Black Trump

WILD CARDS

EDITED BY

GEORGE R.R.

MARTIN

Book III of a New Cycle

BLACK TRUMP

EIGHT

The smell of blood twisted around the muezzin's ululating pre-dawn call to the faithful. A red, slick, looping skein snaked through the night and intertwined with the yodeled vowels; a dream - not a dream. In the silence that followed, Zoe opened her eyes and lay still as Needles walked by her. Inches from her cot, his clawed hand swung past her face. His hand carried the musky stink of fresh blood.

Needles opened the door to the tiny bathroom and slipped inside. Metered water gurgled in the sink. Moonlight marked out the narrow rectangle of the archer's window near the door and outlined the low mounds of sleepers in the high-ceilinged room.

Angelfish, Owl, and Jellyhead lay on their benches on the far wall. They looked so peaceful, her "Escorts," New York street kids who could at least sleep under a roof now, under Zoe's fragile protection. Anne, Zoe's mother, was quiet on her cot. Jan, the littlest of the kids, slept with her feet sticking out from beneath the sheet that she had, as usual, pulled over her head like a tent.

Croyd slept in the alcove, screened off from the rest of the room by a curtain. Croyd had been asleep for weeks. He'd signed on as a boarder, vanished, and then staggered through the door three weeks ago, red-eyed and angry. Needles had listened to Croyd rant for hours until the Sleeper just stopped in mid-sentence and went limp. Zoe had helped carry him to the alcove and shove him into the narrow bed. He didn't seem to be changing much, not yet, anyway.

In the bathroom, the water kept on running.

Needles patrolled with the Twisted Fists. He was a child. The Fists had sent him home with blood on his hands. Anger made Zoe want to shout out obscenities to the rooftops; the need for silence made her tremble. She jerked the thin cotton sheet from her cot, wrapped it around her, and tiptoed across the room, her bare feet welcoming the feel or smooth, cool concrete. She leaned close to the bathroom door and hissed.

The light inside clicked off and Needles opened the door. Zoe slipped inside with him. Shower stall, commode, sink, the little closet was small enough that you could brush your teeth while sitting on the pot.

Needles turned off the tap and dried his hands, working a thin terry rag over each claw, polishing them in the yellow glow of the night-light plugged into the single outlet over the sink.

"What happened?" Zoe whispered.

"It's nothing," Needles said. He had been in a major growth spurt since they had reached Jerusalem. He was as tall as Zoe, and he shaved, every single day.

Zoe reached out and touched his cheek. "You missed a spot."

Needles jerked his face away and looked in the mirror. He scrubbed at the sticky black mark with the damp cloth in his hand. "Shit," he whispered "Oh, shit. Zoe, it's ..."

"Did you kill someone?" Zoe asked.

Needles sucked a deep breath between his baleen teeth and turned his head away.

"Come outside. We'll talk about it." Zoe held out her hands for the towel. Needles passed it over and slipped out of the room. Zoe washed her hands, rinsed out the cloth, and watched the rusty water drain away, more blood to enrich the fertile sewers of the City of Peace.

Whose blood? Had Needles killed a nat? Had the Fists put the boy through some impossible initiation ceremony? Or had he just helped with the cleanup?

Whose blood? Nat, joker, one of Needles' new friends?

In the Divided City, so many died. The Divided City, Jerusalem, partitioned in those strange days of Britain's withdrawal tram Palestine, a war zone for more than fifty years, a walled town swelled to bursting with refugees and warriors. The boundaries of its ghettos were forever in flux. The Muslims gained a few streets from the Christians, who crowded against the Jewish Quarter, and then someone would cut off a water supply or a tourist route in retaliation and the boundaries would shift back again.

The Joker Quarter stayed peaceful. Women and children walked unescorted, shopkeepers hawked their wares under awnings that shaded the narrow streets, and a joker could profess any religion at all, or none.

Weird but true, this was a safer place than New York, jokers and joker children went to school without getting mugged.

The Escorts liked school. They came home babbling about how way cool it all was. Arabic and Hebrew and the Koran and the Talmud. But they learned other things, too, crowd management, that was def. First aid was really to hurl, but it feels good to know what to do, right? Jellyhead could break down an Uzi at FTL speeds, they said, and nobody could touch Needles on banking transactions. A school for literate terrorists could only be a Fists setup. Zoe had tried not to think about it.

She didn't question peace for her kids, and good schooling, even though each of the Escorts had some job to do in the quarter, every building had its designated guards -

The Twisted Fists killed five for one. Always. If a joker died, five nats died. If the Fists knew who had killed, they killed the killer and four compatriots. If they didn't know, they took their best guess.

It was horrid justice. It was no justice. It had to be done - maybe. But not by the Escorts, damn it. The Fists by God shouldn't be sending children to do their killings. She'd hidden from the truth too long, blocked away the ugly reality of what was going on with the kids because she needed a semblance of normality, a salaried job, help for Anne, a little time to forget those last horrid days in New York, a dose of reality.

Right. Reality was the Sleeper in his alcove, locked in a process of transformation that might mean he'd wake up as a walking nightmare. Reality was five adolescents searching for role models, and finding them in trained killers. Reality sucked.

The air in the tiny bathroom was stifling. Zoe turned the tap back on and filled her cupped hand with tepid water. She splashed it on the back of her sweaty neck, slipped out into the room, and eased the bathroom door closed behind her. Needles was awake, his eyes wide and watchful. He looked dazed and numb. He looked hollow, as if something had been drained from him, and she wondered how she had looked in those first hours after she had willed a mannequin to kill for her. But she hadn't had to come home and wash blood from her hands. Poor Needles.

Zoe sat on the edge of her cot and pulled jeans and a maroon silk crop-top from the stack of clothes in the corner. In this crowded space, she had learned the art of dressing under a sheet. Underwired bra, scoop necked blouse that would show cleavage, one button left undone under the length of blue silk cord that held up her hip-hugger jeans. She shrugged out of the sheet to pull on her sneakers. The clothes would offend the sensibilities of most of the religious groups that crowded Jerusalem's narrow streets, but she was so tired of long sleeves and skirts.

Needles stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth. Fifteen-year-old boys never stopped moving, Zoe had noticed, unless they were deeply asleep.

Zoe grabbed a Little Red Riding cloak of thin cotton gauze, the color of copper, its hood trimmed in thin dangling gold coins. She rolled it into a bundle and tucked it under her arm. Deadbolt, chainlock, and lock, she opened them as quietly as she could. Needles followed her to the tiny landing that led downstairs to the street.

"Zoe?" he whispered.

She felt his fingers, tentative, brush her elbow.

"What happened?"

"I can't talk about it. Orders, Zoe."

"From the Fists?"

"From the Fists, yes. We had a job to do, a retaliation. We did it."

Gods. He was horrified by what he'd done, but he was proud, too.

"You killed someone for revenge? You?"

"I had help."

"My God, Needles! Why have they done this to you?"

"This is Jerusalem, Zoe." He lifted his hand as if to grab something from the air. His razor-sharp claws caught the faint light and he stared at them as if they belonged to someone else.

"This is hell," Zoe said. Enough of this. Refuge or no refuge, this use of "her" kids had to stop.

"It's hell. I'm okay, Zoe. Don't worry about me. I gotta get some sleep, okay?" Needles leaned against the wall and gave a theatrical yawn.

Like hell he would sleep. But Zoe could understand that he didn't want to talk out the night's horrors.

"Go to bed, then. Rest, Needles. You did what you had to do. I'm going somewhere for a while. Lock up after me, would you?"

She could see Needles clench his jaw, could see him gather his defenses to protest. "Let me go with you," Needles said.

"No." She stared down the stairs.

"You're going to the Fists."

Zoe didn't answer.

"You won't find them. Don't get me in trouble, Zoe."

"That's not my plan." So what was her plan? Set up an interview with the Black Dog? Great plan. She ran down the narrow stairs, leaving Needles to fasten the three locks on the door. The task wouldn't keep him from following her, but it might slow him down a little.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"I can't believe you told the goddamn Black Dog about the Trump, Dutton." Fury rouged the skin of Hannah's high cheekbones and penciled fine lines around her eyes. Gregg could nearly see the anger sparking electric blue in her eyes.

Spotlights illuminated a trio of Turtle shells suspended from the gallery ceiling, painting cavernous hollows in Dutton's death's-head face. Back in the darkness, there was the moist gleam of eyes. Gregg sniffed: Dutton smelled like the museum itself - dusty, ancient, a perfume of mold and rust. In the shadows to Gregg's left there was a rustling of cloth and a soft, polite moan: Oddity, writhing in the pain of their endless transformations.

"We need help," Dutton answered, aggravation riding in his sepulchral tones. "It seems to me that the Twisted Fists are one of the few allies we have."

"They're thugs and murderers. Their idea of a solution is to kill something, five for fucking one. That's asinine and stupid, Charles. I won't have it."

"You won't have it?" Dutton snapped. "When were you elected the head of our little cabal, Hannah?"

"I'm not the only one who feels that way. Father Squid - "

"Father Squid was one of them for a time."

"And he left them, didn't he? Damn it, we all want Rudo caught and the virus destroyed, but ..."

"But what, Hannah? You don't think that end justifies any means? You don't think that associating with thugs and murderers is worth saving countless joker lives? I'd rather see jokers live than worry about whether I'm associating with the right kind of people."

"Charles," Gregg interrupted, seeing the color deepen in Hannah's face. He tried to speak as soothingly as his high-pitched, whining joker's voice could manage, regretting once more the loss of his old voice and body. How can you be imposing when you're a four-foot-long yellow caterpillar who sounds like a 33 1/3 rpm record played at 45? "I agree with Hannah. I've had dealings with the Fists; I'm not convinced that bringing them into this is going to help." Gregg glanced at Hannah, who was standing with her hands fisted, glaring at Dutton. "And we have another problem. This press conference you've scheduled for tomorrow afternoon - "

"My people" - Dutton accented the possessive heavily, with a significant empty-eyed stare at Hannah. His voice woke sluggish echoes in the dead recesses and far galleries of the Dime Museum - "have a right to know the danger they're in. It's irresponsible of us not to warn them."

"It's going to cause panic and riots," Hannah insisted, cutting off Gregg's response. He wondered whether she'd even noticed he'd been about to speak. "If you tell them about the Black Trump, if you tell them that the Sharks are going to loose a plague that will only kill those infected by the wild card, then you'll have half the population of Jokertown looking to take some nats down with them. That's a great solution, Charles. That way, the jokers just manage to convince the few nats who can help that jokers don't deserve help. If getting the Fists involved isn't enough, that should just about finish it."

Dutton exhaled: a serpent's hiss. "I take it that you feel we should keep them in the dark so they die quietly."

"That's not what I'm saying....Damn!" Exasperation made Hannah's last word throaty and ragged. "I just know how important it is to find the vials quickly."

"You're a nat. It won't matter to you either way."

"Damn it, Dutton, that's not fair - "

"Listen, all of you. The first priority - the only priority - is finding the vials. Hannah's right about that." That was the Oddity - John. "Fuck anything else. We heard what Clara van Renssaeler and Dr. Finn have told us: the Sharks will try to cultivate enough of the Trump virus to guarantee a worldwide release. If that happens, we're dead. All of us. Hannah, Gregg, you two have been our spokespersons since we went public with this. What Charles is asking is for you to go into those roles again. As for the Fists, we're going to need all the help we can get to find the vials, and if the Black Dog can help ..." Oddity shrugged. "Seems like a plan to me."

"A plan, yes," Hannah said. "A smart one, no."

Dutton sniffed. "We can do without the sarcasm."

Hannah turned on the man, hands fisted on hips. "Look, Charles, I got involved in this involuntarily, but I am involved. Totally. Don't tell me that I have to behave nicely because I'm a nat. Don't you dare tell me that I don't care enough."

"Hannah - " Gregg began, but Dutton interrupted him, riding over Gregg's weak, thin voice.

"My sources tell me that Barnett's ordered another crackdown," Dutton said, "SCARE aces are involved, the FBI, the Justice Department, anyone who can be enlisted. I don't know what's going to happen, but I suspect that we need to make our moves soon, or we won't be able to move at all."

"We can find Rudo without the Fists," Hannah said.

"Considering that the authorities want everyone involved in the kidnapping of Dr. Van Renssaeler and Dr. Finn, I doubt that Rudo is even in the country anymore. That's another reason to bring in the Fists. We already know some of the Sharks overseas - " Dutton stopped. "Listen," he said.

Gregg heard it then: muffled shouting from the front of the museum, a few rooms away. "Break 'em down! C'mon, c'mon, let's GO!" Then, more clearly, strident and treble through a bullhorn: "This is Special Agent April Harvest! We have a warrant!" At the same time, there was a splintering ka-CHUNK as something heavy slammed against locked doors.

Quasiman was there in that moment, popping into existence in the middle of the gallery with his mouth open and panic in his eyes, words tumbling from his lips wrapped in a spray of spittle. "The clinic," he said breathlessly. "Dr. Finn, the other doctor woman - all under arrest. The parsonage: Father Squid, Troll.... Got to get - " Quasiman stopped. His right arm had vanished. He looked like a marionette whose strings had just been cut, frozen in mid-speech.

The doors must have held under the battering ram. Faintly, Harvest's voice shouted through the bullhorn: "Get back. BACK! Let him do it ..." There was a sustained, crashing thunder of falling brick, punctuated by beams splintering like twigs. Someone shouted in glee in the midst of the clamor, and Gregg recognized the voice with a cold shudder.

"Snotman ..." he breathed. "Oh, shit."

Loud footsteps sounded in the museum. Flashlights wove mad patterns through the dark galleries. "Federal agents! Everybody down!" Harvest's voice shouted again, clearer this time. A dark form filled the door.

"Don't call me Snotman, caterpillar," said someone from the darkness. "Well, look what we got here: the fucking jackpot." The ace sometimes known as Reflector was a handsome, dark-haired man bulging with muscles and fairly glowing with energy. He could take the energy of a blow directed against him, store it, and use it for himself - the people outside had obviously been beating on him to charge up his ace batteries. Gregg remembered the destruction Snotman had caused at the Rox, and shuddered. "I never did like you, Battle, but it looks like you got pretty much what you deserve," Snotman said. "Now, who's surrendering quietly and who wants to fight?"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

It was night, but the pure white sand still radiated heat from the warm Caribbean day. The breeze was cool and tinged with salt. The stars were a glorious spectacle strewn across a clear, pollution-free sky, but Billy Ray had no time for an astronomy lesson.

The beach was empty but for a clump of gnarled, sun-bleached driftwood that sat perched on a hummock of sand like a bizarre terrestrial octopus guarding its territory. Ray came out of the water and crawled to the driftwood. He took off his wet suit and scuba gear and lay on the warm sand for a moment, catching his breath. It had been a long swim in from the government cutter now hidden behind another fly-speck of an island.

Sufficiently rested, Ray dashed across the strip of beach, heading inland. Crossing the pristine beach offended his innate sense of neatness. Leaving footprints behind on sand smoothed clean by the wind and water seemed so messy. Messy - and if the Card Sharks had decent security - dangerous as well.

Ray didn't mind danger, but he disliked sneaking. He was not a sneaking kind of guy. He was more of an in-your-face-right-down-the-gut kind of guy, but sometimes the situation called for sneaking and this was absolutely one of those situations.

Ray was Shark hunting.

The Card Shark conspiracy had been exposed and broken, though some of the conspirators were still at large. Others were in government custody. Some of them, like Peggy Durand, were singing like the fat lady at the opera. Among other things, Durand had squealed about an island between the Keys and Cuba. It was isolated and inconspicuous, but large enough for a romantic hideaway or a secret headquarters, depending on your exact need. Since it was owned by a dummy corporation that was itself ultimately owned by head Shark Pan Rudo, Ray was inclined to think that it was more of a secret HQ, a sort of Club Med for amoral old farts like Rudo and other Sharks still at large. At least that's what he was here to check on.

The beach quickly gave way to dunes covered with patches of tough, scraggly grass. The dunes dipped and peaked, providing Ray with cover as he made his way to the manor at the heart of the island. He was happy to get off the beach. Because it was night he'd opted for his black fighting suit, but the pure white sand made for a high degree of contrast with his supposed camouflage. Hunkering down in the dunes made him less of a target, and when he broke into the shrubs and palm trees of the island's interior he had plenty of shadows to skulk among.

It was a good thing, too, because that's where he ran into the first sign of Shark security, a lone sentry armed with an assault rifle. As Ray watched, the Shark wandered around the shrubbery, stopped, leaned his rifle against a convenient palm tree, and lit a cigarette. After a moment the sweet smell of marijuana wafted to Ray as he crouched in the shadows.

Ray smiled. Sneered, really. "Moron," he said to himself, and he moved. He didn't bother to move quietly.

He caught the sentry in the middle of a long toke. The guard looked up as Ray's shadow engulfed him, more astonishment than fear in his eyes. Ray took him out with a single blow to the jaw. He could have gone for a soft body part, but tonight he felt mean. He wanted the shock of hitting bone to jolt his fist and run tingling up his arm like an electric current. The pain sent an extra surge of adrenalin flowing through Ray's body. As if he needed it.

Ray stood over the unconscious guard, flexing his fingers. It was hard to tell if the sentry was local talent or a Shark import. He was black. He could have been a local thug. But he was big, well-nourished, and certainly well-armed ("For all the good it did him," Ray thought as he ground the barrel of the assault rifle into the sand.). He even wore a uniform, a khaki paramilitary outfit complete with shiny boots and a fruity-looking maroon-colored beret. Peggy Durand had said that the Sharks had their own security units. Ray's smile fixed and widened. He hoped so.

He considered calling in to the cutter that waited offshore, but decided to maintain radio silence. There was no telling how sophisticated Shark security was - though if the bozo snoozing at Ray's feet was any indication, even if they had a state-of-the-art listening post they'd probably be using it to catch a Peaches game on WTBS.

Ray stopped to put plastic restraints on the sentry's wrists and ankles, stuff the man's beret in his mouth, then wind duct tape over it. He pushed him under some bushes and moved on.

The manor house was a couple of hundred yards away. At first Ray flitted from tree to bush, but he tired of skulking before he'd gotten halfway to his target.

"Screw it," he said aloud. The adrenaline was dancing through his system and he ached to hit someone, to smash the bastards who wanted to eliminate Ray and the rest of the wild carders from the face of the earth.

Luck was with him - or not, from Ray's point of view. No one saw him as he strode up to the house. He paused for a moment to look around. There was a moving silhouette on the roof, man and rifle held at rest. But the guard was looking the other way and he never saw Ray as he walked through the back door.

It opened into a dark hallway. Ahead was a closed door with light spilling from the cracks at floor and ceiling. Ray went to the door and turned the knob, then entered the room.

It was a well-lit, well-appointed kitchen. There was a large electric range, a huge refrigerator, and nice wooden cabinets. A counter ran down the center of the room. Cold cuts, bread, cheese, and condiments were spread over it. One man stood in front of the counter, making a sandwich. Two others sat on stools, eating. Another was perched on the counter near the sink drinking Red Stripe beer from an amber bottle. They all wore the same outfit that the sentry had. Their rifles were piled on the counter among the cold cuts and cheese.

"Who the hell are you?" the man making the sandwich asked, roll in one hand, mustard bottle in the other. He spoke with a Brooklyn accent. He wasn't a local.

Ray shook his head. "Doesn't matter," he said. "But this does: you guys Card Sharks or what?"

"You expect me to answer that?" the other asked incredulously.

Ray smiled happily. "You just did."

The two men sitting at the counter eyed each other. Slowly they started to put down their hoagies and reach for their rifles, and then Ray was among them. He crossed the room before they knew it. He gave one the back of his right hand, the other the edge of his left. He reached across the counter for the third before the first two hit the linoleum. The third waved the mustard bottle at him as Ray dragged him across the rifles and cold cuts. The Shark squeezed the bottle and a stream of brown mustard shot out and splattered the front of Ray's fighting suit. Ray's eyes burned with a sudden cold fury.

"Son of a bitch," he snapped, then head-butted the sentry and left him unconscious among the rolls. The fourth had time to say, "Oh, shit," as Ray turned to him. He swung the beer bottle. Ray blocked it with his left forearm. It shattered, spraying amber slivers of glass. Ray's smile widened.

"Let's talk," he suggested.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Grew knew it was over. If he had Puppetman again, maybe he could have done something - if nothing else, he could have reached inside Oddity and taken the anger he knew constantly boiled there and turned up the fire until the formidable joker hurled himself at Snotman. Maybe the rest of them could flee in the confusion. But without the old power, in this body ... Gregg raised himself up and started to lift the tiny hands on his front two limbs in surrender when he caught a glimpse of motion at his side.

Oddity was charging forward like a bull driving toward a matador.

Two of the most powerful forms created by the wild card - joker or ace - collided. Oddity hit like a truck ... and caromed off, scattering Kevlar-jacketed SWAT-team members like tenpins and crashing into a diorama of the Crystal Palace. Snotman laughed. He hadn't budged an inch. "That felt fucking wonderful," he said, and raised his hand toward Oddity, crouching in the center of the gallery.

"Gregg ..."

A beam of aching blue light arced from Snotman, striking Oddity full in the chest. The joker howled with their ruined voice as the bolt of raw energy lifted them and threw them ten feet back like a rag doll. Oddity hit the wall by the archway, crumpling plasterboard, their dented fencing mask flying off. The Turtle shells above Gregg swayed, two of them striking together and ringing like bells. The face underneath the mask - piebald, knobby, a horrible fusion of the three people inside - cried out once and Oddity sagged into a heap on the floor. They tried to stand again, leaning heavily against the broken wall, then sank back.

"Gregg!" Gregg couldn't move, even though Hannah called him. He thought for an instant that he could feel Oddity's pain, and it felt ... good. The sensation stunned him, left him rooted to the floor as Snotman chuckled, as Oddity groaned. Gregg could feel the shifting of personalities inside Oddity, could sense John - injured and shaken - allowing Evan to take control of their shared body.

Snotman waved back the agents who crowded the gallery as he strode toward Oddity; they seemed happy enough to obey him. Snotman swaggered over, lifting his fist as Oddity raised their hands in weak self-defense. Gregg did nothing, said nothing, felt nothing. The sensation was gone as quickly as it had come. He watched, helpless, feeling acid gnawing at his stomach.

Oddity suddenly kicked upward, striking Snotman square in the groin. Snotman sneered. "You son of a bitch," he said, He looked stronger and more dangerous than ever. Oddity charged again, like a groggy linebacker determined to take down a receiver, but Snotman slapped him aside contemptuously.

Oddity fell, unconscious. Snotman, laughing, lifted a booted foot to smash the tri-featured head below. "No!" Hannah shouted, running forward.

Snotman chuckled. "Ahh, you're no challenge at all," he said, and pointed at her.

Hannah screamed in pain as Snotman's lightnings sent her tumbling backward. Gregg screamed with her, but another voice sounded louder than Gregg's. "Hannah!" The word was a shriek, primal and shrill, and it came from Quasiman.

Snotman grinned "C'mon, hunchback. Let's see what you can do."

"Quasi, no!" Gregg said. He had scuttled over to Hannah, who was shaking her head groggily. "Hit him and you just make him stronger. We're done here. We've lost. Give it up."

"Snotman hurt Hannah," Quasiman said slowly, without looking at Gregg.

"Don't. Call. Me. SNOTMAN!" The last word was a shriek of fury.

Quasiman hurled himself at Snotman. The ace spread his hands wide, as if in embrace. "Come on, asshole," he said.

Quasiman struck the ace square on the chest. The joker's stubby arms locked around the ace. "Run, Hannah!" he shouted.

And Quasiman vanished, taking Snotman with him.

For a moment, an awed silence reigned. Then Gregg saw the agents gathering themselves, the blond-haired woman who must be Harvest motioning them forward. "Get to the back of the gallery," Gregg hissed at Hannah and Dutton. "Pretend you're surrendering." He skittered to the side, clambering up the wall. He made the short leap to the nearest of the Turtle shells. He concentrated on the delicious smell of the metal, of the way it might taste, and felt his gorge rising. Gregg let it come, let the noxious stuff hurl from his mouth onto the cables holding the shell to the ceiling. He leaped to the next shell and did the same, then to the next. Already he heard behind him the groan of over-stressed steel. "Run!" he shouted to Dutton and Hannah. They were standing with hands raised over their heads as the agents entered the room.

Cables twanged and separated. The shell tilted, dangled on one cable for an instant, and fell.

The din was incredible, as if all the churchbells of New York had fallen at once, and the building shook and swayed. Someone screamed; a gun went off and a ricochet whined from the plate metal of the shell. Another shell fell, striking the first and bouncing dangerously end over end like a giant metal football, smashing exhibits. The shell on which Gregg stood suddenly tilted. Gregg leapt for the wall as it came down. He let himself half-fall, half-run to the rear of the gallery. "Go! Go!" he shouted into the echoes of clangorous metal. Dutton and Hannah ran with him, further into the depths of the museum.

They could hear Harvest shouting orders, and running steps as the agents moved through the museum. Gregg turned left into the next gallery, Hannah following. "Where's Dutton?" he asked suddenly, standing on his rear two legs.

"I don't know."

Someone appeared in the doorway to their right. Hannah shoved Gregg and then leaped and rolled as a gunshot cracked, taking off the wax snout of Xavier Desmond, the old "Mayor of Jokertown." They tumbled into the next room, lit dimly by the exit signs over the archways.

Across from the Syrian diorama, Jetboy and Dr. Tod were locked in their final confrontation. "There!" Gregg whispered. He wriggled between Jetboy's feet as Hannah slipped between the wax figures.

Gregg pointed to the door of the gondola, set against the wall of the display. "Hurry!" Gregg said.

"Gregg, this is a dead end."

"Trust me. Just open it!"

Shaking her head, Hannah turned the wheel and pulled; the door hung open a bare inch. Behind, they could hear renewed shouting: "Harvest! Battle's back here!" From somewhere nearby, Dutton's voice rang out, protesting loudly. "I want to see your warrant and your ID - "

Hannah braced her foot against the wall and pulled harder. The door hinges gave with a soft groan, and Gregg slithered into musty darkness. Hannah quickly followed him. She pulled the door closed, and all sounds from outside were abruptly cut off. "Gregg?" she whispered.

"I'm here." Gregg found that the darkness was no longer quite solid. He could see Hannah - her form shimmered ruddily, the face nearly as skull-like as Dutton's. Another new quirk of his joker body: he might not be able to see very well, but he could see into the infrared. Gregg sniffed; there was a faint scent, a feeble movement of the air, telling him that the gondola room continued further back. "Dutton always hinted that there were hidden ways out of the museum," he said to Hannah. "I found this when ..." Gregg stopped. When I was sneaking around here spying on Dutton, when I was trying to find you to give you to the Sharks. That's the truth, but I don't want to say it. "Well, how I found it doesn't matter now, I guess." Gregg moved further away from the door, carefully. As he remembered, there was a narrow corridor, moving to the left.

"I wish Dutton would put lights in his hidey-holes," Gregg said. "Stay there... Yeah, there's stairs here, a little further along. This must lead between the walls. Careful now. I'll go first; just keep your hand on the wall...."

Slowly, Gregg led Hannah through the blackness. The stairs continued down, turning once ninety degrees to the right, then opening into a long corridor that jogged three or four times. Gregg quickly found himself losing track of time as they moved through the blackness: they might have walked ten minutes or twenty before the corridor ended and they headed up another flight of stairs. At the top, another door blocked their way. Gregg could smell oil, old garbage, auto exhaust: outside. Gregg pressed one of his clown ears against the wood, listening. "I don't hear anything. Can you open the door, Hannah? I'm not real good at knobs ..."

The door opened onto an alley and they stepped out into the Jokertown night. The lights of police cruisers bounced blue and red strobes across the brick walls. Gregg scurried to the mouth of the alley and peered out. They'd emerged from a building south of the Dime Museum. The street in front of the museum was strewn with bright police vehicles illuminating the neighborhood. More sirens wailed in the distance. "They're scared," Hannah said behind Gregg. "They know we're right, but they don't want the word getting out. The bastards ..."

"They can't hold most of them for long," Gregg told her. "Even jokers still have some rights. I've known Dutton for years - he'll have his lawyers on the phone in an hour and he'll be free before morning. There's nothing on Father Squid, Dr. Finn, or the others." A shudder ran along the length of Gregg's body. He could feel himself shivering, on the edge of panic. He wanted nothing more than to find a dark corner somewhere and hide. "Let's get out of here while their attention's still on the Museum."

"We can't go wandering the streets, Gregg. They'll find us."

Gregg looked at her. Hannah was dressed in beige Dockers, a Rox T-shirt, and sneakers. She looked normal, if a bit yuppie-casual. As he had a few thousand times in the past few days, he found himself wondering how she could still claim that she cared for him. He wondered what she saw in him now that he was a joker. I'm a sham, he wanted to tell her. I killed people; I hurt them and I reveled in their pain. I still can feel that pleasure.... "Hannah, you have to hide, and your best chance is without me. Dye your hair, cut it short. This is your chance, Hannah."

A faint smile played with the edges of her lips. "Are you saying you want to get rid of me, Gregg? You're dumping me?"

"Hannah ..." He could not answer that smile. "I'm saying that I'm a big liability to you. You stand a much better chance without me. That's just the truth. I think you should take the opportunity."

"Gregg ..." Hannah crouched down beside him. "When are you going to understand? I don't give my friendship lightly or casually. I lost you once and the pain ..." Her voice faltered for a moment, and she looked away. "I don't intend to have that happen again," she said at last.

"I'm a goddamn joker, Hannah." I've laughed and taken pleasure in innocent people's deaths, I've done more horrible things in my life than you can imagine. He thought it; he said nothing. "That changes things, I understand that. I really do."

"Yes," she said, and the word hurt. "I know that. But you're still Gregg Hartmann. You're someone I ..." She stopped. Gregg wondered what she'd been about to say. Love?

"... care about. That hasn't changed."

"Hannah, I - " Gregg didn't know what to say. I don't deserve this, not after all I've done.... He could only look at Hannah in wonder. "Hannah - "

"Look, you can't even open doors by yourself. You need me. We both need each other." She nodded her head toward the museum, where they could see the Oddity being escorted out under guard. Gregg watched, remembering that odd feeling of momentary connection he'd felt during Oddity's fight with Snotman.

Khaki-uniformed men were beginning to scatter through the streets, and more NYPD squad cars wailed their arrival. "We don't have time for this," Hannah said abruptly. "We stay together, Gregg, whatever happens." Her hand cupped his head, and he felt the delicious warmth through his wrinkled skin. Still thinking about the Oddity, Gregg tried to do what he'd once been able to do with a touch - to insinuate himself inside her mind, to establish the mental link that would allow him to ride with her emotions and control them.

But he couldn't, and Hannah took her hand away too quickly. He tried not to notice that she unconsciously rubbed the hand on her pant leg afterward.

"How's your sense of smell?" Gregg asked.

"Pretty good. Why?"

"That's a pity. Because where we're going, that's not exactly an asset. Now - before someone up there starts looking around ..."

Gregg went to the rear of the alleyway and bolted across the street behind the Dime Museum. They hurried away, keeping to shadows, ducking into entranceways and between buildings when cars passed. Finally Gregg led Hannah into another narrow alley near where the Crystal Palace had once stood. He jabbed a truncated arm at a sewer lid.

"Our path out of here," he said. "And my home for the last few months. I hope you like it."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray chugged the last of the Red Stripe, popped the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and chewed. It was well-aged Swiss cheese and an excellent honey-cured ham with a dab of spicy brown mustard. He adjusted his beret and winked at the Shark lying trussed up in his underwear among his still-unconscious comrades. Ray didn't much care for the beret, but it was part of the costume. He left the kitchen whistling tunelessly, proud of the subtlety he was showing, anxious for more action.

The Shark security man had told him some disturbing things. The guy was only low-level muscle, so he wasn't exactly sitting in on policy meetings, but he was with the detachment that had come to the island with General MacArthur Johnson, the head of Shark security. They'd brought half a dozen jokers to the island with them. The jokers had been dumped at the entrance to the manor's mysterious east wing, which was off-limits to most of the staff. That was the last he'd seen of them. A few days later a young blond guy had shown up and taken residence in the living quarters in the complex's west wing. The security man had never seen him before. Rumors spread quickly among the staff that it was Pan Rudo, leader of the Sharks, in a brand new body.

Ray didn't like the sound of any of this. The body-switching was entirely possible. All the jumpers were supposed to be dead, but "supposed" isn't "certain." Ray also didn't know exactly why the Sharks needed jokers from the streets of New York City, but he knew they weren't going to treat them to two weeks of fun in the Caribbean sun. The rumors had to be true. There must really be a Black Trump, the Sharks' final solution to the wild card problem. Maybe Rudo or one of the other escaped Sharks had some of the virus and they were going to test it on the jokers. Maybe.

In any case, the answers seemed to be in the east wing. Ray would worry about tracking down the rejuvenated Pan Rudo later. He had to discover what the Sharks were doing to the jokers. And he had to be damn careful doing it. A Black Trump could bring him down as easily as the scrawniest, weakest joker.

Ray sauntered off toward the east wing. He didn't know how he was going to get in if it was off-limits to most Sharks, but that was something he'd worry about when he came to it. He was quite pleased to see his simple disguise working as he passed a couple of security men hurrying down the hall. They didn't even glance at him as they hustled by.

Sometimes it pays to be subtle, he told himself as he passed from the central part of the manor where the kitchen and service areas were located, to the mysterious east wing. He knew he had reached his goal when he came to a guarded checkpoint. There were two uniformed Sharks at the double doors leading into unknown territory. One wore sunglasses even though the lighting was soft fluorescent.

"What's up?" Ray asked as he approached.

"You haven't heard?" the one without sunglasses asked.

"Heard what?"

"There's an intruder in the perimeter," the Shark said. "One of the sentries patrolling outside was cold-cocked."

"That right?" Ray asked. He smiled at the one in the sunglasses, who looked back stonily.

"Who are you, anyway?" the talkative Shark asked. "Did you come in with the new detachment last night?"

Ray shook his head "Nope. Got here later than that."

Ray waited. The one in the sunglasses caught on first. He tried to bring his rifle up, but Ray grabbed it by the barrel and ripped it out of his hands. He swung the butt hard, catching the Shark flush on the chin. The guard shot backward, banged his head on the wall, and slid down to the floor.

Ray pointed the rifle casually at the other sentry. "You going to open that," he said, gesturing at the door with the gun barrel, "or do I blast it down through you?"

The sentry looked as if he didn't know if he wanted to be afraid or pissed. "You wouldn't."

Ray took a step forward and jabbed the rifle barrel into the sentry's stomach. "Don't bet your life on it, moron. My name is Billy Ray. They call me Carnifex. And I'm a wild carder, motherfucker."

"All right," the guard said, his voice quavering. Slowly he reached for the key chain at his side, selected a key, and put it in the lock. "This okay, huh?"

"Yup," Ray said, and clipped him on the back of the head with the rifle barrel. This was getting monotonous, Ray thought. The Sharks really needed to hire a better class of goon. He slung the rifle, then reached down and grabbed one of the sentries by the collar, the other by the pants leg, and dragged them inside. He tossed the rifle and closed the door behind him. He looked around.

"What the hell is this?" he asked aloud.

It was a laboratory, something Ray wasn't all that familiar with. He recognized glass flasks and test tubes, stainless steel sinks and scarred wooden workbenches, but that was about it. He had no idea about the autoclaves, incubators, freezers, and the electron microscope. The room was clean, orderly, very white and antiseptic-looking. Ray approved. But there was no sign of the jokers.

As Ray looked around with a frown on his face, the door in the back wall opened and a woman wearing a white lab coat entered the room. She was intent on reading her notebook, and almost bumped into Ray.

She looked up, startled. "You shouldn't be here."

Ray smiled. "Should you?"

"What? What are you talking about?"

Ray pointed at the door through which she just came. "What's in there?"

"Are you insane?" She tried to go by Ray. "I'm getting Mr. Johnson."

Ray grabbed her arm, swung her around. "I'm sure we'll meet soon. In the meantime I want you to tell me about the jokers you brought here last week."

She looked indignant and tried to pull away, but quickly realized the futility of that. Her indignation turned to fear. "Who are you? You're not one of the regular - " She noticed the unconscious sentries lying on the floor. "Oh."

"Very observant," Ray said. "You must be a real rocket scientist." His grip tightened. "Who are you?"

"I'm not - " for an instant she seemed defiant, then Ray squeezed hard enough to bruise her arm. She winced and made an instinctive, abortive move to pull away.

"You are," Ray said. He put his face close to hers. "I've had it with this pussy-footing shit. I'm going to get some answers soon or I'm going to start breaking things. And you're right at hand, babe."

"My name is Michelle," she said quickly. "Michelle Poynter."

"Poynter." Ray thought for a second. "Oh. You're Faneuil's assistant."

"Yes. How did you know?"

"Your boss is in a cell singing like a fucking canary."

"You're from the government?"

"Yeah. And you're under arrest. Now where's those jokers? In there?"

He dragged her with him as he went through the door and into another room that was as big as the lab, or would have been if it wasn't partitioned off into half a dozen small cells, furnished only with rack-like beds, stainless steel sinks, and lidless toilets. They were separated from the main room by a glass wall rather than metal bars. There was nothing in the main room besides a desk and matching swivel chair.

Some of the cells were empty. Some weren't.

Ray looked angrily at Poynter. Subconsciously his grip tightened so hard that she went limp from pain. "What is this shit?" Ray hissed in a low, shocked voice.

Four of the cells had occupants. It was hard to say if most of the prisoners were alive. One was sprawled in a heap between his bed and the glass wall that separated his cell from the rest of the room. He lay in a pool of black, coagulated blood. He wasn't moving. Two lay in their narrow beds. One was covered to his chin - Ray thought he was male, though he couldn't be sure - by a sheet stained with blotches of blood and other, less identifiable fluids. The man's eyes were open, but he stared at the ceiling as if he were sightless. He seemed to be crying tears of blood. The other joker lay on her side, naked, her sheet twisted into a stained lump around her feet. Her skin was covered with pulpy, purple bruises, her eyes were fixed with the classic thousand-year stare, looking off into eternity. The fourth stood in front of her cell's glass wall. She was just a kid, maybe twelve years old. Her face was that of a zombie with a fixed expression and sunken, staring eyes. Suddenly, though, she focused on Ray. She put the palms of her hands flat against the wall of glass. As Ray watched, the skin on both palms broke and blood oozed from the tears. She slowly sank to the floor, leaving two smears like bloody snail-ooze on the glass. Ray couldn't hear her because of the wall between them, but he could read her bruised and pulpy lips.

"Help me," he thought he saw her say. Or perhaps it was, "Kill me."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Jay Ackroyd was making love to his wife when the hunchback appeared in his bedroom.

Hastet was on top, rocking faster and faster as she built toward her climax, Jay was underneath, lost in her and the moment, watching her face, the way her breasts moved as she rode him, listening to the sounds she made, feeling her wetness as she slid up and down on him.

Then her eyes opened wide and she screamed, and for a moment Jay thought she was coming, until she scrambled off him, clutching up a tangled sheet to hide herself. "Jay," she said in a choked voice, staring past him.

Jay had been pretty close to coming himself; the sudden disengagement left him a little unsteady. It took him a moment to get his breath back and look over to where his wife was staring, and even then he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Street light filtered through the shades, but otherwise the room was dark, all shapes and shadows, and in that dimness it looked for all the world as if a headless hunchback was standing in the corner.

Jay leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp.

A headless hunchback was standing in the corner.

"Oh, great," Jay said, disgusted. His erection was gone by then, and his balls hurt. "This is going to be one of those nights, isn't it?" he said to no one in particular.

Hastet held the sheet against her breasts and looked at Jay suspiciously. "Another one of your friends?" She'd been on Earth long enough to realize that her husband knew some peculiar people.

"Quasiman," Jay said. "Not exactly a friend, but I know him. He lives down at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery."

"What's he doing in my bedroom?" Hastet hissed in annoyance.

Jay shrugged. "Nothing much, at the moment." The hunchback was standing by the wall, his hands clenching and unclenching slowly with the rhythm of his breath. He didn't seem to have noticed that his head was gone. Or maybe he had, it was hard to tell.

Jay got out of bed and pulled on his pants. Whatever the hell this was about, he didn't want to deal with it naked.

Hastet took it all in stride, more or less. That was one of the things Jay loved about her. "Where's his head?" she asked.

"It'll be along shortly," Jay assured her. "Parts of him drift off to other dimensions from time to time, but they usually drift back before too long."

Hastet got to her feet with all the dignity she could muster, and started gathering up her underwear. "Next time, tell him to knock," she said as she padded off to the bathroom. A moment later, he heard the shower running.

Jay pulled on an undershirt and sat on the bed to wait for Quasiman's head to show up and explain. He wondered how the hunchback had managed to teleport himself here. Jay Ackroyd was a projecting teleport himself, but he could only pop things off to places he knew and could picture in his mind. So far as he could remember, Quasiman had never been up to his bedroom before. How did he even know where Jay lived? Hell, he barely knew where Quasiman lived. The hunchback's teleportation must work differently from his own. That was half the fun of the wild card, Jay reflected sourly; everybody got to make up his own rules.

Quasiman's head appeared suddenly and blinked. His eyes were glazed and a thin line of drool ran from one corner of his mouth. "Jay Ackroyd?" he said uncertainly.

"Real good." Jay stood up. "What can I do for you?"

"Father sent me to find you," Quasiman said. "To tell you." His voice trailed off into silence.

Jay nodded. So far so good. Father Squid was the joker pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. Quasiman worked for him, kind of a part-time handyman and part-time gargoyle. When he wasn't sweeping out the vestry he was crouched up on the steeple, staring off at nothing. "To tell me ..." Jay prompted.

"To tell you," Quasiman echoed, nodding.

"To tell me what?" Jay asked.

Quasiman frowned, his brow beetling with concentration. "Hannah," he said. "Hannah got away."

"Real good," Jay said. He didn't have to ask who Hannah was. Hannah Davis: the arson investigator who had exposed the Card Shark conspiracy. She'd taken her evidence to Gregg Hartmann, the former senator, and Hartmann had hired Ackroyd and Creighton Investigations to check out her allegations. They'd managed to confirm enough of it to give Jay a lot of sleepless nights. Then Hartmann got himself killed and stiffed them on the bill.

"The other one got away too," Quasiman said. "The yellow man with the legs. Hartmann."

"Hartmann is dead," Jay told him. Quasiman shook his head. Jay made it a point never to argue with a hunchback. "Does Father Squid need to see me about something?"

"They took him," Quasiman blurted. You could almost see the memory come flooding back into him. His eyes seemed brighter, his manner suddenly animated, even agitated. "They took them all." He vanished suddenly with a pop of inrushing air, the same noise Jay made when he teleported something with his finger, and reappeared just as suddenly across the room. "Mr. Dutton, Dr. Finn, Dr. Clara, Oddity, Troll, everyone who knew. They would have taken me too, but I carried him away and went home. Sometimes I forget but not this time. Only the church was empty. I waited and waited up on the steeple but no one came so finally I went to Father and he said to find Jay Ackroyd so I went to your place but you weren't there and the looking-at-you man said that you were home so I came here."

"The looking-at-you man?" Jay said.

"The stinking badges man," Quasiman said. "The play-it-sam man. You played it for her, you can play it for me."

"Humphrey Bogart," Jay said. He was astonished. Not that Bogie had told Quasiman to look for him at home, that part he'd figured out at once, but Quas knowing all those movie lines, that blew him away. He wondered who or what the hunchback had been before the wild card had changed him. "Who took Father Squid and the others?" he asked.

That was evidently a stumper. Quasiman groped for words, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Distantly, Jay heard the sound of the shower cut off.

"Was it the Card Sharks?" Jay asked.

"Card Sharks," Quas agreed.

"Or was it the police?"

"Police," Quas agreed.

Jay sighed. "Try to remember. Were they wearing uniforms? Did they tell the Father that he was under arrest? Did anyone show you a badge or a warrant?"

"We don't need no stinking badges," Quasiman said, smiling, his memory stuck on Humphrey Bogart. For a moment, Jay wished his junior partner was there, so he could give him a good slap.

"Were any of them aces?" Jay asked, groping.

"Aces," Quasiman agreed. He pointed an angry finger at Jay. "Don't call me Snotman!" he warned.

"Ah," Jay said. Snotman. Well, that was something, anyway. A place to start.

"Card Sharks, police, aces," Quasiman chanted. "Ring around a rosy, pocket full of posey, ashes, ashes, all fall down."

"Eenie meenie minie moe," Jay replied, "catch a hunchback by the toe. No offense, Quas, but the next time Father Squid wants to send me an urgent message, maybe he could consider Western Union."

Quasiman wasn't listening. The hunchback's left hand had disappeared. Quas stared curiously at the end of the arm where it had been just a moment ago. Then he looked up at Jay, his eyes wide and bright and curiously innocent. "Save us," he whispered urgently. "The Black Trump." Then he vanished.

When Hastet returned from the bathroom, wrapped in a terrycloth bathrobe with her hair up in a towel, Jay was pulling on his socks. "Your friend leave?" she asked.

Jay nodded. "Think of all the money he saves on doors," he said. "Where's the mate for this sock?"

"Why? You're not actually going to wear matching socks, are you? Is this some sort of disguise?"

"The whole Ilkazam harem falls madly in love with me and I have to marry the Henny Youngman of Takis," Jay said. He found the matching sock, pulled it on, and looked around for his shoes.

"Where are you going?" Hastet asked him.

"Down to the office," Jay told her. "I have a bone to pick with Humphrey Bogart. Don't wait up."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray turned to Poynter in sudden fury. He shook her, snapping her head back and forth like a tree branch in a hurricane.

"How can we help them?" he said between gritted teeth.

"St-st-st-stop," Poynter stuttered. Blood dripped from her mouth as she bit her tongue.

Ray somehow controlled himself. "How can we help them?" he repeated.

Poynter shook her head dazedly. She put her hand to her mouth and looked in stupefied fascination at the blood on it. "We can't," she said. "They're in the final stage. They won't last long."

"Is it the Black Trump?" Ray asked.

Poynter looked at him as if afraid to answer. He let some of his strength flow from his hands as he squeezed her arms again, not caring if he broke them. "IS IT?"

"Yes," Poynter admitted.

He dragged her to the glass cage that held the girl. She lay huddled in a miserable pile. She focused on Ray as he approached. There was no nope in her eyes, only pain and knowledge of imminent death.

Ray had never felt so helpless in all his life. There was nothing his speed or strength could do. He grabbed Poynter by the back of the neck and shoved her face against the glass wall.

"You did this, didn't you? I should break your fucking neck."

She was crying, but Ray didn't care. He felt his fingers tightening on Poynter's neck.

"Wa-wa-wait," she stuttered. She was crying, whether from pain or fear Ray didn't know, or care. "Don't. I can tell you - I can help - "

"Tell me what?" Ray asked.

"Rudo's journal. About the Black Trump - "

"Where?"

She pointed a trembling hand at the desk.

Ray let her go. She moaned and slipped down against the glass until she too was huddled on the floor, a mirror image of the dying girl on the other side of the wall.

"Stay put," Ray ordered as he went to the desk. An orderly stack of papers sat in the center of a dark green blotter. Some were memos, some were letters addressed to Dr. Rudo.

Ray scanned them quickly, but they said nothing about the Black Trump. He tried the desk's center drawer. Locked. He pulled at the drawer and it came loose with a screech of tearing metal. Among the miscellaneous crap that you find in most desk drawers, locked or not, Ray found a journal. He smiled.

He opened to the last page. "Last vial to Casaday," the note read. "Johnson and I will divide the remaining culture and head for our targets tonight. God help them then!"

Ray looked up, frowning at the sound of the door swooshing shut. Poynter had snuck out of the room. He tucked the journal into the deep thigh pocket of his appropriated fatigues and went after her.

She was in the lab ahead of him, but she'd stopped and turned to look back as he skidded to a halt. There were a dozen well-armed Sharks in the room with her.

"Shoot him!" she screeched, pointing at Ray. "Shoot him!"

"We will, but not just yet." The man who spoke stood behind the security men. He was tall, muscular, and black. He wore the fatigues of the Shark security forces. He was their leader, General MacArthur Johnson. "Billy Ray, isn't it?"

Ray's fury had burnt so deep that he appeared relaxed, almost casual as he leaned against a lab bench that had a mess of glassware on it. There was no hint of anger in his voice as he calmly answered. "That's right."

Johnson shook his head, "How'd you find us?"

"Your comrades are singing their butts off," Ray said, "hoping to avoid serious time in the federal pen - though that's not too likely."

"We should have killed those motherfuckers," Johnson said. His voice was an angry bass growl, "We can still have it done."

"Too late," Ray was almost smiling. "You're under arrest. All of you."

"You're nuts," Johnson said. "You know, it'd be a real pleasure to see if you're as tough as they say, Ray." He flexed his hands, his smile feral.

"I'm tougher, Johnson. You're just a fucking nat. I'm an ace. Take me about a second to rip your head off and stuff it up your ass."

Johnson twitched, took half a step forward, then controlled himself. "No ... no. Much as I want to, I'm not going to dick around with you, you mutant diseased scum." He stepped back behind his men. "Hose him down."

Fingers twitched on triggers. Poynter was standing out of the line of fire, but the Sharks had released a firestorm of death. Bullets whanged off the stainless steel benches and sinks, caromed off the white-painted walls. Ricochets buzzed like angry bees and Poynter gasped as a couple of rounds cut through her. She went down.

Ray had moved before Johnson gave the command to fire. His head was full of white noise. The only thing he knew was that this was payback time for those poor fucking jokers. He vaulted over the lab bench as the fusillade began. One bullet punched through his left calf, but it missed the bone and the wound was already starting to close when his feet hit the ground. Not that it didn't hurt. It hurt like a motherfucker.

Ray grunted with pain. He squatted behind the bench as the fusillade continued, ignoring the ricochets that whined around him. For once Ray was lucky. None hit him. He put his arms out, against the bench. He pushed, and it scraped along the floor.

"Yaaaaahhhhh!"

He pushed harder, screaming, and he and the bench picked up speed.

"Holy shit!" he heard, then he felt the shock of impact as the lab bench slammed into the gunmen crowded around the door. There were screams and groans. The bench bucked like it was going over a speed bump, then the shooting mostly stopped and Ray was in the middle of the gunmen.

Only half of them were standing. The others were under the bench or smashed like flies swatted against the wall. Johnson was standing in the doorway, undecided.

"Come on!" Ray shouted.

Johnson and Ray locked eyes.

"I'll eat you up," Johnson promised, "and spit you out!"

"Eat this," Ray said as he grabbed one of Johnson's men by collar and crotch, heaved him off the ground and threw him.

Johnson ducked. The Shark slammed against the wall. There was a loud cracking as bones snapped and the man slumped to the floor.

"Hold as long as you can," Johnson ordered the remaining Sharks, and ducked into the hall.

The two standing security men looked at each other. One shook his head and dropped his rifle. He put his hands up. The other did the same. Then they saw the look on Ray's face and they ran, too.

Ray hurtled down the hall after them, grinning like a madman. He had them on the run. It was only a matter of time - what was that smell? he thought as he blundered around a corner and ran into a man-sized heap of stuff that smelled like shit and garbage.

Ray had momentum on his side, but it didn't help any. He hit and bounced, sputtering and spitting unmentionable filth. He was back on his feet almost before he hit the floor, but he stopped, stunned, when he realized whom he was facing.

It was a shambling mockery of a man and it smelled like it was long dead - which it was. Its stench was awful, its appearance hardly less so. It wore a sagging uniform that once fit tautly across its broad chest and wide shoulders. Now the cloth hung loose on a battered body that was sunken, twisted, broken, and charred. It couldn't possibly look that bad and still be alive - and it wasn't - but the one eye that was exposed by its full hood was open and tracking blearily on Ray as it stood and blocked his path.

"Bobby Joe?" Ray said unbelievingly. "How the hell are you still getting around?"

The dead ace called Crypt Kicker wasn't fast in his best moments. The accumulated wear and tear of his previous few adventures, some of which he'd shared with Ray, had taken even more of a toll. When he spoke it was in an agonizingly slow, barely understandable drawl.

"The Lord isn't ready to receive me yet. There's still more for me to do here on Earth."

Ray felt like screaming in what was left of Crypt Kicker's face (thankfully hidden by the hood he wore), but restrained himself.

"Well, Jesus, Bobby Joe, get the hell out of my way and let me do what I'm supposed to do."

Ray went to step around Crypt Kicker, but the huge ace snaked out a hand and grabbed Ray around the upper arm in a grip that even Rays strength couldn't break. "I can't let you do that, Billy."

"You fucking moron," Ray blazed. "You're working with the Sharks?"

Crypt Kicker nodded ponderously. "Yes. They have a serum to cure the wild card. It's the Lord's work, to bring an end to the pain and suffering."

Jesus, Ray thought. "Let me go, Bobby Joe," he said in a low, tight voice.

"Can't ..." Bobby Joe Puckett said, and Ray struck him in the forearm hard enough to snap the bones of most men.

But Crypt Kicker clung on doggedly. Ray swung again and again as the massive ace wound up to retaliate. Puckett's blow came with all the force of a diesel locomotive and all the speed of a sleeping sloth. Ray ducked and Puckett's fist slammed into the wall. The wall buckled, Puckett turned his attention to pulling his fist out of the hole it'd made in the wall and Ray yanked free. He turned, grabbed the back of Puckett's hood, and slammed his head as hard as he could into the wall.

The wall gave before the onslaught of Puckett's head. Ray took a deep breath of thanks, but before he could get away Puckett bellowed like a wounded elephant and tore out a huge chunk of plasterboard as he pulled himself free of the wall.

"Shit," Ray said, and Crypt Kicker, flailing around blindly, caught Ray across the chest with a blow powerful enough to knock him off his feet and send him skidding down the hall on his backside. By the time Ray got up Puckett had managed to extricate himself from the piece of wall framing him like an especially ugly Picasso.

Ray charged and Puckett lifted his hands and let fly with the toxic wastes and poisons that had accumulated in his body. Ray tried to twist away from the streams of venomous chemicals, but some splashed against his side, sizzling through his borrowed fatigues and eating skin and flesh.

Ray didn't even try to suppress his scream. Yelling like a maniac, he hurled himself at Puckett. The dead ace waited with open arms, wanting, no doubt, to enfold Ray to his massive bosom where he could alternately crush him with his inhuman strength and fry him with the toxicity of his flesh.

Ray knew that he couldn't out-strength Puckett. He had to out-think and out-quick him.

At the last second he went down, hitting the floor and kicking out with a leg-whip that smashed Crypt Kicker's knees, Puckett toppled like a falling redwood. Ray leapt to his feet and stomped hard on Puckett's throat. Puckett clutched at his legs, but Ray pulled away. He stomped again, then again, and he heard a sickening crunching sound as cartilage and flesh collapsed. Puckett clutched at his throat, wheezing like an organ with a broken bellows.

Ray stepped away from him, shaking his head. "Stupid fucking redneck," he said, then he turned and ran down the hall after Johnson.

He activated his throat mike as he ran and screamed, "Come in, come on in! They're bolting like fucking rats! Don't let anyone get away!"

He saw no one as he ran through the manor and burst outside. The government cutter he'd called was bearing down on the island at full speed, lights flashing and clarions blaring. Amphibious helicopters were swooping in like birds of prey, guarding the sky in case the Sharks tried an aerial escape.

Ray went around the back of the manor to the small airstrip where something was taxiing out of a hangar. He put on a burst of speed. He wanted to reach it before the choppers did. He wanted to tear Johnson and whoever was with him to pieces.

But Johnson's aircraft suddenly rose straight up. It hung there insouciantly for a moment, as if daring the choppers to try to tag it. Then it was gone with a scream of jet turbines, leaving the choppers far behind like the fat, clumsy children they were. Ray's sprint stumbled to a halt and he stared in disbelief.

"A Harrier," Ray swore under his breath. "A fucking vertical take-off fucking jet." He sat down on the edge of the runway, suddenly very tired. "Where the fuck did Johnson get a fucking Harrier?"

He sat with his head in his hands for a long moment, a pose very uncharacteristic for Billy Ray. Then he stood, and strode around the manor to where the assault team had gathered on the beach. The choppers bumbled around like angry, uncertain bees. They knew they had missed their target, but they had no idea what their target was.

Ray knew. He knew it was the Black Trump, death to all things born from the wild card.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

By tradition, the muezzin called when he could distinguish a black thread from a white. In the dim dawn light, the faithful hurried to prayers, dodging their way past vendors who brought polished vegetables down from rooftop gardens. Silent jokers carried plastic coolers on their shoulders, hurrying toward the City Gate where traders would fill them with crushed ice and eggs and farm-raised fish from pens in the Sea of Galilee. Soon, boys would begin their morning rounds, carrying brass trays hung from swinging chains. The trays would be loaded with cups of thick coffee and steaming tea and cans of trademarked, guaranteed genuine Coca-Cola It never tasted right to Zoe, in spite of the logo.

The air smelled of cucumbers and orange blossoms, of compost and last night's cooking. Zoe followed the vendors toward the souk, the area outside the City Gate where an uneasy truce held, the city's denizens usually kept at peace by the necessities of trade. She stayed in the shadows and walked as quietly as she could. If she found Needles following her, she planned to send him right back home. He would follow, she was sure of it, thinking to protect her, or to protect himself. She watched and listened, but she couldn't see him.

She hadn't gone half a block before she picked up a tail, a hunched figure in a black cloak. Needles? The figure vanished behind her.

The street angled sharply. Upper stories overhung the cobblestones in this section, so close that neighbors could borrow a cup of sugar through the opened windows. Or, more likely, exchange insults. The night's shadows lingered here and made the street seem even narrower than it was. Zoe heard heavy breathing behind her and caught a glimpse of a figure in a black cloak. She forced herself not to run. The black cloak brushed against the wall beside her in a passageway narrow enough that Zoe's hand touched a doorway on the opposite side of the street.

"You look nat." Not Needles, the joker's voice came from the folds of his hood, a cultured British accent, a fine tenor. He spoke in quiet, conversational cadence. A giant snail's foot showed beneath swirling folds of black cotton. The joker's cowled head bobbed at the level of her elbow and something was wrong with the shape of his back and shoulders. "Are you a whore?"

This man wouldn't kill a joker, not in the quarter. But a nat might die here, and vanish from the street in some narrow doorway. "No," Zoe said.

"Are you, perhaps, a customer? My equipment is both adequate and unique."

"Not a customer," Zoe said.

"Pity," the joker said. "It is my duty, then, to escort you out of the Quarter."

"I'm going to the City Gate," Zoe said.

"That is fortunate," the joker said.

They walked in silence for a while.

"I'm going to the City Gate because I know it's guarded - by the Twisted Fists."

She heard his indrawn breath. "A shadow organization. A myth," the joker said.

His dismissal was too casual, too offhand. He was a Fist, or he knew them. "Bullshit," Zoe said. "They've enlisted five of my kids."

"Five? You look rather less maternal than that. My compliments."

"Wards. Foster kids. Whatever. You're a Fist, aren't you? Isn't everyone around here?"

"You are a fool," the joker said "Go home."

"No," Zoe said. What could she do to get shuttled up the chain of command? Offer to screw someone? Use her ace? She hated to do that, wouldn't unless she was forced, didn't want to be known in the streets as an ace, for aces were feared here almost as much as nats. Maybe more so.

Zoe and her one-footed companion turned a corner into a wider street where small signs printed in three or more languages hung above barricaded doorways. Above them, the massive bulk of the gate loomed black against a cloudless violet sky.

Jokers came from the night's shadows to set up their wares in the little square, some yawning, most silent. One looked at her and hissed. Another spat in her direction and made a sign to ward off the evil eye. A breeze brought a scent of hot fat and charcoal, of garlic and coriander and frying dough.

Zoe clenched her folded robe in her left hand and walked to the center of the souk. The stone ramparts of the gate looked empty, but there were men with rifles hiding in shadows. She knew it.

The snail-footed joker accompanied her to the middle of the square. "You can't leave yet," he said. "The gates won't open for another half hour."

"I know," Zoe said.

The joker backed away from her. In a moment, he had vanished.

Zoe picked out an area of the wall where the shadows were deepest, where a cul-de-sac cut into the stone bulk of the gate. She walked toward it with all the bravado she could muster, her ears listening for the click of a safety. The cul-de-sac hid a passageway that seemed to end in a blank stone wall. A hooded figure waited there, his rifle pointed at her belly.

"Good morning!" Zoe said.

The swathed black figure wore a veil. She looked like a Halloween depiction of death.

"Are you in charge here?" Zoe asked. She smiled brightly and tried to look innocent and confused.

Eyes don't have much expression, Zoe knew. The mouth does. She couldn't see this joker's mouth or gauge her facial language. The guard's rifle barrel drew a small circle in the air, still pointed at Zoe's belly.

"The Gate opens at six," the guard said. A man, not a woman. "You go home then, nat."

He had a local accent, the melodic lilt of the Mideast. The man was tall, almost skeletal beneath that swirling robe.

"But I don't want to leave," Zoe said. "I want to talk to you." To you, Fist, and I don't want formal speeches that you've memorized from the how-to-deal-with-stray-nats handbook. Zoe took a step forward in spite of the objections of her belly button. It was trying to retreat toward her backbone. Terror was one hell of an ab exercise, it seemed.

"Stop!"

Zoe stopped. "But I only want to talk ..." The quaver in her voice was not faked.

Someone laughed, high above them on the gate, a terrible laugh.

"I want to see the Black Dog," Zoe said "I - I have information for him."

She felt the jokers behind her before she saw them. Two of them, silent and fast. She saw an outstretched arm, A solid blow to the back of her knees knocked her flat, sprawled on the caftan she'd dropped. One of its bangles cut into her cheek. Someone twisted her arms behind her and ground his knee into the small of her back. Hot pain drew diagrams of the joints in her shoulders.

"Nat," one of her attackers hissed. "Nat whore. Don't yell, pretty thing."

"Why are you looking for trouble, nat?" the tall joker said. "Tired of living?"

"Let me have her." The joker behind her twisted her arms a fraction more. "She'll talk. Shell scream. I like screams."

"Take her inside," the tall joker said. "She'll last long enough for all three of us."

Terror or sexual arousal, either of those activated Zoe's ace, her anima, her gift of the breath of life. Sometimes she had to force its appearance. Not now. She drew in a single breath and sighed into the caftan, a desperate breath that included memories of Needles' desolate face as he scrubbed blood from his hands, Turtle's gentle touch in a dark hotel room, the long black fingers of an animated mannequin locked into the flesh of a skinhead's throat.

The cloak twisted out from beneath her. It rose like a dervish, its gold coins razor-edged, a spinning terror of writhing fabric with a woman's shape and the speed of a whirlwind. The dervish whipped an arm toward the tall joker's eyes. He dropped his rifle and fell backward, screaming, his hands clutching at his torn eyelids. The dervish scattered drops of blood and spread into a whirling net. It dropped over the joker on Zoe's back and cocooned him in windings of steel-strong mesh. The cocoon flung itself against the third joker, slamming him against the wall. A pseudopod of twisted copper snaked around the third jokers thick neck and squeezed.

Zoe belly-flopped toward the rifle and grabbed it. She got to her feet, turned toward the faint light of the souk, and collided full tilt with the solid bulk of a man in a black cloak. He twisted the rifle from her grip and immobilized Zoe in a bear hug. A joker in a black robe took the rifle from him and aimed it toward Zoe, The barrel of the thing looked as big as a cannon. Zoe kicked at her captor's legs, but she couldn't get any leverage.

"Whoa, there! What the hell is going on?" The man who held her had a southern drawl. His eyes were huge and yellow, a devil's eyes.

"Those pricks tried to rape me!" Zoe yelled. "Let me go!"

The vendors in the souk continued to set up their wares for morning, pretending not to notice the commotion near the gate.

The joker with the captured rifle looked in at the mess in the cul-de-sac and whistled. "She tore 'em up good," he said.

"Deal with it," the yellow-eyed man said. He turned Zoe around so that she stood beside him. His fingers found a nerve just above her elbow and squeezed it.

"Ouch!"

"Hush," the man said. "Come over here."

He marched her to an enclosed space between the wall and the back of a striped booth that sold tea. He didn't let go of her arm.

"What happened?"

"I'm looking for the Fists. I need to talk to the Black Dog. Those bastards tried to kill me."

"All you wanted was to talk?"

"That's all."

"What's the message? If it has to do with danger for the quarter, you'd better tell me."

"No. I'll talk to the Black Dog, but not to anyone else."

"You just took out three good men," the joker said "Who are you?"

"Zoe. Zoe Harris." That wasn't the name on her paycheck, that wasn't the name on the checks she gave her landlord. "Uh, Sara Smith."

"Yeah. Sure."

"I want to speak to the Black Dog."

"He doesn't like aces. Neither do I."

"I'm not - " But she was. The evidence of her powers was smeared all over the walls of that cul-de-sac. "I don't - "

"Balthazar!" Needles bellowed as he skidded around the corner of the booth. "Let her go, man!"

Balthazar turned Zoe so that she was held tight against him, a human shield. She felt a cold circle of metal push against her ribs. Needles braked to a stop, his claws flashing, and dropped his hands to his sides.

"She's mine. She won't mess up again, I promise. Please, Balthazar?"

"Jesus, kid. You almost got her killed." Balthazar pushed Zoe toward Needles. "Take her home. Get her out of here."

Needles grabbed her waist. "We're going. We're going, okay?"

"Tell him!" Zoe yelled over her shoulder as Needles turned her toward the souk.

"Shut up," Needles hissed in her ear. "Please, Zoe."

There were tears in his eyes. He would die of embarrassment if she noticed them. She let the boy lead her home.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Forty-Second Street wasn't what it used to be. A couple of years back, the Deuce was solid porno theaters, adult bookstores and sleazeball hotels, teeming with hustlers, junkies, and midnight cowboys. These days ... well, you wouldn't call it respectable, but so much of the XXX action had moved over to video that half the porno theaters had been forced to convert to real films or go dark.

The Wet Pussycat used to be half a block down from Jay's office, a lifetime ago. Now Ackroyd and Creighton Investigations owned a whole building in the West Village, Jay's old office had been taken over by a Korean psychic, and the Wet Pussycat was the Cinefan, screening black-and-white classics twenty-four hours a day. It cost nine bucks to get in, which made the Cinefan either the most expensive movie house on the Deuce or the cheapest hotel, judging from the number of bag ladies, junkies, and teenage runaways nodded out in the sagging seats, Jay figured it was the latter.

It was still very dark, though.

Jay waited until his eyes had adjusted, and strolled slowly down the aisle, scanning the faces of his fellow cinefans. Only a few were paying any attention to the screen, where people in evening dress were throwing huge coins at a very large monkey with a piano on his head. The man Jay wanted wasn't hard to pick out. There he was in the sixth row, center, engrossed in the drama, a huge man, ugly as sin, eating popcorn with both hands. Jay sat down beside him. "Rondo Hatten, right?" he said.

Rondo looked at him, startled. He was uglier than half the people in Jokertown. "Jay? What are you doing here?"

"I got a sudden to urge to see King Kong at two in the morning, what else?" Jay said, helping himself to some popcorn. It was stale and tasted of hot grease. Golden Flavor, they called it at the concession stand. Some things never change.

"It's Mighty Joe Young," Rondo corrected him.

"Just so long as it isn't giving you any ideas," Jay said.

"How did you know I was here?"

"You weren't at home, you weren't at the office, and you weren't at Ezili's. Where else would you be?" On screen, the big monkey was tearing up the nightclub now and lots of people in evening dress were running and screaming. "Don't you have this on tape?"

"On laserdisc," Rondo corrected, "but there's nothing like seeing it on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen."

"Right," Jay said. "I forgot, you're a purist, you want the whole filmic experience, the sticky floors, the rancid grease on the popcorn, the audience all around you ..."

"Hey, shut the fuck up," someone behind them shouted.

"Let's go over to Port Authority and grab a cup," Jay told his partner. "We need to talk."

"You don't want to miss the part where Joe saves the orphans from the fire," Rondo Hatten said.

"Yes I do," Jay told him. "Besides, I think we got some orphans of our own that need saving."

"I told you guys to shut the fuck up!" the angry voice said. A hand the size of Rhode Island grabbed Jay by the shoulder.

Jay glanced back. The face behind him was prettier than Rondo Hatten's, but not by much; the breath that came with it was a lot worse. "Don't you know it's rude to talk in a movie theater?" Jay asked. He shaped his right hand into a gun and pointed it between the close set eyes. "Let go of me, please."

"You want that finger shoved up your asshole, you just keep pointing it at me," the angry man said.

"Wrong answer," Jay said squeezing his trigger. There was the familiar soft pop and the angry man was gone. He turned back to his partner. "Let's go."

The junior partner in Ackroyd and Creighton Investigations, who sometimes called himself Mr. Creighton and sometimes Jeremiah Strauss and sometimes Mr. Nobody, cleaned the Golden Flavor off his fingers with a napkin and followed Jay up the aisle and out onto Forty-Second Street. "Where'd you send him?" he asked when they were outside the theater.

"Our Lady of Perpetual Misery," Jay said.

"The church?"

"The steeple," Jay said. "He didn't look real religious to me, but you never know. Besides, if Quasiman is going to pop into my bedroom, I figured turnabout was fair play."

"Oh," Jerry said. "He found you, then." He scowled. A scowl on Rondo Hatten's face was quite a sight to see.

"He found me," Jay admitted.

Jerry brooded on that as he ambled along, hands in his pockets. Finally he got the complaint out. "How come he wanted you?" he said querulously. "What am I, a potted plant?"

Jay sighed. As much as he liked his junior partner, Jerry's insecurities sometimes wore him out. "I've been working Jokertown a long time. Father Squid and Dutton and the rest trust me. They don't know who you are."

"My name is right there on the door with yours. Ackroyd and Creighton Investigations."

"So you're a name on a frosted glass door. Jokers don't trust anyone, not without good reason. What's Creighton to them? They don't even know his first name. For that matter, I don't know his first name. Does Creighton have a first name?"

"I haven't made up my mind yet."

"Real helpful," Jay opined, deadpan.

"Even so," Jerry said. "It was rude. I was the one on duty. He could have told me what the case was about. All he said was, 'The Black Trump,' and 'Where is Jay Ackroyd?', and I was so startled I told him. Then he vanished, just like that, without so much as a by-your-leave. He treated me like I was nobody."

"You are Nobody," Jay put in.

"Yes, but he doesn't know that."

Jay was losing his patience. "Father Squid didn't give him any messages for Humphrey Bogart."

Jerry looked startled. "How did you know that I was - "

"I'm a trained detective," Jay said. "You know, Jerry, if you keep turning into movie stars around the office, people are going to figure out that Creighton's not what he seems."

"It wasn't Bogart, it was Sam Spade," Jerry said, his tone defensive. "I forgot I had it on. The office was closed, the door was locked, I was finishing up the report on the Wedaa surveillance, and all of a sudden Quasiman pops out of nowhere. There was no time to work on my face." He put on a peevish tone and tried to change the subject. "What's a Black Trump, anyway?"

"No idea," Jay told him, "But I don't like the sound of it."

The Port Authority Bus Terminal was a hop, skip, and a couple of junkies down the street. They found an all-night doughnut stand. Jay ordered coffee, black and very strong, served in a cardboard cup. Jerry got a cruller sprinkled with powdered sugar. The muggers and the chickenhawks were giving them a wide berth, and no wonder. Rondo was almost as big as the monkey in the movie, only meaner. "I can see why you picked this look," Jay said.

Jerry smiled. It looked odd on that huge misshapen face, shy and tentative and strangely gentle. "Rondo's great for walking around bad neighborhoods late at night," he said proudly, "but you wouldn't want to wear him on a date."

"No," Jay said, "listen, we got trouble. A whole bunch of Jokertown's leading citizens were picked up earlier this evening. Father Squid, Charles Dutton, Finn and another doctor down at the Jokertown Clinic, Oddity, Troll, god knows who else."

"Picked up?" Jerry said. "By the police?"

"Feds, I think. The NYPD knew nothing about any of this until it went down. They were howling bloody murder for an hour or two, then someone got a phone call and now they won't say a word. Quas said Snotman was involved, so I had Melissa do some digging."

"You went to her first?" Jerry said miffed again.

"She was with Justice for years, she still has contacts. I figured she could find out the score if anyone could. I was right. The operation was Special Executive Task Force, start to finish. The strikes were well coordinated, simultaneous, and there was a SCARE ace with each team. Snots at the Dime Museum, Lady Black at the Jokertown Clinic, Jim Dandy at the church. Slamdancer, Bloodhound, and a couple of others are in town too, so it could be there were more arrests we don't know about."

"Hoo boy," Jerry said. "Sounds serious. Was anyone hurt?"

"The Oddity tried to fight back and Snotman pounded them into guano. Then Quas gave Snots a bear hug and both of them vanished. That's the last time anyone has seen Snotman."

"Where did they take the people they arrested?"

"That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Problem is, the answer is classified. No one has been charged with a crime, you understand. According to my sources in the cophouse, Father Squid and Dutton and the others are just being held in protective custody."

"Can they do that?" Jerry said, surprised.

"Not legally," Jay said. "Melissa is going to hunt up Dr. Praetorius, he'll file a habeas corpus and wave some papers at them, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it doing a whole lot of good. You know what this smells like to me?"

"Card Sharks," Jerry blurted suddenly.

"Bingo," Jay said, smiling.

"But why?" Jerry asked. "What's this all about?"

"I don't know," Jay admitted. "What's worse, I think the feds just scooped up everyone who does know." He leaned across the table and brushed powdered sugar off his junior partner's lapel. "Now here's the interesting part. Quasiman isn't the the only one on the loose. He said that Hannah Davis escaped them at the museum, along with a joker who may or may not be Gregg Hartmann."

"Hartmann?" Jerry said. "Hartmann's dead."

"Is he?" Jay asked. The last few years, with the jumper gangs running around stealing people's bodies, you could never be sure who was dead and who wasn't. Dr. Tachyon, the Turtle, Elvis, even Jerry and Jay themselves, at certain points all of them had been presumed dead. "Maybe he is and maybe he isn't, I don't care. The point is, somewhere out there is a loose end. Two loose ends, actually. Hannah Davis and a joker who looks like a yellow caterpillar."

Jay had a good view of the escalators that led down to the subway. A boy got off the Up while Jerry was pondering the case. He stood there a moment, a file folder tucked under his arm while his eyes searched the terminal. A firefly was buzzing around him.

He was well dressed for a kid who looked no older than eleven. His suit was Italian, charcoal gray, and he wore it with black wingtips, a white shirt, and a red silk tie, but there was still something about him that made you think of Heehaw. Maybe it was the mop of blond hair that fell across those deep blue eyes, or maybe it was the freckles. He had freckles on freckles on freckles.

His firefly was a point of light, bright and quick, tireless. It darted and circled around him like an electric mosquito.

"Him too?" Jerry said when he saw the kid. "Why am I always the last one on the big cases? If you called Sascha back from Maui, I'm going to be really annoyed."

"I wouldn't dare," Jay said. "Sascha knows where all the bodies are buried. Never mess with a telepath's vacation."

A teenaged hooker sauntered up to the freckle-faced boy. "So who are you, Peter Pan?" she asked, to general laughter.

"That's Pann, you douchebag," the boy snapped at her. He pronounced it Pahn. "It's Dutch."

"Peter," Jay called out. "Over here."

Pann turned and spotted them. He walked over briskly. "I want double time for this," he said as he sat down. "Do you know what time it is, Ackroyd? Pinkerton's never woke me up at three in the morning." His tink darted around his head, buzzing. Peter swatted at it irritably.

"Let's see the picture," Jay said. He didn't bother asking if he'd gotten it. Pann had been with Pinkerton's in Chicago for nine years before Jay hired him away. He was as good as they came. Not to mention being a wild card.

Peter handed him the file folder. Jay opened it and took out a mug shot, a glossy enlargement of the face of a young woman. It was a terrible picture, but she was still beautiful. He showed it to Jerry Strauss. "Hannah Davis," he said. "This is a blowup of her fire department ID photo."

"I remember seeing her on Peregrine's Perch," Jerry said. His Rondo Hatten face suddenly brightened. "I get it," he said eagerly. "We're going to find her."

Jay shook his head. "Nah," he said. "The feds are."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray was not a happy camper on the flight back to D.C. He and Crypt Kicker sat across the aisle from each other, the only passengers in the small courier jet winging back home at supersonic speeds.

"Jesus, Bobby Joe," Ray said, "how could you work for that scum?"

Puckett shrugged ponderously. When he spoke it was even more difficult to understand him. Since Ray had crushed his windpipe his every breath was accompanied by a gasping wheeze that sounded just awful. Ray often wondered what incredible spark of vitality kept the dead ace going and going after suffering such tremendous physical damage. Maybe it was as Puckett himself believed, a touch of the divine.

"Well, I'm sorry, Billy, but they told me they was doing the Lord's work."

"I don't pretend to know God's mind," Ray said, "but somehow I doubt that he wants all jokers and aces wiped from the face of the earth."

Puckett shook his head ponderously. "That's not what their serum does," he said. "It helps people, not kills them. Why, I feel better already."

"WHAT!" Ray jumped up in his seat and backed away from Puckett as far as he could get. "You let them inject you with the Black Trump?"

"Sure," Puckett wheezed. "And I don't feel bad at all."

"You stupid son of a bitch," Ray groaned. "You just stay over there. Keep your distance."

Jesus! If Crypt Kicker was infected, maybe he'd caught it too. He'd fought the dead ace, touched him, for Christ's sake. Ray suddenly ran to the plane's tiny bathroom and locked himself in. He scrubbed his hands furiously, part of himself saying that this was foolish, that it was probably already too late. Another part of his mind said well, maybe not.

Puckett was an unusual case. He was an ace, for one thing. For another, he was already dead. How the Black Trump would affect him would be anybody's guess. Maybe it wouldn't affect him at all.

Ray went back into the cabin and sat as far away from Puckett as possible.

"I'm sorry, Billy," the dead ace said in an apologetic voice. "I didn't mean to hurt you when we was fighting. I just want to do the Lord's work and avert suffering and all."

"That's fine," Ray said. "You just do it over there while I stay here."

An hour passed and Ray began to think that maybe he was worrying for nothing. Puckett, after all, was the most indestructible being he a ever run across. Nothing could do the motherfucker in. Nothing could -

Puckett suddenly turned from his seat in the front row to face Ray sitting in the back.

"I feel strange, Billy. Did it get hot in here?"

Ray stood slowly, staring at Puckett. "No, Bobby Joe, I don't think so."

Puckett pawed at the hood that covered his face, finally pulling it off to reveal his grotesque features. Puckett had killed himself before his ace had turned so strangely. He'd put a gun in his mouth and blown away most of his right cheek and his eye. That part of his face was a hideous ruin. The other part was even uglier. It was speckled with dozens of tiny hemorrhages. His remaining eyeball was filled with blood and was a sickly purple color. As Ray watched, Crypt Kicker's eyelid started to leak blood and a black fluid ran from his nose down over his mouth and chin.

The hulking ace stood, clutching at the cabin wall for support. He tried to shuffle toward Ray.

"I ... can't ... move ... my ... left ... side ..."

He toppled and hit the cabin floor without even trying to break his fall. In moments he lay in a pool of blood that ran from his nose, eyes, mouth, and the horrible gunshot wound in his head, as well as the hundreds of tiny ruptures that had opened in the skin all over his body.

"Help ... me ... Billlll...."

Whatever vitality powered the engine of Puckett's body had finally run out. Ray stared as Bobby Joe Puckett continued to leak blood and fluid and unidentifiable slime. He seemed to melt, liquefying before Ray's horrified eyes.

Ray stifled a scream. He had never felt such fear in his life. The Black Trump wasn't a foe he could fight. It was an insidious, cowardly force that tore invisibly at your body, breaking it down until you were nothing more than a nauseating pool of puke.

Without thinking he went to the center of the cabin and kicked at the emergency escape hatch. The door popped open and air went screaming from the cabin as it suddenly depressurized. Oxygen masks fell down from the ceiling. Ray went past them. The pilot came on the intercom, asking, "What's going on in there!"

"Don't come in here!" Ray screamed. "Stay out!"

He snatched one of the oxygen masks and took a couple of deep breaths. He let go of the mask and grabbed a seat cushion. He approached what was left of Puckett's body and used the cushion to push it to the cabin door where it was sucked out and away, falling down to the ocean below, Ray mopped up what fluid he could with the cushion and a couple of pillows, letting them fly out the door when they got soaked.

When he could clean up no more of the goop that had been Bobby Joe Puckett, he just stood and stared at the dark stain on the cabin carpet where Puckett had lain. He kept the emergency exit open a long time, breathing from the oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling.

After twenty minutes or so, he shut the door. He stayed on the canned oxygen for the rest of the trip to D.C.

But he wondered if it wasn't already too late. The Black Trump had killed an ace who was already dead, an ace whom neither flood for fire nor God himself could kill.

And he'd been exposed to it. He put his hand on his forehead. Was he already feeling a little warm?

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

SEVEN

"Colonel Sucharayan," the President of the Republic of Free Vietnam said, "you've been trying to divert the Mekong River again. That's got to stop. Now."

As if for emphasis she swung her legs around and draped them over the arm of her heavy French Colonial chair of carved teak and green velvet upholstery. She wore what appeared to be tight-fitting black Danskins, and a black half-mask, figured to turn her face into a living yin-yang. Her hair was black, heavy, and unbound.

Despite the bat-wing swish of the fan suspended on a brass stalk from the ceiling high overhead, which at least kept the lethal Saigon afternoon air circulating, a trickle of sweat ran down one side of the Michoacan clay mask which served the Thai ambassador for a face. He was not used to being addressed in that tone of voice by a mere woman. Not to mention one whose dress and behavior were nothing less than scandalous.

On the other hand Royal Thai Army intelligence had it on good authority that she could rip the colonel's arm off as casually as he might pull the wings from a fly. That she was an ace stacked insult atop injury. Still, the situation called for circumspection.

"Madame President," the ambassador said, bowing his head. His English was excellent. He had received training at Fort Bliss. "Muang Thai requires much water to supply the rice-growing lands of the Khorat Plateau. We must feed our people. Surely the Mekong belongs to all the peoples along its banks."

The President's audience hall had once been the great room of the grand French colonial villa in the heart of Saigon - the unwieldy name "Ho Chi Minh City" was scarcely a memory anymore - which had been co-opted as the seat of government for Free Vietnam. It was as unorthodox as its occupant, being hung to either side of the chair of state with parachutes tie-dyed into ludicrous fireworks-bursts of color. Both were hard for the Colonel to take seriously.

Moonchild wagged a finger at him. "And by both treaty and custom the people downstream from your country are entitled to a share."

"That is a very difficult question," the colonel murmured. "There is great drought in my country."

"Which you brought on your own damned selves," said the person who stood at the President's shoulder. A meter and three quarters tall, with the white-feathered and fiercely beaked head of a bird of prey, and claws to match emerging from the sleeves of his tiger-pattern camouflage battle dress, he twisted the colonel's sensibilities. Southeast Asians, by and large, had a loathing for human deformity, and thus for jokers. "You cut down all the trees in your country, for Chrissakes. Fucked up your watershed something fierce. Not our fault."

Sucharayan's thin lips drew tighter, giving the impression his face might be about to implode. "The internal affairs of my country are no concern of yours," he hissed.

"When you interfere with the flow of water to the farmers of the Mekong Delta, you make it our affair," Moonchild said. She raised her legs and spun on her butt until she faced forward, then placed her black-slippered feet primly on the floor. The colonel's eyes started out of his head.

The joker thrust his yellow break forward so that its hooked tip was inches from Sucharayan's nose. "Keep trying to steal our water," he said, "and you're engraving yourself an invitation to an entire world of hurt."

The colonel puffed up like a frog. "If you are making threats, permit me to assure you that the Royal Thai Army - "

"Can't find its butt with both hands." The joker raised his head and emitted horrid cawing laughter. "Remember those Thai Ranger teams you infiltrated through Cambodia, back when Bush was President? The ones with the Green Beanie advisors? How they like us now, baby?"

The colonel put his finger inside his collar, where pressure from his necktie was chafing him. He did not look happy. It had been necessary to liquidate several of the survivors of the missions the Thai Rangers had undertaken in cooperation with the American DEA and Special Forces, to prevent them telling demoralizing tales.

"That's right," the joker said. "You keep messing with the Mekong, shit's gonna happen. You dig? Your officials are going to start acting weird. River monsters will run off your workers. Your heavy equipment's gonna burn. There will be problems."

Moonchild held up a hand and gave a little Queen Elizabeth wave. "Peace, Colonel Inmon." She smiled sweetly. "I'm sure he wants to get along just as much as we do."

She giggled. The colonel stared at her. Sweat streamed down his face.

A woman - a girl really, no more than eighteen - came bouncing into the audience hall. Not just any girl, but a tall glorious Occidental girl with hair like spun gold, wearing a floppy sun hat, a red halter top, and cut-off jeans that showed how impossibly long her legs were. In one hand she held a string bag full of oranges. The other cradled a pink teddy bear to her breasts. She was every tinpot Third World dark-sunglasses-wearing fascist brickhead colonel's ideal vision of what a Western woman ought to be.

A pair of jokers so hideous the colonel couldn't bear to look at them followed her in. They spread out to either side, flanking the door with AKM assault rifles held ready. Trying to ignore the scrutiny of five unfriendly eyes, the colonel watched the girl skip to the President, lean forward and plant a kiss on her unmasked cheek.

"Hi, Isis," she sang in a little-girl voice. "I'm ba-ack!"

"So glad to see you, Sprout, dear," the President said. "Run along now, please. I've important business to tend to."

"Sure." The girl turned, flashed a smile dazzling enough for a beer commercial at the colonel, who was making no effort to hide an expression of sheer disgust. Then she went bopping out of the room, all unconcern.

Sprout," the President said, eyes lingering on the door she'd left by. "My - that is, my chancellor's daughter."

"A most charming creature," Sucharayan said in a voice starched with irony.

"Yes she is, isn't she?" The President grinned at him. "Now, then, Colonel, I'm sure the Kingdom of Thailand is as eager as we are to see relationships between our two countries remain friendly. We can work this out."

"No doubt we can," the Colonel said.

"So," the President said, crossing her legs and rubbing her hands together, "now that we've got business out of the way - you wouldn't happen to have a daughter, would you, Colonel?"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Jay Ackroyd shook two aspirin out of the jumbo bottle he kept in his desk drawer and washed them down with a swallow of cold coffee from yesterday's pot. Then he made a face. The stuff tasted like Rondo Hatten's socks.

He wondered how his junior partner was doing. They should have heard something by now.

Peter Pann was asleep on the long leather couch in the corner of Jay's office, snoring a sweet little eleven-year-old snore. His tie was loosened and his shoes were off. "Wake me up when the tink gets back," he'd told Jay before nodding off, hours ago.

"What the hell is taking so damn long?" Jay said irritably.

Across his desk, Melissa Blackwood looked up from her little bitty computer. It was the latest experimental prototype, she'd explained to him, a NEC Neuromancer powerdeck with bubble memory and holographic display, wouldn't be on the market for another two years, minimum. "We don't even know if he's been arrested yet," she said. Readout flickered in the air in front of her eyes, phantom letters that Jay found vaguely disconcerting. "And they will probably want to interrogate him before they take him to wherever the others are being held."

"God, I hope not," Jay said. "I don't know how long he can carry this off."

"You worry about him too much," Melissa said. "He'll do okay. You should get some sleep." Her hair was an unruly cascade of red curls spilling out from beneath her hat, her body hard and small. Very small. Beyond petite, maybe five feet on a tall day. If she wore boots. This morning she wore a jogging suit, a pair of old Reeboks, and a shiny, black silk top hat.

The top hat was her trademark. Aces magazine had named her Topper back when she was still a teenybopper protegee of Cyclone out in San Francisco. During the years she'd spent with the Justice Department, Melissa had played the part to the hilt, dressing in a distinctive uniform of white shirt, bow tie, long-tailed black tuxedo jacket, black satin short-shorts, black fishnet stockings, and high-heeled black fuck-me pumps.

She'd walked away from the costume, and the feds, soon after the Rox War, for reasons she still refused to discuss. Jay figured that Cyclone's death had something to do with her decision. There was no way to walk away from the top hat, however. Her power didn't work without it, the same way Jay couldn't teleport anything without making his fingers into a gun. Ace crutches were a funny thing.

"You getting anywhere with that thing?" Jay asked, gesturing at the powerdeck. For the past hour, she had been trying to hack into the sealed files of the Special Executive Task Force down in Washington, in the hopes of finding out what the hell was going on.

"Nothing we didn't already know," she said, turning off the machine. The phantom letters vanished. "The feds have three major Sharks in custody. Dr. Etienne Faneuil, Philip Baron von Herzenhagen, and Margaret Durand. Durand's cut a deal and she's snitching out the other two. Pan Rudo, who seems to have been the head of the whole operation, is supposed to be dead, murdered at the UN by this six-legged yellow joker, who's either George G. Battle or Gregg Hartmann, depending on who you believe. On paper, it looks as though the Shark organization has been pretty well smashed up."

"What do you think?"

Melissa closed up her powerdeck. "Faneuil and Durand are in nice young bodies, which has got to mean that the Sharks have a tame jumper, or had one at one time."

Jay groaned. "Jumpers," he said. "Why is it always jumpers? From now on, we charge triple time for any case with jumpers in it."

"I know how you feel," Melissa said. She disconnected her modem, wrapped the line around the computer, took off her top hat and thrust the whole works inside. "Von Herzenhagen used to run the Special Executive Task Force, until he was exposed as a Shark. Now he's been replaced by Straight Arrow. That ought to be good news for our side. Nephi's an ace, and more important, he's a decent man, honest, loyal, hard-working ... only ..." She hesitated.

Jay didn't like the sound of that only. "Only what?"

"Only ... is he really Straight Arrow?" Melissa put the top hat back on her head and cocked it at a rakish angle. "With all this body-swapping going on, there's no way we can be sure who's who, or even who's alive or who's dead. We could be dealing with a Shark in Straight Arrow's body. All those SCARE aces could be Sharks by now. That would explain last night's raids. For all we know, Rudo is still alive in a new body, just like Faneuil and Durand."

"Not to mention how many more Sharks are still out there, under cover," Jay said gloomily. "Leo Barnett in the White House, hell, this damn thing may go right to the top." Jay's head was throbbing. He needed hot caffeine. He pressed his intercom. "Ezili, make some fresh coffee, will you?" There was no answer. She probably wasn't in yet. Ezili came to work when she felt like coming to work, usually around ten-thirty or eleven, but sometimes two or three. He looked hopefully at Topper. "I don't suppose - "

"You don't pay me nearly enough to make coffee," Melissa said. "Make it yourself."

"Have you ever tasted my coffee?" Jay said. "Have pity."

Melissa made a face at him. "Just this once," she said. She took off her top hat, reached inside, and pulled out a styrofoam cup of coffee, black and steaming. She put it on Jay's desk.

He picked it up with both hands, blew on it, took a swallow. Life seemed slightly more tolerable. "Real good," he told her. He looked wistfully at the hat. "I don't suppose you have a cheese danish in there?"

"Don't press your luck."

Something pinged against the office window. Jay looked up. A bright point of light hovered outside, beating against the glass, darting and fluttering back and forth in a frantic aerial dance, trying to get in. He got up and opened the window. The light shot over to Peter, circled around his head, then zipped up to the ceiling, buzzing wildly. "What's she saying?" Melissa said.

"How should I know? I don't speak tink." Jay went to Peter and shook him roughly by the shoulder, until he sat up groggily. The tink zoomed down and hovered in front of his face. Its buzz was frantic, insistent. Peter rubbed sleep from his eyes and listened. "They took him to Governor's Island," he said. "They're all there. We going to break them out?"

"Might as well," Jay said. "Can't dance."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

When the Thai was gone Moonchild waved her chief of security away. Inmon nodded his feathered head and left.

After the door shut on him Moonchild rose from the ornate chair and walked toward another door at the back of the great room. She weaved slightly. As she approached the door, painted in layers of white enamel, her feet sank several inches into the scuffed parquetry floor.

"Whoops," she said, and giggled. "Shit. I'm starting to lose it." Her outlines blurred, shifted, and suddenly it was a man, small and blue-skinned, enveloped in a hood and billow of black cape, who stood reaching for the brass doorknob.

"Screw this," he said in a high-pitched and peevish masculine voice. "I'm Cosmic Traveler. What do I need with doorknobs?" And he walked through the door.

On the far side a short hall led to another door. "That fool Meadows needs to quit fretting like a brooding-hen," the cowled figure muttered as it walked forward. "I've got all the memories that high-kicking bimbo does. And a lot more upstairs. Anything she can do, I can do better." At the door he paused and smirked. "And then some," he said, and stepped through. As he passed through the wood he felt tearing dislocation. "Oh, shit!" he exclaimed. "It's too soon - "

He fell forward, through the door onto the polished hardwood floor of a small office. What landed on all fours was another male figure, tall and lanky, dressed in jeans and blue work shirt, with ashy blond hair getting long and the beginnings of a goatee.

"Whoa," Mark Meadows said in a long expulsion of breath. "Almost lost it there."

He shook his head and reached for round wire-rimmed spectacles that had dropped from the aquiline bridge of his nose. "I'm being the Traveler too much. It's giving me a death wish."

Not to mention the fact that at the end of the interview Trav had broken character to ask if the colonel had a daughter, for God's sake. "If you can't maintain better," Mark said aloud, "I'm gonna start leaving you in the bottle and winging it myself."

Down the dim and dusty back-corridors of his mind a dry mocking laugh rebounded. The threat was empty, and no one knew it better than Cosmic. Power in Asia was a personal affair, and the President of Free Vietnam was Isis Moon, also known as Moonchild. Mark was her chancellor, fully authorized to speak for her - but unless she put in fairly regular appearances, people would sense an opening and start to conspire.

And Moonchild wouldn't come out to play any more. Not since she had broken her vow against taking human life by breaking the neck of the joker-ace Ganesha. Small matter that it was an accident - and that Ganesha had been trying to rape Sprout. Moonchild's powers and very existence were predicated upon observing the Tenets and Student Oath of tae kwon do; to her the third portion of the Oath, "I shall never misuse tae kwon do," meant she could not use her ace powers or martial arts skills to kill a human.

Mark had tried. Endless internal monologues elicited no response. When he took the silver-and-black powder that summoned Moonchild, he curled into a fetal ball and went catatonic for an hour. He didn't even know if she still existed. Or whether, like Starshine - killed by a Ly'bahr cyborg in orbital combat over Takis - she was simply gone.

So he had to rely on Trav, slimy and unreliable as he was. He was taking the blue powder too much; and when he took a single potion too often, bad things happened. Like the one-hour duration of a "friend's" visit became unstable, and you risked translating back into solid with skinny Mark Meadows in the middle of a hardwood door....

A knock on the door. It made him shudder. He picked himself up with the sense of assembling scattered pieces.

"Come on in."

It was Osprey, pumping a feathered fist in the air. "Yeah! You'd think that stiff-necked son of a bitch never heard of "good cop/bad cop." And you should've seen the boss! She worked him to perfection. Perfection."

He blinked huge, golden eyes. Beetling eagle brows frowned. "But she's starting to act, I don't know, a little weird. She's still an ass-kicking little lady, but man, maybe you better talk to her about taking some time off."

"I'll do that," Mark said, in what he hoped wasn't as much a croak as it felt like.

He folded himself into his swivel chair. "What's eating at you, boss?" Inmon asked, perching on the edge of his desk.

A two-time Joker Brigader, Mark's comrade-in-arms in the fight to liberate South Vietnam, Osprey had proven himself a shrewd and resourceful warrior. But sometimes Mark thought he had a tendency to let natural optimism get the better of him. It had to be a powerful sense of optimism, after all; it had survived the wild card turning him into a creature fit to frighten children, not to mention Thai colonels playing at diplomat.

Osprey was not as capable as Mark's former spymaster, security chief, military advisor, and friend J. Robert Belew had been. Then again, Mark suspected hardly anybody was, outside the movies. Belew was long gone. Ordered into exile by Mark himself.

He gave his head a prissy-tight little shake - and was immediately uncomfortable; That had too much Traveler in it.

I'm not gonna beat myself up over that one any more, he told himself. Yes, he had allowed himself to be manipulated into unfounded suspicion of his friend and advisor J. Bob; yes, he had flown into a rage in the aftershock of having killed the man he hoped would be the guru he'd been seeking since his belated face-first fall into the hippie subculture. He had tossed his right-hand man out of the whole country - and had only just managed to avoid ordering him shot out of hand, just like any fascist Third World dictator with aviator shades and gild bird crap on the bill of his hat.

But he hadn't just been in Ferdinand Marcos-emulating mode. The fact was, he couldn't trust J. Bob, not indefinitely. The merc himself had told him not to. J. Bob was a right-winger and a super-patriot, and he had his own agenda - which could not be relied on to run parallel with Mark's clear over the horizon into infinity. The break was coming, was needful; and though not for the best reasons, Mark had done the best thing, by making it clean.

He sighed. "I just wonder if it's ... worth it, man." Right or wrong he missed J. Bob acutely now; J. Bob knew about his "friends." Not being able to share the truth of his masquerade with anyone - even his closest remaining friend - weighted him down like a backpack anvil. "What we're doing here."

Osprey shook his head in disbelief. "Not worth it? Listen, man. Think of all we've done. We've given the wild cards a place where they can be free and pretty much safe. We've given the Viets something they wanted for a long, long time, which was mainly to be left alone. There's starting to be an economy here in the South; people are starting to make stuff, and to trade.

"The traffic is flowing South, not North; shit, everybody says it's just a matter of time before the boys in Hanoi throw in the towel and petition to join us. You've kept us on good terms with the Chinks without sellin' us down the river. And with all this shit about the Card Sharks breaking in the news and all, the way you and J. - and the Major was the first ones to make a stand against them, it's makin' us all look like heroes. Nothing like a little attempted genocide to rehabilitate us wild cards in the eyes of the world."

Mark found himself nodding. He thought J. Bob was raving when he first told Mark they were up against a branch of a worldwide conspiracy to exterminate the wild cards, way down yonder in Vietnam. But J. Bob had been right. As usual. Now the Sharks were exposed, discredited, and on the run.

"We ain't an 'outlaw state' any more," Osprey said. "People are startin' to think what we're doing here is pretty right-on. And old President Leo, he don't like wild cards much - but he don't have a personal hard-on for your skinny white butt like George the Shrub did. When the polls tell him to back off the 'Nam, he listens up."

He laid a hand on Mark's shoulder. Mark felt the tips of his talons, needle-sharp, gently prodding his flesh through the blue chambray of his shirt. Power under control: that was Osprey.

"Mooncnild's the boss," the joker said in a quiet voice. "But not to take nothing away from her, you're our point-man. Always been. We'd never have made it this far without you. I hope you stick it out."

"Wherever it takes us?"

"That's affirmative."

Mark reached up to grip the claw briefly. "Thanks," he said. "I'll do my best."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Billy Ray was pissed, absolutely and totally. He'd been quarantined, put under observation twenty-four hours a day by a bunch of white-coats who looked at him as if he were some kind of interesting, but ultimately disgusting, bug. When they weren't sticking him with a needle to draw blood, scraping his tongue with a popsical stick, or knocking him on the knee with some fucking little rubber hammer, they were asking him to piss in a bottle or do even more disgusting things with other bodily fluids. Worse, the TV set didn't even get cable and by the end of the week Ray was so wound with pent-up energy and frustration he was ready to explode.

The only positive thing was that so far he'd showed no sign of having the Black Trump. The doctors at first considered this a minor miracle since Ray had been trapped on a plane with Crypt Kicker, breathing the same air for an hour or so before he'd realized the ace was infected. Then it dawned on the dome-heads that Bobby Joe Puckett wasn't your ordinary type of guy. He was already dead, for one thing, and one of the scientists postulated that maybe he didn't breathe, "as we know it," therefore he didn't pass the contagion on to Ray. They were pissed that Ray had kicked the body overboard rather than bringing it in for study.

But that was okay. Ray was pissed, too.

He had way too much time on his hands, and very unlike himself, spent a lot of it brooding. He had always thought of himself as, well, invincible. More than once he'd taken wounds that would've killed most men, from the time the pack of werewolves had gnawed on him to the time Mackie Messer had unzipped him from crotch to sternum. But he'd always come back. He was the toughest bastard on the planet. Nothing could bring him down. Nothing, apparently, but a bunch of microscopic bugs too small for him to see. It bothered him. It bothered him a lot.

It was still bothering him when someone knocked on the door and came in without waiting for him to say anything. That was another thing that bothered him. The fucking doctors were always doing that, knocking and then coming right on in. But this time it wasn't a doctor.

"Hello, Ray," he said as he entered the tiny quarantine chamber. "How're we feeling?"

In Bush's day the Special Executive Task Force had been headed by Dan Quayle, but Quayle (thankfully) had had little to do with day-to-day operations. Department heads had had free rein, but as it turned out that hadn't worked so well, either. Barnett's election had changed things. His VP, ex-General Zappa, had been given other duties and to show what a swell guy he was Barnett had turned the SETF over to one of "them." Of course, the "them" he'd turned it over to was the most unwaveringly conservative, boringly whitebread of "them" possible.

"Hi, Nehi. We're feeling just fine."

Nephi Callendar, the ace known as Straight Arrow, sighed like Job, only even more put-upon. "That's Nephi, Ray. Actually 'sir' would be more appropriate. Even 'Mr. Callendar.'"

"Right," Ray said. "Listen, sir, you'd better get me out of here before I start breaking things. There's a lot that has to be done."

"You think I don't know that? Get dressed. We have an important meeting."

"Oh, a meeting," Ray said as he went to the closet. "You don't know how much I've missed going to meetings the past week. You can't imagine the hours I've spent here pining away, wishing I had a meeting to go to."

"No," Callendar admitted, "I probably can't."

There was a limo waiting for them outside Walter Reed Hospital. Ray whistled when he saw it. "Jeez, you're moving up in the world, Nehi. I remember when you were just one of the guys in the Secret Service. Now you get to be the token wild carder on Barnett's staff with your own chauffeured limo and all."

"Try not to be offensive, Ray, if you can."

"All right," Ray said as the limo pulled out into traffic. "I'll try."

"Fine. As you know, the Task Force's currently operating under a special directive from the President to clear up this Card Shark problem."

"Yeah," Ray grumbled. "I'm sure he's been staying up late nights worrying about it."

"He has, actually." Callendar leaned forward. "Look. I know you don't think much of my decision to take this position in the Barnett government. But it was my decision and I stand by it. I'm not sure what Barnett intends for wild carders, but don't forget that I'm one myself. I'm in a position to ... well, watch out for things. You may not believe it, but I am. Ray, you did a good job on the island, but according to the journal you recovered Rudo had already left. And he'd taken a supply of the so-called Trump with him."

"Goddamn it," Ray swore. "You didn't see what that stuff did to Bobby Joe. Christ! I thought nothing could do that shit-kicker for good, but it turned him into a pile of pus and jello right in front of me."

"I saw the photos of the other victims," Callendar said coldly. "Our scientists are working on Rudo's journal and we'll have some concrete information about the Trump any time now. And there's one thing you should remember. Blasphemy does no one any good."

"I'll jot that down in my thought book. Are you sending me after Rudo and the Trump?"

"You'll find out about your assignment soon enough," Callendar said.

The limo turned off the street. Ray glanced out the window. He'd been a Secret Service agent long enough to recognize the back way into the White House when he saw it.

"So what do I call him?" Ray asked Callendar.

"Who?"

"Barnett. Do I call him Mr. President or Reverend?"

Callendar sighed again. He did that a lot in Ray's company. "You're not going to pray with the man," he said. "You're going in for a very private, very high level briefing. Be courteous, be attentive, be quiet and you might still be in government service when the meeting's over. Okay?"

"Sure, okay, Nehi. Whatever you say."

Callendar suppressed an urge to roll his eyes. He was learning that the best way to deal with Ray was to ignore half his comments and pretend to ignore the rest. Ray was quiet as they parked the limo, went through the various security checkpoints and walked down the hallway to the Oval Office. Still, as they stopped before the office door, Callendar felt compelled to issue a final warning. "Just behave yourself with Rev - er, President Barnett. Okay?"

"Of course," Ray said, stepping in front of Callendar. "Think anyone's home?" he asked as he pounded on the door.

It was opened by a Secret Service agent that neither Ray nor Callendar recognized. He was a nat, though. Barnett had weeded all wild carders, ace and joker alike, from those assigned to guard himself and his family. The agent wore mirrorshades. His meticulously pressed suit made Ray envious. He had the omnipresent radio plug in his ear. He looked back inside the office. "Agents Callendar and Ray to see you, sir."

"Show them in, Frank," Barnett said in his soft southern drawl. "You may wait outside."

The agent stepped aside and waved Ray and Callendar in.

"Don't you think the shades are overdoing it a bit?" Ray asked in a low voice as they went by. The agent sneered silently and Ray put him on his list.

Ray looked around the Oval Office. It hadn't changed much since the last occupant had left, but Barnett had added his own personal touches. All and all it wasn't bad, though the pen and pencil set fashioned as a model of the three crosses on Calvary looked a little out of place on the presidential desk.

Barnett stood as they entered the room. He was a tall, fit man, and handsome in what Ray considered a slightly effete way. His voice was rich and powerful. Ray half-suspected that Barnett had some kind of wild card ability. But he didn't. Barnett was just a salesman and a politician, and he was good at both.

"Sit down, Agent Ray," Barnett said warmly, indicating one of the chairs in front of the huge desk that dominated the office. "Just sit yourself down right here."

Ray could swear that he almost heard a twinkle in Barnett's voice. Whatever the hell that could be.

"Thanks, Nephi. Sit yourself down," Barnett said as he put his expensively-clad butt in the chair behind the desk.

Callendar nodded and took the second of three chairs arranged in front of the President's desk. Barnett turned directly to Ray and smiled long enough to make Ray feel more than a little uncomfortable.

"Well," Barnett said after what seemed to be a long time. "Well, well, well." He looked down at his desk top and gestured vaguely at the thick file that rested there. "It's good to see you again. Let's see. When did we last meet?"

"In Atlanta, Mr. President. When I got gutted by Mackie Messer on the floor of the Democratic National Convention." The memory of the twisted little ace with the buzzsaw hands still gave Ray nightmares, though he wouldn't admit that to anyone.

"Of course," Barnett said. "You know, I've been looking up your record. Extraordinary. Truly extraordinary. You're a fine example of American patriotism. All that you've done for your country over the years ..."

I just like to kick ass, Ray was about to say, but he remembered what Callendar had said and for once he managed to hold his tongue as Barnett stared at the closed cover of the dossier, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. When he looked up his eyes were large and soulful, his voice dripping with worry and regret.

"I don't have to tell you," he said - and then did - "that our great country stands as at the center of a difficult crossroads. The wild card is a curse on this land - oh, I know that might sound harsh to you, but after all you benefited from that hellish virus."

"Yes, sir," Ray said quietly.

"Yes, well, naturally you've seen the suffering and pain caused by the wild card. I have. I see it constantly. I'm doing my best to end the suffering for all citizens, but recent events have made things ... precarious."

There was another long silence that Ray felt compelled to fill. "You mean the revelations about the Card Sharks?"

"Yes," Barnett said. "Exactly. Their methods in dealing with the wild card problem have been unnecessarily brutal and have led to no end of disquieting publicity."

"That's one way of putting it."

"Worse," Barnett went on as if he hadn't heard Ray, "many of these so-called Sharks had government connections. Some very high level connections. Most have been exposed and, uh, dealt with, but some still remain at large."

Ray nodded. "Pan Rudo. Johnson." Ray suppressed a smile. He thought he knew where this was heading, and he was more than ready to go out and kick more Card Shark ass.

"Yes. Among others. If you hadn't botched the assignment - " Barnett quickly retreated when he saw Ray's sudden coloring. " - not that it was totally your fault, of course. Still. Still... I know that Agent Callendar has now assigned you to go after one of your own people - "

"My people?" Ray asked. Then added, "He what?"

"Well, it's true that Senator Hartmann is apparently a joker - "

"Senator Hartmann?" Ray turned and looked at Callendar. "What's he talking about?"

"Well, Mr. President, I hadn't quite got around to telling Ray about his new assignment - "

"Hadn't you better, then?" Barnett said, all the twinkle gone from his voice.

"Yes, well. Hartmann, of course, broke the story on the Card Sharks. Now he's on the loose.... If only we'd listened to him in the beginning, but, after all, world-spanning conspiracies and all that ... well, never mind. We figure he may know something more about this Black Trump. Other agents are looking for him, but you were so close with him for so long that we thought you might have more of a handle on what he'd do, where he'd go."

Callendar was speaking faster and faster as he saw the increasingly hostile expression on Ray's face. When he finished Ray glared at him and spoke in a voice of glacial coldness.

"Let me get this straight. Rudo and Johnson are running around loose in the world with God knows how much of this Black Trump stuff, just waiting to set it loose and kill every wild carder in existence. And you want me to go chasing after some fucking yellow caterpillar because he might, he just might know something about this shit! Well this is the biggest piece of - "

"Ray!"

" - fucked up - "

"Agent Ray!"

" - government bullshit - "

"Agent Ray!" Barnett bellowed in a voice that easily overwhelmed Ray's. "I will not tolerate such language!"

Ray clamped his mouth shut and looked sulkily at Barnett. "Yes, sir," he said, almost without an edge in his voice.

That's better," Barnett said. "Now. You're going after Hartmann - that is, if your new partner hasn't captured him already."

"Partner?"

"Yes. For the sake of appearances and, well, fairness and equal opportunity, I'm going to partner you with another agent," Barnett swiveled and spoke into the intercom set on his desk. "Send in Ms. Harvest." He turned again and looked at Ray, "I'm implementing a new policy, Agent Ray. I think it would be appropriate to have a normal agent, that is, a non-wild carder, teamed with those infected, that is, those with ..."

Ray's blood pressure started to rise again, then the door to the Oval Office opened and Ms. Harvest entered. She was young tall, blond, and lean. Her skirt was blue silk; her blazer matched. Her blouse was white with a cute little blade string bow tied at the base of her long graceful neck. Her hair was thick and straight. She wore it short, just covering her ears. Her glasses were gold wirerims. Her legs were leanly muscled, like a dancer's. Ray stood automatically as she approached.

"... Agent April Harvest," he heard Barnett's words again as he took her hand in his. Her handshake was cool and firm. Much, he imagined, as the feel of her body would be, knees to breasts, pressed against his. "She'll be in charge of the operation."

Cool to begin with, but -

"What?" Ray's sudden fantasy was interrupted by harsh reality. He turned to face Barnett. "What?"

"I said that Agent Harvest will be in charge of the operation to find Senator Hartmann."

"Are you serious?" He looked back at her with a frown. "Is she out of high school yet?"

Harvest pulled her hand from Ray's grasp. "I'm twenty-four years old, Mr. Ray, and I've been in government service since I graduated from college. Princeton."

"Well, let's give you a kiss on the cheek and a medal! Twenty-four!"

"Agent Ray," Barnett said, allowing more than a hint of severity to creep into his voice. "Sit down." Ray did, reluctantly. Harvest took the chair next to his. Ray was so disgruntled that he didn't even glance at her legs as she settled down. "If you'd been successful in your last mission the urgency of this one wouldn't be so great."

"It wasn't my fault," Ray muttered.

"Hmmmm," Harvest said.

Barnett waved his hand. "Whatever. We're not interested in apportioning blame here."

No, Ray thought. You've already pinned it all on me.

"We're concerned about the future." Barnett leaned forward, a concerned look on his face. "We must move quickly to capture those who know about the Black Trump. We can't let knowledge of the virus leak to the populace. Think of the riots that would happen if the unfortunate citizens of Jokertown should learn of the existence of the Black Trump. Think of the damage to property and life alike." Barnett turned his attention to Harvest. "Agent Harvest has already led an operation to that end. In fact, I'm eager to hear her report.

"The dragnet was generally successful," she said crisply. "Most of the targets have been placed in protective custody on Governor's Island."

"Including Hartmann?" Callendar asked.

"Well, no." A hint of annoyance crept into Harvest's voice. "He escaped, along with his companion, Hannah Davis. I've just received word that we picked up Davis, but Hartmann remains at large. The joker known as Quasiman also escaped, but he's not too much of a threat to reveal information about the Trump." She hesitated. "We also lost the carder once known as Snotman, now the Reflector. We're not quite sure what happened to him."

Barnett waved his hand. "He's a minor player. The one that concerns me is Hartmann." He turned his full attention to Ray. "So you see, your mission becomes even more valuable. You must bring in Hartmann and all others he might have told about the Trump. We can't have them running around, spreading wild rumors."

"Certainty not, sir," Harvest said.

"But they're not rumors," Ray interjected.

"We know that," Barnett said. "But the effect would be the same, whether this Trump exists or not - "

"It exists," Ray said flatly. "I've seen the results."

"Whatever. The existence of the Trump is to be kept top secret. It is not to be discussed, hinted at, or supposed about. Officially, it does not exist. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," Harvest said.

"Agent Ray?"

Ray looked at the President for a long moment, then he nodded. You bastard, he thought. I'm glad I never bothered to vote.

"Good." Barnett nodded decisively. He picked up the dossier on the presidential desk, stood and handed it to Harvest. "You'll need this. It's all the information we've been able to gather about Hartmann and his movements in the past few weeks."

Harvest took the file. "Thank you, sir."

Barnett came around the desk. "One last thing, before you go."

Ray watched in horror as Barnett got down on his knees on the rug in front of his desk. "Pray with me. Pray with me for the success of your mission and the fate of this great country that's been given to my keeping."

Callendar got down on his knees next to the President and Harvest joined him. Barnett looked expectantly at Ray.

"Well - "

Barnett gripped Ray's wrist. He was surprisingly strong, but Ray could have easily pulled free. Somehow, though, that didn't seem like the thing to do. "Pray with me, son, for your success and the soul of this great nation."

Ray got down on his knees, surreptitiously scanning the rug to make sure it was clean. The last thing he wanted was stains on his trousers.

"All right," he said. He bowed his head but still kept an eye on his commander-in-chief. If he starts talking in tongues, Ray said to himself, I'm out of here.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Fridays for mosques, Saturday schul, Sunday church. Subtle Scents ran twelve hours a day, Monday through Thursday, with optional shifts on the three weekend days. Mondays, everybody worked. Zoe finished a Monday shift and marched home, thinking of a hot shower and an early bedtime. The smell of sizzling butter met her halfway up the stairs.

"Blintzes for dinner, mama?" she asked and stopped short with the door half open.

A thin Robert Bedford type, blond, mustached, and at ease, sat at the tiny table. He was grinning hugely, and scarfing down a stack of blintzes between smiles. The table held a half-gallon of orange juice, a pot of coffee, and a nearly empty quart jar of Anne's hoarded Hungarian cherry preserves.

"When you wake up, it's breakfast," Anne said.

"Hello, Zoe," Croyd said.

Zoe dropped her purse on the floor and sat down at the table. She looked him over, unable to stop herself, looked for horns or a tail or feelers, whatever. Needles had told her stories about Croyd that she wasn't sure sure she wanted to believe. He was thin, yes, and he had a prodigious appetite, but the parts of him she could see looked nat.

"Hi."

"Another batch, Mr. Crenson?" Anne asked.

"No, thank you. This last dozen should be enough to take the edge off."

"Dozen?" Zoe asked.

"He has a good appetite," Anne said.

"Where are the kids?"

"Busy," Anne said. "Busy and fed. They ate early."

If Anne didn't like where they were, Zoe would have heard it in her voice. They were somewhere, they were okay.

"Some for you, Zoe?" Anne asked.

"Two."

Anne handed over a plate with three blintzes. Zoe scraped the last of the sour cream from a depleted carton on them and tucked in. They were very, very good.

Croyd attacked his plate, and while he ate he went through some funny facial stuff. A sort of tic, Zoe thought, but it might have been facial exercises. She couldn't tell. Anne made suds in the tiny sink and washed the mixing bowl.

Anne looked good. The docs were calling it remission. Her hair was growing back, the thick lovely hair that she had lost with the chemo. And she looked oifferent with a nat-style torso, two breasts, fake but shapely. She wasn't even unhappy about the line of scars where her other five pairs of breasts had been.

Humming a tune. Zoe hadn't seen her this happy - since she cooked for Bjorn. Zoe swallowed coffee and tried to swallow the sudden lump in her throat.

Croyd polished off the late plate of blintzes, drank down the juice, chased it with coffee, and got up. He brought his empty, make that gleaming, plate to Anne.

"Excellent blintzes. Wonderful blintzes. The best blintzes I have ever had." He bent and kissed Anne's cheek, as if he were a son, a long-lost member of the family. Anne just glowed.

"I like a little exercise when I wake up," Croyd said. "Is it spring?"

"It's May," Anne said.

"Good. I need to walk. Come with me, Zoe." He twisted his hands in odd circles, stared at his palms, lifted up on his toes as if he were trying to fly. Weird.

"Uh ..."

"Please?"

Well. She might just be inclined to follow that grin almost anywhere, and she didn't want his twitchy behavior to disturb Anne.

"Sure."

Zoe gave her plate to Anne and hugged her.

Croyd hurried toward the souk at a fast pace, his hands in his pockets, alert, watchful. He sniffed at the air as if to catch every scent.

"So those were blintzes," Croyd said. "I've never had blintzes before."

"Did you like them?" Zoe asked.

"Yeah."

She was glad she had her sneakers on. They were moving at almost a trot.

"What's the hurry?" Zoe asked.

"I'm hungry," Croyd said. He looked up at the rooftops along the narrow street and suddenly swerved to get close to the wall. "We're being watched."

"Yeah. Fist guards." She couldn't see anything, just purple twilight and a clear sky. "They watch everything."

"I don't like it."

"They're on our side, Croyd."

She followed him under a vendor's awning. On our side? Well, yes, maybe. The bastards. She'd been unable to figure out a safe way to contact them again. They weren't exactly in the phone book, and she didn't think another trip to the Gate was a good idea.

Needles hadn't said a word to her since her visit to the Gate. He was trying to be subtle about it, but he just wasn't around when Zoe was awake. Angelfish had found things to say to her, had been very nice the last few days, had been available to chat, which wasn't like him at all. Guarding Needles from her, her from Needles. But Needles looked okay. Sort of.

Croyd bought three skewers of shaslik, lamb and peppers and tomatoes, richly spiced, dripping and grilled almost black. He dipped the sticks in a paper cup of yogurt sauce and munched them down. "Want one?" he asked.

"No, thanks. Why were you wiggling around at home?"

"Checking to see what powers I've got this time."

"Did you find out?"

"Nope." He turned to the vendor and thanked him effusively in a language Zoe had never heard. The old man bowed, slapped Croyd on the back, and replied at length, smiling a gap-toothed smile.

Croyd did a little bow, one of those maneuvers with gestures toward his forehead, heart, and middle. He handed over the skewers and grabbed Zoe's hand, pulling her toward the back of the stall and through a gloomy doorway.

"Well," Croyd said. "I never spoke Basque before."

"Basque?" Zoe asked, but they were in a dim space filled with brass and carpets, and Croyd was chatting with a very large man dressed in a caftan of a most violent shade of purple. Something went from Croyd's hand to his, and something went in Croyd's pocket.

Out the back door, into an alley, through another door, and then another, Zoe had never known the Joker Quarter to have so many passageways, or so many places to eat.

Croyd tried a piece of baklava and then bought a pan of it. He ate cucumbers, tomatoes, scallions dressed with oil and coriander at another stall.

"Do you always eat like this?" Zoe asked.

"When I wake up, yeah." He stopped to buy something wrapped in soft, puffy flatbread, something that reeked of garlic and fenugreek. He seemed to like it.

They turned another corner, into a section of the Quarter that Zoe didn't know at all. She felt like a tourist. Croyd's sunny enthusiasm put a different light on the sights and smells. He was having fun. So was she, come to think of it, chatting and walking his hand reaching for hers when she flagged behind him. Croyd wasn't coming on to her; the interaction felt more like teenage buddies touring Disneyland. Nice.

The next doorway opened into a restaurant. Croyd stuck his head in, sniffed, and grinned. The waiter motioned them toward a nest of pillows and a low table, and left them. He returned carrying a pitcher in one hand, an atomizer in the other, and a basin, which he held in the curl of his prehensile tail. The arrangement made the process of hand-washing and rosewater spritzing a one-step operation.

Zoe nibbled while Croyd demolished platter after platter of wonderful things.

"Bastilla," Croyd said. "Pigeon pie. I love Morocco."

"We're in Jerusalem," Zoe said.

"Yeah. Right."

He talked. He talked a lot. He was full of questions about all of the Escorts, about Anne, about news since he'd gone to sleep. Orient me, that was the gist of what he asked. Tell me about the world. In a corner, three musicians played some sort of drum, a flute, something flat with strings. They finished a song and said a few words, the order of the next set or something. Croyd stopped talking and listened to them.

"Dumbek, but it once was called a naqqua. The naq is the flute, and that thing on the woman's lap is a qanan, sort of a zither. The city is called Al Q'uds, except by the Jews and the Christians.... I think I know every language on Earth. Now that's strange." Croyd's brown eyes were bright. He popped another square of sweet pastry in his mouth. "It's time to powder my nose. See if that guy will bring us another tray of these while I'm gone."

He unfolded his legs from the pillow and darted away. Zoe sipped sweet mint tea and listened to the players, the sinuous melodies of the desert, ancient, resonant. This land could be a place to love, if it were at peace. If.

She felt full, and amused, and almost happy. A little spaced but maybe that was the relief of a few hours away from - don't think about the past, she told herself.

She saw Croyd threading his way through the tables, circling back toward her. Something was wrong, she sensed it. Croyd crouched beside her pillow and whispered in her ear, danger all too apparent in the relaxed way he moved "There's some nasty muscle asking for you. Three of them. Here's what we do. You leave. Left, right, left, left, count three doors and you're back to the moneychanger's place, the dude in the purple. Act like you're mad at me and get. I'll follow you and try to pick them off."

"Who are they? Why me?"

"Something about a guy who's cut up pretty bad."

"Oh, shit. Can't we stay here?"

"The waiter's in on it."

She could see him watching, his tail whipping back and forth like a restless cat after a mouse.

"Why are you helping me?" Zoe whispered.

"Because you're cute. Do it," Croyd said.

Believe him? She had to. But Croyd could have turned her in to the guards friends; he'd talked to so many people while they wandered. Get away.

She slapped him, a good solid whack, and ran from the restaurant. Behind her, Croyd shrugged and poured money on the table.

Left, down the alley. Old stone, garbage smells, the shadows so black. Croyd had spent most of the night eating; it was later than she had thought. Running, her sneakers made meeping sounds against the pavement. She concentrated on making no noise. Turn right, then left. This little jog, was that the next left? Damn, she hadn't really been watching it had seemed that they had walked farther than this coming in, and she couldn't remember this totally incongruous storefront filled with shiny kitchen appliances. Surely she would have noticed.

Croyd had said left. She turned. The alley jogged toward freedom, a block away, there were lights beyond the corner, people, some safety.

Nightmarish, impossible, a man's face and torso appeared beside her. He was a hunchback, pathetic, armless. She flinched away from him, away from his pleading gaze, the silent words his mouth formed. The apparition vanished.

Had the monkey-tailed waiter drugged her tea?

A joker in black swirled into motion dead ahead of her, his cloak darker than the shadows. Not this way. Zoe spun around the corner and ran, trying to dodge the other shadow, the huge hands that reached for her. She fought him, and the next one, but they were big, and things moved too fast, and she didn't know how to streetfight.

Croyd was right about the numbers, she thought as a six-fingered joker tied a black gag around her nose and mouth. There are three of them.

"You'll follow us." Six-fingers held her hand, and someone dropped a black veil over her eyes. The gag cutting into her lip smelled of stale sweat.

They led her. She could see the black shoulders of the joker in front of her, the steps when they told her to go up, go down. The night was too dark to see anything else. They entered a building, or a cave, some space of corridors and hallways, all square and closed in.

She felt drugged, dazed. It seemed inevitable, it seemed right, that she would be pushed through a door, locked inside, still gagged. This was what she had expected, even hoped for, since that day in Manhattan when the mannequin had killed for her.

Their footsteps echoed down the hall outside. She could hear nothing at all.

Her hands were free. She pulled off the veil and the gag.

Yell? If she did, the men in black might come back in, and hit her, hurt her. That thought was too scary to deal with. She tried the lock. Animate it? But they hadn't hurt her yet, and this must be the Fists' stronghold. If the plan was to kill her, they could have done it by now.

"You're safe here," a voice whispered.

The vague outline of a hunchbacked man seemed to hover near the ceiling. Zoe screamed and clung to the door, pounding her fists against it. No one came.

"Don't be afraid. Stay here. Don't run away."

What was it she had heard about hearing voices? Don't talk back to them, that was it. As long as you don't talk back to them, you aren't really crazy.

"You're - important." The voice was so kind, so wistful. And it wasn't there, anyway, there was nothing in the room at all.

The minutes crawled by.

What had the waiter given her? Acid? PCP? She hadn't tasted anything in the tea but mint and sugar, and her sense of taste was superb, a part of the ace she'd been dealt. But still, she felt dissociated, distant.

This was the Fists' stronghold. She was in the center of it, as close to the Black Dog as she was ever going to get. Wait, take the opportunity, talk to him or hurt him, make him stop messing with the kids.

They might let her starve, or die of thirst.

As soon as she felt less spaced out, she would animate the lock. If they didn't come for her. Soon.

There was a single wall outlet, no switches anywhere. The room was lighted by a nursery night-light, a plastic model of Turtle's Great and Powerful Shell. It must be a promo toy, a tie-in. Maybe the movie was in production. Zoe hoped so.

She sat down on the floor beside the little light and waited.

And waited.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Hannah went above ground daily to pick up newspapers and buy food. She and Gregg scanned the articles for news, but after a lone mention of a "disturbance" at the Dime Museum (buried on the third page of Metro), there was no follow-up. The Jokertown Cry carried an editorial questioning the fact that no one had seen Dutton, Father Squid, or Dr. Finn since the night of the "'suspicious raids on several Jokertown locales," and suggesting that "Hannah Davis' well-known Card Sharks conspiracy' may have been ultimately responsible. None of the major papers picked up on the accusation, nor did any of the other news media.

Dutton and the others had simply vanished. Gone.

"We're on our own," Hannah told Gregg. Since the raid she'd dyed her hair; it was now a nondescript medium brown, trimmed short. The hair was too dark for her complexion, but Gregg admitted that she looked very different from the Hannah he'd known. She set the paper down on the pile and looked around the wet, dank vault in which they sat, pierced by the thick veins and arteries of Jokertown's sewer lines. "We can't stay here. I won't stay here."

"We're safe here. We can't exactly take a cab out of the city right now, can we?"

"You aren't safe," she reminded him. "You're not going to hide from a - " Hannah stopped. Her eyes widened as she looked at something behind Gregg. "Quasi!" she shouted, a squeal of delight. Hannah was up and running, brushing past Gregg to hug the hunchback who had suddenly appeared in the darkness of their artificial cavern. Gregg felt a sudden stab of jealousy as he watched them, as Hannah kissed Quasiman on the cheek and the two embraced.

Two days here and Hannah hasn't touched you, a voice said inside. The two of you were lovers when you were normal, but now that you're a lousy yellow worm, you're nasty and awful. She kissed you once, when you first came back, but she hasn't tried it since, has she? She keeps talking about how she still loves you, but you know it's not in that way, is it? Quasi is at least humanoid. She can hug him, she can kiss him. But not you, Gregg. Not ever you.

Gregg could see Quasiman's face as he hugged Hannah. In Gregg's near-sighted view, his expression was clear enough to see that Quasi was involved with Hannah beyond simple friendship. Gregg knew. He could see the infatuation in Quasiman's eyes, in his lopsided smile, in the way he pulled Hannah to him. And when Quasi saw Gregg, Gregg saw reflected there the same strange, angry loathing that Gregg felt when he looked in a mirror.

"Quasi," Hannah was saying. "Have you seen Father Squid or Dutton? Any of the others?"

Quasi seemed to shudder. His attention drifted and he appeared to be looking at something not in the room. "Saw them," he said, stuttering. His gaze went back to Hannah. "An island. A you who wasn't you."

"What's that mean, Quasi?" she asked. Her hand brushed the joker's cheek, and Gregg felt his stomach churn acidly at the same moment. "I don't understand."

"You leave," Quasi said suddenly. "Water. Leprechauns. Fists." He looked at Gregg and scowled. "He knows how," Quasi said. "Do it."

"Do what?" Gregg asked him. "If you'd talk in something approaching a complete sentence, we might be able to make some sense of what you're saying."

"Gregg!" Hannah said, whirling around to look at him. "That's cruel. He can't help himself; you know that."

Gregg wrinkled his clown nose, squashing his round face like a hand puppet. The unfocused anger within him burned, and he wasn't sure who he was angry with: Quasi for interrupting their solitude, Hannah for making her affection for the joker so obvious, or himself for allowing it to bother him. "All right, I'm sorry. It's just - "

"You should leave," Quasiman said. Each word was an effort, separated by a breath.

"Leave New York?" Gregg asked. "Go to some other city?"

"Further than that," Quasiman answered. "Other countries. Sentences. You must leave. There's nothing you - " Quasiman's lower jaw disappeared. His tongue waggled helplessly like a gray slug for a moment before the jaw reappeared " - can do here," Quasiman finished. "Complete fucking sentences."

Gregg had never beard Quasiman swear before. The word was so surprising that Gregg almost laughed. Quasiman glared at Gregg, defiant. His arms disappeared, first the left, then the right. The glare went slack and empty, and the joker stood there like a wax dummy, empty and cold.

"Poor Quasi," Hannah sighed. She touched his shoulder above the bloodless wound of the missing arm. Quasiman didn't respond. He was gone to wherever he went in his fugues. "Gregg, you know he can glimpse the future. He's helped me so much before." She crouched down in front of Gregg, but she didn't touch him. Her eyes were full of something that might have been affection, but she didn't touch him. "I trust Quasi. He's seen something and he's trying to warn us."

"I can get as much information reading Nostradamus," Gregg muttered, and at her look: "All right. Maybe he's right. We sure aren't getting anything accomplished sitting down here. But what do we do?" There was a soft pop that echoed ringingly in the underground quiet. When Gregg looked up, the hunchback was gone. "So much for asking Mr. Complete Sentences."

"He wants us to leave the country," Hannah said. "I understood that much. It makes sense, especially if Rudo's fled the country, too."

"Right. And where do we go?"

Hannah looked at him. "Dutton said it back at the Museum: Rudo and Johnson will go to ground with the people they trust - the influential Sharks overseas. You're the one with the contacts. Let's use them."

Hannah watched him, and he saw his alien face reflected in her eyes. He wondered what she was feeling. He felt that if she touched him then, that he might be able to know, that the contact might spark some connection. Hannah's hand was lifted, as if she might reach out to him, but she drew it back and smiled grimly instead. "I just want to find Rudo and the vials," she said. "Wherever they've gone. I want this done."

So you can leave me then? Gregg wondered. So you can return to a normal life? He wondered, but the glimmerings of a plan had formed. "Let me make a call," he said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

April Harvest looked down the short staircase dubiously.

"Are we going to hit every dive in town?" she asked.

"If we have to," Ray said. "You want to find jokers, you go to places where jokers hang out: Freakers, Club Dead Nicholas, The Twisted Dragon. Now this place is something special. I read all about it in an article by Digger Downs in Aces magazine. You'd be surprised how much goes onin a place like Squisher's."

"I think I'd rather not know." She wrinkled her nose in disgust. "I can smell it from here."

Ray grinned, the fluttering neon light from the sign for Uncle Chowder's Clam Bar making his face look surprisingly sinister. Squisher's Basement was located below street level under the clam bar. The small metal sign with the bar's name on it was peeling and rusted. The hand that pointed down the stairs had six fingers.

"Don't worry," Ray said. "I'll take care of you."

"You don't have to take care of me, Ray. I do that all by myself. It'd be better if you'd remember that I'm in charge of this investigation. I'm only following your suggestion because all our previous attempts at finding Hartmann have turned up empty."

Ray nodded. "Whatever you say."

Squisher's Basement was a dive, a joint where the locals went for cheap but bad food and serious drinking. It smelled like Jokertown: old and dirty and sad. Inside it was dark and quiet. Most of the light came from the fluorescents hanging above the huge aquarium behind the bar, where Squisher resided. The few muted conversations among the patrons dropped off into silence as Ray and Harvest walked to the bar. Every eye in the place was on the two, even Squisher's as he floated silently in his aquarium.

"I'm looking for someone," Ray announced.

"You'll be looking for your own ass in a minute," someone rumbled from the bar.

"Yeah, you tell him," a joker standing near Ray said.

"Yeah, tell him," the other head sprouting from the joker's torso said.

Ray smiled. There was genuine amusement in it, as well as anticipation. "Who the hell are you?" he asked the two-headed joker.

Actually, they had more than two heads. They shared a single massive set of legs and one pelvis, but were bifurcated from the waist up: two heads, two sets of shoulders and arms, two massive torsos. They were thickly built and looked strong hut unwieldy. Separately they would have outweighed Ray by sixty pounds each. Together, they dwarfed him.

The two heads looked at each other. "My name is Hans," one said with a sudden, strange accent. "This is Franz. Who are you, girly-man?"

Some of the bar patrons tittered. Ray smiled more widely and turned to face the jokers squarely.

"You must be as stupid as you are ugly," he said, "if you think you can get away with that weak shit. You're really ... uh ..."

"Rick and Mick Dockstedder," Harvest said crisply. "Cheap muscle. Used to work for the Shadowfists, now freelance."

"Right," Ray said. It seemed she did know her shit.

"Are you heat?" Hans - that is, Rick - asked.

"That's right, moron. The hottest kind. Federal. This is Agent April Harvest. My name is Billy Ray and I can lick every man in this place."

"Oh," Rick said.

"Oh," Mick said.

They sat down.

Ray looked up and down the bar. "We can fight," he said, "or we can drink. Either is fine with me."

There were some mutters, but no challenges.

"Okay," Ray said. "We drink. A round for the house on me. And give me a receipt."

The bartender drew the drinks and Squisher breathed easier in his aquarium as Ray explained his mission.

"I'm looking for Hartmann, Senator Gregg Hartmann. You may remember him. He's been jumped into the body of a guy named George G. Battle. Battle used to be a government agent, but he went bad. He turned into a joker, men switched bodies with Hartmann. Battle got his ticket punched but Hartmann's still around. He's hiding somewhere in J-town as a yellow caterpillar. Now I know all about joker solidarity and all that shit, but we need to talk to Hartmann about this Card Shark mess. I want his ass, and one of you can probably give it to me. There's bucks in it. You can reach each of us at the Carlington Hotel." He looked around the room. "Got it?"

Some of the jokers looked angry, some indifferent. A few looked thoughtful. "Okay," Ray said. "See you on the funny pages." He turned to Harvest, "Let's go."

"Think it'll work?" she asked as they started toward the stairs.

Ray shrugged. "Maybe. We just have to wait and see."

There was a sudden, unexpected pop, and a wide-eyed hunchback was standing in front of them. Ray and Harvest stared. Some of the bar patrons looked up, then went back to their drinks. It was no big deal in Squisher's.

"It's that joker!" Harvest said.

"Quasiman," Ray confirmed.

"Get him!"

"All right, cool down. It doesn't look like he's going anywhere." Ray turned to Quasiman, who was staring sightlessly past the both of them. There was a look of real horror on his face. Ray put his hands on Quasiman's shoulders and looked into his eyes. "What is it? What's the matter?"

Quasiman roused himself from his stupor. He focused slowly on Ray's face. "The mushroom flower," he said distinctly, "blooms where it's sunny."

Ray glanced at Harvest and shrugged. "Sure. Why don't you come with me and we'll talk about it?"

He tried to get Quasiman to fall into step, but the joker was going nowhere. He stood, rooted to the spot, a line of drool dribbling unnoticed on his chin. His eyes suddenly narrowed and his brow furrowed in concentration. It was as if he had to tell Ray something of great importance, but he couldn't force it out. "Duh - don't drink the wine," he finished in a rush.

"Don't drink the wine?" Ray asked, puzzled.

Quasiman nodded, his head bobbing up and down like a puppet's on a string. And then he vanished, popping away to wherever it was that he went to when he popped away. Ray staggered, finally catching his balance as Harvest looked on in disgust.

"You had him," she said, "and you let him get away."

"Well, how the hell was I supposed to stop him?"

She shook her head in disgust. "Never mind. Let's go."

Ray followed her up the stairs. "Don't drink the wine," he said, half to himself. "I never drink wine. I hate the stuff."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Miss Harris?" The voice was diffident, and there was a shy tapping at the locked door.

"Come in," Zoe said, which was the most ridiculous response she could imagine anyone making who was locked in a cell. The words just slipped out. Had it been three hours, four, since they locked her in here?

The door opened. A girl beckoned to her, a joker girl with a pearly unicorn horn in the center of her forehead. The girl wore Fist black and carried an Uzi. "Would you come with me, please?"

Please, and a gesture with the Uzi. Zoe blinked at the light in the corridor and went where the girl pointed.

To a thick metal door, polished and gleaming amber in the reflected light of eye-saver fixtures. A joker with a snail's foot came through it. That guy, yeah, the one from the souk. Faintly, she heard vendors calling out their wares, the morning bustle of the waking city.

Snailfoot looked up and smiled. Unmasked, he was handsome in a rather Peter O'Toolish fashion. "We meet again," he said.

Beside Zoe, a black robe rustled. She could have sworn there was no one else in the corridor.

"Zoe Harris," a tall joker said. His baritone voice was slightly muffled behind the black beast mask that covered his face. "You wanted to see the Black Dog. You're seeing him." He offered his arm and Zoe reached out for it, compelled by the man's presence, the aura of power that surrounded him. His forearm was muscular and very warm. "Come with me. Snailfoot, tell Balthazar to get his ass in here."

Snailfoot nodded and slithered away. The Black Dog opened the metal door. Stone steps lighted in amber led down to a landing and continued down into gods-knew-what.

"You've got to learn to control that ace of yours. All you did with that business at the gate was you let a lot of jokers know you've got powers," the Black Dog said. "You can't afford to panic."

Brooklyn? There was some Brooklyn in his voice, under the European sounds that Israelis used when they spoke English.

"Guns make me just a little tense," Zoe said.

"You'll get over it."

He started down the stairs, and Zoe found she was following him. She didn't want to go down those stairs. The guy was hypnotic, and scary as hell. She had expected to be brushed aside, dismissed, or challenged, and it seemed she was being welcomed. Something was a little skewed here.

"Hurry" The Black Dog's cloak swirled out behind him. Darth Vader, Zoe thought, and this is the Death Star. This should be funny, and it isn't. Someone was behind her on the steps. Needles. He shook his head at her, pleading for her silence.

"Go on, Zoe," Needles whispered.

The bottom of the stairway led into a rough stone corridor. The air was fresh and cool. Zoe heard a faint whine of ventilator fans.

"Why am I here? Why did your goons lock me up?"

"I let them ventilate some of their anger. You hurt one of our people. Remember?"

"I was only trying to communicate with you. They played rough."

"Communicate? What important communication did you have for the Twisted Fists?"

Her concern sounded so foolish, but she had to say it anyway. "I don't like what you're teaching my kids." He wouldn't listen to her. Why should he? "I'm royally pissed about the way you're using them."

"Are you?" the Black Dog asked. "They're getting the best training in Jerusalem."

"Training for murder?" Zoe asked "That's supposed to be good?"

"Training for survival," he said. "It's hard to educate corpses."

"They will become inhuman! Monsters!"

She hurried to stay behind him in the narrow space.

"They aren't human now, and 'monster' isn't the worst thing I've heard them called." He sounded amused.

"Please, Zoe, don't," Needles whispered behind her.

"Is life as a murderer worth living?" Zoe asked.

The procession traced its way down a slanted passage cut into rock.

"Is it, Zoe?"

No. No, her knowledge screamed at her. It's no life at all. Zoe remembered the spasms of the skinhead she had killed as he shuddered out his life, his arms clutching her father's corpse in an ugly embrace. Dreams, dreams and nightmares, when she dreamed it was her hand on the knife in her father's belly. In her dreams, she killed Bjorn, over and over. At night, she wanted to die, to rid herself of dreams. Every night, she forced herself to live one more day, to stay alive as long as Anne needed her. Anne's death had begun to seem a liberation, because then Zoe could stop living, stop sleeping, stop dreaming. A suicide. Was that the message she would leave the Escorts? Give up, die, your life is shameful?

The tall man with the yellow eyes of a goat came from a side corridor and fell into step beside Needles.

"Balthazar was impressed by your talents at the gate. That's why you're alive. Thank him, someday."

The corridor made a sharp turn and widened enough for two people to walk side by side. The walls were honeycombed with rectangular crypts, some occupied by stone sarcophagi, some, high up in the shadows, filled with reclining, placid skeletons.

"Where are we?" Zoe asked.

The Black Dog walked beside her in the wider space. He was tall, his masked face immobile and inhuman save for the moist gleam of the whites of his eyes, stained amber by the scattered lights in this quiet maze of catacombs.

"Under the City."

They left the graves and entered another stairway that led down. The air temperature dropped. Zoe pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders. Pipes and conduits mazed along the ceiling. Doorways led into dark, vast rooms, full of canisters and angular crates that could have held anything - guns, portable buildings, tractors or tanks. The City hid a city beneath its streets.

"Was I drugged? Are you so afraid of aces that you had that monkey-man put drugs in my tea?"

"Monkey? No. No drugs."

He sounded so puzzled that she believed him. Her sense of taste was still okay. She was just crazy. Great.

Side doors led to offices. The corridor ended in another armored door.

"Needles, come in with us," the Black Dog said.

Balthazar clenched his fist in salute and stayed in the corridor. The Black Dog led Zoe and Needles through a doorway screened with a beaded curtain, into a carpeted room scattered with pillows.

Croyd sat cross-legged on the floor next to a stocky woman in full chador. The woman rose as the Black Dog entered.

"Welcome, Hound of Hell," the woman said.

"Good morning, Azma." The Black Dog bent and took the woman's hands in his. He brushed the muzzle of his mask across her fingers. She bowed to Zoe and the newcomers and left the room. Croyd got his legs under him with less grace, but he got up without using his hands, which were wrapped around a tiny coffee cup.

"I think you have to grow up sitting on the floor," Croyd said, "or your knees just don't bend the right way."

"Miss Harris, this is Croyd Crenson."

"We've met," Zoe said. She tried to put enough ice into her voice to freeze his nose off.

"Hello, Zoe," Croyd said. He toasted her with his cup and sipped more coffee. "They got me, too."

"So I see."

The Black Dog seated himself on the floor and pulled a floor cushion up to use as an elbow rest. He poured himself a cup of coffee from an ornate silver urn. The coffee smelled of cinnamon. Don't sit down, Zoe told herself. Keep the tiny advantage you have by standing while he sits, make your speech, and go.

"I wanted to plead with you the first time I came here," Zoe said. "I still do. I don't want my kids trained as killers. I'll do anything I can do, pay any price that I'm able to pay, to prevent that. I don't mind that they're associated with the Fists. We can't live here otherwise, I know, but surely they can be trained as non-combatants. I beg you, don't do this to them. They are tough kids, but they're good kids. Please. That's all I have to say. I'll go now.

"Thanks for the coffee," Croyd said. "I'll just be running along myself."

A guard, not Balthazar, appeared in the doorway, his rifle at the ready.

"Please," the Black Dog said. "Sit down, both of you. Needles, pour the lady a cup of coffee." He motioned to the floor in front of him. Zoe sat. So did Croyd.

"You're here for a reason. You too, Croyd. You're here because I need you, and because you both look like nats. I don't like nats. I don't like aces. I don't trust them. But trust can be contracted, if the terms are right. I need your help."

Needles handed Zoe a cup of thick black coffee.

She stared at it. Was it drugged, too?

"I need you to go to the Ukraine and buy a nuclear warhead," the Black Dog said.

His words were clear enough. He had just said, "I need you to go to the Ukraine and buy a nuclear warhead." Right. Zoe had a lot of experience in international arms trade, sure. That's why he had kidnapped her, of course. The man was totally psychotic, she had no business here to begin with, and a rifle was pointed at her back.

"The Card Sharks have a biologic weapon that can kill all of us, jokers, aces, carriers, anyone infected with the wild card. The Sharks have developed a killer virus they call the Black Trump. If it gets loose, we'll die. All of us."

"That's crazy," Zoe said. No one could develop such a weapon and be sure it would work. "The Card Sharks were a delusion of Gregg Hartmann's. He said so." But then Hartmann had always had a tendency to bend the truth, Zoe remembered.

"Needles? The case report, if you would."

Needles handed Zoe a manifa folder. She opened it, seeing scattered words: Hemorrhagic shock. Lysis of internal organs including the brain ... the victims exhibit lethargy and cerebral dysfunction so that they appear to be dead while still alive....

Zoe slapped the folder shut. An eight by ten glossy slid out, full-color reds and blues of something collapsed and limp that might have once been a joker.

The Black Dog retrieved the photo, slipped it back inside the folder, and handed it to Croyd.

"The virus has been tested. It works. The Card Sharks aren't a delusion. The Sharks are real, and they have the Black Trump. I don't want it turned loose in Jerusalem. I don't want it turned loose anywhere."

"Go to the police. Go to Interpol. Go to the UN."

The UN didn't do such a great job in Jerusalem as it was. So many UN "peacekeepers" had died in Jerusalem that their presence was now a carefully calculated sop for tourists. They left the real violence in the city alone. Maybe not the UN. Maybe CNN.

"Your friend Charles Dutton is under arrest. Father Squid is missing. No one can find that horsy little doctor from the Jokertown clinic."

"Dr. Finn? Missing?"

"Everyone in New York who knows about this virus is missing. Jokertown's most colorful freaks vanish and there's not a whisper, not an arrest, no inquiry."

"That much coverup couldn't happen."

"It has."

Bjorn had believed Hartmann's stories about a conspiracy. If this were one, it had to go all the way up. All the way.

Impossible.

But there had been all that trouble about getting Anne's records out of the clinic, strange voices on the phone, delays, no way to talk to Finn, and he had liked Anne.

"That's why we need a bomb. If we can blackmail the Sharks with it, we will. If we can't, and there's an outbreak - "

"You'd have to pray that the virus was loosed only in one confined place. You're crazy. Can't you just tell the Sharks you've got a bomb?" Zoe asked.

Well, no. The Sharks couldn't be that stupid, the Black Dog couldn't be sure that some of his people didn't report to the other side.

"What do you plan to do with this ... device ... when you get it?" Zoe asked.

"Threaten to expose the plot. Bargain for the virus. Turn the warhead over to the UN when we can."

Uh-huh.

"If you're looking for a smuggler, you're looking in the wrong place," Zoe said. "I've never even shoplifted anything."

Croyd shut the folder, laid it on the floor beside him, and sipped at his coffee.

"Mr. Crenson has skills in this area," the Black Dog said.

"Your pictures don't scare me and I don't understand some of the big words in that report. Pictures can be faked. Forget it. I don't do nukes," Croyd said.

The Black Dog leaned back against his cushion and rested an elbow on his knee in a storyteller's pose from a bad movie of the Arabian nights. His masked face seemed to stare at something above Croyd's head.

"Croyd Crenson has always been afraid to sleep. His fear is not of sleeping but of waking." The Brooklyn street slang in the Black Dog's voice vanished, replaced by the sonorous cadence of a storyteller in the souk. "Because he believes that one day he will wake as a madman, as demented as the mother that he scarcely remembers."

"How could you know that? Nobody knows that." Croyd's face went pale and his eyes locked on the dog mask.

"We spoke of contracted loyalty." The Black Dog sighed as if he were contemplating human treachery with great sorrow. "There was a man once who wanted to help you. Do you remember?"

Croyd's lean body had looked almost gaunt. It wasn't, Zoe realized. He was thin in the way bodybuilders called "ripped." Every muscle in his forearms, in his neck, stood out in tense definition. She pulled her shoulders in, trying to look smaller and nonthreatening.

The Fist's leader settled back on his cushion again. "Pan Rudo. Here's the deal, Croyd. Bring me the bomb. We'll bring Pan Rudo to you. I promise it."

"Bullshit" Croyd said "One, the Card Sharks are cranks. And two, I finally managed to kill that sonofabitch Rudo. He's dead! I killed him. Count me out of this, okay? I gave at the office."

"Pan Rudo's alive. He was jumped into a strong, young body. We're looking for him now.

"No!" Croyd moved with the speed of a trained athlete, on his feet in an instant with his hand stretched toward the Black Dog's throat. The guard at the door snapped his rifle into position, and Croyd stopped in what seemed to be mid-leap. He had managed to put down his coffeecup before he moved, Zoe noticed. He hadn't spilled a drop.

"Sit down, Croyd. The Twisted Fists are after Rudo now. We'll find him. When we find him, he's all yours."

"He's dead, damn it!"

"He's young. Younger than you, by the calendar. He's a handsome man, so I near. Not many men get to taste their dearest enemy's death twice, Croyd. Think about it."

"I don't believe you," Croyd said.

"I think you do," the Black Dog said.

Croyd settled back on his cushion. His eyes never left the Black Dog's face. He motioned with his empty coffee cup and Needles filled it for him.

"Zoe Harris, you think you can't be part of this. Nice girls don't play games with horrors. Your moral code would never let you touch a situation like this, even if your refusal meant your death and the death of every joker and ace in the world. Yeah. I might just feel that way myself, if I had the choice.

"I don't. Here's my offer. You get this bomb back to Jerusalem. Once that's done, you'll never hear from us again. We'll send your kids to Vietnam. All of the kids go and they go to school. The Fists pay the bills. Jellyhead wants to be a doc, I hear. She's got real talent in that direction."

She did. The Black Dog was talking security for all of them, more security than a wage earner under threat of extradition could hope for. Vietnam would mean another move, another displacement, another culture for the kids to fit themselves into. The situation might change there, but there were enclaves that might be free of the sound of gunfire for a few more years. A few quiet years to grow and hope.

She couldn't do this. Could not. Would not. In the photo, the half-dissolved sagging body of a joker, blood oozing from eyelids, nostrils, fingernails ...

"That's my offer, but that won't be enough to convince you. Needles, speak to her," Black Dog said.

"You have to help," Needles said. "I mean, you don't have to. But Jan is in this bomb thing. She's the only one of us who looks nat. Zoe, it has to be nats. There's borders to cross, and jokers don't get past them alive. You haven't seen what they do to jokers in the desert, what they do to the kids if their card turns and we can't get to them in time.

"Jan's already headed for the Black Sea, Zoe. She's with Balthazar."

Jan? Pick the one that's closest to my heart, except all of them are close to my heart. This was vile blackmail. But Jan? What if she panicked and let her joker eyes show at a border crossing?

"I don't know how to buy a bomb," Zoe said.

"Most of the arrangements are made. The package is ready. Payment has been discussed. You and Croyd are buying some farm equipment. That's all there is to it. You pick up the package; someone you'll never see hands over a draft on a Swiss bank. You're just mules. It isn't all that cloak-and-dagger stuff. Forget that.

"You, Jan, your husband Croyd, and his brother Balthazar. An innocent, hardworking family transporting an irrigation pump. You'll manage this, Zoe Harris. You will do whatever you can to keep your 'daughter' alive. And in the process, the rest of us may buy time to destroy the fucking Trump. We have to try, anyway."

"I don't get it. Why Croyd? Why me? Why Jan?"

"You mignt get stopped. You might be asked questions. You don't know much about the Fists. If you're caught, you can't say much, any of you, that would hurt us. We deny that we ever heard of you. That's how it has to be."

"You bastard," Zoe said.

"Yes," the Black Dog said. "Oh, yes."

"I don't speak anything but English," Zoe said.

"Croyd does. Needles, take them to Snailfoot. He can brief them." The Black Dog's robes swirled around him as he rose and vanished through the beaded curtain.

"Come on, Zoe," Needles said. "You'll like Azma. She'll do a good job with your hair."

Hair? Nuclear warheads? A trip to Russia? But Needles was smiling at her, as calm as if he'd just mentioned a trip to the souk for cucumbers. Croyd Crenson didn't look like a Turk. What if he fell asleep? Irrigation pumps? A disease that dissolved jokers in their own blood?

The room itself seemed a stage set. Zoe felt that if she pushed one of the stone wails, it would break like cardboard. She would see the barren brick wall behind it, and stagehands running back and forth to set the next scene.

She stood, walked to one of the wails, and laid her hand on the solid stone, cool and unyielding. She punched at it.

"Zoe?" Needles asked.

Her knuckles bled from tiny scrapes. She held her fist in her hand feeling the bones. She hadn't broken anything.

"My hair. Black?"

"Yeah, sure. You, too, Croyd. Come on."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg had learned the layout of the sewer lines in the month or so he'd spent hiding there after he'd been jumped. He came up into the subbasement of Squisher's establishment, through a loose grate in the storeroom floor. He pushed open the unlocked door and eased himself out into a dimly-lit corridor. Worn concrete stairs led to the bar just below street level. As Gregg remembered, there was a phone booth here, in an alcove between the restrooms.

So far, so good. Squisher's seemed safer than up on the streets where he was being hunted, and this was a call that Gregg had to make, not Hannah. In the early afternoon, Squisher's was mostly empty. Gregg could hear the sounds of someone's heavy tread on the floor above, and the insistent bubbling of Squisher's tank behind the bar. The low drone of a TV masked the fragments of conversation that drifted down the stairs. The basement smelled equally of uncleaned urinals and spilled alcohol.

"I think I prefer the sewers," Gregg muttered to himself as he went to the phone booth and heaved his long body up on the seat. He pushed the receiver up with a tiny hand; it fell, dangling from the short cord. He'd been clutching a quarter in one hand resisting the temptation to pop it into his mouth like a piece of hard candy; now he slid it into the slot. Gregg punched numbers and pressed his ear against the swaying receiver, waiting. One ring. Two. Three. Gregg sighed, thinking the answering machine would kick in, when he heard someone pick up the phone. "Yeah?"

Gregg lifted his body slightly so he could speak into the mouthpiece; his truncated arms couldn't bring the receiver to his head. "Bushorn? Bushorn, don't hang up please. You have to listen, have to hear me out."

Gregg dropped down. " - listening," a faint bass voice answered.

Up again. "Good. You remember your court case a year and a half ago? EastAirFreight fired you because you were a wild carder, said you were 'dangerous.' We agreed on half a million in an out of court settlement; you said you were going to buy that plane you always wanted. You also said that if I ever needed a favor, to just ask. We were standing in the street outside the offices. You shook my hand, my left hand and you said it didn't matter what, didn't matter when, just call Gary Bushorn. Well I need that favor."

He dropped down again. " - artmann? Gregg Hartman?"

Up. "Yes. I'm Gregg Hartmann. Much changed, I'm afraid. Gary, I need a flight for two out of the country, and I need it now."

Down. " - rumors about you are true, then. With what I've been hearing, that explains a lot, I guess. Look, I ... I guess owe you one, maybe. But I have to file a flight plan, get the plane ready, make sure things are set here. That's gonna take a day or two. Just where you planning to go?"

"How far can you take us?"

" - outh America. Upper Canada. Europe, if we take it slow and easy."

"Europe," Gregg said. As Hannah had said, the vials would be with the Sharks; if Rudo had indeed fled the country, then he'd have run to one of them - and they knew that the British general in Ulster, Horvath, was a Shark. If that didn't pan out, then England was close, and Gregg knew people there: Captain Flint, Churchill. Suddenly Gregg was feeling less useless. "That sounds good. How soon, Gary?"

" - days. That should do it."

"When? How many days?"

Gregg was suddenly aware of someone watching. He could feel the pressure of a gaze. His head jerked up to see the large body of the joker known as Mick and Rick staring at him from the stairwell leading to Squisher's. The two-headed joker didn't say anything, and Gregg wondered how long they'd been listening. Bushorn was talking. He thought he heard the word "Thursday." "We'll be there " he said quickly, and he pressed the hook, disconnecting Bushorn. Gregg slid down from the seat. Mick and Rick watched, the doubled heads swiveling as Gregg scooted across the hall and into the storeroom.

"Where's he going now?" he heard Mick say.

"How the hell should I know?" Rick answered. "I ain't getting near him. I heard his puke can melt metal."

Gregg slithered down the narrow sewer inlet feet first. He pulled the lid over him. He hoped Bushorn understood, hoped he had the right day. That left only one small problem - how to get to Tomlin.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The waiting was boring. When Ray got bored he had too much time to think, and now he had something to think about. He came back from the bathroom where he'd just taken his temperature (normal: one hundred and three degrees) and spent a minute or two staring at his tongue (looked normal, but Ray wasn't sure; he'd never really looked closely at his tongue before). He seemed to be all right, but then Crypt Kicker seemed okay until he'd turned into a pile of shit right in front of Ray's eyes. This Black Trump stuff was maddening. And Ray had the feeling that he'd have to go face-to-face with it again. He didn't want to, that was for sure. He didn't know if he could. He'd never run away from anything in his life, but the Black Trump was like nothing he'd ever faced. Maybe he was better off chasing Hartmann than chasing death.

To get his mind off the Black Trump he looked at Harvest, who was sitting at the hotel room's tiny writing desk, reading the dossier Barnett had given them. Her silk-clad legs were crossed at the knee, her blond hair was attractively tousled. She looked good enough to eat.

"Harvest," Ray said as a conversational gambit. "What kind of name is that?"

April Harvest looked up from the dossier. "A last name," she finally said.

"Well, it's an unusual last name."

She looked at Ray expressionlessly. "Not to me it isn't."

"Well ..." This wasn't going very well. Ray didn't know if he should be exasperated or angry. He suspected he'd reach the latter stage soon enough. She continued to look at him. He felt trapped by the gaze of her killer blue eyes. "Well ..." he said again. He felt like an idiot. This wasn't going well at all.

A knock on the door rescued him.

"Who is it?" he barked, louder and harsher than necessary.

There was a momentary silence, then a voice on the other side of the door said, "No one. No one's here "

Ray frowned. He looked at Harvest. She was frowning, too.

"Yes there is," another voice said. "It's me."

Ray growled. He got off the bed and glided to the door with his usual effortless grace. He yanked it open. "Oh. It's you." Ray stepped back. "Come in."

"No, I have to be going," Mick Dockstedder said. "Nice seeing you again." He gave a jaunty little wave and tried to walk away, but his conjoined twin wasn't having it.

"Now just wait a minute, Mick," said Rick. "I want to talk to Ray."

"I don't!" Mick said a bit sharply. "Let's go."

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No!"

Ray silently watched the twins' struggle for control of their single pair of legs. This was it, he told himself. There was no doubt, now. It was anger.

"Get inside," he growled in a low, dangerous voice, "before I knock the crap out of you ... out of both of you ... and drag you in."

Mick looked at his brother with hurt in his eyes. "You've done it, now, Rick."

"No I haven't," Rick said as Ray closed the door behind them. "It'll work out just fine. Won't it?"

"You bet," Ray said without enthusiasm.

Rick and Mick stopped when they saw Harvest look at them with disbelief and disgust on her finely-chiseled features.

"Who's that?" Mick asked.

"You remember her," Rick answered. "She was at Squisher's."

"I know that," Mick said. "I want to know who she is."

"She's on the Special Executive Task Force," Ray said.

"I'm his boss," Harvest added.

"Maybe we can trust Ray," Mick said, "but we don't know anything about her."

"You a wild carder, lady?" Rick asked.

Harvest shook her head.

"That's it," Mick shouted. "I'm out of here."

"No, you're not," Rick shouted back. "You wait right here for me."

"I won't!"

"Oh, yes you will, you dummy!"

"Well, yeah, I'm smarter than you any day of the week!"

"Are not!"

"Are too!"

The two shouted invectives at each other as they moon-walked back and forth across a patch of carpet, heading to the door and back, the door and back. Ray planted himself in front of them, grabbed them, and spun them around.

"What the hell do you guys want?" he roared.

"Nothing!" Mick said "My mouth is shut."

Ray grabbed his nose and twisted. "Keep it shut," Ray barked. "Or I'll tear your nose off." He looked at Rick. "How about you?"

Rick licked his lips. "You said there'd be money in it if we told you where Hartmann was."

Ray nodded, suppressing a smile. "That's right."

"How much?"

"A thousand."

Rick looked at his brother.

"Tell him to let go of my nose," he said. Ray sighed and did. Mick refused to meet his brother's eyes. Rick nudged him, but Mick shook his head. "Nope. This is your doing. I want no part of it."

"Okay," Rick said. "Suit yourself." He looked at Ray. "I been around, you know. I know a lot of what's coming down."

Ray nodded impatiently. "Sure. But what do you know about Hartmann?

"He's been seen in the company of some blond nat bimbo - oh." Harvest had cleared her throat and stared at him with her hard blue eyes. "No offense, lady, um, ma'am. He's been hanging with Fatter Squid, too."

"We know that," Harvest said briefly.

"He's been on his own since Father Squid and the others were picked up by the police. But he wants to get out of the city. I overheard him in Squisher's."

"How's he trying to get out?" Ray asked.

"A plane," Rick said. "He's trying to hire a plane. Ain't that right, Mick?"

Mick shook his head. "I ain't saying."

"Where? Tomlin? La Guardia? Where?" Harvest asked.

Rick shook his head. "I don't know."

Ray frowned thoughtfully. "That's not much to go on."

Rick looked indignant. "It's the skinny. You can trust me."

"Hah!" Mick interjected.

"Sure you can, Mr. Ray. I wouldn't want to screw with you."

Ray nodded judiciously. "Damn right. Okay." he reached into his pocket for his wallet. He counted five hundred-dollar bills and handed them over to Rick.

"You said an even thou."

"Another five hundred when we get Hartmann."

"But - "

Ray looked at him.

"Okay. That's fair." Rick stuffed the bills in his pants' pocket.

"Here." Ray handed him a sheaf of printed forms. "Sign this receipt."

"Okay."

Rick's signature was accomplished in a laborious scrawl. As they headed out the door they began arguing about what to do with the money. Mick was all for a big celebration dinner and maybe a visit to Chickadee's. Rick was firm that this was his money and Mick wasn't going to benefit from it. He remembered that there was a new edition of Star Trek porcelain plates rimmed in real 14-carat gold that he'd wanted for his collection. Ray stood at the door, watching them argue as they lurched off down the hall. He shook his head and shut the door.

"Can you believe those two?" he asked Harvest.

"I don't know. You've invested five hundred dollars of the government's money in them."

"Plenty more where that came from. What are you doing?"

She stopped dialing the phone and looked at him with eyes that could melt ice. "Setting up a dragnet to cover all the airports in the metropolitan area. You have a better idea?"

Ray opened his mouth, then shut it and shook his head. Nothing he felt he could go into right this moment.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In New York, it was said the prerequisite for a taxi driver's license was that the recipient must be unable to speak English. Supposedly it was an added bonus to look more like roadkill than anything human.

From what Gregg could gather between the plastic bars of his cage, this cabbie met both requirements. The driver of the cab Hannah flagged down near Roosevelt Park had too many arms, all of them seemingly slathered with green slime, and the parrot's beak set in the middle of the over-size wrinkled prune the joker used for a head looked disturbingly unsuited for normal speech. "Wayryegot?" he squawked at Hannah as she opened the rear door and slung the pet carrier holding Gregg across the cracked vinyl seat.

"It's my dog," Hannah said. "Spot. We - I mean I - need to get to Tomlin. Take the Manhattan Bridge, please."

Something round and saucerlike blinked in the center of the prune as the driver looked back at Hannah. Gregg could see a yellowed copy of the newspaper photo of himself clipped to the passenger seat visor, half obscured by someone's school picture - if it was the driver's daughter, there was no visible sign of the wild card in her. Gregg huddled back in the carrier, hoping the joker wouldn't notice his yellow skin through the vents. A slimy hand punched the meter on the dash, another plucked the microphone from the set; another waved out the window at traffic while the final one turned the wheel as the cab pulled out onto Chrystie. "Nubberhunneredfurdysebben. Goderfair," the joker garbled into the mike. "HeddbingtoTommin."