Armageddon Crazy

THREE

Mansard

There was a chill wind blowing off the river and across the landfill. Charlie Mansard huddled his shoulders deeper into the bulk of his sheepskin coat. Behind him, the lights of the city had taken on their nighttime unreality. Mansard glanced back at them. All his life he had worked with lights, but they never lost their essential magic. It was ironic that light and illusion should have become his stable reality. He fished in his coat pocket for his other stable reality, pulled out the silver hip flask, and took a quick nip of scotch.

"Is there any coffee?"

Rita poured steaming coffee from a vacuum flask and held out the Styrofoam cup to him.

"You want to call a break so we can all get warm?"

Mansard shook his head. "Absolutely not. I want to get on with it."

Mansard had never transcended the elemental fear that the device would simply refuse to work. In the last minutes before the field test of the scale model, the tension was unbearable. If anything went wrong at this point, it would be a long way back to the drawing board. He turned to the nearest production assistant and pointed to the communicator on his belt. "Give me that."

He all but barked into the radio. "Are we ready yet?"

The unruffled voice of Jimmy Gadd came back to him through the tiny speaker. "Not quite, boss. Just a couple more minutes."

Mansard impatiently stamped his feet as he handed back the communicator.

Rita was as calm as Gadd. "Do you want an Equital?"

"No, I don't. I don't want any pills." In fact, he had taken two uppers on the way down to the landfill.

Rita sniffed. "If you don't calm down, you'll burst a blood vessel."

"I'm perfectly calm."

"Sure you are."

Mansard turned and faced the towering cityscape. "They could have blacked out the twin towers for us."

"They threw a shitfit. Said they couldn't do it, just for the test of a model."

Mansard turned back on the offending skyscrapers and faced the river. "Screw them."

The PA had his communicator to his ear. "It's Gadd, Mr. Mansard. He's ready to go."

Charlie Mansard held out his hand for the unit. "How is it, Jimmy? You can roll it?"

"Everything on line, boss. Zero on the fault deck."

"Okay, then, let's get to it."

Bono, the chief engineer, was already punching buttons on the portable masterboard. Rita handed Mansard a bullhorn. Mansard took a final look around.

"Okay, ladies and gentlemen, here we go. Fog up."

A dozen or more pillars of vapor rose straight up into the night sky from a point some fifty yards away. At first they were thin individual strands, but quickly they thickened and solidified into a single cohesive column.

"Fog running ten of ninety on the board, boss."

Mansard nodded. "Put up the reference points."

A complex constellation of bright green stars appeared in the column of mist.

"Image up to one-third."

In the mist ghostly figures were shaping themselves around the green stars. They were too faint, however, for Mansard to make out any details.

"So far so good. Bring in the base structure nice and slow. We don't want any overload this early in the game."

The ghostly figures began to solidify until they were static sculptures of white light. Now it was possible to see exactly what they were. The four mounted figures of horror on their equally terrible steeds stood motioness in the mist: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, each over fifteen feet tall and perfect in every detail – the cowl of Death, the ornate armor and plumed helmet of War, the outstretched arm and rotting flesh of Pestilence, and the hollow skull eyes and sunken cheeks of Famine. Mansard rubbed his hands together. The design was holding together very well. About the only blemish was the tip of the spear that War brandished aloft. If flickered and wavered. The image came and went.

Mansard spoke urgently into the communicator. "Jimmy, what's the story on that spear?"

"It's too long. It's projecting beyond the effective apex of the fog generators."

"Will we have the same problem on the full-size version?"

"If anything, it'll be worse. We can't expect the same fog apex on the real thing."

"Damn."

"Do you want us to rerig it?"

"No. We can fix it on this end by simply lowering the figure's arm."

Mansard walked over to Bono at the masterboard. After a short discussion, the engineer put up a schematic on the main function monitor and nursed a simple joystick. In a perfectly natural movement, War dipped his lance until the tip came into sharp focus.

"That's good. Let's color the matrix."

It was like the dawn of some medieval hallucination. As the color came up, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse took on a ghastly solidity. The colors vibrated into the night.

Jimmy Gadd whooped through the communicator. "How's that, boss? Right on the master drawing or what?"

Mansard grinned. "Close enough for rock and roll."

The colors were, in fact, perfect: the graveyard, damp earth brown of Death's robes, the glowing red coals that were his horse's eyes, the sheen of orange fire on War's blue-black armor – it was all there, just as Mansard had dreamed it, and it was awesome.

"Okay, here comes the big test. Run the animation up to fifty percent speed."

Bono nodded. "Running them nice and easy."

The Four Horsemen slowly started to move. The horses raised one foot and then another. Their heads nodded ponderously, their nostrils flared, and their manes fanned out behind them. It was as if they were attempting to gallop through some thick heavy liquid.

"How's the power load holding up?"

"Everything's in the green."

"Let's ease it up toward normal. Pull back immediately if anything starts to redline."

"Stop sweating it, boss. It's all going fine."

Mansard knew that Bono was right, but he would never admit it. "Just watch out for an overload."

The Four Horsemen began to gather speed. Mansard was transfixed. When those images were scaled up to nearly a hundred feet tall, they would blow the city away. There had really been nothing like it before.

"Up to normal motion."

The horses' hooves pounded the empty air in eerie silence. Their necks stretched and strained; their glowing eyes bulged from skull sockets. Death swung his scythe, and the outstretched arm of Pestilence broadcast contagion across the Earth.

Mansard rubbed his hands together. "How's it holding up?"

"It's holding. Quit worrying."

Mansard started to walk toward the shining images. He glanced back at the lighted apartment windows of the Tribeck Tower. What the hell would they think of this apparition on the landfill? Not that he particularly cared. The general population had become so goddamn weird that they deserved all they got. He stepped carefully over the snaking cables that connected the laser banks and the massed fog generators. Jimmy Gadd and his crew crouched beside the bulky equipment, watching tensely. Gadd straightened, weary but grinning, as Mansard approached.

"I think we got it."

"It does look like it."

"Now all we have to do is build the big one."

Mansard made a dismissive gesture. "Just a detail."

Gadd sniffed. "Tell me that on the day."

Winters

"Have you heard about the sub-basement?"

The suspect from Fifteenth Street had stopped being truculent and was becoming genuinely frightened. She inspected her fingernails. They were bloodred and as long as claws. She was avoiding his eyes.

"I've heard about it. There's a few of your buddies who just can't stop talking about it."

"We have our own dungeon down there."

"I said I heard about it."

"It's not one of your fantasy games. It's the real thing down there."

"I said I heard."

"I have the power to send you down there."

The woman looked frantically at the clerical auxiliary who was chaperoning the interrogation. The CA remained stone-faced. The suspect turned back to Winters. "You can't do that to me."

In fact he could not. The instruction had been very simple. The deacons assigned to each of the women brought in from Fifteenth Street were to scare the hell out of them, but there was to be absolutely nothing physical. "If you so much as breathe hard on one of those whores, you're dead. You got that?" Those assigned to the job were all junior deacons. Too many of the senior officers had been regular customers at the house. Dreisler and his headhunters were all over the building. The working girls from the house were rapidly becoming an embarrassment. Even though Dreisler had managed to keep away the media, the matter of the house on Fifteenth Street was still a loose cannon in the department. A cover might have been put on it if the PD had not burst in there first, but, as it was, the thing was so close to being public that the hookers had to be handled with kid gloves. Carlisle was walking around like a man who had the world by the balls, and without a doubt, if the women simply disappeared, he would blow the story to the more hostile elements in the press. The deacons had reacted by falling into a holding pattern. Junior deacons like Winters would keep the women in a state of shock, off balance, and malleable, until some upper echelon decided what to do with them.

"I can do pretty much anything I want with you."

The woman was looking at her nails again. "I want a lawyer."

"This is nothing to do with the law. We aren't policemen. We're the spiritual guardians of society. What happens here is a matter between you, me, and God."

The woman's face twisted. "God?"

"Don't add blasphemy to the rest of your crimes."

Winters was starting to enjoy himself. The woman was small, with black hair, green eyes, and spectacular breasts. Although she had been in the Astor Place complex for close to half a day, she had not been allowed to change out of her working clothes. She was still half-naked in a leather twopiece, black latex stockings, and alarmingly high heels. It was extremely exciting to have even illusionary total power over a creature who, in almost any other context, would have completely intimidated him. In the interrogation room, the costume put her at a positive disadvantage. She kept shifting around in the hard, high-backed chair as if trying to hide or protect her considerable expanses of bare flesh. A bluebird was tattooed on the outside of her left thigh. She caught Winters looking at it and covered it with her hand.

"I don't understand why you're doing this. I haven't done anything. I haven't committed any crimes."

"You're a first-degree common harlot. That, on its own, would be worth a year in Joshua."

"This is ridiculous. We were working for the goddamn deacons. We had a deal and we kept up our end of it."

"You had a deal until three of us were murdered coming out of that place."

"That was nothing to do with any of the girls."

"We don't know that. It's quite possible that any of you could have been working with the terrorists."

"That's impossible. The place was bugged from top to bottom. You couldn't get away with anything. I already told the PDs and now I'm telling you. Me and the rest of the girls were there for one purpose and one purpose only."

"The unclean lusts of the flesh?"

"Money. We were making money and keeping out of trouble."

"I suppose you have some suitably pathetic sob story about how you first became a fallen flower."

"You don't need a sob story when unemployment's at thirty percent. I come from Bangor, Maine, Mr. Deacon. You know what they get up to up there? Those bastards passed a city ordinance that prescribed branding for fornicators."

"Some areas are more zealous than others when it comes to the Lord's work."

Winters was staring at the suspect's breasts and thinking about fornication and branding. The woman went on talking.

"So I get down to New York and I find that there ain't any more jobs down here. My second night, I get picked up on Tenth Avenue and instead of getting busted, I get recruited."

"You saying that society made you a slut?"

"What gives you the right to judge me?"

"Just doing my job."

Anger was taking over from the woman's fear. "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?"

Winters was, but he could not admit it. It was as if the woman knew all about his sexual stirrings. She was leaning forward in her seat.

"You can call me what you like, but you'd better remember how well I know you guys. I'm an expert in all your dirty little urges." She half smiled. "You're getting hot right now, aren't you?"

Winters avoided her eyes. The more she talked, the worse the images in his head became. He wanted to grab her there and then. If it had not been for the chaperone, he might have. She leaned back slowly, spreading her legs and stroking the insides of her thighs.

"You'd just love to feel these around you, wouldn't you?"

The chaperone looked at her sharply. "That'll be quite enough of that."

"Someone else just doing their job?"

Kline

Cynthia nervously lit a cigarette. She was scared. It was a kind of fear that she had never experienced before. She knew the breathless fear of life-threatening situations, but this was completely different. It was her first time on television. Her mind grabbed at the obvious details. Would someone out there in the huge TV audience recognize her from the old days? The plastic surgery she had undergone in Montreal before she had been planted in the deacons had not been particularly drastic. She knew it was a risk, but she had been given no instructions to cover such an event. Nobody had suspected that the deacons would decide to make her into a media star. She had sent out the emergency signals that she wanted to talk to her control, but no one had contacted her. She was on her own.

Beneath the details, there was the less complicated fear of the lights, the cameras, and the millions of pairs of invisible eyes watching her through their TV sets. She had been given a four-hour crash course in TV technique. It had not helped too much. She knew what she was supposed to do, but she still wondered if she could do it. Nothing that she had been taught in the PR section on the thirty-fifth floor stopped her legs from feeling like jelly or a sense of nausea from gathering in her stomach. Deacon Longstreet, a somewhat effeminate officer who handled his duties from a position of total cynicism, had tutored her on her public image and the official story that she was a simple country girl who had discovered, quite to her own surprise, that she could handle herself in a tight spot. Even he could not convince her that her mind would not become a complete blank when the camera was pointed at her.

This first ordeal was taking place live on the Vern and Emily show. They were broadcast locally on Channel 9 and distributed by satellite to the rest of the country. Vern and Emily Burnette ran a traditional Christian talk show. They were aggressively downhome, and Jesus played a continuous personal role in their public lives. Emily dispensed recipes, makeup tips, home hints, and advice on pet care. When she and Vern felt the need to leaven the relentlessly cute and folksy with some slightly harder content, they ran exposes of the evils of lust and promiscuity or the demon drink. Vern had a definite mean streak. He would dare prominent sinners to come on the show and, when they did, he would sweat mem without mercy. Vern and Emily were the third-rated show of their kind, following Harry Hollister's Happy Talk and The Ingram Family Hour in the national ratings.

Cynthia had been through makeup and was in the green room waiting for her turn. Everybody seemed to be ignoring her. A researcher had talked her through the interview but then left her to her own devices. She had yet to meet either Vern or Emily. There was coffee and Danish on a side table, but Cynthia was too nervous to eat. What she really wanted was a drink. She mentioned that to a passing production assistant and received a look that was part pity and part contempt.

"Vern and Emily don't like any of their guests going on the air with alcohol on their breath. They're very particular about that."

"I don't want to get drunk; I'm just very nervous. This is my first time."

"I'm sorry, it's one of the rules of the show."

Cynthia made a mental note. Before the next show she did, she would hide a hip flask in her bag.

She was scheduled to go on right after Emily had finished conducting a wedding between a pair of miniature poodles. Their owner did not want the dogs mating without benefit of the Lord's blessing. As Cynthia watched it on the green-room monitor, she was once again convinced that the lunatics really had taken over the asylum. Once the wedding was over, the commercials rolled. After that, Vern would go on and do a solo pitch for their personalized, mail-order Jesus Wave units. When he was through, it would be Cynthia's turn.

Emily bustled into the green room followed by the dogs' owner, a makeup girl who was attempting to powder her off, and a gofer carrying the two poodles. The dogs seemed to have become completely hysterical and were busily trying to bite the kid.

"So you must be little Cynthia."

Cynthia did not quite know how to react to being called little by someone who scarcely made five one in four-inch heels. The chubby hand that was extended in greeting was weighed down by no less than four huge diamond rings. Any one of them was probably worth enough to keep the average family for a couple of years.

"I heard that you're pretty handy with a gun."

Cynthia did her best to look shy and awkward. It was not hard. "I just did what I had to do."

"There's only one way to treat criminals, honey."

Emily Burnette was a fat cherub losing the fight against flab. The worst bulges were concealed by the folds of a loose-fitting blue dress that was cut like a surplice. Her makeup was layered on with a trowel, and her false eyelashes were so long that Cynthia could not see how they did not impair vision. She bid the poodle owner a gushing farewell and then turned her attention back to Cynthia.

"Now don't you worry about a thing, my dear. Just ignore the cameras and all the folks out there. You and me are just going to sit ourselves down and have a nice friendly chat."

Emily took Cynthia firmly by the hand and towed her out of the green room, down a corridor, and through the double doors that led into the dark, cavernous hangar space that was the studio. Apart from the single camera that was pointed at Vein, everything was concentrated on the sitting room set where Emily conducted what she liked to call her little chats. When they were both seated and micromikes had been attached to then-clothes, the cameras moved in. Cynthia knew that she was going to be rendered mute. The floor manager was counting them in.

"Three, two, one, and – "

Emily Burnette's face formed itself into its famous on-screen smile. Her voice also changed to the high, chipmunk squeak that was her public trademark.

"We have a little lady with us today who did something that most Americans only see on TV. Let's have a big Vern and Emily welcome for Deacon Clerical Auxiliary Cynthia Kline."

The applause light flashed, and there was a wild yell from the studio audience seated in a half circle of banked bleachers. One whole section was given over to an entire troop of red-and-white uniformed Young Crusaders. The remainder of the crowd was liberally sprinkled with the regular teenage yahoos who provided a noisy rooting section when Vern launched into one of his political diatribes. They were waving the stars and stripes and crucifix banners and howling their approval. Cynthia found them scary. Emily gave them a few seconds to blow off steam and then silenced the crowd with a single gesture.

"Cynthia here is a brave little girl. She's attached to the crime control unit here in New York City and, a few days ago, as part of her normal duties, she was riding in the back of a police cruiser when the car was called to a violent street disturbance in one of the less pleasant sections of the city. A large gang of third world thugs attacked the car, and although the two officers fought bravely, they both died defending the car and themselves."

There were angry boos and catcalls from the bleachers. The yahoos were shaking their fists. Emily held up an acknowledging hand.

"Believe me, I now how you good people feel, and I just hope those brave officers are resting in the bosom of the Lord."

There were shouts of amen. Emily moved quickly along.

"Now, I know that if anything so terrible happened to me I would have been hiding under the seat. Not Cynthia, though. She must be one of the pluckiest little gals around. She just snatched up one of the fallen officers' guns and started blasting. She drove off the subhuman mob, killing a few in the process. Now how about that?"

The yahoos were roaring. Emily let them rip for a while and then turned to Cynthia.

"So weren't you scared out of your wits, my deal? I know I would have been."

Cynthia was amazed at how easily she found her voice. "Oh, I was plenty scared, but when I saw the two officers go down, I just did what I had to do. I guess you could say it was like the old-time pioneers who first opened up this great country. In the normal run of things, it was the menfolk who did the fighting but, if something happened to the menfolk, then the women picked up the guns."

"So you think that you've inherited the spirit of our pioneer women?"

Cynthia did her best to look helpless. "I really don't know. It all happened so fast, I didn't have time to think about anything. Like I said, I just did what I had to do."

"And were you hurt at all?"

Cynthia shook her head. "No, I was in shock afterward, but nobody laid a finger on me. I must have been too fast for them."

"Well, praise the Lord for that."

There were more shouts of amen.

"One thing that I don't understand, honey, is how come you got to be so good with a gun. I mean if, the Good Lord forbid, but if I got myself into a situation like you did, I wouldn't have had a clue what to do. Put a gun in my hand and I wouldn't have the first idea what to do with it."

Cynthia did not believe a word of it. Emily Burnette could probably smile while she killed. Cynthia, however, continued to go with the program.

"Well, Emily, I grew up a country girl with a bunch of brothers, and they taught me to shoot when I was a little girl."

"Maybe the Lord knew what was coming up in your life."

"Maybe. We never know, do we?"

Cynthia was over her stage-fright and starting to feel a little queasy. Talking to Emily was like sucking saccharine. For a few more minutes they went on, Emily asking all the prearranged questions and Cynthia coming out with the bullshit as laid down by Deacon Longstreet. Finally the floor manager signaled to Emily, and she wrapped it up.

"Well, honey, I'm real pleased that you stopped by to chat with us. I know it must have been a terrible ordeal for you and I know that everyone watching will be praying, not only for you, but also for the dear departed souls of those brave officers."

Vern was walking toward them, clapping as he walked. He faced the studio audience.

"Let's have a big Christian hand for this brave little girl. I don't know about you, but I think that she struck a real blow for all of us who are sick of getting pushed around by dope-head atheists and communists and agents of Satan and all the other scum that need to be cleared out of our cities."

The studio audience went berserk right on cue. They were on their feet, stamping and yelling and waving their banners. Cynthia felt a perverse sense of elation. Even though they were manipulated bigots and probably crazy evil, she could not lose the feeling that they were cheering for her. Despite all her instincts, it was a feeling that she liked. She was enjoying the applause.

Speedboat

Johnny Cash was singing 'Ring of Fire'. The Grass Roots Tavern on St. Marks Place had one of the last real coin-operated jukeboxes in the city. Most of them had been destroyed through that terrible weekend two years earlier when the deacons had purged the video games and pinball machines. Some fool in Washington had taken it into his head that video games were the instruments of Satan, and all across the country the dekes had gone to work with a vengeance. The dekes loved anything that involved conspicuous violence and destruction. Unfortunately they had acted with a fairly wide interpretation of their orders, and the jukeboxes had been smashed right along with the other machines. Only an administrative oversight had saved the pool tables.

The Grass Roots Tavern was something of a surviving relic itself. As far as he knew, the low-ceilinged semibasement had been there since the 1950s if not longer. It had always been the hangout for East Side bohemians. In its time, it had seen beatniks and hippies, punks, skinheads, and zippos all pass through its doors. Even though it had been plastered with all the anti-alcohol propaganda that covered the walls of every bar, and the bohemians of the Faithful era had been reduced to petty criminal lowlife, it still managed to retain a few shreds of its traditional atmosphere. The jukebox was one of those shreds.

Speedboat ordered himself a shot of bourbon and chased it with a draft beer. Normally he did not drink hard liquor, but he was tired and tense. He had unloaded the rock records and the pornosoft without too much sweat, and Jook Aroun had come through with the spansules. Speedboat had already moved half of those, and if he kept on going at the same rate, the rest would be gone by later that night. He had over a thousand dollars stashed in one of the secret pockets of his parka, and escape to Canada was close to becoming a reality. He had even run into a piece of luck. A pillhead who had bought his spansules at one of the rat traps had a line on where to get a set of forged travel documents. There was a guy who worked on the lighting crew at the Garden who could give him all he needed to get across the border for twelve hundred. The pillhead had given Speedboat a number, and he had dialed it, though not without a good deal of trepidation. Pillheads were notoriously unreliable, and there was always the chance that the deal might be a setup. Over the phone he had been given a list of instructions that seemed, on the surface, to be the real thing. In five days' time there was going to be an Arlen Proverb spectacular at the Garden. Speedboat was to go there and meet his contact after the show. Normally Speedboat would not have gone within a mile of that kind of Christian freakout, but if that's what he had to do, he would be there. At least it was a public place, which lowered the odds on getting robbed.

A bunch of mouthbreeders were feeding coins into the jukebox, and the country music was quickly replaced by a dirgelike, modern, no-bop instrumental. It was some doombeam band, probably Flugzeug. Speedboat had nothing but contempt for the doombeams and the way they pretended they were so goddamn subversive. All they did was play around at being self-destructive; at no stretch of the imagination was that going to bring down Faithful and his gang. The bands were a perfect example. They slid by the literal minds of the music censors by playing all instrumental music. They put out a lot of attitude that somehow their hollow, minor chords were going to change the world. To Speedboat's ear, it was nothing more than grim, depressing, industrial noise.

Speedboat ordered another drink. He needed to relax. As Canada came closer to reality, the fear grew that something would go wrong. He would be ripped off on the final deal, or, worse than that, he was somehow being set up for the big fall. Earl the bartender put his shot and beer in front of him.

"What's the matter with you? You look like there's a hellhound on your trail."

Speedboat shook his head. "It ain't nothing. I just got a lot on my mind."

"You got to watch out for that thinking. It can make you crazy."

Speedboat forced a half smile. "Sure."

Earl shrugged. "Barkeep wisdom."

He moved off to serve another customer. An individual who went by the name of Rancid had come out of the toilet and was talking to the mouthbreeders by the jukebox. Speedboat had not spotted him before. The word on the street was that Rancid was a deke snitch, and the smart money said that sooner or later he would wind up dead in a dumpster. Speedboat watched him out of the corner of his eye. Rancid moved from the mouthbreeders to a pair of doomy blondes who worked a sheep and shepherd game up on Union Square. The blondes did not seem to be particularly pleased to see him, but he persevered. He seemed to be trying to sell them something. As he talked, he glanced in Speedboat's direction a couple of times. Speedboat inwardly twitched. Were they talking about him, or was Rancid watching him? Suddenly he wanted to get out of the bar. He downed the shot in one gulp and took a quick swallow of beer. He left a two-dollar tip and stood up.

Earl nodded. "Leaving so soon?"

"I got to see a guy."

"So take care out there."

As Speedboat reached the door, someone else was coming through – a tall man in a raincoat and an old-fashioned fedora. Speedboat stepped quickly back. The guy had to be a cop. Nobody else would have the gall to dress like that. To his great relief, the man paid him no attention at all and walked on into the bar. Speedboat scuttled off into the night.

He hurried down St. Marks. The whole street was covered in posters for the Alien Proverb revival at the Garden. They were big 3D duraprints of Proverb against a dark, storm-cloud sky. The angry eyes that glared out of the poster seemed to follow Speedboat down the street. At the corner of Second Avenue, he ducked into Gem Spa for a pack of cigarettes and a candy bar. Two meth maniacs, Jetson and Ratner, were hanging out inside. Ratner was nervously flipping through a copy of Life, hardly seeing the pages, and Jetson was staring with bug-eyed concentration at the TV behind the counter and chewing his lip. Speedboat could not imagine why someone like Jetson should be so engrossed in Vern and Emily. It was the kind of chance encounter that Speedboat would have liked to avoid. The pair had a reputation for being dangerous and usually armed. He hoped that he might slip away without them noticing him. As usual, his luck was lousy.

"Hey, Speedboat, we want to talk with you."

They followed him outside.

"We heard you got a bunch of spansules off Aroun."

"We sure could use a few of those."

Speedboat didn't doubt that. They both looked in bad shape. Their eyes seemed about to spin, and their hands were trembling. He began to back away. "You heard wrong. I don't have a thing."

"Maybe you sold 'em all and you got the money on you?"

Speedboat felt sick. "I'm telling you, you heard wrong. I'm tapped out."

"Maybe we should look through that funky coat of yours."

At that moment a police gunship clattered overhead, randomly probing the neighborhood with twin searchlights. Speedboat saw his chance and went for it. While Jetson and Ratner were looking up at the chopper, he took off at a dead run, his legs pounding for dear life.

Carlisle

The Grass Roots Tavern was not the kind of place that Harry Carlisle normally frequented, but it was close to the Astor Place complex, and he had a bad need to drink and think. The Grass Roots Tavern also was not the kind of place that cops were supposed to frequent. It was the hangout of all kinds of East Side scum. Its clients ran pills and pornography and low-rent prostitution. Cops who hung around in scum joints were generally frowned upon. The only reason for a detective to go in there was to anchor a snitch or bust a drug dealer on his home turf. If one wanted to get drunk, he was supposed to go to one of the cop bars up on Fourteenth Street. Anything else was suspect, and if he was seen going into the Grass Roots, it would doubtless go on his political file. Carlisle did not give a damn. He was so far in after the day's fun and games that there was virtually nothing they could do to him anymore. Besides, Harry Carlisle had had enough of cops for one day.

The clientele of the Grass Roots did not exactly make him welcome. A suedehead in a ragged parka, who was coming out as he was going in, turned white at the sight of him. The kid probably had a pocketful of Haitian speed, but Harry didn't give a damn. He had more on his mind than a cheap, off-duty bust. The bartender gave him a hard look as he poured his scotch, and a number of customers seemed to be thinking about leaving. Harry mitigated the effect that he was having by taking his drink to an empty table as far from the jukebox as he could get.

He was still disturbed by the conversation with Dreisler. The man was like no other deacon that Harry had ever encountered. There were plenty of swine among their ranks, but Dreisler transcended the usual choice of fanatic sadism or brute nastiness. He seemed to be totally without belief or principle. He was also quite without the bulldozing hypocrisy that was the usual deacon method of rationalizing their excesses. He looked at it all as one great game, and he played it with a chilling relish. He was either so compartmentalized that he had no real feelings, or he was a brilliant case of arrested development, a vicious child pulling the wings off flies, who had been layered with a cold, steely self-control and an urbane, scalpel-sharp wit. He was certainly a master of the oblique. In fact, now that it was all over, Carlisle realized that he had no real idea of what they had been talking about. Ostensibly Dreisler had been pumping him for his thoughts and suppositions regarding the Lefthand Path. Underneath it all, though, something else had been going on. Dreisler was so Machiavellian that he would certainly have covered all of Carlisle's theories and probably many more besides. It was as if Dreisler had been sounding him out about something deeper but was not revealing what.

There were times when the man's cynicism glided close to actual heresy. Perhaps, as chief headhunter of the city's deacons, he felt that the normal constraints did not apply to him. Even his manner amounted to an affront to the deacon orthodoxy. With his silk scarves, leather coat, immaculate black lounge suit, and languid attitude, he was nothing less than a sinister fop. At the same time, though, the dark dandyism was the velvet glove that covered the remorseless iron hand. If Faithful ever came up with a final solution, it would be Dreisler who would implement it.

Harry recalled how strange the conversation had become toward the end. Dreisler had given him an odd sideways look.

"When you think about it, the Lefthand Path was inevitable. "

Carlisle had not rushed to reply. "What was inevitable?"

"The whole thing. It's almost Darwinian."

"It is?"

"Oh, yes. Any truly repressive regime is going eventually to produce a highly efficient clandestine opposition. I think we have ours."

Dreisler had looked quite pleased by the idea. Carlisle knew he had to call him on his choice of words.

"Are you saying that we're repressive?"

Dreisler had smiled, taken off his Raybans, and dangled them by one earpiece. "Not you, dear boy. You're much too busy being an honest cop."

Carlisle got up and went to the bar for another drink. His action caused only a slight ripple among some new arrivals who had failed to notice him sitting quietly in the corner away from the jukebox. The Grass Roots was getting used to him. He returned to his seat. There were levels of speculation about Dreisler that, for his own peace of mind, he did not particularly want to explore. The worst was that Dreisler had almost seemed proud of the Lefthand Path. Sure, he was pleased that the LP existed because it fitted in with his theory of cyclical cause and effect, but Carlisle was sure there was more to it than that. Dreisler had really seemed delighted that there was a terrorist operation running rings around the police and the deacons. A man like Dreisler scarcely seemed capable of being that delighted with something that was not his own creation. That was the thought that Harry did not want to think. If Dreisler was somehow involved with the LP, it opened a universe of wheels within wheels, and each wheel had cogs sharp enough to tear him apart. What really worried Harry was that he was becoming more and more certain that Dreisler had decided that he might be of some use to him. Harry Carlisle did not want to be of use to Deacon Matthew Dreisler, if for no other reason than the fact that he did not want to discover what might happen to him when he stopped being of use. Dreisler's parting remark had been the final enigma.

"Remember, Lieutenant, it is a natural process. Every so often there has to be a cleansing of the temple." He had given Carlisle a knowing smile. "I'll be in touch."

With that, he had summoned his aides and swept out.

Harry sat in the bar shaking his head. "I don't like this. I don't like this at all."

He realized that he was talking to his scotch on the rocks. He was spending too much time on his own. He rubbed his chin. Maybe he should flash his badge, take a complimentary bottle off the bartender, and head on home. With all the stuff that was running through his mind, he would have a hard time sleeping without a good deal of whiskey inside him.

He was just reaching for his hat when two men came in. They were local street punks, but bigger and badder than the usual. They were dressed in old, full-length military raincoats and heavy engineer boots. Their eyes, their expressions, and the way they moved combined to scream silently that they were in the advanced state of strung out where it hurt to be alive. Harry half recognized one of them, a guy with a record of low-class armed violence. What was his name? He used a street name, the title of some old TV show. Jetson. That was it.

They were too strung out to be drinking. Harry was reminded mat he was still carrying the Magnum under his left arm. Jetson was walking toward the bartender while his partner just stood his ground, halfway down the long narrow barroom. Heads were starting to turn. Harry was not the only one who could sense the tension. Jetson opened his coat and laid a caseless, stripped-down autoload on the bar with the muzzle pointing at Earl. Harry sighed. It was going down.

Jetson sounded as if he had been gargling razor blades. "We needs a loan, Earl. All you got in the till."

The partner also opened his coat. He had an Israeli needier, the kind that fired bursts of metal slivers from its triangular barrel. "Don't nobody get excited. There's a transaction going on here that ain't no concern of any of you."

How the hell had that punk gotten his hands on a needier? A single burst could decimate the room, and turn the Grass Roots into a bloody slaughterhouse.

When Earl finally found his voice, he sounded as bad as Jetson. "You're crazy. You can't get away with this. Everyone knows you."

It was a fact that probably did not need pointing out.

"The money, Earl, get the money. When we out of here, we gone."

Were they crazy enough to waste everyone in the place? It had happened before in narcotics-related holdups. Carlisle had his hand on the Magnum. He was easing back his chair. Earl was emptying the till. The two punks were watching the bartender intently. Carlisle was on his feet in combat stance, the Magnum pushed out at arm's length. His voice was soft but absolutely audible.

"Police officer. This is your only warning."

The punks were half turned away from him, but they started to bring their guns around. Carlisle fired twice. The recoil of the old gun felt reassuring. Jetson went down, shot through the head. Blood and brains were spattered all over the mirror and bottles in back of the bar. The second shot was a little low on the partner – he took it in the chest and spun around. The needier went off. Carlisle ducked, but the blast tore harmlessly into the ceiling. Dirt, paint, and plaster cascaded down. A section of the decaying tin ceiling fell out. Harry walked slowly forward, the smoking Magnum held loosely at his side. Jetson was sprawled across the bar, flat on his back and stone dead. His partner was in a fetal position on the floor with his chest making sucking sounds.

Harry looked at Earl. "I don't expect tearful gratitude, but first you could pour me a drink. After that you could call some uniforms and get this mess out of here."

Earl poured Harry a very large straight scotch. He peered over the bar. "Should I call the paramedics for him?"

"That's up to you."

Carlisle removed himself from the place as soon as the uniforms had taken control. When the sergeant in charge had asked him if he wanted to tape a statement, he had wearily shaken his head.

"I'll do it tomorrow. I'm beat."

There was always a degree of shock after a shooting, a blank numbness, as if a bit of him had been left with the dead. He did not relish killing, the way some in the department did, but this time he felt a certain sense of release. There had been something real about pulling the trigger, a reality that was the perfect antidote to the shadow play of conspiracy in which he had been spending too much of his time. Harry Carlisle knew what he was going to do. He flagged down a cab and took it to Eighty-sixth and Broadway, one of those blocks where the police turned a blind eye. As he got out of the cab, he took off his hat and draped his raincoat over his arm – he did not want to look like a cop. He was approached by a dark-skinned girl with long legs and straight black hair. She was wearing an old fur coat, which she opened to allow him a flash of naked flesh.

"You want to go out?"

Carlisle's smile was crooked. "Sure, I want to go all the way out."

Winters

At three o'clock in the morning Winters was still at his desk. His eyelids felt gritty, and the hard neon light was boring into the back of his head. There was the metallic taste of machine coffee in his mouth. And nothing he was doing seemed to have any useful purpose. He and the other junior deacons, on duty for more than sixteen hours, had been given what amounted to little more than make-work. He had interviewed four of the women from the house on Fifteenth Street, seen that they were locked down in the holding cells, and then completed four totally inconclusive reports. He had fed the reports into the database along with the transcripts of the interviews. His next task had been to run everything through an inconsistency filter and cross-match his results with those of the interviews that had been conducted by the other officers. The whole process had taken the best part of the day and had yielded nothing. The discrepancies in the prostitutes' statements were well within the parameters of standard eyewitness variations. If any of the whores knew anything about the triple assassination they were hiding it extremely well. In fact, they were hiding it like a professional. Oddly, the higher-ups still had not authorized a depth interrogation of any of them.

It was probable, of course, that the higher-ups had more pressing matters on their minds. Dreisler's headhunters were still all over the place. At regular intervals, one after another of the senior officers were taken out for questioning. Some returned to their duties quite quickly, while others did not come back at all. It was starting to look as if Dreisler and his Internal Affairs goons were using the murders of Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney to conduct a full-scale shakedown of the upper levels of the anti-terrorism section. Hie junior deacons were more than a little resentful, in part because they felt their turf was being violated, but also because of a very definite fear that after IA had finished with the senior officers, the juniors' turns would come.

Around seven, the junior deacons who had been on continuous duty since eight that morning had expected to be ordered to stand down. No such order was given. The red condition that had been imposed after the news of the killings continued, and they were put on monitor status, watching the incoming crime reports, the stepped-up sweep of telecommunication patterns, and the random spy eyes in the major newspapers and TV stations. Again it was make-work. They were overseeing complex computer programs that were quite capable of looking after themselves. It started to seem that they were simply being bottled up in the CCC complex and kept occupied. The suspicion was that the killings and the PD raid on Fifteenth Street had blown the lid off some kind of major scandal that they were not being told about.

The worst of it was that even in the skittish atmosphere of building tension and resentment, none of the junior deacons felt they could talk about it. Certain that their every word and deed was being observed and recorded, they either folded in on themselves in tight-lipped silence, or, if they talked at all, they reduced conversation to its blandest fundamentals. A few of the more competitive tried to trap their rivals into an unguarded moment of complaint. Rogers had taken a couple of shots at Winters. The last time had been as he had walked past Winters' desk carrying a pile of videotapes of the crime scene that had finally been confiscated from the Channel 15 news department. He had shot Winters a rueful glance.

"So when do you think we'll get out of here?"

Winters, who was staring uncomprehendingly at a graphic representation of pay-phone usage in lower Manhattan at the time of the killing and wishing that he were stretched out on the couch in his apartment watching Pretaped Football, was almost jolted into some grunted condemnation of the hierarchs. He caught himself in the nick of time. "I guess Satan doesn't work to our convenience."

Rogers treated him to a sour look and went on to the viewing room.

Around eleven-thirty, insult was suddenly added to injury. On the police blotter, which was running on his secondary screen, an item came up: Carlisle, off duty, had shot two aimed holdup men in a bar on St. Marks. The bastard who had caused all the trouble that very morning was making himself a hero. He would probably be on TV. Grim junior deacons exchanged glances. Aside from the LPs themselves, Lt. Harry Carlisle was the one they would most have liked to see take a fall. Winters was instantly suspicious. The story had to be some phony PD media setup. Carlisle must have thought that a bit of publicity would keep him out of reach of the deacons. Screw you, Carlisle, Winters thought. We'll get you in the end.

Hie night dragged on, and the red condition dragged right on with it. It was starting to look as if he were never to go home. The stuff on the monitors had ceased to make any sense at all. His eyes were just starting to droop when, with no warning, both his screens blacked out. He was reaching for the helpkey when a single sentence glowed green, right across the middle of his primary screen.

His jaw dropped. He blinked stupidly. What? The message lasted for five seconds, pulsing slowly, then it faded to black. Abruptly everything returned to normal. Winters looked around, trying to act as casual as possible. The others were all going about their business just as they had been doing all night. Was he the only one who had seen it? Should he report it? His paranoid conditioning warned that it could be a loyalty test. How he reacted to it could have a serious effect on his already precarious E&D scores. There was something else though. Something deep inside made the confident suggestion that God was talking to him. But that was ridiculous. God did not talk to junior deacons. Not through a computer terminal. Winters found that he was sweating.

Kline

By the time they arrived at the third party, Cynthia Kline had lost all sense of time. Immediately after the taping of the Vent and Emily show she had been picked up by Deacon Longstreet in a large black Lincoln Continental. The first party had been a fairly sedate affair at a reception suite on the fifty-sixth floor of the Trump Grand Tower. The situation had been explained to her as they had ridden up in the crystal elevator, through the melodramatic sweeps of the tower's neo-Egyptian architecture.

"It's very simple, Cynthia. We're here to show you off to the print media and the TV stations that have not, as yet, committed to going with you and your story. You don't have to say anything. Just smile nicely and let us do the talking."

There were maybe a hundred journalists in the suite. It was a brave magazine or TV talk show that turned down a party invitation from the deacon PR department. The decor was white and gold with a palm-tree motif. It looked like the set fora very crass production of Antony and Cleopatra. Once inside, Long-street and his team of seven surrounded her like a beaming phalanx. They smiled and bantered, handed out press kits and ten-by-eight color glossies, and put amiable but quite determined pressure on those who remained unsold. Longstreet repeated the same pitch over and over again.

"What you have to understand is that this isn't simply about Cynthia and her act of courage. It isn't even a matter of making the Corps of Deacons look good. It goes much deeper than that. It you think about it, you'll realize that Cynthia is a symbol for everyone who has ever wished that he or she could strike back against the daily terror that plagues our city. Cynthia may be attached to the deacons as a clerical auxiliary, but when she drove off those Godless thugs, she wasn't doing it as a part of her duty. We don't put women in the danger zone. She was a woman on her own, fighting back. She'd seen the men with her shot down and she was determined to save her own life. I think everyone can relate to that."

A battery of TV sets against one wall was running a tape of Cynthia on Vern and Emily. Waitresses circulated with trays of champagne and plates of small sandwiches. When Cynthia began to reach for a glass, Longstreet quickly shook his head. She was starting to realize what being a media symbol really meant. It meant that PR men like Longstreet took over one's life.

The press party ended with a photo opportunity. Still cameramen and video crews closed in on Cynthia.

"Look this way, honey. Over here!"

"Come on, babe, push it out a bit."

"Yo, hike your skirt up just a tad."

"Let's see a little more leg!"

Cynthia did not know whether to bolt or to slug one of them. They obviously had temporarily forgotten what she was supposed to be famous for.

Longstreet was beside her, whispering reassuringly. "Don't let them get to you. Just smile and take it. It'll soon be over."

The photographers were relentless.

"Hey, baby, how about a shot with the gun?"

"Yeah. What about the gun?"

Cynthia had expected Longstreet to rescue her when the demands for the gun started. To her amazement and considerable distaste, one of his assistants produced a standard-issue Remington Controller, just like the one that she had used on the two cops. She took it gingerly, took a deep breath, and brandished it. After a few moments, she looked from Longstreet to the photographers and back again.

"Is this thing loaded?"

Longstreet put on a show of cracking up for the audience, although something in his eyes warned her that he was the one who did the jokes.

Finally it was over. The press was leaving and busboys were clearing away the debris. Cynthia flopped into a chair, relieved that the show was over for the day. But Longstreet seemed to have other ideas.

"So, are you ready to have some fun?"

Cynthia had taken off one of her high heels and was massaging her right foot. She looked up in surprise. "Fun?"

"All work and no play. We have a couple of parties to go to."

"I thought that this was the party."

"This was business. The rest of the night is pleasure."

Cynthia frowned. "I don't know. I feel kind of beat."

"There are a lot of people waiting to meet you. You're the woman of the moment, after all."

Cynthia sighed. "So I'm still on duty? "

Longstreet lit a cigarette and handed her a glass of slightly flat champagne. "Not turning into a bolshevik prima donna already, are we?"

Cynthia looked down at her uniform. It had been instant-tailored for her. Figure hugging and made of Italian silk, it had nothing in common with her regular drab outfit except the insignia. At first, she had been amused by the idea of playing the wide-eyed innocent from inside this deacon killer-vamp creation. The costume had certainly helped her stand up to Emily, and when the taping was finished, Vern had become exceedingly friendly. After the TV show and the press bash, however, the outfit was beginning to wilt, and she was even starting to fear for its computer-stitched instant seams.

"Couldn't I go home and take a shower and change or something?"

Longstreet smiled. "It's all been taken care of."

"It has?"

Longstreet pointed. "You see that thing that over there looks like a minor but is, in fact, a door?"

"Yes."

"So if you go through it, you'll find that you have a private bath and dressing room. A hot bath is waiting, and your clothes have been laid out."

Cynthia had known that the officers of the PR section were different from the rest of the deacons, but she was only starting to discover just how different. Longstreet himself summed it up completely and set the pattern for his handpicked underlings. With his patent-leather hair, effeminate gestures, and voice like a castrato W.C. Fields, he would have been called gay back in the old days, but no one was gay anymore – he was simply creative. His mannerisms became more extravagant now that they were alone and the show was over, but Cynthia did not let that fool her. She was also starting to realize that he was a master of his craft. His life probably depended on that.

Another uniform was laid out for her in the bathroom. Where the last one had been form fitting, the new one was a second skin of black satin. The perfunctory tunic was so low cut that it revealed more cleavage than she had shown since she had been a teenage bounce dancer in the summer of '96.

"I'm not sure about this outfit."

"Selling the deacons with sex bothers you?"

"Getting arrested bothers me."

"You can't be arrested. You're with deacons."

"But this? I look like a hooker."

"Give me a break, Cynthia dear. I know the corn-fed, prude act is a crock."

"What do you mean?"

"I've been watching you. You're taking to an audience like a glutton to punishment. There's always an audience for sex. Think about it. Everyone is fascinated by sex. They're even more fascinated now that they don't do it anymore. Besides, you won't exactly be playing to the great, dull, proletariat of Jesus this time. No Vern and Emily where we're going, stalwart in the service of the Lord as they may be. I said that we were going to have fun."

Fun according to Longstreet turned out to be a frenetic, roller-coaster tour of the thin ice; high society that existed many floors above the yahoos howling for God, the spiritual cripples staring into the lights of their Jesus Waves, and the dark, miserable, strife-torn streets. Ground-level reality never penetrated their steel and crystal towers. It never got past the private security forces with their Uzis and electric clubs. Cynthia entered a Manhattan that was the last remnant of old-fashioned American hedonism. She was suddenly surrounded by people who still played and glittered against the shimmering skyline as if Cole Porter, Andy Warhol, and Sable Lydon had never been gone.

"Of course, there aren't as many of them as there were in the old days," Longstreet told her. "Most of them relocated to Rome or Brazilia when we took over. These are the rump, of the rich. The real diehards, so to speak. You might even call them an endangered species."

The night started at Der Blaue Engel, a private nightclub off Central Park West that, behind a blank basement facade, was a loving re-creation of a cabaret in Nazi Berlin. The singer dredged up Marlene Dietrich, the strippers were elaborately bizarre, and even the waiters and waitresses were like something out of Salon Kitty. The emcee was an elderly exquisite in a velvet tuxedo who loosed a stream of consciousness that was pure venom, sedition, and heresy.

"… so Larry Faithful dies and goes to heaven."

There was a ripple of applause. The exquisite looked at the audience curiously.

"And what are you people so pleased about? That he made it to heaven, or merely that he died?"

The drummer hit a rimshot. The crowd guffawed, and the exquisite started again.

"So anyway, Larry Faithful dies and goes to heaven and St. Peter comes out and he's wearing high heels and a dress…"

Longstreet leaned close to Cynthia. "The moment he stops being adorable, he'll be in Joshua."

Cynthia had felt profoundly uncomfortable in the first place. There was the stupid outfit that exposed her as if she were some 1950s movie starlet out on display. There was also the desperate blatantness. If Longstreet was correct in his advanced cynicism, this endangered species thrilled to the danger. Why else had these last lonely jetsetters not taken the final jet out? There was a sprinkling of deacon dress gray among the suits and evening dresses. Despite Longstreet's apparent lack of concern, the place made her extremely nervous. There had to be a limit somewhere around the point that cynicism blurred into recklessness.

"Are those real deacons or just people masquerading as deacons?"

"Probably both. Does it really matter when you come down to it?"

Cynthia had shaken her head and ordered two martinis in quick succession. The alcohol had not made the place seem any less insane, but it had afforded her a certain level of detachment. The question of why anyone would want to fool around with Nazi-era decadence when there was a real live concentration camp just across the river in New Jersey became a little more academic.

"How do they get away with this stuff?"

"Probably because they think they don't care."

"Yes, but why do they have to play at I Am a Camera?"

Longstreet glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. "I Am a Camera? Your milk-and-cookies exterior really is a crock, isn't it?"

Cynthia realized that she had screwed up. The booze had made her careless. Longstreet read her expression and laughed.

"Don't look so upset, my dear. You're among friends. We all have pasts, you know. Only the very rich and the very stupid don't have to wear bland masks, but if you're going to swill martinis by the bucket, I suggest we order some food."

As Cynthia was finishing the best steak she had tasted since she left Canada, a man and two women joined them. The man was a short, Napoleonic Chilean called Raoul. Longstreet told her later that Raoul owned one of the biggest hack houses engaged in running the Japanese embargo. The deacons were never going to touch him, and he expected the pick of everything. Since he brought in 40 percent of the advanced software that reached the Eastern Seaboard, he normally got what he wanted. One of the women played small parts in the soaps. Her name was Donna, her hair was black, and she was voluptuous and wore a leather dress that suggested that pain might be amusing. She hardly said a word and rarely even smiled. The other was a willowy and anemic blonde with the unlikely name of Webster. Her white jersey dress was quite as tight and revealing as Cynthia's satin uniform but, in addition, she had a Blackglama mink hanging over her shoulders. She was also stumbling drunk. At regular intervals, she would do a mood switch, stop giggling, petulantly announce that she was bored, and demand to be taken to Hell.

Hell turned out to be a clandestine nightspot among the ruins of Tenth Avenue. It was the renovated and heavily disguised basement of one of the blackened buildings beside the burned-out Javits Center. The five of them rode down there in Radii's rented limousine. When they got out of the car, they had to pick their way along a narrow path between piles of rubble. Cynthia, who had drunk most of a bottle of Mouton Rothschild with her steak, as well as a couple more martinis, did not like this at all. Aside from the simple physical problems of negotiating the uneven surface in four-inch heels, an impossible skirt, and with her sense of balance more than a little impaired, it also reminded her too much of the dark vacant lot where she had shot the two cops.

There must have been some kind of heat sensor concealed in the rubble. Without any warning an automatic trap slowly lifted. Red light spilled out from below.

"Damn, it really is the entrance to hell."

A flight of steps led down to something out of the pre-AIDS '80s. Lasers flashed and holograms whirled in a huge, industrial-tech cavern. Porno loops were playing on a giant back-projection screen, and the music was oldies and outlawed. The live DJ, a tall black woman in spandex, seemed determined to run through the entire catalog of proscribed rock and roll. The dance floor was crowded with gyrating people, some of whom were practically naked.

Cynthia looked at Longstreet in amazement. "I didn't know anything like this existed."

"Everything exists. There have to be a few fleshpots, if only for foreign visitors. We're not Syria, you know. Most things can be accommodated if they're discreet and don't frighten the proles."

"This isn't discreet."

"That's why it has only three more weeks to go."

"You sound like you know that for a fact."

Longstreet laughed. "I'm already composing the media campaign that will accompany the bust."

"And what about all these people?"

"I'm afraid a lot of them will end up in the camps. Illicit thrills wouldn't be thrills if there wasn't a penalty attached to them. Besides, anyone who's important to me will be warned to stay away."

Cynthia blinked and shaded her eyes with her hand as a focused light effect hit her full in the face. "Don't have the fun if you can't do the time? Is that what you're saying?"

Longstreet nodded. "Exactly."

"There's something fucked up about all this."

"Of course there is. It's all a part of modern America."

They left after what purported to be a heavy metal band took the stage. Four young men in shag wigs and bondage costumes hammered loud raucous guitars and howled about Satan.

For the next party, they went uptown and across the park to Fifth Avenue. The Gotti Building was an art deco spire that had been financed by some very dubious millions during the mini-boom of the mid-'90s. Up in the penthouse, the music was smuggled hits from England and Australia, and the style was a brittle sparkle. The women were in designer originals and wore their own diamonds, and the men were in tuxedos. No doubt the tuxedos had been immaculate at the start of the evening, but by the time Longstreet's party arrived, jackets were unbuttoned and bowties undone, voices were loud, and the odd breast threatened to spill out of a low-cut Giva or Manetti. Cynthia felt more than ever like a freak on display, but she had passed the point of caring. Longstreet was treated like a major celebrity, and once it had been explained who Cynthia was, she found herself surrounded by her own circle of admirers. A breathless woman with cropped red hair and orange lipgloss wanted to know how it felt to kill someone.

Cynthia winked. "You just curl your finger around the trigger and pull, honey. You know how to pull, don't you?"

Later she heard the woman describing her to a group of friends as a psychopath. By that point, Cynthia was seriously drunk. Even coming up in the elevator, she had sagged against Long-street.

"How do you keep this up night after night?" she had asked them.

"You probably haven't noticed, but I don't drink that much."

Cynthia lost all sense of time. The penthouse was starting to spin. Running on automatic, she headed for the bathroom, which turned out to be bigger than her apartment and decorated in black glass. Two women were leaning against one of the walls, caressing each other. One of them was Webster. She was half out of her clothes. She turned and looked blearily at Cynthia. "Your Longstreet's protegee, aren't you? What was your name again?"

"Cynthia."

"Hi, Cynthia."

Webster's companion also peered at her. Her bared breasts looked as if they had had the benefit of surgical implants.

"Hi, Cynthia."

Cynthia swayed and raised an ineffectual arm in greeting. "Hi."

Webster held out a small fold of blue paper and a rolled hundred-dollar bill. "You ever do cocaine, Cynthia?"

Cynthia's eyes widened. She had not seen cocaine since the '90s.

"Don't look so shocked. Although it is terribly illegal."

Webster's friend giggled. "They'll come and take us all away one of these days." She waved a fluttering butterfly hand. "All away."

Webster disengaged from her friend and moved unsteadily toward Cynthia. "You want some?"

It seemed to be a drunken dare. Or maybe it was a trap. Paranoia floated up through the haze.

"I don't know."

"Come on. You only live once."

"We're all witches and we're all going to burn. Might as well burn for something good."

Cynthia took the packet. Drunken bravado had swamped fear. She opened it and what she saw stopped her dead. Sure there was a small amount of white powder in the blue paper, but that wasn't it. There was a single symbol drawn on the inside of the pack. A simple right angle like an inverted L. It was the symbol of the Lefthand Path.

1346408 Stone

The hiss and staccato crack of the whip were immediately followed by the scream of the inmate. The sequence of sounds echoed around the concrete wails of the blockhouses that surrounded the main yard. There was nothing else. The whole camp, assembled there in the yard, seemed to have stopped breathing.

"Twenty!"

Voorhiss, the huge guard who acted as camp executioner, was bringing back his arm once again. He stretched to his full six five, leaning back slightly. The inmate was making soft whimpering noises. The scaffold on which the punishment was taking place had been fully miked. Every audio detail was being relayed over the PA. Voorhiss struck again. Again there was the hiss, the crack, and the scream. The inmate struggled and twisted against the heavy plastic restraints that secured her to the tall wooden triangle.

"Twenty-one!"

Armed bosses walked slowly up and down the overhead catwalks, ready to open fire at the first sign of any kind of protest. Punishments always raised the level of resentment among the inmates. Trusties paroled on ground levels, slapping their electric clubs into their gloved hands and scanning the eyes of the inmates. The prisoners had to watch every moment of the punishment. Closing one's eyes or looking away was an offense equal to three days in the bunker. The whip struck again. This time the scream strangled off into a series of racking sobs. The inmate's back was bleeding.

"Twenty-two!"