Black Trump

The receiver squealed back something equally unintelligible. Thankfully, the driver didn't try to make conversation on the way. The radio blared percussive, bass-distorted hip-hop.

"Spot?" Gregg whispered through the bars to Hannah.

"Hush. It was the only thing I could think of. Now lie down. Good dog." Hannah placed her hand on the carrier. Nervously, they both watched the buildings of Jokertown pass.

They'd debated how to get to Tomlin and Bushorn's hangar. Neither of them knew how to steal a car, and everyone they knew who they could have trusted to provide transportation had disappeared. That left public transportation. Buses were full of too many people. They'd judged that with Hannah's changed appearance and the animal carrier, their odds were fair to good hailing a cab.

The choice had been a good one, so far. As they went south, Jokertown gave way eventually to Chinatown, where they turned east, then the wharves of the East River appeared, the towers of the Manhattan Bridge appearing over the low roofs. To their right, a little further south, they could glimpse the broken-toothed ruin of the Brooklyn Bridge, destroyed when the Turtle had smashed Herne's Wild Hunt, the same night Gregg had lost his right hand to one of the hellhounds.

That was your utter nadir: Puppetman gone, the Gift yet to come. You were reviled and weak.

What have I got now ? Gregg responded to the voice. What makes this any better? I'm hunted, reduced to pretending to be a goddamn fluorescent-yellow dachshund. I feel so fucking useless.

Inside, someone seemed to chuckle.

They were nearing the approach to the bridge when Gregg felt the cab slow and come to a stop in a miasma of gasoline fumes. Hannah leaned forward "What's going on?" she asked.

"Rodeblog," the driver said. Assorted arms lifted in what might have been an attempt at a shrug. "Noddineyekundoabohdit" The meter clicked metallically.

"Shit." Hannah sunk back in the seat. Gregg saw muscles tensing in her jawline. He could almost feel her quick fear - a taste in his mouth, a tang like steel, as delicious as iron. Hannah leaned over to him; he inhaled the warmth of her breath as she whispered. "Police," she said. "It looks like they're checking cars. They're looking for us, don't want us to get out of the city. I know it. I just know it. Damn!"

Hannah lurched forward again before Gregg could say anything. She gestured at the driver. "Turn around," she told him. "I want to go back."

Another multi-armed shrug. "Iztoolade, Candoit." One arm pointed at the car in front, another at the one in the rear. They were jammed in bumper-to-bumper. Uniformed police were moving down the line, peering into cars and then waving the drivers on, sometimes looking into trunks. The car ahead crawled forward; their cab driver didn't move, looking to turn around in the open space. The cars behind started to honk their horns, and the cops looked up to see what the disturbance was down the line. Two of them began walking toward them.

It wouldn't be a problem with Puppetman. Cops were always easy, nice, big, fat strings to pull. But now - you're trapped, already nicely packaged for them. "Hannah, let me out!" Gregg said, and the driver jumped wide-eyed at the sound of Gregg's voice even as he started to turn the cab.

At which point he got another surprise.

There was someone else crowding into the front seat: Quasiman. The cab driver squawked like a distressed parrot at the joker's sudden appearance and jammed on the brakes. Gregg's carrier hit the back of the front seat and rebounded. Hannah yelped, half in distress and half in joy.

"Hannah," Quasi said. "Going wrong way."

"I know, Quasi," she said. "We need your help. Take us to Tomlin."

"Can't," Quasiman said. "Not with him." Gregg could see Quasiman's gaze locked on him through the vents of the carrier, and there was no friendliness in the hunchback's eyes at all. They were not the eyes of a fool; rather, they seemed to see too much. "Charon," Quasiman said.

"What?" Hannah asked.

Quasi looked back at Hannah. "Charon. I saw you. The river at night. Charon." Quasiman blinked. "My friend," he said. "I love you."

"I love you too, Quasi," she answered softly, and glanced up at the approaching officers. "Quasi, you're going to have to help us now. I need you to stop those men. Do you understand? You need to get out of the car and help us get away from here." Quasiman just stared dumbly at her, and Gregg knew the joker was lost in a fugue once more.

"Hannah!" Gregg said again. "Open my goddamn cage!"

She ignored him. "Quasi, please," she crooned softly. Gregg saw her reaching toward him, but Quasiman was gone.

And just as quickly back, just outside the cab. The cops, a few car lengths away now, shouted at him. Quasiman stooped down and grasped the rear bumper of the late-model Toyota Camry in front of them. He grimaced.

The car lifted slowly, the metal creaking. A trio of teenagers scrambled from the tilting vehicle as Quasiman lifted it up and sideways. He grunted and pushed: the Camry went sliding on its side, screeching against pavement. The cops made a judicious retreat.

"I believe there's room for you to turn around now," Hannah told their driver. Several of the cars behind them were doing the same. He nodded. Quasiman had taken the next car and stacked it on top of the Camry. The cops had moved well back and were calling for backup.

"Godcha," their driver said. "No problem."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"This is insane," Peter Pann complained as the sailboat sliced through the cold green waters of New York Bay. He was wearing shorts, sneakers, and a Dodgers T-shirt. "Governor's Island is a maximum security installation. I told you what the tink saw. Armed guards, security cameras, computerized cellblocks, titanium bars. We can't just sail in, hop out, and let everybody loose."

"You got a better plan?" Jay asked. The boat was leaning perilously to one side, and Jay was turning green. "Don't worry, whatever happens, you're home free. Nobody's going to shoot a guy looks just like Opie Taylor."

Peter made a face, took a fat black cigar out of his pocket, and bit off the end. His tink buzzed at him furiously as he lit up. He sucked in a lungful and blew a cloud of smoke at the dancing light. The tink dimmed and fluttered and fell, extinguished.

"You're so mean to them," Melissa Blackwood called out from the back of the boat. The aft or the stern or whatever the fuck it was, Jay wasn't nautical enough to be sure. She was holding the tiller or the rudder or whatever with one hand and her top hat with the other. A brisk salt wind kept trying to snatch it off her head.

Peter Pann slammed his foot down on the fallen tink, crunching it under his heel. "They're like flies," he said. "How'd you like to have a glowing housefly buzzing around your head twenty-four hours a day?" He blew a smoke ring. The wind ripped it apart.

Governor's Island loomed ahead, dominated by the red brick walls of its Civil War fort. "Here we go," Jay shouted. "Remember, we're just some salty dogs out for a family sail," He adjusted the jaunty white captain's cap he'd bought on Times Square. "Peter, put out the fucking cigar, you're supposed to he eleven years old. And you, Melissa, off with the top hat, you'll give the game away."

Peter Pann sucked in one last lungful ot smoke and flicked the cigar out over the side of the boat. It hissed as it hit the water. Melissa grinned at Jay, doffed her hat, gave a practiced flick of the wrist. The topper folded up neat as a pancake. She sat on it.

A Coast Guard patrol boat appeared from behind the island as they headed for the landing, booming out commands on a loudspeaker. Melissa pretended not to hear. Ahead of them, a dozen uniformed men with semiautomatic rifles were waiting on the pier. Jay wondered if this had been such a terrific plan after all. He hadn't expected such a large reception committee.

"SHEAR OFF," the voice from the patrol boat boomed. "YOU ARE ENTERING RESTRICTED WATERS." It was a smallish boat, scarcely bigger than a cabin cruiser, but the machine gun on the roof gave it a certain authority.

"How many crew on that size boat?" Jay asked Peter Pann as they bounced and rolled through the waves.

"Oh, six or eight," Peter said. "This is a felony, you know. We're all going to lose our licenses, at the least."

"Only if we get caught," Jay said.

The patrol boat was coming up fast. "SHEAR OFF IMMEDIATELY."

Melissa shouted out a reply. "I don't know how to steer this thing," she cried, doing her best to look helpless and lost.

"PUT ABOUT AND PREPARE TO BE BOARDED," the patrol boat thundered. It was very close now, racing in toward them. Two guardsmen scrambled over its deck, lowering some kind of padded fenders. There was a third man visible at the wheel, speakerphone in hand and a fourth taking up position by the machine gun.

Jay cracked his knuckles. "Here goes nothing," he announced to his stalwart crew. He made a gun and pointed over the water at the captain of the patrol boat.

"THIS IS YOUR LAST - " the patrol boat warned. The motor was too loud to hear the pop as the speaker vanished in mid-sentence. The wheel spun and the boat veered wildly off course. Jay moved his finger and teleported off the guy by the machine gun.

The guards on the pier hadn't figured out what was happening yet. Jay swung his hand around and starting popping. One, two, three, and someone finally saw his buddy disappear before his eyes. He started to shout, but Jay nailed him before he'd gotten out much more than, "Hey!" That was four. Five, six, and now several of them were shouting. Seven, eight, and someone began shooting at them, the bullets kicking up the water around the sailboat. Nine, and the shots stopped, but two of the remaining trio dropped flat, and the last guy started running up the hill screaming. Jay got him on the run, ten, but the two on their bellies were firing. A bullet ripped the sail behind him, another punched through the plastic hull, Peter Pann was yelling something at him and the sailboat was coming around hard lifting him up in the air. Jay tried to keep a bead on the guardsmen as a stream of bullets came ripping out of one muzzle and tore up the water. There! He popped on the bounce, eleven, and a shot knocked his jaunty little captain's cap right off his head and reminded him of how much he hated guns. He locked his left hand around his right wrist to steady his arm, took careful aim, and brought down the hammer of his thumb. The last man blinked out with a surprised look on his face. The last bullet, whizzed harmlessly over their heads.

They slammed against the pier, hard. Peter Pann jumped across, rope in hand, and tied them up. Jay looked back behind them. The Coast Guard had finally gotten its patrol boat back under control, but it was too far off to pop the new guy at the wheel. "Move it!" he shouted to Melissa.

She was right behind him as he clambered onto the dock. Peter offered a hand to help her up, but she ignored him and jumped for it. Her hat was in hand. She popped it out and planted it on her head. "What now?" she asked.

"Phase two," Jay told her. He started to clap. Melissa joined in. All around Peter Pann, tinks winked into existence. Two, six, a dozen, tiny lights dancing like fireflies on speed. One by one they scattered, zipping off in all directions, a ring of scouts.

"The prison's this way," Peter said. He led them up the hill at a dead run. They were halfway there when the door opened and more guards came pouring out. Jay started popping them away before they knew what was happening.

One of them lost his rifle as he vanished. Peter Pann bent and scooped it up. "Put that down!" Jay yelled. "We win or we lose, but we aren't going to shoot anyone." Peter dropped the gun.

The heavy iron door, a relic of the old Civil War fort, had slammed shut behind the guards. Jay pulled at it ineffectually. "Locked damn it."

A tink came zipping back over the walls, buzzing. "More guards on the way," Peter warned them.

"We have to get inside," Jay said.

"Let me," Topper said. She took off her hat, reached in, pulled out a key, unlocked the door. "After you."

Jay and Peter went in together, left and right, rolling. Gunfire stuttered around them. Jay heard Peter cry out in pain. He got the shooter in his sights and popped him away.

An alarm began to hoot, making a annoying whoop whoop sound. Jay did a quick look-see and spotted a guard in a glass security booth over their heads. He pointed a finger, dropped a thumb. The guard vanished. The glass was probably bulletproof, but that meant fuck all to Jay's finger. If he could see it, he could pop it. The alarm went on and on.

So much for stealth. The cell block was in front of them, behind a wall of titanium bars embedded in bulletproof glass. Jay didn't see any keyholes. Topper's hat was going to be no use here, they were sealed out.

Melissa knelt over Peter, pulling off his T-shirt. His arm was bleeding. "I get triple time for wounds," he said through gritted teeth when Jay came over to look at the gunshot.

"You know, sometimes I think of you as the son I never had," Jay told him. He had to shout to be heard over the whoop whoop whoop. "How bad is it?" he asked Topper.

"The bullet went clean through. He'll live."

"Only if you kiss it and make it better, honey," Peter Pann said to her. The alarm whooped.

"I'll kiss it all right," Melissa said grimly. She pulled a bottle of iodine out of her hat and splashed some on his arm. Peter let out a remarkably authentic eleven-year-old shriek. Melissa produced a length of sterile gauze and began to dress the wound.

A tink came racing back from somewhere and buzzed in Peter's ear. He made a face. "Trouble," he shouted to Jay. "They've sealed off the whole complex. Electronic locks."

"That's your department," Jay told Melissa. "I'll finish him."

"Don't I get a vote?" Peter Pann asked.

Jay ignored him. Topper pulled her powerdeck out of her hat and nodded at him. Jay studied the empty security booth overhead. There was a bank of monitors, a huge console, a swivel chair. Whoop whoop whoop went the alarm. "First thing you do," Jay shouted, "you turn off that fucking alarm." He made a gun of his fingers.

Melissa Blackwood vanished with an inaudible pop and reappeared above them, behind the wall of bulletproof glass. Jay saw her looking around carefully. Then she hit a button, and the alarm died in mid-whoop. The sudden silence was a blessed relief.

"Hey, remember me?" Peter nagged. "I'm bleeding over here, boss man. The health plan damn well better cover this."

Through the glass, Jay could see Melissa jacking in with her powerdeck. He turned his attention back to Peter Pann and finished up the dressing. No sooner was that done than he heard a low humming noise behind him. Jay turned just in time to see the cellblock door sliding back smoothly into a wall. Melissa was smiling down from above, giving him a thumbs-up.

Jay ran through the door with Peter right behind him. The cellblock was a three-story affair, metal catwalks fronting the upper levels on both sides. The cell doors were still locked, sealed with heavy titanium bars. Jay went to the closest cell.

Inside was a pony-sized palomino centaur, his blond tail flicking nervously from side to side. "Ackroyd? Is that you?"

"Nah, it's my evil twin," Jay told him.

"What's going on? The alarm - "

"We're getting you out of here. Hold still."

"Never mind me, get Clara! The women are on the second level, listen, Clara knows - " Before Finn could protest further, Jay pointed and popped. The centaur vanished.

As he started to the next cell, lay heard a series of loud metallic clicks. All up and down the corridor, the cell doors began to open. Peter Pann whooped with triumph. Prisoners began to wander out into the central corridor. Father Squid naked from the waist up, tentacles twitching beneath his nose, his wet gray flesh obscene in the fluorescent lights. Charles Dutton, looking like the grim reaper's ugly brother. The Oddity, huge and twisted, their mottled flesh moving and shifting with each step they took. There were others too, jokers that Jay did not recognize.

A woman's voice called down from the catwalk above him, "It's about time you guys got here!" Jay glanced up and saw Hannah Davis in prison grays.

"You know how hard it is to rent a sailboat in Manhattan on short notice?" Jay said, defensively.

On the catwalk beside Hannah, a brown-haired woman in oversized glasses stepped from her cell. "Bradley," she called out anxiously. "Where's Finn?"

"Safe," Jay said, "I popped him out already."

Further down the second tier, a gigantic iridescent snake with a woman's face was slithering out of a distant cell. The brown-haired woman cried out, "Maman," and ran to embrace her.

Father Squid was looking at Peter Pann, aghast. "My son," he said to Jay, "thank you for your gallant efforts on our behalf, but you ought not have brought a child to this dreadful place."

"Who's a child?" Peter said angrily. "Watch the mouth, jellybelly, or we'll leave you here."

Everyone was shouting. Jay heard Black Trump and Card Sharks and Pan Rudo from a half-dozen different throats. No one was listening to a word anyone else was saying. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. They all shut up.

"Better," he said. "Look, there'll be time to fill me in later. First we need to get you all out. If everybody will just stay calm and do as they're told - "

But then suddenly Peter Pann was screaming at him. Jay turned and saw a swarm of tinks buzzing around Peters head. "Gas!" Peter was yelling over and over.

All around him, Jay heard a hissing sound, and sleep gas began pouring out from the air ducts.

He told himself to hold his breath, but it was already too late. His head swam dizzily. Jay took a step, thinking, I've got to get my people out first. He found Peter Pann, pointed. The boy vanished, leaving behind a cloud of tinks in the place he had been. Reeling, Jay clutched the bars of a cell for support and looked up. Hannah Davis had begun to slump. He popped her away, let go of the bars, searching for Topper. The cellblock was dark with gas. Forget Topper, he told himself, pop Dutton or Father Squid, anyone you can find. But they were all down by now, and Jay's chest hurt, and the world was whirling around him.

He felt his legs go out from beneath him, but he was gone before he hit the floor.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

From a second story window Mark glanced out. The late-night grounds were dark and still, though when he looked hard he could see the glow of an ember where a sentry squatted in the rosebushes smoking a cigarette. Like everything else in the ostensible Moonchild regime, security was pretty informal - but it was fanatical, and, at need, ruthless.

J. Bob had seen to that. But while that ruthlessness sometimes appalled Mark, he never tried to change it. Because it was needful when there were people out there who would come to kill you, who would not be dissuaded if you stuck a fucking daisy down the barrel of their Kalashnikov.

It wasn't for himself that he ringed the Palace with guns, and jokers and Vietnamese who were only too eager to use them. Not rationalization, but plain fact: he wasn't fanatical about clinging to his own life. Nor did he believe that only he, in his complicated Traveler-as-Moonchild guise, could lead Free Vietnam.

He was fanatical about Sprout.

He looked into her bedroom. She lay on her side atop the coverlet, curled up asleep with her teddy bear clutched to her chest and her thumb in her mouth. He went into his own less-than-sumptuous room across the hall, sat down on the brass bed, and kicked off his sneakers.

One advantage of the stress the chemically-induced masquerade laid on him was that he was exhausted clear down to the marrow each and every day. He was gone as soon as he was horizontal.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg and Hannah stood on a pier in the midnight fog, looking down at the greasy, black water of the East River lapping at the pilings. Getting here - especially after the fiasco of yesterday - had been a slow, long process, moving through the sewers and subterranean serviceways of the city until they surfaced - still in Jokertown - near the East River.

"What now?" Hannah asked Gregg. Their trip had lent Hannah and Gregg a certain miasma. Hannah's hair and Gregg's spiky tufts were wet, and Hannah's clothing was hopelessly soiled. What Gregg could see of his own body told him that he hadn't fared any better.

"I'm not sure," Gregg said. "But this is where Charon used to come. We wait, that's all."

They waited occasionally ducking back into shadows when security guards came by on their rounds. The hours went by slowly, but the waters of the East River remained unbroken and dark. Charon, the joker who had once ferried others to the Rox, and who - it was whispered in Jokertown - still came here to the edge of Jokertown to pick up passengers, never arrived. A false dawn began to touch the building on the far shore, Gregg sighed. "I guess this was a mistake," he said.

"Let's stay a few minutes more," Hannah said. "Quasi said Charon would come."

The mention of Quasiman sent a shiver through Gregg, and the memory of Hannah hugging the joker. Gregg huffed, irritated. "Seems to me that Quasi could have just zapped us over to Tomlin himself, if he really wanted to help," he said.

Hannah looked at him, and he knew she'd been cut by the edge in his voice. "Quasi can't control what he is or what happens to him, Gregg," she said. "You can't blame him for that. I get the feeling that something else is bothering you."

For several seconds, her gaze held him. He was glad, for once, of his expressionless joker face. I want you to love me the way you did before, he thought. You loved me without my making you love me, and I want you to feel that way again. I want you to act as if I were normal, and if I had Him back, I'd make you do it. I'd twist your emotions and wring them out; I'd bind you to me so tightly you couldn't goddamn breathe without me.

"Nothing's bothering me," he said blandly. "Nothing at all."

"Gregg - " She crouched down alongside him. Her fingertips brushed his side, tingling like a live circuit, and left quickly. Too quickly. "Have I done something to hurt you? I ... I never meant - "

"You didn't do anything. I'm fine."

Her eyes searched his face. He wondered what she saw. "Good," she said at last. "Because I do lo - "

"I know," he said. He wouldn't let her say the words because he didn't want to hear the falseness in them. You're a joker. She can't love you, can't even touch you. Not any more. It's over. "I don't want to lose you, that all."

She smiled at the words. "That's not going to happen," she said.

"Good" he answered. "All right. We'll wait a few more minutes, I suppose. Until the sun's up."

Not long after, Gregg heard a soft wave wash over the pilings. He looked down as the waters of the river rippled and parted below them, and a huge, bizarre creature surfaced. As the first light of dawn touched the towers of Manhattan, Charon's bulk broke the dark waters, phosphorescent dots puckering the transparent flesh like cheap Christmas lights. The vestigial head on top peered at them. "To the Rox again, is it, Senator?" he said to Gregg.

"You recognize me?" Gregg said, incredulously.

"I see your mind," Charon said "And everyone in it." Gregg had no time to wonder what Charon meant by that. "You nostalgic for the Rox, Senator?" it asked again.

"The Rox is gone," Gregg told him.

"Yep, that's what they say. The question's still there, though. Are you going where I'm going or aren't you?" Charon paused. "I heard you calling. I came."

"We need to get across the river," Hannah said, and Charon's head turned slowly atop the massive body bobbing in the water. A streamer of raveled magnetic audio tape was wrapped around the cilia near the waterline.

"That's all you want?" it rasped. "Take a cab."

"We tried that," Hannah said drily.

"Charon," Gregg told the joker. He cursed his weak, ineffective voice. "We - I - need your help. I don't know what you've heard, but They've" - his voice added the capitalization - "arrested Father Squid, Troll, Oddity, Dutton, and God knows who else. Things have broken loose." Gregg gave Charon a brief explanation of the Black Trump virus. Afterward, Charon seemed to shiver, as if the dawn air was cold around its slimy body. "Bloat's war isn't over," Gregg said. "It's just changed tactics and battleground."

"That's news I'll have to relay. I thought something new and nasty was happening. I could feel the pain, every night that I come here, a tide of sadness washing out from Jokertown," Charon said. "I've been feeling it more and more recently. Business lately has been ..." He paused again. "... brisk," he finished.

"Where do you take them?" Hannah asked.

"To where all outcasts go."

"Then take us where we want to go. We're outcasts too."

Charon seemed to harrumph. Bubbles fluttered to the surface of the water with the sound. "It's that important?" it asked.

"Yes," Gregg answered for both, his high voice piping.

A froth of bubbles erupted around Charon as it rose higher in the water and moved toward the pilings where they stood.

"Then get in," it said. "Your meter's running."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Mark tried his damnedest to be just, but tonight he wasn't sleeping that way. He dreamed a crooked dream.

In that dream a crooked man appeared. He was big and powerfully built, with his shoulders cast at an odd angle and his head held low and to one side. He stood at the foot of Mark's big, colonial four-poster bed swept his glance over him, then looked at the chintz-covered windows with a distracted air.

"Father Squid and Dutton got taken," he said in a soft musing voice. "Or did they? Maybe that's going to happen." He shook his head. A vacant look closed like shutters behind his eyes, and a string of drool ran down his chin. "You're somebody," he said, seeming to come back to himself. "Somebody who's important. Or ... going to be important. It's all jumbled up in my mind."

In his dream Mark sat up in bed. Sweat made his T-shirt cling to his ribs in a clammy intimacy. "You're Quasiman," he said. "I've heard about you."

"I've heard about you, too. If I could only remember when, or what. Or why...."

He wandered out from behind his eyes again. Mark sat watching him, propped on his arms, aware that this was a very realistic and immediate dream - so much so that the muscles in his arms began to tremble from unaccustomed exercise.

A furtive sound from the hallway. A dream? Quasiman blinked and raised his head. "That's it, Mark," he said. "It's why I came."

He shrugged uneven shoulders. "It's about your daughter - "

He vanished.

Mark's senses stretched out like a long-parted lover's arms. No mistake: scuffling sounds from somewhere.

At the base of his door, shadows occulted the thin strip of yellow hallway light.

Mark was out of bed in a stork-legged leap for the door before he was aware that this wasn't a dream, any part of it. With a shattering sound the door slammed open, the lock's receiver ripping right out of the jamb with a squeal of tearing wood.

A dark figure in the door, features hidden by a black ski mask, machine pistol held ready. Without thinking Mark lashed out with his foot. It caught the dark figure smack in the crotch.

With a soft grunt the intruder let his weapon drop to its sling's extent, clutched himself, and went to his knees. Mark rushed past him into the corridor.

Two more dark figures stood by Sprout's door. One turned as Mark lunged at him.

Befuddlement was transmuting to frightened anger in Mark. Somehow he remembered that on those few occasions when he'd punched people in the face in the past he had hurt his hand. Or maybe he recalled some of the unarmed self-defense Belew had tried to drill into him; or perhaps even part of Moonchild that was still in him - or part of that in him which had been Moonchild - kicked in. He swung his clenched right hand in a wide arc at a ski-masked temple, but struck not with the knuckles but the fist's bottom.

Impact jarred his arm. The man in the mask fell against the door and slid downward, looking limp.

His companion was trying to swing his own MP5 around. To Mark's inexpert eye its barrel was unusually stubby.

He jumped on the gunman's back, wrapping his arms with his own long limbs, trying to pin elbows to ribs. The man turned with Mark riding his back like a hundred-dollar-a-day habit, threw himself backward against the wall.

"Oof!" Mark said.

"What the fuck's going on here?" It was Mason, a joker whose skin had the appearance of brick, down to the mortar seams. He stood at the end of the corridor by the stairs, raising a Kalashnikov.

Unfortunately, his skin didn't have the consistency of brick. The man whose back Mark rode raised his MP5 one-handed, fired a short burst. The noise was loud in the confines of the hall, but nowhere near as loud as a raw nine-millimeter going off; the weapon had a built-in suppressor.

Mason reeled and fell. His body convulsed as he died, but he didn't have his finger on the trigger.

This was getting serious. Mark thought about his hand-to-hand combat repertoire, which he'd just about exhausted, and look where he was. He thought about the vials of potion - all safely tucked away in the nightstand by his bed, and a few more covert locations, all equally remote - that would turn him into somebody much more useful in situations like this, such as JJ Flash, Esquire. He thought about Sprout, asleep and helpless in her room.

Screw pride; I'm useless. He opened his mouth to holler for help. From the corner of his eye he saw the man he'd nut-kicked leap at him. Before Mark could force sound from his mouth the man slapped a wad of gauze soaked in something cold over it.

Mark's head filled with astringent fumes. Instantly it swelled like a balloon and began to float away from his shoulders. Great, the biochemist in him thought. Chloroform. That's -

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Jay awoke in darkness, his face a mask of hurt. A bolt of pain went through him when he moved, hitting him right between the eyes. His mouth tasted of blood. Gingerly, he felt his nose. When he touched it, it moved. Jay let out a muffled gasp.

"You broke your nose," a vaguely familiar voice said from the darkness. "Someone broke my nose once. It was a long time ago. I remember it hurt."

Jay moaned. It was black in here. He couldn't see a thing. Memories of his disastrous raid on Governor's Island came back to him. He must have landed on his face when the gas hit him. "Where am I?" he said aloud, although he figured he knew. "Doesn't this fucking prison have a hospital? Damn it, I need medical care, I want to see the warden."

A match flared in the darkness. Quasiman peered at Jay with concern, his broad homely features twisted in concentration. "I don't know the warden," he said uncertainly. "Who is he? I can go tell him you want to see him if you like."

Jay struggled to sit up. "No," he said, "no, forget the warden." He groped at Quasiman's face. The hunchback felt real enough. He wasn't dreaming. Was he? "What is this place?"

Quasiman looked around the gloom. "This is the house of the wax people. I like to come here when it's dark and quiet. Sometimes I look at the wax people and I remember things."

"The Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum," Jay said. Dutton's museum. He knew the place. It gave him the creeps. Some unfortunate things had happened to him over the years in the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. On the other hand, it beat the hell out of the prison on Governor's Island ...

Quasiman was watching. The match had burned down to his fingers. He studied it, his face blank, as his flesh began to burn. Then he blew it out, and the dark swallowed them.

"How did I get here?" Jay said. "Did you carry me out?"

"I saw you," Quasiman told him, his voice strange and low in the darkness.

"You ... saw me?" Jay said, baffled. "Where? In the prison?"

"I saw you at the end," Quasiman said. "You were up in a big balloon fighting a man with half a face."

"I think you're confusing me with Jetboy," Jay said. This was fucking useless. He needed to reach Finn if he was going to make sense of this, the sooner the better. At least he'd gotten one of them out. How long bad he been asleep, anyway? "I've got to get to a phone," Jay said, struggling to his feet. His broken nose sent a bolt of pain through him when he rose. He ignored it, stumbling through the dark and groping for a wall. He walked into a wax figure. It fell with a crash. "Where are the lights?" Jay bitched loudly. "I can't see a goddamn thing."

Light flooded the room. The sudden glare made Jay throw up his hand in front of his eyes. He hit his nose and moaned. He found himself in the middle of the Aces High diorama, face to face with a wax Astronomer. The figure he'd knocked over was Modular Man, Jay saw. The android had lost his head in the fall.

Quasiman was outside the glass, standing by the light switch. "Is that better?" the hunchback asked.

Jay started to nod. His nose reminded him that nodding was a bad idea. "Yes, thank you," be called out instead. He could see his reflection in the glass wall of the diorama. Under the dried, caked blood, his nose was starting to resemble Rondo Hatten's. His eyes weren't black yet, but they would be soon, both of them. He'd look like a raccoon. This is just fucking great, he thought.

He found a hidden door in the back and exited the diorama. A narrow access corridor led him out to where Quasiman was waiting patiently. Or maybe it wasn't patience.... Jay looked closely and saw that the hunchback was in some kind of fugue, his eyes glazed and cloudy, his hand frozen on the light panel. He sighed and left Quas where he was as he searched for a phone.

The Dime Museum was closed and deserted. There was a bank of pay phones outside the men's room. Jay dropped a quarter, started to punch in a number, and then froze. He'd been about to call Hastet, but maybe that wasn't such a good idea. The feds had to be looking for him by now. If a platoon of Coast Guardsmen showing up in the middle of White Sands Missile Range hadn't been enough of a clue for them, they had Topper. His home phone could be tapped. Ditto for Starfields and the office lines at Ackroyd and Creighton.

Well, okay, he thought. They'd prepared for that possibility. He punched in the number for Jerry Strauss on Staten Island, and for once felt thankful for his junior partner's stupid secret identity. With luck, the feds didn't know that Creighton was really Strauss.

"Hello?"

"Jerry, it's me."

"Where are you?" Jerry said, astonished. "I thought they had you for sure. How'd you get off the island?"

"A trained detective is always resourceful, even when he's unconscious."

"Is Topper with you?"

"She didn't get out," Jay said. "Don't worry, Topper can take care of herself. Do you have Finn?"

"He's down in my wine cellar," Jerry said, and Jay breathed a sigh of relief. "Peter's with him. We were having a strategy session when the phone rang. Jay, you better get here as soon as you can. This Black Trump thing -

"Did Finn tell you what the fuck it is?" Jay interrupted.

"A virus," said Jerry, his voice gone grave. "A virus designed to kill every ace, joker, and wildcard carrier in the world."

For a moment, words failed Jay Ackroyd. A wisecrack curdled and died unborn on his tongue. What do you say to something like that? Finally he managed weakly, "This thing exists?"

"Finn says so," Jerry replied.

Jay could tell there was a second shoe waiting to be dropped, so he reached out and shook the shoe tree. "And the Card Sharks have this virus, is that it?"

"I'm afraid so."

There was a sudden throbbing behind Jay's eyes. It was hard enough to get a taxi to go to Staten Island at the best of times, he thought, never mind trying to get one in Jokertown at night with your nose mashed in and your face covered with dried blood. "I'm on my way," he said wearily, and hung up the phone.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Hangar 14 - thankfully - lay out in the low rent district of Tomlin facing the East River, well away from the distant busy terminals of TWA, American, and Pan Am. The steel frame of the building may well have been of World War II vintage, decades of use half-hidden under the cosmetics of paint. Unlike many of the hangars lined up in the area, 14 had no corporate logos or names painted above the main doors. A small sign was mounted alongside the side door, but neither of them could read the letters from their hiding place - for that matter, Gregg could barely make out the sign itself.

Gregg and Hannah watched the hangar from the cover of tall weeds along the river. The big hangar doors had been opened to the stained and cracked concrete apron leading out to Tomlin's maze of runways; inside, the rising sun touched the red-and-white sleek fiberglass lines of a five-seat Learjet. A black man in blue overalls was inspecting the undercarriage of the craft. Twice while they watched the man straightened and looked out across the field, shading his eyes against the rising sun. "Bushorn?" Hannah asked Gregg.

"Yes. I hope he's still expecting us."

"I know one way to find out."

Fright shivered down Gregg's body. He was afraid to stand up, afraid to move at all. "Hannah - "

She ignored him, rising from a crouch and vainly brushing at the stains on her clothing. She ran fingers through her cropped newly-dark hair and began walking toward the hangar while Gregg watched as Hannah's figure blurred with distance. Bushorn noticed her about halfway there. He straightened, silently watching her approach. Gregg wished he could see the expression on the man's face. They talked for a moment, then Bushorn disappeared into the interior shadows of the hangar. Gregg heard the whine of jets warming up. A few minutes later, Bushorn came out again with a large cardboard box. Leaving Hannah by the hangar and the idling aircraft, he walked out across the concrete and into the high grass, whistling tunelessly as he approached Gregg. Gregg huddled down in a crouch, poised to run at need.

"I see you," the man said softly. "Don't be running away, my man. That body's damn near neon."

"Gary, it's good to see you."

"You want me to say 'me, too' or would you prefer the truth?" A quick grin pulled at the edges of his mouth and vanished as he set the box down, its open end facing Gregg. "Get in," Bushorn said. "Can't have anyone spotting you."

Gregg crawled into the box. The carton smelled of styro-foam - a few peanuts clung stubbornly to the sides - old tape, and delicious metal. The smell reminded him how long it had been since he'd eaten. A nice stainless steel tire rim, with a side of pot metal ... Bushorn tipped up the box and lifted, grunting. "Damn, you sure didn't lose weight when the virus shrunk you down."

"It's my diet," Gregg said. "It's on the heavy side."

"I believe that." Bushorn grunted again, adjusting his grip, then began walking back toward the hangar. He didn't look down at Gregg, he didn't smile. He smelled of soap, grease, and jet fuel, all overlaid with sweat - now that the man was close, Gregg could see beads of perspiration clinging to the man's skin like dew, even though the morning was cool. He remembered that Bushorn always sweated profusely, even on the coldest days - the wild card had reset his core temperature. "You sure you two weren't followed?"

"Not unless they used a submarine."

Bushorn snorted at that. His footsteps jarred Gregg rhythmically; perspiration rained from his forehead and into the box. Gregg would have sworn that he could feel the heat of the man's skin through the barrier of cardboard. They were nearly at the hangar; Gregg could see the roof of the building, then the sky was replaced by high girders and a corrugated steel roof. Bushorn set the box down, pulling a handkerchief from his back pocket and mopping his face with it. "Europe still on the itinerary?" he asked, half-shouting over the rumble of the jets.

"We're not in a position to be real picky," Hannah told him. "But that's our thought."

"Mmmm." Bushorn shrugged. Sweat darkened the spine of his uniform shirt; when he wiped his hands on the overall pants, he left behind streaks. "Well, let's - "

Bushorn stopped. He looked out toward the tarmac and covered his eyes against the sun's glare. Gregg looked that way and could see nothing but a vague blur of grass and concrete. "Why don't you two get into the plane. Now."

"What's going on?" Gregg asked.

"There's a car heading this way."

"Police?" Hannah asked.

"Uh-uh. A black panel van." Bushorn shook his head; droplets of sweat scattered like silver rain. "They're accelerating. Damn, what've you got me into, Hartmann? Shit ..."

Hannah put her hand on his arm. She looked at Gregg, then back at Bushorn. "Look, Mr. Bushorn - Gary - you don't have to do anything. Not now. We understand. You didn't ask for this trouble."

He looked at her with his solemn face. "You understand, huh? Yeah, well, I know you, too, even with the new hair. I know what you've done. Just stay ready to head for the damn plane."

As Gregg and Hannah watched, Bushorn jogged over to a large metal barrel just outside and began pumping liquid through the nozzle of a hose attached to it. The smell of petroleum wrinkled Gregg's round Rudolph nose as the stream spread over the concrete in front of the hangar. He stood waiting, holding the still-trickling hose, as the van approached.

The side doors of the van crashed open as it squealed to a churning stop in front of them. An athletic man in a white suit leapt out, followed by a lithe blond woman Gregg recognized as April Harvest, who had led the raid on the Dime Museum, and a quartet of gray suits in sunglasses. A lopsided grin hung on Carnifex's face as he stepped forward. He stood at the edge of the growing puddle on the concrete; if he noticed any smell, he gave no indication. "Surprise! Seems we're just in time," he said. He glanced at Bushorn and obviously dismissed the man. His gaze lingered appreciatively on Hannah for a second, then the grin widened as he looked at Gregg. "Hey, I like that look, Gregg," he said. The grin vanished. "You never even fucking came to the hospital after I saved your lousy life at the Atlanta convention. You never even called and said thanks."

"Ray, you talk too much. Just do it," Harvest said, and Ray gave her a lopsided scowl before motioning toward the van.

"Hartmann, nothing would make me happier than having you resist arrest," he said, "but let's just make it easy and get into the van. You too, Ms. Davis." He glanced again at Bushorn. "And you, mister. Surprised there's still nats willing to stick their necks out for jokers."

"I'm not a nat," Bushorn said.

Carnifex narrowed his eyes. A look of pleasure and anticipation crossed his torn face. "Oh? You're no ace I've ever heard of," he said.

"I'm not an ace either," Bushorn said slowly, his voice barely audible over the screech of the jets in the hangar. "I'm just a deuce." His eyes on Carnifex and the silent men behind him, Bushorn crouched down. His fingertip touched the pool, dimpling the liquid. A faint smoke whirled in the breeze around the finger.

And then flame, louder than the jets, roared across the small lake, leaping and curling ten feet in the air with a concussive blast. Gregg heard Carnifex swear and Harvest yelp, heard the other men shouting. Then they were lost behind the screen of flame and heat. Gunshots punctuated the din; bullets whined and pinged on the back wall of the hangar. Bushorn was running past them toward the plane, cradling his right arm to his body. "Inside! Now!"

Hannah ran; Gregg scuttled with them, all six legs pumping. Bushorn picked Gregg up, heaving him over the wing and into the small cabin. Hannah, breathless, followed, and then Bushorn swung in, taking the pilot's seat. "Buckle in. This could get rough," he said over his shoulder.

"You're hurt," Hannah said, grabbing at Bushorn's hand. Gregg saw that the skin of Bushorn's right hand was a seared, white ruin to the wrist. Even Gregg's unskilled eyes could tell that Bushorn's hand would be a scarred, stiff horror, if he managed to save it at all. He hated the concern he saw in Hannah's eyes.

"It happens," Bushorn answered. Sweat was running down his arms, over his brow. He wiped at his eyes with his sleeve. "I heal quick. Anyway, we ain't got time to worry about it now. Hang on." Bushorn pulled back on the throttles left-handed; the jets screamed like twin banshees and the craft shuddered. Bushorn released the brakes, feathered the pedals, and the plane began rolling, picking up speed. Through the windows, Gregg could see the flames rushing toward them, filling the windows with orange fire and black, greasy smoke. Then they were through.

All of the suits were down; Harvest was on her knees, firing at them with a handgun. Gregg caught a glimpse of Carnifex, shouting wordlessly and rolling as the plane's wing nearly decapitated him, and then doing an impossible leap up onto the plane's wing. The ace began running along the wing toward the cabin. "Damn!" Bushorn grunted, and turned sharply left.

Carnifex made a desperate leap and grab as the motion took his balance. His fingers caught the plane's antenna; muscles corded in the ace's arms as he pulled himself upright. They could see Ray's face pressed against the cockpit window, grimacing with effort and flushed with anger. "He's a persistent little fuck," Bushorn said and gunned the engines, at the same time turning sharply right. The antenna snapped off, still gripped in Ray's fingers, and the white-uniformed man went tumbling over the back of the wing and disappeared. Bushorn played the brakes and turned the aircraft left again - the tip of the wing screeching as it left a long graze on the side of the van, and then they were rolling freely down the concrete, picking up speed. Bushorn pulled a headset from its holder and pulled it down over his head.

"Tower, this is Alpha Delta Rio One Niner Six Four Oh. I need runway Five NW cleared immediately." A thin voice answered back through the headset; Gregg could hear none of the words. "Look, I know all about regulations and my damn license, and I don't fucking much care, Tower. They've got a gun on me" - Bushorn grinned at Hannah and Gregg - "and I'm taking off on Five NW in about thirty seconds, if you don't clear it, there's going to be one hell of a mess, and you'll be responsible. Is that clear enough for you?" The voice sputtered in the earphones again. "Good."

Bushorn sighed. He looked back at his two passengers. "I sure as hell hope this is worth it," he said.

"It is," Hannah said.

"That's all I need to know, then."

Bushorn steered them down the complex of concrete, turning at last at the end of a runway where a queue of 727s waited, the heat of their jets shimmering the air. There, Bushorn took a long breath before pulling back all the way on the throttles. The aircraft leaped forward pressing Gregg and Hannah back against their seats as the jets roared their power. As they began to race down the runway, the black van pulled in front of them a few hundred yards ahead, blocking the runway. "Bushorn!" Hannah shouted, but the man paid no attention to her. They continued to race toward the van. Carnifex, in soot-stained white, opened the driver's door and ran, diving into the grass alongside the runway.

Gregg wondered what it would feel like when they crashed. He wondered if he'd feel the pain. Hannah hugged him; he folded his tiny arms around hers, glad for her closeness at the end.

Bushorn yanked back on the controls. With agonizing slowness, the nose of the plane lifted and the rumble of the wheels stopped. Gregg felt a distinct bump as the tires grazed the top of the van, and he was certain they'd pin-wheel back onto the runway. Bushorn cursed and fought the controls. The wings waggled, the nose dropped and the engines wailed, but the plane steadied a few seconds later, and Bushorn took them in a long, climbing turn.

Tomlin, New York, and Billy Ray receded behind them.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"That feel any better?" Dr. Bradley Finn asked.

Jay Ackroyd felt his nose. It was numb from the anaesthetic, his nostrils packed solid with dressing, the whole thing covered with a bandage the size of Jetboy's Tomb. "I can't wait to do some undercover work, I ought to blend right in," he said gloomily. "I must look like Jack Nicholson in Jokertown."

"Oh, no," Jerry Strauss put in, never the one to let a movie reference go unchallenged. "Jack Nicholson didn't have two black eyes, and his bandage was much smaller."

Jerry was wearing a smoking jacket today, to go with Errol Flynn's face. He was incognito. Finn knew Jerry Strauss by sight, as a patron of the Jokertown Clinic, and Jerry didn't want the Strauss identity compromised so he was being Creighton. "Fred" he'd whispered to Jay as he'd escorted him through the huge old house, past walls covered with rare mint-condition movie posters. "It's Fred Creighton, short for Frederick."

"Personally, I think he looks more like the star of Bandit, the Wacky Raccoon," Peter Pann said. He was perched up on top of a huge wooden cask of amontillado, his arm in a sling and a pair of tinks orbiting his head.

"Enough, Jay said. He was in no mood for extended discussions of his nose, not with global genocide staring them in the face. "We've got more serious problems."

Bradley Finn sat on his haunches. "You have a plan?" he said. Finn was smallish as centaurs go, but he still filled up most of the Strauss wine cellar. His back half was a palomino pony, complete with blond tail and mane. His front half looked like a surfer, especially in the oversized Hawaiian shirt he'd borrowed from Jerry.

"Face it, Ackroyd," Peter said, swatting lazily at a tink, "this is too big for us, way too big. We've got no choice but to go to the authorities."

"The authorities know," Finn said sharply. "Clara and I went straight to the police after we escaped from the Sharks. The police called in the FBI. We were questioned for days. Then they classified the whole thing and rounded up all of us who knew the score and shipped us off to Governor's Island." His voice turned bitter and sarcastic. "Temporarily, of course. Strictly for our own protection."

"Who questioned you?" Jay wanted to know.

Finn shook his head. "Who didn't? The FBI, the CIA, lawyers from the Justice Department, some guy from Treasury, a couple of doctors from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta ..."

"Anyone from the Special Executive Task Force?" Jay asked.

Finn looked surprised. "As a matter of fact, yes. A pair of them. Straight Arrow, you know, that Mormon ace, and a woman named April Harvest. You don't forget a name like that. She asked most of the questions. Why?"

"The Task Force was a Card Shark front when it was headed by Herzenhagen," Jay told him, frowning. "It could be legit now, I don't know.... Hannah Davis exposed Herzenhagen and Battle and a few other Sharks, but who knows how many more are still hidden?"

"Leo Barnett," Jerry said in a glum voice.

"You guys are all paranoid*" Peter Pann insisted. "The whole federal government can't be made up of Card Sharks."

"Paranoids have enemies, too," Jerry warned, sounding ominously like Richard Nixon.

"I delivered that sonofabitch Faneuil to the police personally. They ought to be way ahead. They ought to have arrested Rudo and Johnson by now. Instead they're arresting us."

Jay thought about that for a moment. "It's not hard to figure why they don't want news of the Black Trump getting out. You tell a couple hundred thousand jokers that they're under a death sentence, and you'll have a riot that'll make that Rodney King thing look like a block party. And I don't even want to think about what some of our more unstable aces might do."

"Are you saying that's why they brought in Finn and the others?" Jerry asked.

"Sure," Peter said. "A public safety thing, misguided, even illegal, but you can understand why they did it."

"Or maybe they're all Sharks and they wanted to silence us," Finn said. He stood up, his tail lashing angrily, flicking thick clouds of dust off rare vintages in the racks behind him, "We have to go back out there and get Clara!"

"No way, Flicka," Peter said, "Once is enough for Mrs. Pann's little boy."

"He's right," Jay said. "I'm sorry, Finn. Last time was a disaster. Peter got shot, and we had to leave Topper behind. I was lucky to get out of there."

"Clara's the one you should have gotten out of there!" Finn said angrilv. "I told you, damn it! Clara designed the Black Trump, she was part of the Shark inner circles, she can give you chapter and verse on who they are and where they are ... facts and figures, names and numbers ... she's the one you need!"

"Yeah, well, you're the one we've got," Jay said.

"How much time do we have?" Jerry asked worriedly. "You know, before ... well, before the end ..."

Finn sighed heavily. "A month. If we're lucky. They'll need at least that long to culture the amounts they need."

"Explain," Jay said. "In small words. I flunked high school chemistry. Angela LaBruno was my lab partner, and I couldn't take my eyes off her chest long enough to follow the experiments."

"All right," Finn said. "The Card Sharks have the Black Trump, but right now they don't have enough of it. Clara managed to destroy most of the cultures. The strain they have is only lethal through three or four generations, so - "

"Wait a minute," Jay interrupted. "What does that mean? That generation business?"

"I get the virus," Finn said. "First generation. Before I die, I pass it to you. Second generation. You die too, but first you give a dose to Peter Pan here."

"Pahn," Peter said sharply. "It's Dutch."

"Third generation," said Jay.

"Right, and Peter Pan dies too, after he infects Mr. Creighton, and Creighton maybe gets real sick, but he doesn't die. It's fourth generation, and the Black Trump isn't lethal any more. What's more Creighton continues to spread the virus, only now it's just a bad flu, and anyone who comes down with it is immunized against the fatal, first-generation strain of the disease."

Jay was starting to see the big picture. "So the Sharks can't just release this bug and wait for it to spread ..."

"Not in the small quantities they have, no," Finn said, "not unless their goal is to kill a few hundred jokers and give the rest of the wild cards around the world a nasty flu. To get the kind of pandemic they want, first they need to culture a larger supply of the deadly first-generation strain. For maximum spread, they'd want a simultaneous release in several major cities, preferably ones with large wild card populations and major international airports."

"Airports?" Jerry said, puzzled. "Why airports?"

"Airplanes spread epidemics faster than anything I know," Finn said. "One guy coughs at O'Hare, and in twenty-four hours strangers in nineteen time zones and five continents have got his cold."

"Hoo boy," Jerry said. It sounded strange, coming out of Errol Flynn's mouth. Errol didn't look like the kind of guy who said "Hoo boy" a whole lot.

"Jesus," Peter Pann swore, "you're talking global here! This is a job for Interpol or the World Health Organization or somebody."

"Pan Rudo was practically the head of the World Health Organization," Finn pointed out. "Etienne Faneuil was working for WHO when he was giving AIDS to jokers in Africa."

"I'd like to pass this buck too," Jay said to Peter, "but I don't think we dare. Maybe the feds and Interpol and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are all hot on the trail of Pan Rudo at this very moment, but if they're not ... if they're not ..."

"Ring around a rosy, pockets full of posey, ashes, ashes, all fall down," Bradley Finn said slowly, his voice grim.

Jay threw him a sharp look. "What is this, national nursery rhyme week? I got the same thing from Quasiman. I thought he wanted to skip rope."

Finn said, "No, Jay. That little song dates from the Middle Ages. It's about the bubonic plague. The Black Death." His voice softened. "They used to burn the bodies."

"Ashes, ashes," Jerry Strauss whispered. "All fall down. It killed half the population of Europe."

"Well, fuck it," Jay said, angrily. "Not this time."

His junior partner nodded. "Not if we can help it."

Jay looked around the wine cellar. A faux swashbuckler, a centaur, an eleven-year-old kid, and a guy who looked like a raccoon with a broken nose. What a team. The Card Sharks were probably shaking in their boots right now. He took a deep, deep breath.

"So where do we start?" Jerry asked.

Everyone looked at Dr. Bradley Finn. The centaur gave a hopeless shrug. "Clara is the one to ask, she ..." He stopped in mid-sentence, running his fingers through his thick, blond hair. "Her father," he said. "Clara's father, Brandon van Renssaeler. He was a Card Shark for years and years, but he was opposed to the Black Trump project, he thought it went too far. Clara warned him before she went to the police, to give him time to run."

"And did he?"

Finn nodded. "She figured he'd go to Australia. He had a friend down there, another Shark, what was his name now?" He snapped his fingers impatiently, frowning with concentration. "Farmer or Fielding or ... no ... He had the same name as the guy who wrote the James Bond novels."

"Ian Fleming," Jerry provided helpfully.

"Eric Fleming," Finn said.

Peter knew the name. "Eric Fleming owns half the newspapers in Australia, along with a couple in England and one or two over here."

"Then he shouldn't be that hard to find," Jay said. "All we have to do is get to Australia." There was a problem with that, he realized. "I suppose it would help if I had a passport."

"Usually," Peter Pann said.

"I have a passport," Jerry Strauss said quickly. "I'll go." Errol Flynn had never sounded so puppy-dog eager. "Just give me time to pack a suitcase, I'll get the first flight out. I can be in Sydney tomorrow morning."

"Australia requires an entry visa too," Peter said. "Six weeks, minimum."

Jerry looked stricken, but he was fast on his feet, Jay had to give him that. "I'll change into Paul Hogan and say my passport was stolen by a fan," he said. "They wouldn't turn away Paul Hogan."

Jay had actually been thinking about sending Jerry to find Fleming all by himself. His junior partner had been doing some good work lately, and there was no doubt that he'd drawn a versatile ace. That way Jay and Peter Pann would be free to follow up other leads. On the other hand they had no other leads, and he wasn't sure Australia was big enough for two Paul Hogans. "Maybe we should both go," Jay said "There are a dozen places in Jokertown where we can get fake papers that look better than the real thing."

"I'm going with you," Dr. Finn announced.

Jay looked at him, surprised. "That's not a real good idea."

"I'm going," Finn repeated, in a voice full of resolve. "I have a personal stake in all this. Those Shark bastards made me an accomplice to murder in Kenya, and then they used me as a hostage to force Clara to recreate the Black Trump. I owe them."

Peter Pann laughed. "Great speech, Flicka, but you just escaped from federal detention. How the fuck do you think you're going to get to Australia? Creighton can change into anyone he wants, and Jay's got this swell raccoon disguise, but you ... well, no offense, doctor, but you're a horse."

"I wasn't planning on flying Quantas," Finn put in. "My father has a Learjet. I'm sure he'd let me borrow it."

Peter made a face. "Who's your father, Secretariat?"

"One more horse joke and I'll make sure you never grow up," Finn said, giving Peter a hard look. He turned to Jay. "Well?"

"A private jet would be handy, but last time I looked, you were a doctor, not a detective. The only thing worse than an amateur is an amateur with something to prove."

"I'll keep my head down and do what you tell me," Finn said. "And if you don't take me, I'll go anyway."

"All right," Jay said, dubiously. He was remembering the last time he let someone go with him to play detective. He still had nightmares about that night. "I'll arrange for our passports. Finn, get on the horn and see about that plane. Jerry, make sure you pack lots of money. We may need to bribe people."

Finn was confused. "Jerry? I thought his name was Fred."

"It's, ah, Jeremiah Frederick," Jay said glibly.

"What am I going to be doing while you guys are throwing a shrimp on the barbie?" Peter Pann wanted to know.

"Holding down the fort," Jay said. "There's nothing to connect this house to anyone at the agency, so you should be fine so bng as you stay here. We can use the phone as a message drop, check in every few days in case anything breaks. I want you to smother this city with tinks. Maybe they'll pick up something. And get a hold of Sascha. We'll stop on Maui and pick him up."

Peter grinned wickedly. "He'll be so happy."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"I guess they're going to let us live," Bushorn said. "If they were going to shoot us out of the sky, they'd've done it already. They'll be tracking us with radar, though."

They'd been heading steadily eastward for the last several hours. Bushorn had throttled them back not long after their takeoff - "We aren't going to outrun an F-14, and if we try, we're just going to run out of fuel in the mid-Atlantic." - and set the plane on autopilot.

"They want to know where we're going," Hannah said. "They can wait."

"Which means we're going to have a reception waiting for us when we land, wherever we go. You got any other tricks you can do, Bushorn?" Even in the chilly cabin, Bushorn was still perspiring heavily.

"I'll admit I'd hate to have your laundry bill," Hannah said to him. "You always sweat like that?"

Bushorn chuckled softly in the pilot's seat, turning around to them. "It's the wild card's fault. Hit me late, while I was in the service in South Carolina, flying transports. Started out running a fever, and just got hotter and hotter. Literally burned off my robe, set the bed on fire, too, but it didn't do much to me. About like this. Remember what this looked like?"

He held up his hand; his palm was now a mass of fluid-filled blisters, like a handful of gelatin capsules. Hannah reached out and cradled Bushorn's hand in her own. She'll touch him. You see; he's normal ... Gregg forced the voice down, but he watched. "You had third degree burns there before," Hannah said wonderingly. "Now.... Well, I've had worse burns myself."

"Cooking?"

She gave him a look. "Fire fighting. I'm - I mean, I was - an arson investigator."

"Then you know about how flammable jet fuel is."

"Yeah," Hannah said softly. "I know."

"Guess Mr. White Suit does now, too." Bushorn smiled at Hannah.

"Probably. Nothing like firsthand experience to teach you lessons you'll never forget."

She was still holding his hand. Gregg could almost feel the touch, as searingly hot as the fire Bushorn had set. I could have made you leap into the fire yourself, Gregg heard himself growling inside. You were angry; I could have made you furious, enraged ...

"You need some ointment on this? Some bandages?" Hannah was saying.

"Nah. By tomorrow it'll be gone." Bushorn took his hand from Hannah. "Took a long time, but I finally managed to get all this under some control. Now I can light a cigarette without a lighter. Big deal - a damn parlor trick. The government was interested until they decided that it was a pretty useless talent, then they discharged me fast. I ain't no friggin' Jumping Jack Flash, throwing fireballs and flying through the air. And I pay for it with having to pay attention to how hot I'm running all the time. Nights, I sleep in asbestos sheets just in case, and I run my damn air conditioner in the middle of winter. You ask me, I ain't much better off than a joker."

"So what happens to us now? Where we heading?"

"I'm following Gregg's instructions." He gestured toward the array of instruments and nodded to Gregg. "You said Europe; I've got us headed for England."

"And they'll be waiting for us when we land," Hannah interjected.

"You can bet on it," Bushorn said. "Unless you've got a better idea."

"I do," Gregg said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

SIX

For a time Mark was in Limbo. Or maybe it was Hell.

It was a lot like Hell, certainly. But he could never really believe it was. Because Sprout was there with him, and he couldn't believe that even the hating vengeful god of the fundamentalists - name your flavor, Jewish, Christian, Muslim: all one, all one, all one - could damn such innocence. Only men were that bad.

Mark hoped.

He came partway back to himself lying on his back in the bottom of a sampan stinking of spoiled fish and rubber tires, staring up at daylight that oozed like acid between slats of the bowed wood roof. From somewhere past his head an outboard engine sang its whiny, thumping song. Beneath nguc-mam and Ho Chi Minh slipper-soles, he could smell mud-rich river water, hear it slogging against the thin hull, heavy and slow.

Discomfort had roused him. He lay on his arms. His wrists chafed his coccyx while the boards of the hull rubbed them raw in turn. He tried to pull them out from under. He couldn't. Something like a big plastic twist-tie secured his wrists, and bit in when he struggled.

He raised his head. The slight rise in blood pressure made it throb counterpoint to the engine. A small brown man in black pajamas squatted by Mark's feet. He held a rifle across his knees - a new AK-74, he could tell by the bright-orange plastic banana magazine. It was amazing what bits of information you picked up in Southeast Asia.

"Daddy!" Sprout knelt beside him and cradled his head on her lap. His first reaction was pleasure that she was near. Guilt at his own selfishness followed at once, then despair that hit like a sledgehammer and numbed like a shot of Novocain.

Because wherever he was, he was in trouble, and his daughter was in it with him.

"Oh, Daddy," Sprout said, shaking her head so that tears fell on his face like hot monsoon rain, "what's happening? Where are they taking us?"

"I don't know, honey," he said. "But it's okay; everything's going to be all right."

Then he got to hate himself for lying to her.

The boat carried them north along what Mark was sure was the Mekong. That meant that within a day or two - Mark had no way of knowing how long he'd been under; from the way he felt he suspected they'd given him a needle to keep him down after knocking him out with chloroform - they crossed the border into Cambodia.

That wasn't something a sane person would be eager to do. Cambodia was undergoing a civil war in which history's champion genocides, the Khmer Rouge, blithely ignored UN efforts to make them play nice and accept a civilian government and promise not to try to finish off the two-thirds of the country's population they hadn't gotten to murder in the seventies.

It was especially uncomfortable for Mark. The Red Khmers had tried to use Vietnam for an operating base. Though they had been J. Bob's playmates once upon a time, his advice mirrored Mistah Kurtz: "Exterminate them - exterminate all the brutes!"

After Free Viet patrols found a couple of villages depopulated by KR "People's Tribunals," with the usual atrocities, Mark had swallowed his Summer-of-Love scruples and ordered it done. If the Chancellor of Free Vietnam, not to mention his beautiful blond daughter, fell into their hands, they could expect to be treated ... well, the way the Khmer Rouge treated everybody, which was basically as if a race of giant alien insects had come to earth and decided to take vengeance for the way generations of small boys had treated their tiny cousins.

In fact, after their first night on the river Mark feared their captors were Khmer Rouge. He couldn't tell. Little brown men in black pajamas were pretty much the population of mainland Southeast Asia, along with similariy-clad little brown women. All he knew was that they weren't speaking Vietnamese. That told him nothing; lots of people in Vietnam didn't speak Vietnamese, either.

The kidnappers never spoke English. They communicated their requirements with grunts and jabs of their gun barrels. That truly was the universal language; it worked on Takis, too.

Whoever they were, the kidnappers wanted no more to do with the Khmer Rouge than Mark did. After Mark's second day back among the living they moved exclusively by night, lying-up in the weeds by day. Mark and Sprout stayed tied up in the boat, hanging over the edge of suffocation in the dry-season heat.

At least underway they untied Mark's hands. Sprout stayed handcuffed to a stanchion by one ankle, except when the captives were prodded ashore at gunpoint to answer the call of nature. The small brown men understood too clearly that if Mark couldn't take his daughter he'd never run.

They seemed curiously untroubled by the prospect that Mark might pull a Rambo, overpower them all, and escape with the girl. To his great shame, they were right - dead right, the way those defensive-driving TV commercials put it when Mark was a kid. He had his friends, of course, next to whom Rambo was a quadriplegic Girl Scout. But those friends - Aquarius, the were-dolpnin, JJ Flash, the flamboyant fire-shooter, Cosmic Traveler, and, if she even still existed, Moonchild - came in vials of brightly-colored powder. The kidnappers had thoughtlessly neglected to bring any of them along.

Without them Mark was helpless. He towered a foot and a half above his tallest captor, outweighed them by God knew what. But without his drug-and-wild card-induced friends he was a tall, weak, skinny middle-aged man who had no more idea of how to fight than he did of how to fly flapping his arms, as his futile Palace-hallway efforts showed with painful clarity. It was chemical dependency of a kind the drug warriors never even thought of.

Helplessness tormented him. His alter egos were superhuman. He was useless. Am I anything without them?

And if he were something ... shouldn't he be able to protect Sprout? In all his life, she was what mattered the most.

He felt his impotence most keenly the first time muzzle blasts flared from the darkened riverbank with headbusting racket. One of his captors shoved him down to the bottom of the boat and sat on him. Someone else pushed Sprout, wild-eyed and clutching her pink Gund bear, down beside him. The engine roared flat-out while the four men in black pajamas shot back in deafening hiccups of fire. Mark could do nothing but murmur encouragements to Sprout - protestations even her perpetually four-year-old mind must know were false.

Miraculously, or so it seemed to be by the sheer quantity of noise and muzzle flash, they escaped the ambush unscathed. Two nights later a single burst of gunfire erupted out of blackness. One of their captors grunted softly and went over the gunwale with a splash. His comrades never even glanced aside. They just fired back and kept the prop churning thick water until they were beyond the reach of their unseen enemy's bullets.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Everyone ready?"

Hannah glanced at Gregg with Bushorn's question. Despite - or maybe because of - the situation, she chuckled at the sight. Her amusement made Gregg scowl, but he forced the irritation down.

"Go ahead and laugh," Gregg told her. "I think I can imagine ..." Gregg wriggled in the odd assortment of straps and buckles that Bushorn had rigged around his body. If the glimpses of himself he'd caught in the windows were any indication, he looked like a dominatrix in a porn film for caterpillars. Gregg regarded Hannah in the jumpsuit, helmet and goggles Busnorn had provided. "You're rather attractive, actually, in a military sort of way," he told her.

"Thanks. You look ... uh ..."

"Never mind. I can guess." He wondered if she could guess how scared he was. If anyone bumped him, he was liable to go skittering around the plane like a banshee on speed.

Hannah smiled at him. Bushorn tugged at Gregg's parachute harness, then tightened a strap on Hannah's. "Either of you done this before?" the man asked.

Hannah just chuckled again, nervously. Gregg gave Bushorn what he hoped was a sarcastic tilt of the head - it was hard to tell what his body language communicated anymore. "No, huh?" Bushorn answered "Well, we're a bit south of Belfast in Northern Ireland. We're on a heading that will take us into Glasgow; I imagine the reception committee will be waiting for me there. My story is that you hijacked me, and that you jumped out over the Wickiow Hills hear Dublin; that should buy you some extra time while they look for you in the south."

"Are you going to be all right?" Hannah asked Bushorn.

The man shrugged. "I hope so. If not, I'm sure Gregg can recommend a good lawyer."

"Bushorn, thanks," Gregg told him. "You didn't have to do this."

"Yes, I did. I followed all that stuff about the Card Sharks in the papers; I saw you two on Peregrine's Perch. I know what you re running from, and I figure it's my little contribution. Looks to me like you two got the hard job."

Hannah hugged Bushorn tightly at that, causing another stab of jealousy to prick Gregg's soul. He thought she held the embrace just a little too long. "I hope we'll see you soon," she told Bushorn.

Yeah. I'll bet you do. He looks normal. He's not a damn worm. Then: You're not being fair, Greggie. She's acting the way Hannah has always acted - friendly, open, trusting. It's your vision that's screwed up.

Fuck you, Gregg told the voice.

Bushorn was scanning the instruments. "All right. This is as good a place as any. Let's get you two on your way." Bushorn led the way to the back of the plane. Gregg followed Hannah, the bulky pack of the parachute dragging behind him like a soft anchor. His body kept threatening to go into overdrive just from fear, he tried to calm himself People jump out of airplanes all the time. Really. Most of them even live through it....

"This is going to be a lot worse than a normal jump," Bushorn was saying.

"Great. That's a real comfort," Gregg said.

Bushorn almost grinned. "You want me to lie to you?"

"Yes."

"I won't. We aren't in some poky Cessna trainer. When I pop this door, the wind's going to try to tear you right out of here. It's going to be cold and very dark. I'll give you two a push, Gregg first, then you, Hannah. Let yourself fall for a count of ten, then pull the cord. If your main chute doesn't open, don't wait - go for your backup chute. If you can, try to stay together as much as possible. The landing's going to be the real problem, though. There's a moon tonight, at least, so you'll be able to see somewhat, but we're over rural and hilly country - use the lines to control your flight down. See if you can find a flat meadow somewhere. There should be farms around here - plowed fields should be pretty soft. As soon as you're down, cut loose and head for cover. If we're lucky, you'll be able to see each other and make a connection. If not ... well ..."

Gregg looked at Hannah. His stomach was already doing somersaults, and he struggled to keep whatever was in there down. Hannah crouched down alongside him. "I'll see you on the ground, love."

Gregg grimaced at the word. I don't believe you. You say it, but you don't mean it. "Sure. What's left of me, anyway."

Hannah's smile was wan and a little unsteady. Oddly, that gave Gregg a spasm of pleasure. Back in the cockpit, an alarm shrilled. "Okay, now!" Bushorn said "Here you go - "

Gregg wasn't prepared for the noise and the violence as the hatch blew open and went pinwheeling away. He didn't have much time to contemplate the situation as Bushorn - "Remember! Count to ten!" - pushed him out of the plane. The wind hit him like a steel wall; the blurred bulk of the plane streaked past him as he tumbled. The frigid wind rushing over him thrummed the strap around his body and took his breath away; the goggles Bushorn had tried to wrap around his head went flying away. His eyes teared up uncontrollably, not that it mattered.

Gregg's joker body went into its instinctive overdrive, the legs kicking and pin wheeling uselessly. The world roared around him in a giant's bass voice, and Gregg fought to exert his will over the body's flailing.

He found that he was still grasping the iron ring of the cord, but it seemed like he'd been falling for ages already and he'd forgotten to count. To hell with it - Gregg pulled the cord and the chute blossomed above him in the darkness; he grunted as the nylon grabbed air and halted his headlong rush to the ground. He couldn't see: between his myopia and the darkness he might as well have been falling from the top shelf of the world's largest refrigerator.

"Hannah!" he called into the night. He thought he heard a feint answer, but when he called again, he didn't hear anything.

At least his panic seemed to be subsiding. Gregg experimented with tugging on the lines, as Bushorn had told them - he could tell that he was turning as he swayed in the straps, but without being able to see the ground or have some stable reference point, it was a pointless exercise. Gregg hung there for long minutes, waiting for the world to come up and swat him back to reality.

He wondered how fast his legs would be able to go after that.

He wondered if he'd survive the experience.

Gregg squinted into the night, wriggling his long body in the straps to peer down. Suddenly something - trees? a hillside? - was rushing by him, and a blur of green came up like a fist and slammed into him. His body kicked into a useless overdrive that the straps contained, and his legs were pummeling only air. He realized that he was swaying back and forth a good thirty feet above the ground, the parachute draped over the branches of a huge oak on the border of a wide field. A strong, chill, wet wind blew in his face; the moon was obscured by clouds. From where he dangled, through the branches of the trees shielding him, he could see the spectral blue-and-white blur of Hannah's chute coming in across the field. She missed the woods lining the far side of the field, hitting the tall grass and falling to be dragged several yards by the chute. "Hannah!" Gregg called into the wind. She didn't turn, didn't look. She stood, dropping the straps from her and stepping out of the harness, her back to him.

A voice chattered softly, a whisper he could just barely hear.

She isn't going to help you. She's going to leave you because you're an ugly joker and she really doesn't care about you. You could have betrayed her, could have given her to Brandon van Renssaeler and the Sharks, but you chose not to. You helped her; you gave them the information they needed about the Black Trump. So here's your pay-back - left to the Irish authorities to arrest; a joker caught in a tree, helpless....

"Hannah!" he called again. She had pulled the chute in, crumpling the nylon. She looked around her once - how could she miss seeing you, even in this darkness? - and ran toward the trees, chute and all. In a moment she'd disappeared into the dense shadows underneath the branches. Gregg fumed in his straps, the wind tossing him, the cold beginning to seep into his bones. He could smell the fragrance of moss, of humus, of the cow droppings in the field. The tree limbs creaked and groaned in the wind; the clouds played hide-and-seek with the moon.

"You planning to stay up there all night?"

Gregg looked down. Hannah was below, her head back as she stared up at him.

"Hannah! You went into the woods ..."

"I thought that'd be better than going across the field in case someone was watching."

"I thought ..."

Hannah smiled up at him, "You think I'd leave you? No chance. You're the one with the contacts, remember?" As Hannah started to climb the tree, the voices warred inside Gregg.

Don't flatter yourself Greggie. She isn't doing this for you. She doesn't want to be alone here. Not yet. She'll wait until she's found a better time. And then ...

It's not true, he answered. I know it's not.

Think about it. "You're the one with the contacts." She's using you, and when you're more a liability than an asset ...

Hannah had scrambled up the tree and was sitting on the limb above him, hugging it with a wan grin. "Haven't done this since I was a kid," she said. "What do you think, Gregg? Should we take up skydiving for a hobby?"

Gregg forced his tiny mouth to smile back at her.

Let her laugh at you. One day you'll be doing the laughing, if you're smart. If you listen to me. Just listen to me ...

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"... has been no word from President Moonchild since the devastating explosion that leveled Saigon's Presidential Palace," Bernard Shaw was saying. Behind him was the smoking ruin of a French colonial villa, "Among the half-dozen bodies pulled from the rubble this morning were those of her Chancellor, Marcus Aurelius Meadows, and his daughter, ah, Sprout."

The director cut to the image of a stuffed toy, a plush pink fish burned almost beyond recognition.

Jay stood by the bar, staring up at the television, the beer in his hand forgotten. The lounge at Kapalui Airport was crowded with tourists coming and going, grabbing a quick one between planes; sleek tanned women and smiling men with suitcases, lugging their swimsuits and leftover sunblock and jars of macadamia nuts back home from Maui. Mark Meadows was never going home now, but none of them cared, or paid the slightest attention.

CNN filled the screen with old footage of Mark in his purple Uncle Sam suit as Shaw droned on. "Meadows, the notorious ace known as Captain Trips, was wanted in the United States for kidnapping and drug trafficking when he led a joker revolution that established the outlaw nation he called Free Vietnam. In the wake of his death, three members of the cabinet have proclaimed themselves his successor, and there are reports of joker rioting all over Saigon."

"That's a fucking shitty epitaph," Jay said sourly. The Mark Meadows he had known deserved better. He remembered how thrilled Mark had been when their starship lifted off Earth. Space travel had been one of the most relentlessly boring experiences of Jay Ackroyd's life, but Mark had been beside himself at the wonder of it all. What a goddamned dreamer he'd been, still full of romantic notions despite everything he'd gone through. Not Jay. Jay considered himself hardheaded and practical. Takis had been just another job to him; for Meadows, it had been a childhood fantasy come true. Yet it had been Jay who found love on Takis and brought home a wife. Mark found only death. Starshine, one of his "friends," had perished in a space battle, and Meadows had come back to Earth having lost part of himself.

And now it seemed he'd lost the rest as well. Jay wondered if Meadows and his other friends had found Starshine again. He hoped so. If ever a man deserved his peace ...

He left his beer on the bar, untouched, and strode out into the terminal. Dr. Finn was off with the pilot, getting their plane refueled, but Jay found Jerry Strauss at a pay phone, taking notes on a yellow legal pad as he talked to Peter back in New York. "Okay," he kept saying. "Right, right, got it. Okay, right." Sascha Starfin stood beside him, wearing a black Hawaiian shirt and a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed his face where his eyes weren't. The skin over his empty sockets was as tan as the rest of him.

Jerry hung up. "Peter's trying to hack into some of Fleming's corporate records, but he hasn't been able to get access. He got us some basic biographical stuff." He noticed Jay's face. "Is something wrong? You look terrible."

"The commies blew up Mark Meadows," Sascha told him, plucking the thought off the top of Jay's mind. Jerry's mouth fell open and he gaped like a fish, his eyes blinking.

"Stay the fuck out of my head, Sascha," Jay snapped at the joker telepath. "Give me what you've got," he said to Jerry.

Jerry shut his mouth and read from the legal pad. "Eric Fleming, born 1948 in Queensland, second son of a millionaire rancher named Thomas Fleming. His older brother was killed in the Vietnam War and Eric inherited the entire estate when his father died of a heart attack in 1974. He's multiplied the fortune many times over, buying and selling ranches, luxury resorts, cruise ships, television stations, and especially newspapers. His first paper was the Townsville Drover, a weekly he acquired in 1975. Today he owns nine papers in Australia, four in England, and two in the United States, plus six magazines and a paperback book company."

"Where does he live?"

"Well, he owns houses in Townsville, Brisbane, Melbourne, London, and New York, but Peter says he spends most of his time at a private island off the Great Barrier Reef."

Jay groaned. "Another island. Real good. Topper was the only one we had who knew a rudder from a rutabaga. Five'll get you ten that's where he's stashed van Renssaeler, too."

Jerry fingered his chin thoughtfully. "Well, I could - "

"If you say one word about the Creature from the Black Lagoon, I'll leave you here," Jay warned him. "What else do we have? Any personal stuff?"

Jerry looked back at his notes. "Nothing good. Just the usual Who's Who junk on his marriages. Let's see, he's been married four, no, five times." His finger moved down the page as he read the names. "Married Lucy Taylor 1971, divorced 1973. Married Jane Carson 1973, divorced 1974. Married Jennifer Simms 1977, divorced 1984, two children, Thomas and Stephen. Married Cassandra Webb, an American actress, 1985. She died in a boating accident in 1988. Remember her? I was an ape when most of her movies came out, but I caught some of them on tape. Hoo boy, there was a girl with a figure. She was in Black Roses. And Doc Holliday, remember, with Donald Sutherland? She was the dancehall girl who gets killed in the crossfire. Peckinpah directed that one ..."

"Did I ask for a filmography?" Jay said. "You said five wives. Who was the last one?"

Jerry flushed. "Sheila McCaffery," he muttered, glancing back down at his notes. "She was a model. She married Fleming in 1990, divorced 1992. one child, a daughter named Joan.

"A model and an actress," Jay said. He rubbed at the bandage over his nose. The pain was creeping back, a dull ache now, but soon it would be a throbbing. "He liked a good-looking woman."

"You have an idea?"

"Maybe the beginnings of one," Jay admitted.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray watched the night go by through the ripples of rain sliding down the plane's window. There was little enough to see. It was dark, they were flying through masses of clouds, and they were over the ocean. Infrequent flashes of lightning tore the darkness, illuminating nothing.

Ray was in a bad mood. In the best of times he hated transatlantic flights. They were dead boring. He had nothing to do but squirm in his seat for hours and hours, and think. But this was not even the best of times. His burns were healing, but they still hurt like a motherfucker. And his throat was raw. It often was when he had to breathe stale, recycled airplane air. But now he had to worry about whether the rawness was caused by bad air or the Black Trump. Maybe a colony of the vicious little viral bastards were sitting in his lungs, enjoying the steamy wetness, laughing and partying and having a jolly old time as they replicated like maniacs, sending out fine tendrils to clog and choke his system, spreading like some damn killer fungus from his head to his toes.

Life had been so much simpler, Ray thought, when he'd believed himself invincible. He sighed, glancing at April Harvest in the seat next to him. She was sleeping. Some women looked goofy when they slept, mouth open, hair mussed, makeup tracked all over the sheet or pillowcase. Harvest lost none of her beauty. It became softer, lost a little of its edge. It made Ray feel more confident when he looked at her while she slept. It made her look like maybe she wasn't too quick for him, too fast and sharp.

It was hard to say what made him more uncomfortable, thoughts of April Harvest or the Black Trump. He'd have to deal with both when they arrived in Scotland, where radar had traced Bushorn's plane. Right now, he just wanted to turn off his brain and rest, but he couldn't.

Somehow the hours passed. Harvest woke up after a while and buried her nose in one of the thick dossiers she was always reading. When they finally disembarked at the Glasgow airport Ray had that unfortunate mixture of wiredness and tiredness common at the end of transatlantic flights. And the greeting committee did little to improve Ray's mood.

"What'd you say?" he asked with an irritated frown, leaning closer to the giant of living stone who loomed before him and Harvest in the mouth of the disembarkation gateway.

The giant sighed. The sigh, like his voice, was a soft whispering that contrasted weirdly with his immense, sharp-edged appearance.

"I said, welcome to Scotland. Miss Harvest. Mister Ray." The giant nodded at them as he spoke in barely audible tones. His ghostly voice gave Ray the creeps, and Ray didn't care much for the way the guy looked, either. He towered over Ray like a cliff-face. His body, hard-edged and unyielding, looked like living rock, not human flesh. His eyes were twin flames dancing in the recesses of his roughly-hewn face. "I'm Kenneth Foxworthy."

"Of course." April Harvest pushed past Ray. "Brigadier Foxworthy. Grand Marshal of the Most Puissant Order of the Silver Helix. I've read a lot about you and your career."

"Oh," Ray said, the light dawning. "You're the guy they call Captain Flint."

"Indeed." Flint glanced at the hand Ray offered, and shook his head ponderously. "Please take no insult." He held out his own massive hands. "My fingers are razor-sharp and rock hard. They would cut your fish to ribbons."

"You must be a holy terror on the handball court," Ray said.

"Yes," Flint said without a trace of a smile. "I have news about your quarry. Good and bad news, I'm afraid."

Ray and Harvest glanced at each other.

"Well," Harvest said, "let's hear the good news first."

"This way, please," he whispered, starting off slowly down the corridor. "More privacy."

They made their way to an empty, glassed-in debarkation lounge that was guarded by a pair of agents. British, American, whatever, Ray could spot them instantly. Flint moved about as quickly as a glacier and it took all the patience Ray possessed, to slow down to match his pace.

"My men picked up Bushorn when he landed," Flint whispered once they were behind the glass walls.

"Great," Ray said, "Let's go talk to him."

Flint shook his head ponderously. "Now comes the had news. You won't get much out of him. He was the plane's only occupant. He claims that he'd been hijacked and forced to fly across the Atlantic."

"What happened to the hijackers?" Harvest asked.

"He says they bailed out when they were passing over Dublin."

"I see," Harvest said. She looked thoughtful. "That's all we have to go on."

"Yes." It was positively creepy the way Flint said that word in a sort of whispery hiss.

"Then," Harvest said, "I guess we'd better go to Ireland."

Flint nodded, his head teetering like a boulder on the edge of a cliff, trying to decide whether or not it wanted to roll down the slope of his chest. "I have a plane waiting."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The sign pointing south said CARRYDUFF 2; below, another plank pointed north with the legend BELFAST 10. The road was cracked blacktop barely two lanes wide, but it was a highway compared to the rutted dirt track they'd been following. A dry goods store with a petrol pump sat at the intersection. Since the sun had just risen, they'd decided to hole up in a dense growth of trees and brush on the top of a small hill not far off the road. They watched the occasional lorry and car pass, most of them traveling north to Belfast. A woman came and opened the store. Gregg breakfasted on a hubcap they'd found in the gulley alongside the road. Hannah had contented herself with raiding a cottage garden they'd passed before dawn.

"What do we do now?" Hannah asked Gregg. Below them, a small pickup truck had stopped. An older man got out and went into the establishment.

"I don't know," Gregg said. "We need to get to Belfast. There's a small jokertown there - I've toured it a few times. We should be able to lose ourselves in the city - Peter Horvath's here; he might be able to lead us to Rudo."

"If we can get to Belfast before someone finds us," Hannah said.

She was grinning at him. "Yeah. If," Gregg answered.

"Then I think I can do something about it. Just make sure you pick up on your cue." With that, Hannah got up, brushed the dirt from her jeans, and started down the hill toward the grocery.

"Hey!" Gregg called "What are you doing?"

"I'm just a poor American girl from Belfast whose boyfriend took her on a ride out this way. We had a terrible argument, and he left me here. I'm lost and and a little scared. I just need a ride back to town." She smiled at him. "You'd give me a ride, wouldn't you?"

"Thats not going to work," Gregg told her.

Hannah stopped. "You have a better idea?" she asked.

Something in her tone put wrinkles around the round balls that served Gregg for eyes. You're just a joker, after all ... "No," Gregg admitted.

"Then get ready to hop on. Our bus is leaving in a few minutes."

Gregg watched Hannah jog down the hill and go into the store. Gregg followed her reluctantly, crouching behind a heap of empty boxes at the side of the building. A few minutes later, Hannah came out with the driver of the truck. As she climbed into the passenger seat, she looked around, saw Gregg, and nodded slightly. "I really appreciate this," she was saying as she closed the door. "Michael just left me ..." Gregg leaped up on the bed of the pickup and wriggled his way behind a toolbox there. The truck engine coughed, the transmission whined, and they were off. Gregg contented himself by opening the box and eating a socket wrench.

An hour later, after a slow and leisurely drive, they were in Belfast. The jokertown district lay along Belfast Lough in the western part of the city. They were passing through the area when Gregg heard the truck door open as they waited at a light. "You don't want to get out here," the driver said.

"You're probably right, but I'm doing it anyway," Hannah answered as Gregg wriggled out from behind the toolbox and quickly leapt over the side of the cab. "Thanks for the ride." The driver was shaking his head at Hannah, who waved at him and smiled. Still shaking his head, the man threw the truck into gear and drove off. Hannah looked at Gregg, then surveyed the close-ranked buildings around them and the jokers walking the streets. "Welcome to Belfast," she said to Gregg. "I got us here. Now it's your turn."

Not much had changed since Gregg had last been in the city, a decade ago. Belfast's jokertown was a smaller, dingier, and poorer version of the original. Most of New York's jokertown looked affluent by comparison. The buildings here were ancient, and as dark as if they'd inhaled the patina of violence and struggle which had washed over Belfast through the centuries. The briny smell of the harbor mingled with the odors of factories and fireplaces and automobile exhaust. The lowering gray sky pressed down uncomfortably, and the occasional drizzle that passed did nothing to wash away the dirt.

As for the jokers, they were no different than those prowling Jokertown streets back home. Twisted and changed by the wild card virus, they came in the same infinite variety of shape and form, the same infinite variety of pain.

the wild card virus had first been labeled the "Protestant Disease" here - perhaps aptly, since the initial and largest outbreak of the disease had been in Belfast. Until the early sixties, the virus had capriciously spared the island; then it had struck with a vengeance: the 1962 Belfast infection had rivaled in virulence and suddenness that of the original New York City outbreak. The IRA had originally claimed credit, a claim that many still believed. It may even have been true. The wild card indeed struck the Protestant areas hardest - at first, anyway. It was not to remain that way for long.

The outbreak had fueled some of the most vicious fighting in decades. Belfast had burned; the British had brought in troopships and a cadre of diplomats to handle the violence, but - perhaps from fear of the virus - the tendency was to shoot rather than negotiate, and the level of violence simply escalated. There were reprisal bombings nearly every week in Belfast, and across the Irish Sea in Manchester, Liverpool, and London. Two hundred of the British troops were killed, along with untold numbers of Catholic and Protestant partisans, before some semblance of order was imposed on the north.

And the virus, uncaring about such political niceties, had traveled south. The "Protestant Disease" proved to be all too catholic. It didn't care what faith its victims professed to believe. It prowled from Ulster to Connacht, Leinster, and Munster, capricious and unpredictable, and always, always deadly. Over the last thirty years, the Protestant/Catholic problems had sometimes been overshadowed by those of wild carder and nat. The events had colored the treatment of the wild card victims in all of Ireland. Three decades later, Irish jokers had reason to hate the nats who controlled them. Being Irish, they had long memories for wrongs.

Hannah was looking at Gregg expectantly. They were drawing stares from the jokers passing them, Hannah getting most of them. Gregg noticed that she was the only nat visible other than those passing in cars. "First, let's get off the street. By now, Bushorn's told them that we bailed out over Ireland. They may already be looking for us. There's got to be a pub around here somewhere ..."

A few minutes later they entered Joseph Coan's, a small, dim pub on the next corner. The patrons were jokers; there didn't seem to be a bartender. As they entered, the buzz of conversation stopped as if cut off by a switch; everyone glared at them suspiciously. "I thought that only happened in movies," Hannah muttered to Gregg. Gregg heard her inhale, and she pushed the door wide and went to the bar. She put her hands on the polished wooden surface ...

... and pulled them abruptly away. "Jesus!" she said loudly. "It moved."

That brought laughter from around the pub. "Did'ja hear that, Joseph?" one of the jokers called.

"Indeed I did," a bass voice answered from somewhere in front of Hannah, and she took another step back from the bar.

"It talks, too," Hannah said to Gregg.

"And it has a name," the bar said. "I'm Joseph Coan, and I own this establishment, or rather, I suppose you might say I am the establishment. Now, are you thirsty or did you come in looking for some local color, lass?" Hannah looked at Gregg and stepped forward again.

"Two pints of Guinness," she said.

"That'll be one pound five," Joseph said. The voice seemed to emanate from directly in front of Hannah.

Hannah pulled a few notes from her pocket - Irish currency purchased in New York - and peeled off a five pound note. "Umm, where do I put it?" she said.

"On me," Joseph answered. Another wave of laughter rippled through the bar. Hannah smiled into the laughter and stepped forward. "All right," she said. "Here you are." She laid the bill on the table.

The wooden surface seemed to melt under the paper, and the note disappeared under the varnished surface as if drifting through thick water. A moment later, more bills and some coins wafted upward, the bar solidifying under them. "Your change," Joseph said. A glass mug slid by itself along the rear shelf and a bar tap dunked forward as the mug filled with dark brew. The tap clicked back and the glass glided toward Hannah, as if pushed by an invisible hand, as another mug slid under the tap. "There you go. Looks like all the booths are empty; have a seat by me."

"Are you part of the seats, too?" Hannah glanced at the bar stools cautiously.

More laughter cascaded from the booths and tables. "What's the matter, lassie? Don't want old Joseph touching your bum?"

"At least I'm warm," Joseph said.

"If I get splinters, I'm holding you personally responsible," Hannah said. A bar stool slid in place behind her. Hannah sat. Another one slid into place as the second glass of Guinness eased into place alongside. "For your friend," Joseph said. Gregg grimaced and scuttled across the floor to the stool. He jumped up, sitting with his rear two feet tucked underneath. He looked at the Guinness and the thin brown foam atop the black liquid. The brew didn't look or smell anywhere near as appealing as it had when he'd been normal. He wondered how accommodating Joseph would be if he asked for a side order of wing nuts.

"Don't often get Americans in here," Joseph said conversationally while Hannah took a sip of the Guinness. Gregg noticed that he could see a faint pair of lips moving below the surface of the oak, like something glimpsed in murky water. The rest of the jokers in the pub had gone back to their private conversations now that they were sitting at the bar. Gregg peered myopically into the haze of pipe smoke. He had a sense that someone was watching, but he found it impossible to find the source. Near the back, a joker with three legs got up and left the pub by a rear door. "And one of you a nat, no less," Joseph was saying. "Very unusual. Very noteworthy."

"Is someone taking notes like that?" Hannah asked. She gave a small, forced chuckle that took some of the edge from the question. Gregg's unease increased. He could feel something - someone - approaching, a malevolence that almost felt familiar. His body tingled with the feeling, a buzz of adrenaline that made his legs twitch.

"I did not say that, lass. I was only making conversation. Being friendly, don't you know. No need to take offense."

"No offense taken," Hannah told him. She seemed to jump slightly, squirming in the seat. Gregg noticed that she was careful not to touch the bar. For that matter, he didn't either. "But if you squeeze my ass again like that, I will."

The bar chuckled, the surface jiggling with the sound and rippling the stout. "Ahh, sorry. Old habits, you know."

"How much of this place is, well, you?" Hannah asked. Gregg was content to let her do the talking. All the hairs on his body were standing erect. The three-legged joker had come back in, and Gregg thought he saw a small shape move in the shadows behind the man as the door closed.

"More than you'd think," Joseph was saying. "I can get feeling from most of the surfaces - the tables, the booths, but I can't manipulate them. Most of me is here in the bar, if that's what you mean. You haven't touched your Guinness," he said, and Gregg realized that Coan was talking to him.

"Sorry," he told the bar. "I guess I don't drink anymore."

"Then I'll drink it for him, Joseph," a voice spoke behind Gregg, and the deep timbre of it made Gregg spin around in his seat, almost losing his balance, as his mind sensed a darkness, a blackness shot through with red like fire. The feeling was familiar. No, it can't be ... "Gimli?" Gregg cried, squinting.

A short, green man was peering up at him, his head cocked expectantly at Gregg, his eyes as bright an emerald as his skin. He held a gun, pointed at Gregg's red clown nose.

"Jesus! A leprechaun!" Gregg cried.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The doors to the warehouse stood open to Odessa's docks. Zoe watched the numbers blink on the cheap watch she wore. Eight minutes since Croyd had gone in to set up the buy, four more and she would walk in, find the office door somewhere in there in the murk, and hand over the sack of Israeli multivitamins that were part of the deal. The Russians were entranced with vitamins, Snailfoot had said. They thought they protected them against the fallout from Chernobyl, maybe.

The ship that was to take Croyd and Zoe across the Black Sea waited at the pier. Zoe stood as close to the gangplank as she could, as far away from the warehouse doors as she dared. The ship was the most beautiful ship Zoe had ever seen, a stubby freighter with rust stains oozing down its sides from every porthole, beautiful because she promised shelter and escape, if only for a while.

Nine minutes. Zoe stood on the docks because that's where the plan told her to stand. The plan was all she had.

She felt numb all over, a forced numbness that had begun in the catacombs of Jerusalem. Follow the plan. Do what you're told. Go here, do this, wait for that. Her head was reeling with things she had never wanted to know and desperately needed to know, Snailfoot's dry discussions on the potential radiation hazards of something she could now think of only as The Device, Azma's quick, sharp lessons on proper decorum for a Muslim wife. Behave this way in Turkey, but this way in the desert. Keep your eyes down; don't stare at anyone, don't, for the love of Allah, stare at a man's face. Snailfoot's dry British voice saying, Croyd you will go to this cafe, you will discuss this year's crops with a man fitting this description, you will remark on this amount of rainfall. Zoe, you don't need to know this part, try not to listen, and that was when she'd gone numb, had begun to concentrate only on her role in this charade.

No cloak-and-dagger stuff, no. This was simply a business deal. Meet the seller. Hand over the cash and pick up the merchandise. Don't even think about the complicated politics and the feuds over a collapsed empire that left holes in the Russian system big enough for a nuclear warhead to slip through. It's not cloak and dagger anymore. It's just business. Smile.

Odessa went about its bustling business on a hazy day, a port city testing the rituals of capitalism, and smiling.

There were so many smiles here, smiles that flashed on acres of cheap dentures and dull metal fillings. The clerk at the hotel had smiled last night, and carried their luggage with a smile, and held out his hand for a tip with a smile.

Zoe's face ached from a forced smile that she had plastered on her face, for anyone who didn't smile must not have anything to sell, and therefore was a potential customer for any newly fledged entrepreneur who had a string of sausages to sell, or lettuces to spread on a cloth on the sidewalk.

Smiling last night while she and Croyd climbed the Potemkin steps up from the water to the promenade and found seats in the little cafe at its edge. She had sipped sweet hot tea from a glass and toyed with some sort of salt fish canape that she couldn't force herself to swallow. In the dark cafe, she'd kept smiling while Croyd made his speech in what he'd said later was Ukrainian peppered with Russian peppered with Arabic. Smiling while the short, bouncy boy with swarthy skin and curly chestnut hair had talked about rain. Crops and rain. No cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Smiling when Croyd tensed beside her, those scary knots of his muscles rising in his jaw, for the boy had gone on to offer Croyd a sheaf of stock in some bedamned company or other, all printed on thin cheap paper in Cyrillic with huge red and black capitals, and that wasn't in the script. But Croyd had said something that made the boy laugh, and nothing bad had happened.

Zoe smiled in no one's direction, and watched a pair of pale, bulky, smiling tourists in flowered short-sleeved shirts, maybe recovering from black-mud baths at one of the spas. They walked away, their buttocks fighting rhythmic battles beneath their baggy khaki shorts. It was two in the afternoon on a hazy day, and all was calm, busy and calm. The port city rumbled with commerce and smelled of coal smoke.

From the opened sliding doors of the warehouse, longshoremen trundled out with crates of powdered milk and sacks of grain stacked on clumsy-looking handtrucks. They roped their loads to the hook of a winch and yelled at each other in a bored sort of way as the cargo lifted over the side of the ship and vanished, swaying, into the hold.

Zoe lifted her head to look up at the ship again and the silk scarf slipped backward on her hair. Anne hated her black hair.

"Why that color?" she had asked.

"Just a whim, momma." They had kept Croyd away from the apartment once his hair was dyed black. Two "whims" at once might have clued Anne that this "business trip" wasn't quite what it seemed.

Zoe tightened the knot under her chin, settled the strap of her canvas tote on her shoulder, and walked into the warehouse.

Follow the plan. The office won't be at the front, go to the back right corner. Follow the plan. The aisles changed every day as goods got loaded in and loaded out, no one knew which path led back there, just go. Keep your eyes down.

Beside her, lined up in a row, one of these machines contained The Device. Green enamel, thick cast iron, the pumps were the size of a Maytag washer and dryer bolted together. A dozen, twenty, all alike, they looked efficient and innocent. But not this one, Zoe stopped, unable to take the next step, sensing the heavy package behind the bland metal, a casing of thin lead and thick steel that hid a heart of darkness, a limitless black universe where tiny particles flashed blue-white like falling meteors in a dark night, a chattering of brutal entropic decay never meant to be confined.

"Bos?" the man asked. "Bos?"

The voice startled her into motion. She looked up at the man, stubbled, gray hair and a grin that gapped over some missing teeth. "Ya nyeh gavaryu pa Russkie," Zoe said. Croyd had taught her that much.

"Von!" The man gestured toward the rear of the warehouse.

"Spasebo," Zoe whispered. She went where he pointed.

A square of frosted, ornately-leaded glass, thick and dusty with age, filtered gray light through the carved mahogany door. The door was a relic of a gas-lit past, incongruous in this dank, musty warehouse. It looked like Sam Spade's door strained through a samovar. Zoe could see the warehouse manager in his place behind a desk and the back of Croyd's head, black hair, a black pilot's cap, leaning back in the visitor's chair.

Zoe opened the door. The man in the cap wasn't Croyd. Croyd slipped in beside her, quick and silent, and before she could take a breath they stood in the office with the door closed and Zoe had moved sideways to get her back against the wall. Beneath her palms, its texture was slick, greasy, gritty.

The manager had a pair of heavy chins and a belly that he rested against the front of the desk. The man in the visitor's chair turned toward them, black eyebrows raised over wary Mideastern eyes, narrow eyes, the pupils dilated with fear. The smile faded from the face of the man behind the desk. His thick fingers splayed out across a bearer draft, covering some of the printed zeroes marching across its face. A lot of zeroes.

Croyd moved in what seemed like slow motion. He reached a hand toward the swivel chair and tipped its back toward him. The knife against the Mideasterner's throat hadn't been there before but now it was, the man's head tilted back and cradled against Croyd's belly. A single drop of blood formed in the dimple the point of the knife made in the Mideastener's skin, right over the Adam's apple.

Croyd asked something in Russian. The manager replied in a spate of rapid words. His silver front teeth were separated by a large gap. He gestured with the hand that wasn't holding down the bearer draft, indicating Croyd, the man in the chair. Then he rubbed his fingers against his thumb as if they held cash. Croyd spoke again.

"Oh-kay" the manager said.

"Zoe. Give him the package," Croyd said.

She pulled the white, crackling paper sack, filled with vials of multivitamins, out of her canvas tote and reached forward to lay it down on the scarred wood.

The manager grabbed it and tipped the contents onto his desk. Bottles rolled in all directions. Bright candy-colored pills scattered from an opened container and fell to the concrete floor with a sound like popping corn. The manager's thick fingers teased at the fold in the bottom of the sack. He tugged at a paper folded in the bottom and eased out a bearer draft. He laid it next to the other one.

Snailfoot hadn't told her she was the courier for the bank draft. The bastard.

"Sure," Croyd said. "Cash 'em both. Why not?"

The manager smiled.

Croyd's forearm tensed, the cords of the tendons leaping under his dyed brown skin. The Mideasterner's torso jumped. Both his arms reached skyward with a jerk. The gun in his hand made a soft popping sound.

The manager's eyes went vacant and his lower jaw sagged. A tiny amber fishing fly - a dart - quivered in his upper lip, just above the gap between his front teeth. The dart gun fell from the Mideasterner's hand. The manager's belly held him in his chair as he sagged forward against the desk, and Zoe thought, there's only one door in here. Only one fucking door. We've got to hide the bodies somewhere.

"Shit," Croyd said.

"Yessss." Zoe couldn't get her jaw open enough to stop hissing.

"We just leave 'em, I guess," Croyd said.

"The knife."

"Yeah." He tossed it onto the desk. "They killed each other. That's cool. But we've got to keep anybody from coming in here until the pump is on board. Any ideas?"

"No. This man. Whose is he?"

"Shit, Zoe. I don't know. Ivan, over there, didn't know. Ivan thought he was me."

Someone knew about the Fists, someone was trying to stop them, and it wasn't any legitimate power, not the UN, not the FBI. The Sharks? Or had the fucking Black Dog set this up for overkill? A failsafe in case Croyd or Zoe chickened out?

Zoe wanted out of here. And if she left now with Croyd, ran for it, they wouldn't have a clue on where to go for safety. If they left without the bomb, the Black Dog would hurt Jan somehow. Zoe knew it.

Three men, a woman, a deal being cut. A need for privacy. "Croyd, you're a pimp."

"Huh?"

"Just get your skinny ass outside and guard the door. I'm adding a little something to sweeten the deal, right? A little extra service. Deals get cut in here; we have to figure this isn't the only business that goes down on the docks, or at least we have to hope so. Just thump on the door twice if I need to do some heavy breathing okay? And for God's sake, let me out of here once that pump is on board!"

"Right," Croyd said.

He opened the door and closed it behind him. She could see his blurred outline, his back against the door.

Neither of the corpses was bleeding much. The little wound in the center of the Mideasterner's throat looked so tiny. The Russian - no, the Ukrainian - the manager wasn't messy at all.

The Mideastener's head lolled back against the chair. His cap hadn't fallen off. From the window, maybe he'd just look relaxed Zoe tiptoed around him and sat on the desk, her back to the window, her legs on either side of the manager's fat belly. She tore off her headscarf and tossed her hair loose. The manager was close enough that she could kiss him if she leaned forward.

The tiny dart hung limp in his upper lip. He had cut himself shaving this morning; there was a little scrape on one of his chins. What had been on the dart? Shellfish toxin was the only thing she'd ever read about that could work that fast, and even then there should have been a breath, a gasp, a struggle of some sort. This man had gone as still as a stop-motion sequence in a bad movie.

She had heard that dead men smelled of shit, but these two didn't. The air in the office smelled of dust, paper, and cheap ink. The Mideastener reeked of stale sweat. And that was all.

A cart rumbled by outside. She heard it, but the office was dead silent.

Dead.

Silent.

Don't think. Follow the plan, even if this was never the plan. Why didn't they load the fucking pump? How would the Ukrainians ever manage a free market if they couldn't learn to load freight? Didn't anybody ever work around here?

The dead manager stared at her. He was just someone trying to get along. He looked like a family man, a guy with kids. She imagined him at home in one of those baby-blue apartment buildings with the rococo balconies, eating sausages stewed with cabbage. There were no rings on his fingers. Zoe had noticed that when he caressed the bank drafts.

She reached out a tentative finger and closed the dead man's eyes, one, the other.

A voice called out some sort of query in Russian.

"Nyet! Minutku!" Croyd said.

He said something else. Zoe turned her head just enough to see his shadow at the door. She couldn't see anyone beside him.

Just get the pump loaded, okay? Come on, Ukrainians. Load that ship and we'll leave. We'll never come back here, honest.

Croyd said something tersely. Zoe heard a clang, metal falling on concrete, Croyd didn't thump on the door, but what if he were afraid to? What if someone stood watching, some eagle-eyed employee who wondered what was going on?

Zoe grasped the manager's neck in her hands and pulled. It didn't want to move. She tugged. His neck sagged forward. The dead weight of the corpse's head fell against her lap, his forehead pushed against her belly, the lethal dart dangling free and not in contact with her cringing skin. She held him there, aware of the rough, light-brown stubble on the back of his neck, the thick texture of his skin. His skin was warm, but it was doughy. She closed her eyes and felt hot, silent tears run down her cheeks.

How much longer? How long?

She whimpered.

The whimper threatened to change into sobs. No. The plan. She had to remember the plan, and she heard someone coming toward the door, and Croyd's voice.

Croyd's heel tapped the door, twice.

Zoe panted. She arched her back and let her neck tilt and she twisted back and forth a little. She panted again. She moaned. She heard Croyd say something, a sharp comment, and then she heard a different voice, a chuckle.

Boots scuffled on the concrete, someone walking away.

And nothing happened. Zoe sat there, the manager's head in her lap, afraid to move. A muscle in her lower back began to ache.

"Zoe!" Croyd hissed. He opened the door just wide enough to peer inside. "Come on!"

She scooted backward across the desk, leaving the manager where he sat. Croyd held the door ajar.

"What about the bank drafts?" she asked.

"Leave them," Croyd said. "They're trouble for somebody. You look - well, never mind." He brushed a hand across her cheek, wiping away tears. "Keep calm."

Her scarf. She picked up her headscarf from the desk and twisted it around her hand. The door closed on the hell behind them.

Follow the plan. Croyd waited for her to come to his side, visibly at ease if you didn't look at how controlled his motions really were. They strolled between crates and boxes toward the hazy sunlight. The man who had yelled "Bos!" put down a crate and watched them. Croyd stared past him and maybe he didn't see the man's spit hit the floor behind his heel.

Stroll, don't run. Zoe didn't see the pump. Maybe it wasn't on board. Maybe the warehouse had loaded the wrong one. It didn't matter. Follow the plan.

Someone had backed the crane away from the side of the ship. She could hear the ship's diesels rumbling. A sailor leaned over the rail above her, looking down. He was smoking a thick cigarette rolled in tea-colored paper.

She walked up the gangplank beside Croyd. Cloak-and-dagger stuff was for the middle of the night, not for a spring afternoon.

The sailor tossed his cigarette over the side. He ambled over to a set of chains and pulled the gangplank up into its slot on the ship's side.

Croyd led her into a small passageway, metal and the smell of mechanic's grease. Outside the porthole, the warehouse doors stood open.

Croyd paced back and forth, watching the open doors. Slowly, as if in a dream, the ship eased away from the pier, out into the Black Sea.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

They entered a hilly region which Mark took to be northern Cambodia, where the land started to rise toward Laos' Bolovens Plateau. The river spread out to accommodate numerous tree-crowded islands. On one of these the boat put ashore.

Mark and Sprout were allowed to spend the day hidden beneath the trees. After dark came the drumbeat of rotors from the west, and with its distinctive thud-thud-thud an ancient American Huey utility helicopter showing more rusty dented metal than olive-drab paint faded gray by the terrible Southeast Asian sun settled down on a sandbar. The kidnappers chivvied Mark and Sprout on board with their muzzle brakes and stood back to watch, expressionless to the last, as the chopper jumped into the air and flew west.

The helicopter churned between low tree-furred mountains and out over drowned paddy land glittering like mercury pools in moonlight. Mark reckoned they were over eastern Thailand. The pilot was a heavyset, balding white guy in a polo shirt and khaki pants. He might have been American, but then he also might have been French, German, Russian, or God knew what. He said nothing in Mark's hearing, either to captives or to the quartet of black-pajamaed brown men who rode with him. This set showed subtle differences from the last to Mark, in details of dress and body language, and the singsong inflections of their language. He still couldn't identity them.

Near dawn the helicopter set down among barren red hills. Men in Royal Thai Army cammies refueled the craft. The black pajamas ushered Mark and Sprout outside and into the brush to tend to this and that while the pilot went out of earshot to confer with the soldiers. Then the little ship rose into a sky so hot its blue was nearly white, and flew on.

They crossed a mountain range, stopped for the night in another armed camp. This one was occupied by more little brown men, wearing military castoffs from half a dozen nations, carrying an equally eclectic assortment of weapons. Some wore skirts of striped dark-green cloth to augment their uniform bits and pieces. They were obviously bandits or guerrillas, and their appearance and language struck Mark as similar to that of his current escorts. But the four in black kept themselves and their captives apart from the others. The pilot went away with some locals and did not put in an appearance until daylight, by which point he smelled alarmingly of gin.

They flew over more mountains, and then a deep river gorge, a stroke of beauty to clog the throat, if you weren't too preoccupied worrying whether the pilot was sober enough to drive this thing. Sprout, who adapted more readily than her father, looked out the open side doors and clapped her hands in delight. Despite their predicament, the spectacle moved Mark as well - though he kept an eye on her, to make sure she stayed securely strapped in, and kept a firm grip on her bear.

Beyond the gorge rose dense, forested hills. As the sun began to roll down a cloudless sky, a broad clearing came into view, filled with huts clustered around an open square. The helicopter settled down in the midst of the open area. Mark and Sprout were prodded forth, blinking and wobbling to meet a trim brown man on a big white horse.

A tall Westerner stood by the horse, studiously clear of the hooves it flashed as it pranced and snorted at the helicopter's red dust whirlwind. He wore a white linen suit with an open collar. One hand clamped a white straw hat to an immense round head against the rotor downblast.

The black pajamas prodded Mark in the kidneys with their AKMs. He dropped to his knees. The man on horseback gazed down on him impassively. He had that handsome, ageless, Southeast Asian look. He wore tiger-stripe camouflage fatigues with the creases pressed to razor edges and an American .45 holstered on a webbing belt. He smoothed his mustache with a thumb and nodded.

"Is this the man you wanted, Mr. Casaday?" he asked in clear English.

The tall man's face split into a jack-o'-lantern grin. "The very one. Marshal Hti. My main man from here on in. And his lovely daughter, too, I see."

He laughed. "Your people have done me proud, Hti. You'll be well rewarded."

"Anything that hurts Yangon rewards us," the Marshal said, "but money is always appreciated." He wheeled the horse and rode off at a crisp trot toward a beaten-earth practice field where ranks of sweating men charged each other head-down like boars.

Kalashnikov barrels gouged Mark to his feet. "Bring them both," Casaday said, turning away.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"... and so he hollers "Jesus! A leprechaun!" in a little scratchy voice that could cut glass, like he's as normal as the bloody Prince of Wales. I thought he was going to ask me to give him the pot of gold, I did"

Gregg winced as the laughter rolled around the back room of Joseph Coan's. Around Hannah and him were a quintet of jokers: the "leprechaun" who so eerily reminded him of Gimli; a woman who looked normal until she lowered the scarf around her lower head revealing unbroken skin below the nose; a man with arms and legs that looked like they'd come from four radically different people; a joker who huffed asthmaticaily as far away from the fire as possible, his skin as impossibly bright a red as his hair, dry and papery; he looked like a match could reduce him to quick ashes; and the three-legged joker who had first spotted Gregg and Hannah. All of them were well armed. The others had arrived not long after the leprechaun had gestured with his weapon, herding Hannah and Greg into the room.

("I don't want no trouble here," Joseph had called to the small joker as Gregg and Hannah moved reluctantly ahead of him into the back room.

"There may be trouble, but it won't be here, Joseph," the joker said. "I promise you that.")

"You can call me King Brian, since you think I'm one of the Little People," the leprechaun said now. "That's Cara, Stand-in, Scarlet Will, and Trio." Brian pointed at each of the jokers in turn. "You've given us a bit of problem, you have."

"What do you mean?" Hannah asked. She glared down at Brian, hands on hips, defiant. "We haven't done anything to you."

"No? Then why'd you send the hunchback to us? How'd you know how to tell him to find us?"

"Quasi?" Hannah asked. "He came here?" Hannah laughed, looking at Gregg. "What did he say?"

«We didn't understand most of it.» A feminine "voice" - Cara's, since she was looking directly at them - seemed to emanate from within Gregg's head, muffled as if he were listening to a conversation behind a wall. The others were hearing it too, nodding with Cara's statement. «He said something about a virus, that you would need to go to the Black Dog, that we were to help you ...»

"You're Twisted Fists," Gregg burst out suddenly.

"Ahh, now he gets it," Brian said. "A better guess than leprechauns, after all." The others laughed, grimly. "So you see, we've been waiting for you. 'They'll come to the place where the wood speaks,' the hunchback said. That's as good a description of Coan's as any I've heard."

"The hunchback mentioned Father Squid, too, and a few of us here remember the man," Scarlet Will said. His voice was as papery as his body. "But Squidface is no longer one of us. He follows his own way now. But I'll at least listen to someone who knows the Father. If you have information about this Black Trump, tell us your tale."

"Not here," Gregg said. "Not yet." The glimmering of a new plan began to form. He looked at Hannah. She may be a problem. She was against dealing with the Fists. But maybe, maybe ...

Forget her, came an answer from somewhere. Worry about yourself. "How do we know you're who you say you are? If you're Fists, prove it. Put us in contact with the Black Dog. I'll speak to the Hound of Hell," he said. "No one else."

They laughed. "By the blood of Christ, man, you're in the wrong country for that," Brian said, and guffawed. "Now, maybe we can send you to the Dog, and maybe we can't. You're just going to have to trust us, aren't you?" Brian slapped his thigh, then the amusement left him suddenly. His eyes went expressionless. "So you will tell us, will you not?"

"We didn't come here to find the Fists," Hannah said suddenly. She was looking at Gregg. "I'm sorry, but I won't deal with terrorists."

Brian glared at her with a lopsided grin on his face. "It doesn't appear you have a choice."

Hannah shook her head. "Damned if I don't," she said. "I'm outta here. Gregg? You coming?" Hannah started to walk toward the door. Greg didn't follow, but Brian moved quickly to block her path, his weapon snapping up, a semiautomatic that looked huge in his tiny hands.

Hannah looked down at the joker. "Damn it, get out of my fucking way or I'll shove that goddamn penis substitute up your little green ass."

Brian clucked. "Oooh, such language from a lady. You're an ace, then, since guns don't scare you."

"No," Hannah said angrily.

"A nat?" Brian cooed. "I hate nats. I'm thinking that you owe us all an apology." Deliberately, he brought the notched muzzle of the weapon up, so that it prodded Hannah in the breast. A delicious fright rippled along Gregg's spine, frightening and yet at the same time tantalizing. Gregg, you can't let this happen ... someone was saying, but another, darker voice answered. Why not? Isn't it what she deserves?

Shut up! he told the voice. Leave me alone!

Hannan faced Brian without flinching. "Then you're a fucking stupid man along with being a small one," she told Brian. "I've spent the last year of my life and lost everything I once had dealing with the wild card virus and Sharks, and if it still matters more to you that I'm a nat and not a joker, than you deserve the fate you're going to get when the Sharks release the Trump."

Someone - Gregg thought it was Stand-in - chuckled in the background, but Brian became apoplectic, his face flushed and tight. Gregg saw muscles bunching along the man's arm, and he was certain that Brian was going to pull the trigger.

Gregg, you can't let this happen ...

And Gregg did something that utterly surprised even himself.

Puppetman would have eagerly licked at Brian's rage. He (with Gregg riding him) would have enjoyed the terror, would have escalated it for the sheer pleasure. If Hannah happened to die, then, well, too bad. There were always other puppets to be had - what was the loss of one compared to the pleasure of her death?

Gregg - after the death of Puppetman, his ace gone - would have cowered in terror, too frightened to do anything. He would have been pleading for his own life. He would have regretted Hannah's death, but his own survival would have been far more important.

Since he'd become a joker, Gregg had never responded to a crisis with any reaction but flight. But Gregg - the joker - the coward - leaped in front of Hannah. He could feel the adrenaline pumping, just on the edge of kicking him into overdrive yet again. "Out o' the way," Brian snarled. "I don't wish to harm jokers, but if I must..."

Gregg almost obeyed. He wanted to run, and the welter of emotions confused him. Get out of his way! the voice screamed inside, but Gregg shook his head. I'm not listening to you. Not again! Suddenly it didn't matter. The churning in his stomach could not be denied Gregg opened his mouth and heaved.

A viscous jet of vomit slathered Brian's hands and chest and dripped from the gun muzzle as Brian looked down at himself in horrified disgust. Gray-green effluvium sizzled on metal. The vented barrel of the automatic weapon suddenly sagged and drooped, and Brian let the thing drop with a scream and then - abruptly - upchucked himself, on top of the whole mess.

The smell was overpowering, horrendous and - to Gregg - utterly delicious. It made him want to lap at the sweet, puckered metal.

Behind him, Gregg heard Hannah struggling to control her own stomach. "Sorry," he said to the company in general. "But I couldn't let you do that. If you hurt Hannah, you hurt yourselves far more. You don't know how much she's done for - " ... me, he was going to say, but the bitter voice, the one in the shadows of his mind, laughed. She's done nothing for you, Gregge. You were a convenient fuck when you were a nat, and now that you're a joker, you're nothing at all. Gregg swallowed. "Us," he finished shakily. He forced that voice down.

«I believe she mentioned that somewhere in the tirade,» Cara said amused and speaking in their heads.

"Hannah uncovered the entire Card Sharks conspiracy," Gregg continued, looking at Brian, who appeared to be a little greener than usual. "Goddamn it, kill her and you might as well blow your own fucking brains out. Kill her, and the Black Trump might just get released - and if that happens, you've signed the death warrant for every damn joker in the world. The Sharks and the nats will have gotten exactly what they've always wanted."

I couldn't let you do it because I care for her. That, somehow, he didn't - couldn't - say. He was confused. Voices warred inside him, and he didn't know who to listen to. He wasn't certain where the sudden bravery had come from or why he'd put himself between Hannah and Brian's threat, especially since he was no longer sure what Hannah felt for him. All he knew was that thinking she was going to die had forced him out of inaction.

The realization, after all the doubt of the last several days, startled him. Maybe for the first time in his life, Gregg had done something because he cared more about someone else's life than his own.

He marveled.

Gregg stopped breathing heavily. Behind him, he could feel the warmth of Hannah's body and hear her own quick breath. Brian was glaring at them, his hands still dripping with Gregg's vomit. The other jokers waited.

Finally Brian nodded, and he smiled, but there was nothing friendly or sympathetic in his smile. It was merely a random movement of the dark green lips. "All right. But you will tell us all about the Trump, if you expect any help at all." Brian nudged the misshapen mass of his half-melted weapon on the floor with a careful boot. "That be a useful trick you have there, but it's not enough. Tell me what you plan to do here, and then we'll see about letting you talk to the Black Dog, eh?"

"You're wasting time," Gregg said. "Time that we don't have. God knows where the Trump is now, or how long before they'll release it. The longer we delay, the harder the three vials are going to be to find."

Brian shook clinging goo from his hands. "You act like you could go to fucking Churchill and ask him for help."

That brought bristles erect on the folds of Gregg's skin. "Churchill? He's here? In Belfast?" Gregg asked. Brian guffawed.

"Aye, he is - on another one of his useless quests to pacify the poor, wayward colonials, meeting with Sinn Fein, the DUP and the UUP, even though it's all a useless bother. Why don't we send him a calling card? Who should I say requests the presence of his Lordship's company?"

"Somebody he's met before," Gregg said, ignoring Brian's sarcasm. "Somebody he'll listen to."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

When the door opened a frigid blast of conditioned air almost blew them back up the stairs. Mark blinked eyes from which the moisture had abruptly been sucked into the Arctic wind.

It was a laboratory, crammed with modern equipment, chrome and plastic and Formica, all agleam in the nervous light of fluorescents hanging from a dropped white acoustic-tile ceiling. The scene contrasted so violently with the grubby, hot guerrilla camp hacked out of oak forest aboveground that it seemed to lie in an alternate dimension, that Mark Meadows had been thrust down the White Rabbit's hole instead of down the steps of a bunker blasted into the thin, red dirt and limestone of Burma's Shan Plateau.

"What the hell is this?" he asked the man in the white linen suit. The a/c was raising goosebumps on his bare, sunburned forearms.

O.K. Casaday smiled smugly. Mark was already learning to hate that expression. He knew a lot about the CIA man already - Casaday had been one of his major antagonists during the fight for Vietnam, and was by way of being J. Bob Belew's pet hate - but Mark had never laid eyes on the man before.

"This is where you'll be working, Dr. Meadows. Like it? Most modern facility opium money can buy."

"You kidnapped me from Saigon so I could make drugs for you?" The precariousness of his position did not inspire Mark to try to play things cool. It wasn't that he was too naive to realize how deep was the shit he was in; the events of the last five or six years had scoured a lot of the innocence from him, at least of the wide-eyed, "oh, wow" flower-child sort. He knew he was screwed; yet after all he had been through - fugitive from the law; flying saucer passenger, household warrior on Takis; corpse floating in orbit; fugitive again hunted across damned near the length of the Eurasian landmass; President, Chancellor, and (literally) Pretender of Free Vietnam - he found it hard to get all worked up any more. It was a pissoff, sure; but nothing cosmic.

Besides, they weren't going to kill him. They needed him.

"Get real," he said.

Casaday nodded his big, round balding head. Lank blond hair bobbed above his collar. "So it's reality you want, Doctor?"

He glanced at the man who stood by Mark's left shoulder. He was shorter than Mark by about two inches. That still left him fairly tall, six-two or so, and unlike the erstwhile Chancellor of Free Vietnam he was young and in excellent shape.

"Layton," Casaday said. With a smile and his right hand the young jock grabbed Mark's arm above the left elbow and squeezed.

Mark gasped. His blue eyes watered behind his Lennon glasses, and his knees got weak. But he didn't go down. Nor did he turn his head to took at his tormentor. He just kept glaring at Casaday.

"This is really making me feel cooperative," he said, choking only slightly. "You CIA boys sure learned a lot about winning hearts and minds back when you were losing the Vietnam War."

"Tough guy," a voice said in his ear. Like Mark's, it was American, Southern California-accented. Its owner had narrow cover-boy features and a blond ponytail, and lots of big muscles he liked to show off. Right now he was wearing a muscle shirt with a skull in a green beret on the front, above the legend "Grab 'Em By the Balls, And Their Hearts & Minds Will Follow."

The hard boy in the ponytail had never been in the US Army Special Forces. If he had been, he wouldn't have been caught dead in that shirt. Mark found himself wishing J. Robert "A Green Beret is just a hat" Belew was on hand to rip it off his back. Then he thought dismal thoughts of lying in the bed one has prepared oneself.

"Want me to adjust his attitude a little, boss?" asked the muscle boy, keeping the pain grip on Mark's elbow.

Casaday chuckled, a sound like pebbles shaken in a tin pail. "You really think you can beat him up until he helps us, Layton?"

He reached out and grabbed a pinch of the prettyboy's cheek. "Sometimes I think you're as dumb as the Last Hippie here thinks I am." He let go of Layton's face, slapped it lightly, and walked into the lab.

"I'm not dumb," Layton said in a petulant whine. He relaxed his grip. "I'm a warrior. I don't see any point in coddling this son of a bitch just because he's some kind of hot shit scientist."

"Bring him." Acoustic tiles muffled Casaday's words. The muting of sound added to Mark's sense of dreamlike irreality, as if his brain was wrapped in cotton batting.

Sprout sniffled. That snapped him back. He reached out to squeeze her hand.

Layton pushed him hard between the shoulder blades. "Get going, you," he said. Then, to himself, "I'm not dumb."

Casaday was talking. Mark tried to make himself attend. In the last few years he had discovered in himself far more physical fortitude than he had ever imagined. What had actually happened, he realized, was that he had achieved a state of apathy about himself that amounted to near-perfect insulation from threats years before. Many years ago, back in the middle seventies, when it was becoming painfully clear that his storybook romance with Sunflower was going to have an all-too-mundane and sordid ending, and that he was never going to recover his one moment of glory as the Radical, golden ace hero of the Movement who had battled the forces of repression, back-to-back with the Lizard King in People's Park.

But Sprout - she had been what he lived for, what he fought for, every minute since she was born. He had sacrificed more than he ever imagined he had for her.

These bastards had her. That meant he would do what they asked. Period.

Or at least until I figure out a way to call my friends.

Something the CIA spook said snagged his preconscious mind, and snapped his attention back like an elastic band.

"What are you saying, man?"

"That the Black Trump virus has a flaw," Casaday replied, "which you are going to help us correct."

Mark stopped dead. Layton grabbed his arm, applied his pain grip again. "No way."

Casaday laughed as if that was the funniest thing he'd heard all month. "Yes, way," he said. "Dr. Meadows, permit me to introduce your research associates, Dr. Carter Jarnavon and Oberstleutnant Gunther Ditmar."

They had reached the underground lab's far end, where desks and computer workstations formed a U-shaped niche. Two men stood waiting. Both were evident Westerners of medium height. That summed up their similarities.

The first wore a lab coat, horn-rimmed glasses, and an expression of earnestness that elsewhere and elsewhen might have been comical. "I'm Jarnavon," he said, thrusting out a pale hand. "I can't tell you how honored I am to meet you, Dr. Meadows. I've read everything you ever published. You were something of an idol of mine, growing up. A pioneer in my field in genetic engineering."

Mark looked down at the hand as if it had died some time ago and begun to smell. Jarnavon's face fell. It was a square, near-handsome face, clean-cut, and could not possibly be as young as it looked.

"My friends call me Carter," the young man said in words that stumbled out. "I, uh, I hope you'll call me that, too."

Mark looked at the other man, who nodded crisply to him. He was a heavyset specimen in a blotched and crumpled linen suit, who stank impressively of tobacco, alcohol, sweat and mildew. He had a moon face, protuberant Baby Huey lips, and one black eyebrow that stretched right across his forehead. He wore a horrible little green fedora, with a brief feather stuck in the band, like something a Bavarian tourist might wear on a jaunt up to SchloB Neuschwannstein.

"Herr Doktor Professor Meadows," he said. From his academic German, Mark recalled that Oberstleutnant meant "lieutenant colonel." He wondered what a lieutenant colonel of anything might find to do in this lab.

"It's just Herr Doctor," Mark said reflectively. "I don't, like, have a chair anywhere."

"That's a terrible injustice," Jarnavon piped up. "If you help us here, maybe we'll be able to do something about that in the future."

"As if I have any future, if you nutcases kill off all the wild cards," Mark said. Jarnavon jerked his head back as if Mark had slapped him. "I can commit suicide a lot easier without helping you, Casaday."

"We're not asking you to commit suicide, Dr. Meadows," Casaday said briskly. "Obviously, we can protect you from the Trump when it's released. And then a simple vasectomy to make sure you don't do any more pissing in the gene pool, and we all go our separate ways.

"Yeah. Right.

Casaday chuckled. "That's why we have the Colonel, here, on the team. You might call him your incentive."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, see, not all mercenaries of the Cold War era got their jobs through Soldier of Fortune. Quite a lot were working the other side, if you catch my drift. For example, the Colonel here belonged to an elite cadre dispatched by the former East German Stasi to the far corners of the Earth. They specialized in teaching the fine points of physical interrogation to Third World counterintelligence agencies."

Ditmar smiled a greasy smile. "Heart and minds," he said.

"The Colonel is a second-generation torturer," Casaday said. "His father worked for the Gestapo before the Soviets caught him. Then he worked for them. Gunther here was raised in the business, so to speak."

He nodded. The two men in black pajamas thrust Sprout at the German. Mark tried to intercept her, but Layton held him back. Ditmar grabbed the girl, held her. His hands were unusually large, with long fingers. Despite his flabbiness he held the writhing Sprout without apparent effort.

"So," Casaday said. "The problem with our Black Trump is that it only remains viable for three to four generations. What we need you to do is fiddle with this bug until it gets more staying power."

He looked significantly at Ditmar. The former East German stroked Sprout's long blond hair with the back of one stranglers hand and smiled wetly at Mark.

"If you actually do the work for us, and don't jack us around, not only will we make sure you get to live, but I won't let Gunther here play with your baby girl. Am I generous, or what?"

"Please prove obstreperous, Dr. Meadows." Ditmar said. Along with his Katzenjammer Kids accent, he had trouble pronouncing his "r"s, which made him sound like a Nazi Elmer Fudd. The threat's cartoonish quality, combined with the sick certainty that this wasn't a fucking game, pierced Mark like a stainless steel probe to the medulla.

The torturer smiled. His upper right canine was steel.

"I like little blond girls," he said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"How do I look?" Jerry Strauss asked as he inspected himself in the mirror. Her voice was low, throaty, seductive.

"You look more like Peregrine than Peregrine does," Jay reassured him.

"Just so no one expects me to fly." Jerry fluttered his huge white wings nervously and tugged down on the hem of the short black dress so it revealed a shade more cleavage.

"That's too much, Jay," Bradley Finn said. "You can see the top of his nipples."

"Her nipples," Jay corrected. Pronouns were confusing when dealing with his junior partner.

"Whatever," Finn said irritably. He shifted the cumbersome minicam from one shoulder to the other. "Peregrine never wears anything that revealing."

"Oh, I don't know," Jay said. "You ever see her Playboy layout? Anyway, at the moment we're more concerned about Eric Fleming's dick than Peri's TV-Q."

"If his dick works anything like mine, we're on the right track," Sascha Starfin put in. "I believe I'm in love."

Jay couldn't resist a glance down at the front of Sascha's trousers. There was an impressive tenting effect going on. "Looks like love to me," he admitted.

Jerry turned around to see for himself. "Sorry, Sascha, I'm saving myself for Mister Fleming." He gave his wings a coquettish flutter.

"Your lips are saying no, but your mind is shouting yes, yes, yes!" Sascha replied, smoothing his pencil-thin mustache with the back of his hand. With mirrorshades in place to cover the smooth skin where most people kept their eyes, Sascha could pass as a nat, and his telepathy - though limited to surface thoughts - was a real plus in any interrogation.

Bradley Finn was getting annoyed. "This goddamned camera is heavy. Are we going to do this or not?"

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

The rental company had delivered the mini van to the hotel parking lot. Jay got in the driver's side door, realized that the steering wheel was missing, and slid over. Jerry-Peri started to get in beside him, until her wings got tangled up in the door frame. "How the hell does she ever sit down with these things sticking out of her back?" he complained.

"I think they fold up somehow," Finn put in from the back of the van, where he and Sascha were loading the minicam and the sound equipment.

"Maybe hers fold up," Jerry-Peri said. "Mine don't seem to." She-he gave an annoyed flap, and feathers went flying everywhere. Somehow he-she managed to get inside the van, hunched over and wedged around sideways in the passenger seat. The little black dress had hiked up over her crotch, and the dark shadow of her pubic hair was visible through her white silk panties. Glancing over, Jay had to admit that the view looked just like he remembered from Playboy. When Jerry did an impersonation, he went all the way.

"It's a short drive," Jay said, turning the ignition. He flicked the lever to signal that he was pulling out, and his wiper blades started up. This driving-on-the-wrong-side business wasn't going to be as simple as it looked.

On the way there, Finn started getting anxious. "Do you really think this hare-brained scheme is going to work? Fleming is a Card Shark, he hates wild cards, why would he consent to an interview with Peregrine?"

"He hates wild cards but he loves actresses, models, and sexy babes," Jay said. "When a man's good sense says one thing and his dick says something else, bet on his dick every time. Trust me, I went to detective school."

"What if he decides to check our credentials?" Finn asked. "What if he phones New York and finds out the real Peregrine is right there taping her show, half a world away from Australia?"

"Now why would he do something like that?" Jay asked.

"I don't know why," Finn said. Jay could see his long blond tail flicking nervously in the rearview mirror. "Maybe he's paranoid. Maybe he's cautious. Maybe he's a member of a secret conspiracy and he's used to checking out everything, just in case. Just assume for a moment that he does check, and he finds out that Creighton isn't really Peregrine, what then?"

"Then we're fucked," Jay said, as he pulled up in front of the offices of the Townsville Drover.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

There were bars on the hut window through which Mark watched his daughter. Beyond that, he had to admit her quarters weren't bad. Though the one-room structure looked like an ordinary bamboo hut, it was sealed, with air-conditioning inside, as the chill beating off the glass windowpane demonstrated. There was a bed and a dresser, and a pile of colorful stuffed toys including Sprout's favorite pink bear. Sprout herself sat on a stool with her back to the window, while two Black Karen women in black pajamas fussed over her hair.

"These dinks think we're funny-looking," O. K. Casaday remarked, "but they can't get enough of that long blond hair."

"Huh," Mark grunted. He turned away. The movement apparently tweaked the peripheral vision of one of the local women, eliciting a reaction Sprout caught - because suddenly her face was pressed against the window, muffled voice screaming, "Daddy! Daddy!"

Mark turned back, pressed his lips to the glass over hers for a kiss. Then he tore himself free and went loping across the compound with great-legged strides, tears pouring down his face. Big black crows picking over the hard-packed earth jumped up out of his path with caws of complaint and wheeled into the red explosion of sunset over the evergreen-oak woods.

"You see, Meadows?" asked Casaday, matching Mark stride for stride. "We're not total monsters. We believe in the carrot as well as the stick. Wait'll you see your quarters; they're even plusher."

Mark moistened his lips with his tongue, forced himself to think about something other than Sprout and the danger he had placed her in by being - what? Too smart? Too weak? He had no idea what he might have done differently, but he could not shake the conviction that he was to blame.

"Quite an operation you got here," he said huskily. "I saw the poppy fields on the flight in. Aren't you afraid a KH-12 will spot them?"

Casaday's face creased in a frown. "Where in hell does a hippie burnout hear about the Keyhole bird?"

Mark just looked at him. Casaday laughed and slapped his substantial forehead. "Of course. Where did I leave my brain today? Your dad used to be head of the Space Command."

"And I used to be Chancellor of Free Vietnam," Mark said. "I know a little bit about American spy satellites."

"Well, think about who actually owns and operates the birds. That's why we have such good leverage on Marshal Hti, here. If it weren't for our goodwill, the DEA could feed the Myanmar government the serial numbers on the guards' fucking rifles. Rangoon goons would hit this camp like a plague of fucking locusts.

"I thought the U.S. had repudiated you bastards."

"You mean us Sharks?" Casaday snorted. "Well, officially - too bad that Jesus-freak asshole Barnett turned out to be such a wimp, but fuck, what do you expect from politicians? They have no balls, by definition. No, we're outside the law now, just like your favorite Mel Gibson character. And just like your favorite Mel Gibson character, we still have some friends on the inside, if you know what I mean."

"I don't have a favorite Mel Gibson character," Mark said.

His quarters were fairly nice as trailers went. Mark always had a sort of prejudice against them, which he vaguely suspected was class-based. It was one of the old metal rounded hunchbacked ones, maybe thirty feet long and about twelve wide, with a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. There was even a TV with remote-control and VCR, hooked into the compound's satellite dish. Though the consumer electronics were reasonably up-to-date, Mark suspected the trailer itself dated from the Vietnam War. The furnishings were comfortable enough, smelling only slightly of wet rot, and the air-conditioning was sufficient to keep the awful daytime heat at bay.

Not bad. For Hell.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ireland, as Ray watched it unroll outside the limo's window, was the greenest country he'd ever seen. The blush of early summer was on the land. Cottages gleamed whitely among the emerald lawns and fields. Roses were scattered about like unburning red stars. It gave Ray the creeps. Made him feel like he'd fallen onto a postcard.

They drove from the airport to a hotel on the outskirts of Dublin where Flint dropped them off.

"You're sure we can't help in the search, Brigadier?" Harvest asked.

The British ace shook his head ponderously. "I doubt anyone would open up to strangers. We have local men canvassing the villages and farms, looking for witnesses to the parachuting. Besides, you should rest after your long flight. With any luck we'll turn something up by tomorrow."

They got adjoining rooms. Ray was still restless and edgy, despite or maybe because he hadn't slept during the crossing. He tried watching television but there was nothing interesting on the few available channels. For awhile he watched a sport that seemed to be a cross between football, soccer, and free-lance mayhem, but he couldn't figure out the rules and the thick accents of the announcers annoyed him. He shut off the TV, paced the room for awhile, then stopped before the connecting door between his room and Harvest's. He knocked and heard a faint, "Come in," from the other side of the door.

Harvest was sitting up in bed, poring over one of her ever-present dossiers. She still wore her skirt but had taken off her blouse to reveal a blue-satin and lace teddy.

"I thought," Ray said, "we should talk or something. Make some plans."

Harvest smiled. "Or something?" she said.

Why the hell not? Ray thought. He crossed the room, leaned over and braced himself with his arms against the headboard. He kissed Harvest hard. He pulled back after a moment, and looked down at her and smiled.

She slugged him. It wasn't a slap or a gentle tap. It was a shot to the jaw that rocked his head back.

"Hey!" he protested.

"Nobody kisses me without my permission," she said, staring hard at him.

Ray rubbed his jaw. "Well, excuse me for not asking - "

"All right," Harvest said. She grabbed his tie and yanked. He wasn't expecting it. He fell down on top of her. She held his tie as she pulled his face to hers and kissed him fiercely. Her tongue went into his mouth and fought with his.

"Hummpphh."

Ray wanted to say something but her mouth swallowed his words, and then he quickly forgot what he was going to say anyway. She released his tie and rolled him over so that she was on top, straddling him. She unzipped and shimmied out of her skirt. Underneath she wore silk stockings and a garter belt that matched her teddy. She looked down at him, still smiling.

"You're a big talker, Ray. How are you for action?"

"I think you'll find that I'm big enough."

"We'll see," she said, and tore his shirt open, sending buttons flying all over the room.

Sometime later, the phone rang. Ray reached over her and picked it up.

"Hello," said Flint's whispery voice. It sounded even more ghost-like over the phone. "I trust I'm not interrupting anything."

"Nope," Ray said. "Close though."

"We found two parachutes abandoned near a field. Only the field was outside Belfast, not Dublin."

"Damn Bushorn," Ray said. "We've lost another day to his lies."

"It's too late to do anything tonight. Tomorrow we'll motor to Belfast. I'll ring you up first thing in the morning."

"First thing," Ray said. He hung up the phone and leaned back on his side.

Harvest was looking at him. During their love making she had shed her teddy. She lay against the sheets, exposing her lithe, athletic body to Ray's appreciative gaze.

"You hear what the whispering rock had to say?"

She nodded. "Enough. We'd better get some sleep." She swiveled onto her side and slung a silk-clad thigh over Ray's hip. "Take my stockings off."

Ray grinned. "It'll be a pleasure."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

FIVE

"Gregg, is meeting Churchill really going to do any good?"

Hannah asked the question in the dark of the room. Brian and the Fists had taken them to a run-down apartment building deep in the warrens of the Belfast jokertown while the message to Churchill was sent. It will take a few days, Brian had said. But he'll get it. Scarlet Will was just outside the door, and Gregg knew the man was there as much to guard against them leaving as to protect them.

Hannah sat on the sagging mattress of the bed; Gregg hopped up alongside her. The only light in the room was what managed to get through the grimy windowshade that looked out onto an alley and the building across from them.

"I know Churchill," Gregg told her. "I've met Winston several times, and he's solidly on the side of the wild carders. He's publicly admitted he's infected by the virus himself - and I'd say the wild card gave him extended life, since the man was born in 1874. He'll help us."

"If we can get to him."

"There's that, yes."

Hannah laughed in the twilight. "Well, I'll give you credit for trying. And Gregg, thanks for what you did before. I think you probably saved my life."

"Don't worry about it."

"I do." Hannah stroked him, her hand moving from his head down the rolled, bristly flank. Gregg watched her face, watched the way the smile wavered as she touched him. Gregg found himself pushing up, trying to prolong the touch. The reaction was instinctive, automatic. Hannah pulled away, just slightly. Her eyes questioned. "Gregg?"

"Hannah, I - " Gregg didn't know how to answer. He didn't know what he wanted; didn't know what his body wanted. He wasn't sure how this body responded sexually; he wasn't even sure it had a sexual response. He could feel odd sensations along his lower flank, sensual. Hannah's hand, brushing the wiry clumps of hair, was a delicious agony, and something bright neon-orange and bifurcated like a divining rod was protruding low down on his body.

"Oh," Hannah said. Her hand came away. She moved away from him - just a few inches, but they both noticed the instinctive retreat. "Gregg, I'm ..." There were tears in her eyes now, and she bit her lower lip, her breath trembling. Her gaze went to her hands, on her lap.

He could have deflected her apology. He could have made a joke, could have dropped down on all sixes again so that the embarrassing, unbidden erection couldn't be seen. He didn't. You see? She's disgusted by you. She can't even look at you.

"Gregg, I don't know ... I don't know if I can." A breath. Her blue eyes found him again, but she would not look down the length of his body. "I'm sorry. Look, give me some time, and maybe ... I didn't mean to ..."

"Didn't mean to arouse me?" Gregg seemed to say it in concert with an inner voice. A bitter laugh followed the words.

The tears were tracking down the side of her face. Part of Gregg felt pity for her obvious emotional torment. I understand, he wanted to say. I'm sorry, too. But he didn't. "No," she said. "Gregg, look ... Shit ... I'm the one who's failing here. Can you understand? It shouldn't make any difference, not after all you've meant to me ..." Her voice trailed off.

"But it does?"

Hannah nodded.

Bitch ... The erection was fading, withdrawing back into his body. Gregg dropped until only his first two segments were up. Hannah watched him. Her hands were on her lap again, her eyes were rimmed with tears. Nat bitch ...

"It's okay," he said. "I know what I look like."

"Gregg - "

"Like you said," Gregg told her, and he knew that the very understanding of his tone was cutting at her soul, tearing at her. He liked knowing that. "Give it some time. We have more pressing problems." Hannah was looking at him bleakly, and he continued, enjoying the hurt in her face. "I figure that our message will get to Churchill sometime tomorrow - the details I put in there should convince him that I am who I am. I know Churchill; he's not going to be able to resist the invitation to meet. Brian should hear from him soon. So - "

"Gregg, I'm so sorry."

"Don't worry. It's not that important" he told her, and he saw the way she grasped at that, the way she gave him a weak, uncertain smile. She clutched at the lie, wanting to believe it: "It's not important at all."

But it really is, isn't it, Greggie? It really is....

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Nanotechnology," Carter Jarnavon said, with the air of a benediction. "That's where the promise for the future lies."

Mark sat in one of those terrible spring-loaded office chairs that tempts you to lean far back and dumps you on your cranium if you do, leafing through printout of the lab journal of an anonymous researcher. He wondered idly what parts beside the name had been cut out.

The researcher had modified a comparatively mild droplet-carried human-virulent flu virus - affecting both nats and wild cards - by hanging a Black Trump gene on its DNA:

"For the control cultures, in which the wild card initiator sequence isn't present in the DNA, the Black Trump has nowhere to attach on the genome, so it and the transposon remain as junk floating around in the cell. The carrier - a much less dangerous virus - proliferates instead.

"In the wild card cell cultures, the Black Trump attaches at the initiator site on the DNA. The linked transposon element wildly recombines and reproduces the Black Trump, causing random genetic insertion and throwing the cell immediately into lytic phase. The cells burst, dispersing the Black Trump virus to other cells.

"In theory this should be deadly. But the 94-15-04-24LQ virus got progressively weaker as it was transmitted from cell to cell...."

"I was working in nanotech," Jarnavon said almost dreamily, sitting on the stool with hands clasped between his knees. "Pioneering work. Vital work. Work that could have transformed the world."

Mark almost smiled. The nameless researcher had succeeded too well. Virus 94-15-04-24LO, dubbed necrovirus Takis I, was so mutable that in reproducing it created versions of itself that, while less lethal, managed to out-compete the original. As it was, it was nasty enough to kill up to four generations of hosts.

But it would hardly suffice to rid the world of aces, jokers, and ever-elusive dormant carriers.

"I had a grant from the DEA. It was written to research a self-replicating assembler, that's something like a robot virus you can program to perform tasks - " A chuckle, accompanied by a quick thumb-stab to slide heavy-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose. "Not that I need to tell you that, Doctor. This assembler was designed to wipe out the world's supply of coca plants, and end the cocaine plague once and for all."

The uncontrollable self-mutation of the Black Trump, Strain I, added another joker to the deck, so to speak. It could conceivably mutate into something that would burst cell-walls without being triggered by attachment to the original wild card sequence. That would make the virus as deadly to nats as wild cards - the deadliest plague in human history.

"Worthy as that goal was - and achievable, too, I'm sure you understand - that wasn't the project I was really working on. I was actually put to work on a project to achieve control of the human mind through nanotechnology. Programmed happiness - no more disobedience to authority, no more self-destructive behavior. Utopia. And that led me to you, Dr. Meadows."

The journal promised results on a Black Trump II, 94-04-28-24LQ, "by Sunday." And that was all she wrote. Sunday never came, the old song had it, and evidently it hadn't.

Jarnavon's words in filtrated Mark's forebrain. He glanced up and blinked through the round lenses. "Huh?"

The younger man nodded, smiling a smug toad's smile. "To you. To the journals describing your own hegira through the labyrinth of human consciousness. We have them, you know - Drug Enforcement, that is."

Mark struggled to shift the gears of his mind. Hegira? It was as if he had fallen into a recursive looking-glass world, defined by laboratory journals.

"You looked through my notebooks?" Suddenly rising outrage burned his cheeks. He felt violated - that this hackwork Frankenstein wanna-be had raped his personal diaries with his eyes, in the service of his ancient nemesis, the DEA.

The young man bobbed his head. "Yes, yes, and a treasure they were. You truly could not grasp the vistas you would help to unfold, Doctor."

No, Mark thought, I damned well didn't. "I helped you design a mind-control nanodevice?" he asked in horror.

"No." Jarnavon said sadly. "Someone blabbed. A reporter caught wind of it, started asking questions. Oh, the Agency had the meddling bitch strangled in her BMW, got 60 Minutes to help make it look as if she'd been in with the Medellin cartel and gotten burned by them. But by then the damage was done; bleeding hearts were asking questions in Congress. We shut down; we just couldn't handle exposure."

He shook his head. "But you if anybody know what it's like to be afflicted by those who lack vision, Dr. Meadows."

Yes, Mark thought. And most of them are friends of yours. He realized, then, that what he very much wanted to do was to kill Dr. Carter Jarnavon.

And here I thought I didn't have any innocence left to lose.

He forced his attention back to the sheaf of computer paper. From the viewpoint of the Card Sharks, the nameless scientist had not gone far enough. From Mark's point of view he or she had gone much too far. Because the researcher had recorded clearly - so clearly even a layman like Casaday could comprehend, never mind Jarnavon - what needed to be done to enhance the virus' lethality.

Ironically, it was to make it less lethal, by inhibiting its self-recombinant action. The journal even outlined a possible way to do that: omit the transposon.

Mark let the printout fall into his lap. Jarnavon gazed at him with shining eyes. Mark met the gaze, even offered a watery smile. Takis-instilled caginess was kicking in.

How good is he? he wondered. His experience of the DEA suggested that they were fully capable of hiring an incompetent to run their mind-control research. They had set nincompoops to pursue him around half the world, after all; why not a half-baked scientist? Certainly they had hooked themselves somebody who showed few signs of having all his marbles.

He can read the journal as well as I can. That means he's not good enough to carry the work forward himself, or Sprout and I would still be in Saigon. For a moment Mark found the inner space actually to be amused at himself, for missing his multiple life in Free Vietnam.

We never know when we're well off. It occurred to him to wonder when the time would arrive at which he looked back at now and thought, those were the good old days. He stifled a shudder.

"It's late," he said, glancing at the old-fashioned analog dock - meaning, with hands - on the walls. The hands said it was after eight. "I need to knock it off. I've had a tough couple of days."

"Certainly, certainly." Jarnavon bounced to his feet and stuck out his hand like a victorious tennis player. "Until tomorrow, Doctor."

His handshake was cool, dry, and surprisingly strong. Is he good enough to know if I fake it? Is he good enough to know if I try to recombine the virus into something harmless, or try to poison the whole batch? Mark had no aptitude for intrigue, though God knew he'd been exposed to it enough since he was driven underground. He would have to do his best to draw the enthusiastic young scientist out, learn just what he might expect to slip by him.

Because, otherwise, Mark Meadows would have to decide between sacrificing his daughter Sprout, or the lives of every wild card on Earth.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The letters crawled before Zoe's eyes, black bugs on a paperback page yellowed by the lamp over her bunk. She had been staring at the same paragraph of Shell Games for what seemed like hours, trying not to think.

Visions of the stone catacombs of Jerusalem crept around the edges of the page to haunt her. She couldn't forget the feel of the dead Ukrainian's skin under her hands or the hatred in the New York skinheads' eyes when they brought her father down. She saw the stubby claws on Bjorn's dead feet, naked for any passerby to stare at and cringe. Look, there's a joker man! A dead joker man, whose daughter lay on a narrow bunk in a tiny cabin on a rusty freighter in the Black Sea, playing teamster to the worst abomination humans had managed to invent yet.

In Odessa, someone must be putting the pieces together by now. Any moment, someone would come with guns. Any moment.

But maybe no one had reported the deaths. Maybe no one had looked for the warehouse boss for hours, and hadn't said anything when they found him. Maybe nothing would happen.

She couldn't stand it anymore. Up, across the cabin, back to the bunk, to the door again. If she didn't find something to distract her, she'd go mad. Zoe leaned against the cabin door, thinking - I'll get dressed and find somebody to talk to. Yes.

Who? She couldn't talk to anyone on the ship. Zoe pounded her fist against the door and sat back down on the bunk.

Probably some of the crew spoke English, but she couldn't chat them up. She wasn't Zoe Harris, she was a nameless "wife" of a Turkish entrepreneur and she had to stay in character. She couldn't even talk to Croyd. He was gone, prowling about the ship in the night hours, hanging out in crew quarters or trying to work up a poker game. He didn't sleep and he didn't stay in the cabin much.

Above her, on the deck, heavy footsteps rushed toward the rail. Zoe heard words that had to be curses, unmistakable even though they were Russian curses, full of gutturals she didn't understand. They would come and get her; she knew it. Zoe pulled on a black sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans. She didn't want to die naked.

Something metallic clanged against the side of the ship.

Who was up there? The Card Sharks, whoever they might turn out to be? The Russian Army, hot to recover a stolen and extremely embarrassing nuclear device?

We're dead, Zoe thought. All of us, the captain who smiles and thinks I'm a mute of some sort, the sailors, who are just working guys trying to get by. All of us. It's an answer of sorts. Let them sink us here, let this hellish bomb sink to pollute the fishes. Let it be over.

Barefoot, she climbed the ladder that led to the bridge and stopped short at the open doorway that looked out on deck.

Russian sailors were popping up over the side of the ship. Russian sailors with big, ugly guns. She heard the captain's voice, gone oily and smooth, explaining something to a short, thick officer who carried no gun that Zoe could see.

She felt a split second's warmth behind her, someone close. Before she could turn, a hand snaked past her neck and strong fingers clamped themselves over her mouth.

"Shh!" Croyd whispered. Zoe choked back a scream. "Cargo. Fast."

He turned toward the hold. Zoe followed him past the closed doors that led into the four tiny cabins, through the hatch into the cargo space.

"They'll search," Croyd said. He dogged the hatch behind them. "The Captain says he's running a Ukrainian ship, not a Russian one. The Russians say they're searching anyway. Something about medical radioactives that got into some crates accidentally." Croyd scooted down the ladder, talking as he went. Zoe came down behind him. "Fuck, Zoe. The Russians know a bomb's missing, and they won't even talk about it to each other."

They would have Geiger counters, then. Zoe looked at the row of irrigation pumps lined up in the ship's hold.

The stocky Russian officer opened the hatch from the deck. He turned and began to climb down the ladder. No gun. He had a black case strung over his neck on a strap. He was facing the bulkhead, not the murky cargo hold. Zoe grabbed the neck of her sweatshirt and tried to tear it.

"Zoe! Are you crazy? They'll see us!"

"I can't help it, I've got to fix the counter or we've had it. Shit! Help me with this, would you?"

Croyd, looking baffled, tugged at the thick fabric.

"Rip it!" Zoe hissed.

The neckline tore. The Russian officer had reached the deck, and turned at the sound. Croyd dropped the cloth as if it burned his hands. Zoe screamed and swung her open hand at Croyd. It smacked against his face with a satisfying sound.

Someone hit the light switches, probably the captain, who clambered down the ladder behind the Russian. Bare yellow bulbs gave enough light to see pathways through the stacked crates. Zoe sobbed, twisted away from Croyd, and ran across the deck toward the Russian. The sobs were real, generated from sheer, sick terror. Under her bare feet, the rough metal decking made her clumsy, and that made her look even more helpless than she felt. Good. She held the torn sweatshirt across her breasts like a towel. When she got close to the Russian, she reached out for him. The sweatshirt sagged baring her nipples. Zoe stumbled into the Russian's arms and buried her face against his shoulder. She got a close look at the instrument slung across his chest. It had a screen like an oscilloscope, tiny flashes appearing and fading. The little box ticked like a drunken cricket.

Now, if Croyd would just think!

The Russian, gentleman that he was, tightened his arms around her while Croyd shouted something. The Russian replied. Zoe cringed against the man's chest as if to take shelter and tried to imagine the innards of a Russian particle detector. Two Russian sailors climbed down the ladder and took up positions beside the Captain. They held their guns at the ready. They were children, Zoe realized, still in their teens.

Croyd held both hands open in what seemed to be exasperation. He came forward slowly, talking nonstop.

Copper wire. There had to be copper wire that led from the battery to power this thing, there had to be a metal snapper that made the tapping little cricket sound, or a diaphragm of some kind. She didn't know which phosphor was making the little flashes on the screen. Opaque the screen? No, too obvious. Zoe took a deep breath and sobbed it out toward the little box. There. The copper wiring would slowly draw itself thinner, and then coalesce into tiny spheres, beads that would separate and begin to rattle, maybe. So be it.

Croyd began to sound like he was begging her to forgive him. Zoe peeked at him from under the officers sheltering arm.

"Zoe?" Croyd asked.

Zoe drew away from the Russian. She ran to Croyd, grabbed his face in both hands, and gave him a passionate kiss.

Croyd shrugged. The Russian shrugged. The captain smiled, but the smile faded as the Russian officer began to explore the rows of stacked crates, his gadget in his hand.

It ticked as he walked along, but the ticks were keeping a steady rhythm. He frowned at the screen, shook it, and then continued to walk through the cartons. Zoe hoped she had the timing right. He went past the pumps. Zoe held her breath, but the officer kept walking at a steady pace, his eyes on the instrument's little screen. The officer passed the pump and Zoe sighed. Croyd's arm tightened around her shoulders.

The officer nodded as if he were satisfied, but he barked out a couple of orders in Russian and motioned to his sailors. They began to open crates, an activity which led to protests by the Ukrainian captain. More sailors appeared, called down from the deck. They looked with disinterest at barrels of barley and bales of textiles. They poked at the four irrigation pumps and didn't seem to fiid them interesting at all. They were more interested in a crate of Japanese VCRs.

Zoe stayed huddled in Croyd's arms, watching the search. A deal was struck. A few of the VCRs got handed up the ladder, and the sailors disappeared.

Croyd nuzzled his nose against Zoe's neck like the fond lover he was supposed to be. He whispered in her ear. "I'll go find out what the captain thinks about all this," he whispered. "Go back to the cabin, okay?"

"I'll be on deck," Zoe said. "Come and tell me, damn it!"

The officer smiled in the direction of Zoe's chest as he went by. He hauled himself up the ladder, puffing at the exertion.

Zoe waited until Croyd had time to get to the bridge. She climbed up the ladder and went to her on-deck retreat, a niche between two pallets of fertilizer sacks, hot and stuffy in the daytime but cool enough, cold, in the hazy night. She'd spent a few hours here while the freighter made its way from port to port, abominably slow, business as usual and plenty of time for tea to be sipped and packages to come and go in the hold.

A corner of tarp made a little tent for her. The bow watch probably knew she came there, but the boy never bothered her.

Zoe couldn't see anything that looked like a Russian ship. The sailors seemed to have disappeared into the water.

From the north, a pair of huge helicopters buzzed out of the night. Zoe could see fat guns slung beneath their bellies. She pressed her back against the sacks and huddled under her tarp, holding her torn shirt over her shoulders. The choppers cruised over the deck, bathing it in spotlights that cast crazy shadows as they passed by. They finished their pass and went away, but not far. She could hear them. Damn. Stay here? Go back to the cabin, a metal box where she felt like a trapped rat? Oh, damn. She sat frozen, afraid to move.

The choppers made another pass. In the darkness that followed, Croyd slipped across the deck and ducked under the tarp beside her.

"Were not going to get shoved overboard because our captain is a Moldovan," Croyd said. "Don't ask me to explain how that is, I couldn't quite figure it. The Russians didn't find anything, and the captain of the Russian sub is probably going to report that the whole deal about the medical radioactives was a false alarm. But they might just shoot us out of the water anyway, for practice."

"That's comforting," Zoe said. The choppers buzzed in the distance, circling for another pass.

"Well, the Russian Navy will probably keep anybody else from bothering us, at least for a few nights.

"Does our captain have a clue about what's going on here?" Zoe asked.

"No," Croyd said. "I came on like I was an offended passenger. I didn't hear a word about anything wrong in Odessa. Somebody must be keeping that little scene real quiet. Figure it, Zoe. The guy we bought this thing from is a crook even to the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians want the Russians to take all the warheads out of the Ukraine, and the Russians don't have the resources to do it. And anyway, Snailfoot said the KGB were the only ones who ever had access to the arming devices. So the Ukrainian we bought this thing from had to be part of the KGB, because he promised the Black Dog he could deliver the whole package. The Ukrainians probably figure somebody did them a favor."

Snailfoot's lecture ran in her head, his proper British accent making the words even more terrible. The Russians won't tell the West, even if they discover that a warhead has been stolen. Why? You don't dismantle a tradition of secrecy that easily. And other warheads are missing, or so we hear. The numbers don't add up, and no one has admitted it yet.

But don't think about that. It's not part of the plan.

"Searches are routine, the captain says. He says he gets boarded about twice a year. That's why he always carries a few portable goodies to get confiscated. Keeps the sailors happy," Croyd said.

The choppers came in low, buzzing the deck. Their blue-white lights angled across the deck and made it seem to tilt. Croyd squeezed closer to Zoe and slipped his arm behind her back, hugging her in a painful grip. He was trembling, from speed or terror or just because he was wired that way. She hoped it wasn't speed, not yet. The choppers lifted away, leaving the two of them in the dark again.

"I guess they didn't like the brand name on the VCRs," Zoe said.

"I told the Captain to stock CD players next time. Are there any of those cookies left? The ones your mom sent?"

"Rugelach," Zoe said. "You ate them all, Croyd."

"That was a nice kiss you gave me back there when the Russian was watching," Croyd said. "Isn't fear supposed to be an aphrodisiac?"

"So they say," Zoe said. Out in the water, a dark tower rose from the water and sank away again, the Russian sub, still nearby.

"I don't get much chance at relationships," Croyd said. "I never know what shape I'll be in when I wake up again. I'd hate to waste this body. It's as close to standard as I seem to get these days."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I woke up as a lizard once. A lot of women don't think lizards are sexy."

But some women might, Zoe figured from the way he said it. She shivered, her sweatshirt not enough protection from the nights wet air. Croyd pulled her close. He was warm, not at all like a lizard. He was warm and alive, and Zoe found that the lizard part of her brain, the old primitive part of it, was screaming for dominance. Let me live, it moaned. Turn off the horrors and let me live.

"We could check out the systems," Croyd said.

Check out the systems? How technical! "Croyd! I'm not a test pilot!" Zoe scrambled out from under the tarp. She hurried across the dark deck, down to the enclosed cabin.

It was stuffy. It was lonely. She wasn't sleepy; there was too much adrenaline charging through her system for sleep to be even a remote possibility. She paced the three steps of the cabin's length and back again. She couldn't stop thinking. She couldn't think.

The choppers made another pass, close enough to vibrate the walls, and she ducked. The Russians might have given up and let the Ukrainians know that a warhead was missing, that they had traced it to the Odessa docks. They would never tell the Turks, or anyone in the West, what had happened, but they might sink every ship in the Black Sea before morning, just as a precaution. This might be the last night of her life. She deserved to die. She wanted to die, if dying would erase Anne's cancer, her father's death, the horrors in New York that had driven her to an uncertain refuge in the war zone that was Jerusalem.

But the Black Dog intended to keep this bomb from ever being used, and the Escorts could get out of Jerusalem in payment for her help. And she lived, every cell, every breath toned by a respite from terror and ready to keep on living, to exult in life.

She was horny. Croyd? Well, she was stuck with him for a while. Sex had become a remote possibility in her life. There hadn't been anyone since Turtle. Turtle had been so sweet. Turtle had taught her how to relax. She wished he hadn't disappeared back to the West Coast. She wished he weren't so happy with Danny. But she liked Danny. Messing up somebody else's nest wasn't a game Zoe cared to play, thank you. Zoe picked up Turtle's book and paced the cabin again.

Croyd had cut that man's throat without even blinking. Croyd wasn't a nice person at all.

Croyd knew she was an ace. If she animated a few things when she got excited, he wasn't likely to freak out. She couldn't hate him for killing the Mideasterner. It had to be done. She'd killed a man herself, once. And she was aroused, she could feel energies in the air around her. Why not Croyd?

She breathed lightly on Turtle's book. Shell Games sailed through the air and landed on the bed. It lay on its back and clapped its pages like hands.

Someone tapped at the door. Zoe frowned at the book. It jumped to the floor beside the bunk and quit quivering.

She opened the door for Croyd. He was grinning, and he held a sack behind his back as if it were a surprise birthday present.

"Would you mind some company?" Croyd asked. "I think it's going to be a long night."

"I don't know. This is hardly my idea of a romantic setting." Zoe waved her hand at the crowded cabin. It was painted in institutional green enamel, richly incised with Cyrillic graffiti. The bunk was rock-hard and covered with a scratchy brown army blanket, its surface peppered with random holes from cigarette burns.

Croyd stepped toward the bunk and put his sack down. "I'll see what we can do about the ambience," he said. He pulled out a candle, a saucer to stand it in, a bottle of champagne beaded with condensation, and two thick, brown pottery mugs, slightly chipped.

"Champagne?"

"I bought it from the captain. I said it was to settle your nerves."

"You're supposed to be a good Muslim," Zoe said.

Croyd said something in Turkish.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Today, I drink. Tomorrow, Allah forgives."

The thud of the diesels speeded up and the ship began to heave, lumbering through the swells at a faster pace.

"We're running for the Turkish coast. Full speed ahead," Croyd said. He held a match to the bottom of the candle and set it carefully in its saucer. "There."

The choppers buzzed by again, as loud as freight trains. They left relative quiet betiind them, the ship silent except for the booming of the diesels.

"The choppers won't come back," Croyd said.

"Do you know that for sure?"

"No." He set the mugs down by the candle. "I'll need some sort of towel to get the cork out of this champagne."

Zoe turned off the overhead light, pulled her torn sweatshirt over her head, and tossed it to Croyd.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The message was terse and grumpy. That in and of itself told Gregg that it had come from Churchill.

Come to 9 Shannon Lane, Lamberg, nine o'clock Friday, rear entrance. A friend's house. You'll be let in. This had better be important.

Lamberg was a small village five miles outside of Belfast. Gregg and Hannah were driven there by the Fists, in the rear of a panel van. Scarlet Will, driving the van, stopped down the street from the rear gates of the house. "We let you two out here," Brian said to Gregg and Hannah. "We'll drive around a bit, then stop down at the next corner, where we can see the gates. When you come out, head this way."

Gregg slid down the rear of the van, Hannah following. Brian shut the door after them; the van moved away in a puff of blue exhaust. The house was surrounded by a tall fieldstone wall. The street, well away from the village center, was quiet and dark, though there were spotlights up near the wrought iron gates that broke the wall. "Let's go," Hannah said, and began walking toward the gates. Gregg followed after her.

A man in the uniform of the local constabulary was standing behind the gate, his semiautomatic weapon held casually ready. "We're expected," Hannah told him. The guard looked at her, at Gregg, and let the gate swing open. When they were inside, he nodded to Hannah. "Hands out; spread your legs slightly, and turn around, please."

Hannah grimaced, then did as instructed. The guard frisked her carefully, then looked at Gregg. "And you, sir."

"Does it look like I'm hiding anything?"

"Sir?"

Gregg sighed and raised up on his rear feet. The man patted him down efficiently and quickly, then tilted his head to speak into the microphone on his lapel. "They're clean," he said. "I'm sending them up." He pointed through the trees to the house, and spoke to them. "Follow the path to the double doors. He'll be waiting there."

Gregg saw the familiar silhouette framed against the light as they approached. Churchill was short, round, and wide, and the smoke from his cigar left a fragrant, blue-white trail in the evening. He was dressed as if for a dinner engagement, though the tuxedo's coat had been exchanged for a satin-trimmed smoking jacket. He was balder than Gregg remembered, only a few wisps of white hair remaining on his head. His pudgy face was a landscape of deep wrinkles, the eyes twin dark holes in the white skin. A hand came up as they approached, fingers like short sausages grasping the cigar and pulling the well-gnawed end from his mouth. He looked at Hannah, and at Gregg.

"Our reports always said you were a womanizer," Churchill's gruff voice said. "I'm surprised you can still maintain that reputation now."

You arrogant SOB. Once I could have ... Gregg forced the irritation down. Churchill, like so many of the political leaders of the past three decades, had been a puppet of Gregg's. Now he could still sense the sour taste of the ancient man, never one of his favorites. But he had no choice now, and no way to pull those strings. "And our reports, Winston, always said you were too old to last much longer. I'm surprised you're still breathing."

Churchill barked a short laugh at that and stepped aside from the door. "You're Hartmann, all right," he said. "Come in." For a man twelve decades old, Cnurchill moved well. He shuffled like an old man, taking small, careful steps, but Gregg had seen men half Churchill's age do the same. Churchill led them to a small library, where he settled carefully into a plush leather chair, leaning back and wreathing his head in cigar smoke. He gestured to the other chairs in the room. His breath was loud and slow. "Sit, please. Would you like something? I can have the kitchen staff find something for you ..."

"No, thank you," Hannah said. Gregg just shook his head. He crawled up into one of the chairs, wriggling until he could see comfortably. Churchill took a deep draw on his cigar, letting the smoke dribble out of pursed lips.