all this sparring. He held out the tracy on his wrist. "Do you know how long it would take me to get a ruling in my favor on this?"

Carlisle raised his hand. Enough was enough. "I know you can run me out of here at any time, but if you do, I'll be back with the first camera crew I come across. There's media all over the neighborhood. They were tipped and they went live with the killings before the censors could get in and blanket it. They'll love this."

Dreisler looked Carlisle up and down as if really seeing him for the first time. "Well, well, you don't give up too easily, do you, Carlisle?"

"Just doing my job."

Dreisler smiled. "The classic Nuremberg answer. I tell you what, Lieutenant Carlisle. While your men are doing their work, why don't you and I go somewhere on our own and talk about terrorism?"