Black Trump

"Tell me," he said to Gregg. "What was it I said to you back in 1984, when you came to see me during the WHO tour? I recall there was a moment in private where we talked about your aspirations for the presidency ..." Churchill didn't look at Gregg; his hoary eyes appraised the smoke curling around the reading light on the smoking stand alongside his chair.

"You told me that I was a 'damned, bloody fool,' if I thought that being the head of a country would bring me anything but 'an ulcer, a headache, and an early death.' You also said that kind of power was 'better than Scotch whisky, and more intoxicating.'"

Churchill chuckled, a deep, liquid sound. "Ahh, your message didn't lie then. You are Gregg Hartmann, after all. Back from the dead."

"Yes."

Churchill took a long, slow breath. "A pity. I didn't want to believe any of this." Churchill puffed on the cigar, exhaling a thundercloud of blue.

"Those are terrible for your health, you know," Hannah told him.

"At my age, young woman, you indulge in what vices you can," Churchill answered, but he set down his cigar in a bronze holder. "I know the name Hannah Davis, of course," he said to her. "I'll be frank, Miss Davis, when I first heard your tales about the Card Sharks on the news reports a year ago, I thought you were crazed. I thought Gregg crazier for supporting you." Another breath, wheezing like an asthmatic sigh. "Unfortunately, my sources tell me that far too much of what you reported was true. Pan Rudo ..." Churchill shook his head. "I've never been able to trust a Nazi, reformed or not, so I suppose I'm not surprised. Is it true, he's still alive?"

"Yes," Hannah told him. "In a fine, young, blond Aryan body." Gregg looked at her, then realizedthat she was playing to Churchill's obvious prejudices and his tolerance of attractive young women. The intelligence reports that had passed Gregg's senatorial desk had also told him about Churchill's numerous affairs. The old man sniffed, and cleared his throat.

"And you say that these Card Sharks have developed a virus to kill those infected by the wild card?"

"Yes," Gregg said. He and Hannah gave Churchill a detailed account of the past year, ending with the discovery of the virus and Rudo's escape with the vials. Churchill listened intently, occasionally interjecting a question of his own. He began smoking again. Churchill seemed to draw deeper into his chair as their tale went on, sagging and growing darkly angry with time. "Your note mentioned that at least one of the people around here is a Card Shark," Churchill said at last. "Give me his name."

"General Horvath," Gregg said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The change was a subtle thing, but palpable, like going from sunlight to shadow, a warm summer breeze to a cool autumn chill. It was as simple as passing a checkpoint on a road and crossing from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland.

The checkpoint was manned by British soldiers who took their work seriously. Not even Flint's presence granted them a pass. The soldiers examined their papers and inspected the limo before allowing them into Belfast. It was not so much that the landscape itself had changed, but that the touch of man lay heavier on it. There was more barbed wire and armed men than Ray had ever seen in his life. The people they passed seemed pinched and sullen. Belfast was more an armed camp than a peaceful confluence of a third of a million souls. Ray felt as if they'd entered a live war zone. He became fidgety, his mind revved up a notch as if it anticipated action at any moment.

Even Harvest seemed affected. She peered out the window, a slight frown creasing her forehead as she watched Belfast reel by. Only Flint remained aloof, as distant and unreadable as if sculpted from the rock that gave him his nickname.

British HQ was bustling. Men in officers' uniforms were marching to and fro with grim looks on their faces. Even the ordinary guardsmen, normally phlegmatic to the point of stoniness, seemed uptight.

"Is it always like this?" Ray asked.

"Well," Flint rumbled, "Northern Ireland is a difficult place. Very difficult. The sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants has been going on for decades. Oh, it's not continuous of course. There are periodic bits of calm. You may have heard the recent revelations that Her Majesty's Government has been holding secret talks with both sides - the Irish Republican Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Since the press has seen fit to publicize these tete-a-tetes, Her Majesty's Government has decided to bring the talks out into the open. Churchill has recently arrived to lead the negotiations. I'm afraid that General Horvath will be more concerned about security for Sir Winston than in tracking down a couple of Americans who dropped into the country illegally."

"God knows we wouldn't want something to happen to him," Ray said. "What's the fate of a hundred-and-eighty-year-old geezer compared to the rest of the world?"

There was the sound of grinding stone as Flint swiveled his neck to look down at Ray. "Sir Winston holds the fate of all of Ireland in his hands. That is not an inconsiderable burden. And he's only one hundred and twenty."

"Yeah, whatever. It'd be tragic for his life to be cut so short."

Harvest elbowed him. "Who's General Horvath?"

"The head of the British Expeditionary Force in Northern Ireland," Flint whispered.

"We don't want to keep him from his duties," Harvest said.

"Nonsense," Flint replied. "He wants to meet you and get a briefing on this Card Shark business."

"We'll tell him what we can," Ray said. He suddenly saw certain advantages to the scenario as it was shaping up. Let Horvath spend all his time nurse maiding the ancient politician, guarding him from loonies from both sides of the political spectrum who wanted to blow the old gent back into the middle of the last century. That would leave the way open for Harvest and himself to do a little poking around on their own. After they ditched the walking stiff, of course, who seemingly had been assigned to be their personal watchdog.

The walking stiff led them to an office zealously guarded by an orderly who looked as though he'd been left over from the Crimean War. He spoke quietly into the intercom on his desk, then rose, eyed the three of them with open suspicion, and opened the door to Horvath's private office.

Horvath was coming around his desk to greet them with typical British restraint as they entered the room.

"Foxworthy, good to see you," he mumbled stiffly.

"And you, Peter," Flint performed the introductions. Horvath was perfunctory with Ray, a little more effusive with Harvest, taking her hand and bowing over it.

"Good to see you. Nice to come by and chat. 'Fraid I can't offer you too much time."

"We don't want to take you away from your work," Harvest said.

"No. No. Don't worry. Sit, Here." Horvath pulled out a chair for Harvest and waved Ray to the other. Flint loomed like a cliff behind them, there being no chair in the room solid enough to take his bulk.

Ray sat. For all his clipped brusqueness, he noticed that Horvath placed Harvest where he could get a good look at her silk-clad legs. He didn't blame the general. He looked, too, and he remembered them scissored around his back, pulling him in tightly, as they made long, hard love the night before.

"Now then," Horvath said. He shuffled through some papers on his littered desk top. "Looking for two Americans. Jokers, what?"

"One joker," Harvest said, "one natural. A woman." She seemed to have caught Horvath's propensity for speaking in clipped sentences.

"Ah, yes. Here we are." He scanned one of the papers, looked up with a cocked eyebrow. "A caterpillar? Surely you jest."

Ray shook his head. "No joke." He told them all about Hartmann and Hannah Davis, omitting only the part about the Black Trump. Barnett had said to keep it secret, so he was.

Horvath listened attentively. "Extraordinary. Yellow, you say?"

Ray nodded.

"Well. My men shall be on the lookout."

"About those parachutes your men found?" Harvest prompted.

"Ah, yes." Horvath shuffled more papers. "Here we are." He handed Harvest a slim file. "Not much, I'm afraid. We'll check on it, but can't spare too many men, now."

"Ah, yes," Ray said. "The Churchill situation."

Ray heard a sound that might have been Flint clearing his throat, but the phone on Horvath's desk rang interrupting them.

Horvath's phone manner was as brusque as his personal approach. "Yes," he said. "Of course. The devil you say. Well, then. Certainly. They are not to leave." He hung up the phone, looked at Ray and Harvest and uttered the longest sentence they'd yet heard him say. "Your yellow caterpillar is now having a brandy with Winston Churchill. I've ordered him detained."

Ray and Harvest looked at each other.

"What're we waiting for?" Ray said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The breath exploded out of Churchill in a skeptical huff and a burst of cigar smoke. "That's preposterous. I've known the man for years. I appointed him to his post here.

"Horvath is definitely one of them," Hannah said. "Gregg and I thought that once Rudo and General MacArthur Johnson escaped with the vials of the Black Trump, they might come here for protection. I've already told you what Rudo looks like now. Johnson - "

" - is a tall, muscular black man, about forty-five or so, very handsome and striking."

"Yes," Hannah said. "How do you know him?"

Churchill shook his head. "I saw him from a distance, talking with Peter a few days ago. I thought the man looked familiar, but I didn't make the connection until just now ..." Churchill puffed on the cigar until he seemed to peer through a cloud. "Worse, most of the security men here have been assigned by Peter." Churchill ground out his cigar, stabbing it into the tray and smashing it. "I am afraid that will mean that General Horvath is aware of our meeting. I ... I need to think about this. There is someone else I want to speak with, and then I'll make my plans. I'll have to move carefully."

"Why?" Hannah asked. "And who are you going to talk to?"

Churchill glared at her, not unkindly. "You seem to have a mistaken impression of my abilities, Miss Davis," he told her. "While I have a certain influence, I also hold no official position. I can't guarantee your safety, especially since you tell me that the person who controls the army is a Shark. Northern Ireland, as you know, has a reputation for violent solutions to its problems. As to whom I am going to speak with - it will be someone I trust, as you have trusted me. That should suffice. I'd offer you the safety of my rooms in Belfast, but I'm afraid that I'm no longer sure that's true. The two of you must have somewhere you'll be safe for a few days, I suppose?"

Gregg looked at Hannah. "I suppose," he said.

"Good. Then you'll come here again in a week, let's say. By then I should know what I can do. Until then, be careful."

"What about you?" Hannah asked.

"I'm 120 years old my next birthday," he told her. "And very visible. I don't plan on dying any time soon. Don't worry." Churchill pulled himself slowly from his chair. As he escorted them from the house, he moved more than ever like an old, old man.

"A good meeting?" the guard asked them when they were back at the gate.

"We hope so," Hannah told him. She smiled, and the man smiled back.

Gregg didn't like the smile. It was a mask, and he had a sudden sense of hidden colors inside the man: tasty colors. Luscious colors. "He's a very impressive man, Mr. Churchill."

"I think so," Hannah answered.

"Hannah," Gregg said. "Let's get moving."

Gregg tugged at the gate. It swung open, and he started through. The guard had moved from the gravel drive as the heavy bars passed, then stepped back. "Mr. Hartmann," he said. "Not yet, I'm afraid."

Gregg heard a metallic click behind him, a sound that was out of place in the night. With frightening clarity, he realized what it was. He turned to see the guard's weapon pointed directly at him, and he knew, that he was dead. Gregg was frozen, motionless. He could see the muzzle and waited for the flash that meant death. Gregg first, then Hannah.

Except that Hannah moved. She shoved the gate with a grunt. The heavy iron bars slammed into the guard from the side. He fought for balance, but his feet went out from under him in the loose gravel. He started to turn as he fell, ready to fire anyway.

Hannah kicked him in the side of the head. The sound of shoe against skull was hollow and loud, and the man's head snapped sideways with the impact. He groaned and went limp, his weapon clattering to the gravel. Gregg looked at Hannah. "College soccer," she said. "I was a great forward. Let's go."

They could see the van, parked at the corner. They ran for the vehicle. The back doors opened and Scarlet Will poked his head out. "Get it started!" Gregg yelled to him. He could feel himself just on the edge of uncontrolled adrenaline overdrive from the fright of their close call, and he tried to ignore the growing buzz. Hannah was just in front of him. Scarlet Will held his hand out for Hannah and pulled her into the van as Cara, in the driver's seat, turned over the engine. Scarlet Will leaned down for Gregg, his hand extended. Gregg grasped his hand in his own.

What happened then would be forever a confused welter of images and feelings for Gregg. There was no sound, but suddenly Will's head jerked back, then came more forcibly forward. Will's hand was still clasping Gregg's as a red volcano erupted from the back of his skull, a fine mist of blood and brains splattering the interior of the van as the body, in motion from pulling Gregg, tumbled onto the floor.

And Gregg ... He felt the death. The link was faint, a bare shadow of what it had been with Puppetman, but the unexpectedness of it staggered him. For a moment, he was lost, trying to find the gossamer shreds of the death's emotions, already fading. Can it be? Oh, God, can it be?

No. It was gone now. A ghost.

"The police!" someone was shouting, and Gregg saw a pair of uniformed men running toward them. "It's a trap!"

"Hartmann!" someone else was yelling. "Get in, man!"

Gregg shook himself. Another shot whined, pinging from the metal door a few inches from him. Gregg leaped and Stand-in pulled the doors shut as the van squealed away from the curb.

In the swaying van, Brian cursed slowly and monotonously as he brushed at the gore that had splattered his clothing. Hannah stared down at Scarlet Will, on his back, his face a ruin of blood and bone.

Gregg stared too, wondering what he had felt and wondering also whether he wanted it to be true or not.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Horvath, busy as he was, decided to come along. It showed, Ray thought, how seriously he took his responsibility in providing security for Churchill. It made for a crowded vehicle with Ray, Flint, Harvest, Horvath, and the driver, but it was only a short trip out to the village where Churchill was ensconced.

It was a nice place, ancient and mossy and blazing with light as they drove up. The hullabaloo at the gate immediately told Ray that something had gone wrong.

"Report," Horvath clipped when they reached the checkpoint.

"Sir!" Everyone stood like they had wooden poles rammed up their butts. "The, uh, gentleman and his companion escaped, sir."

"Shots fired?"

"Yes, sir. As per instructions we returned fire only when fired upon."

"This is very distressing." Flints whisper only hinted at his distress. He clenched his fists, making the sound of rocks grinding together.

Horvath nodded. "Casualties?"

"None on our side, sir. I believe we hit one of the gentleman's party. They were Twisted Fists, sir."

"Very distressing," Flint added.

Horvath nodded again. "You know what that means. Keep alert."

"Yes, sir!" The sentry saluted again, and Horvath signaled the driver to go on.

Ray and Harvest glanced at each other. "The Twisted Fists are operating in Ireland?"

"Yes," Horvath answered. "Terrorist scum."

"If your men killed one, it'll be five for one."

Flint nodded ponderously. "The violence spirals higher and higher."

They parked the car and were ushered into the study where Churchill sat behind a desk, wreathed in cigar smoke. He didn't look too bad, Ray thought, not a day over ninety, anyway. He looked chubby even in his expensively-tailored formal wear, topped by a nice maroon smoking jacket. He was mostly bald and totally wrinkled but his eyes burned with energy and, if Ray was any judge of emotions, anger.

"Come in, come in," he said querulously. "I suppose you heard what happened outside."

"Yes," Horvath said. "Pity, that."

"Yes." Churchill pierced him with his ancient, cunning gaze. After a moment he swept his eyes past Horvath, looking at Ray and Harvest. "You must be the Americans. Come in, sit down."

They did as he bid. Flint introduced Ray and Harvest and remained standing, casting his shadow over the scene and making Ray feel nervous, like someone was reading the paper over his shoulder.

"That gunplay was terrible business, General. It'll make my job here all the more difficult if you rouse the Fists."

"It was, Sir Winston. Pity the Fists started it."

"Yes," Churchill said. "Who knows what goes on in the minds of terrorists?" He seemed to fall into a reverie for a moment, then gathered himself and looked up again. "Pardon an old man's musings," he said, frankly eying Harvest. "I'd like to discuss things with you in more detail, but I'm afraid that's going to have to wait. I'm an old man and I need my rest, but first other things must be done. Foxworthy."

"Sir."

"We'll be moving to the Belfast Hilton. Tonight."

"Sir!" Horvath said with as much emotion as Ray had seen him muster. "Do you think that's wise?"

"I do," Churchill growled. "We've already had gunplay here. My security has been compromised." He returned his attention to Flint, "Your men of the Silver Helix will take over security. Organize it."

"Sir," Flint repeated.

"Why replace my men?" Horvath asked stiffly.

"Your men tangled with Twisted Fists tonight, General. If I surround myself with wild card security people, the Fists will be less inclined to include me in their plan for revenge."

"They wouldn't anyway, sir."

"Perhaps not, General. But we'll do things my way."

"As you wish, sir."

Churchill stood, "Indeed, General." He turned his attention back to Ray and Harvest. "Perhaps tomorrow we'll get a chance to chat longer. I'm very interested in your perspective on the Card Shark situation."

"Thank you, sir," Harvest said. "It will be an honor."

"Yes, sir," Ray added.

He knew a dismissal when he heard one. Flint stayed behind to organize things, as Churchill had requested. Horvath returned to Belfast with them and was his usual communicative self. He said nothing; only a brief "Good-bye" when he dropped Ray and Harvest off at the Belfast Hilton, where they were also staying.

The meeting played itself over in Ray's mind as they were driven back to their hotel room.

"You find anything strange about our chat with Churchill?" he asked Harvest at her door.

She shook her head. "He seemed a little preoccupied, but he is a hundred twenty years old and someone may have just tried to kill him."

Ray shook his head. "It wasn't that. It was his attitude. Suspicious. Questioning. I don't know."

Harvest looked at him. "Do you know if you're coming in or not?"

Ray suddenly smiled. "Try to keep me out."

Harvest put a hand on his cheek. "I could. But I think it'd be so much more fun if you just came on in."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Brian looked down at the body of Scarlet Will, laid out on the bed where Hannah had slept the last few nights, the dead joker's head covered with a bloody sheet. Gregg could feel the volcano heat of Brian's emotions as he stared at the corpse, and when he looked up again, the force of his gaze was nearly enough to cause Gregg to stagger backward.

"Five for one," Brian whispered, and the words had edges of torn steel, glimmering with fire-pierced red in Gregg's mind, tasting of dark sweetness, "Five for one, it is. Five nat deaths will pay for Scarlet Will."

"No." That was Hannah, her voice a small, purple welt in the greater darkness of Brian's fury. Her clothes were still stained with Will's blood. "You can't do that. That's no solution - that's just a continuation of this endless violence. More senseless death."

Brian whirled on Hannah. None of the other Fists dared to interrupt. Gregg could feel them, all reflecting Brian's anger and feeding it back into him. "Shut up, woman," Brian snapped, each word a whiplash. "You have no say in this."

"I sure as hell do," Hannah insisted. "Churchill gave us his word that he'd help. I'm not going to have you ruin that chance."

"We've just seen how effective Churchill will be." Brian spat. Gregg reached out mentally, stroking the corona of fire around Brian. I was right when I first met him, he marveled. He's so like Gimli. I remember. I remember....

It tasted good.

"There's how much Churchill can help," Brian raged, his fingertip trembling as he pointed at Scarlet Will. "There's your example of how powerful his influence is. The police don't listen to Churchill; they listen to Horvath. We kill the fuckers - that's how you show them."

"Brian - " Hannah persisted.

"Shut up, nat," Brian snapped. He glared at her, up and down. "You're a fine attractive woman, you are. But that means that you don't, you can't, understand how it is for us - no matter what you've done."

"This might ruin our chances of finding the Trump virus."

"Don't you listen, woman? This isn't about your bloody virus. It's about us!" Brian gestured, tapping his index finger on his chest. He looked at Gregg, and his eyes narrowed. "And it's about you, too," he said. "You want help from the Fists? Then I think it's time you prove your worth, worm. Five for one, and you will help."

Brian's statement sent an odd, undefinable thrill through Gregg. "No," he said, but inside, someone whispered: Yes!

As if listening to that voice, Brian hissed the word at the same time. "Yes," he said. "Because if you don't ..." Brian glanced from Gregg to Hannah and back. "If you don't, we may just make an example of your sensitive nat friend here."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Just before docking, Zoe changed into a Carole Little from last year's season, black georgette printed in thirties ecru florals, almost ankle length, and a headscarf, black silk shot with tiny bronze stripes. She would never get the knack of keeping one on her head.

Limestone villas dotted the rolling hills above the little town of Ordu and formed a backdrop for the silhouette of a ruined basilica. Mountain peaks, some of them still marked with snow, rose in the background. The scene was medieval, more like Switzerland than anything else Zoe might have imagined.

A battered blue school bus, perched on dual sets of huge balloon tires, waited on the pier. Crates and boxes were tied on its roof. Some of its windows were broken and covered with cardboard.

That couldn't be what we're driving, Zoe thought, but then she saw a man in pleated twill harem pants and a turban made of two fat coils of dotted red silk, on watch beside the bus.

Balthazar? He wore mirrorshades to hide his strange eyes. Jan? If she didn't see Jan, if Jan wasn't here and absolutely okay, Zoe planned to run. She didn't know where. Sne didn't know how, but if Jan wasn't here, this was it.

"Not much longer, Zoe," Croyd said. He vanished into the small shed that was the freighter's bridge. "Wait on the pier."

She went ashore and almost lost her balance. The pier was solid. It wasn't rocking. Zoe tried to remember how to walk while a boy on a motorscooter buzzed past on the shore road spilling Michael Jackson music from the boom box tied behind him.

Jan, a small figure in swirling black skirts, climbed down from the bus. She jumped up and down and danced across the pier. Zoe met her hug.

"Shh," Jan whispered. "Talk later."

Jan wore a black scarf over her hair. She wore two bolero jackets, one bright turquoise, the other maroon cotton. Under her skirts, Zoe caught a glimpse of what looked like pajama trousers, with brown and white stripes. Jan had grown an inch in the past week. She looked happy.

The crew offloaded the irrigation pump. It swayed in its harness of chains, rocking down to rest on the pier, its green enameled metal bright as neon against the rusted sides of the Ukrainian freighter. Zoe told herself not to think of it as anything but an irrigation pump, a Rubik's cube of metal and PVC pipe, a plumber's nightmare that looked as if it could suck up half the Euphrates.

The thing was so small. Zoe thought of bombs as ICBMs that lurked in giant silos. Maybe this was all a scam. But then she felt, even from twenty yards away, the horrid silent heat fitted inside this particular pump.

Zoe and Jan, as was proper for women, stood aside and watched the men do what men did. Balthazar stood with folded arms, watching the pier, the ship, the bus. At intervals he reached into a sack and brought out date confections the size of hen's eggs and chewed them methodically, like a cud. Croyd and the captain appeared on deck and gave each other a bear hug, maybe a result of Croyd's parting gifts. Croyd came ashore with the Turkish customs officer and disappeared into a concrete-block building.

On the freighter, sailors hauled lines and moved around the decks, performing inexplicable tasks that resulted in the freighter's sliding away into the morning haze over the oil-slicked waters of the Black Sea. Zoe wondered if the freighter would make it to the next port. Twice, before dawn, Zoe had seen a sub's conning tower lift from the water, too close to the freighter for comfort.

Zoe's stomach tied itself into a knot. She forced herself not to squeeze Jan's hand, sweaty in hers. If Jan was worried, she didn't let it show. Zoe kept her touch light and expected to see, at any minute, the door burst open, the guards with their rifles pointed at her gut. She didn't want to think about the interior of a Turkish jail.

Croyd was taking so long in there. The haze was beginning to burn off, and she felt sweat trickle down the back of her neck. Her scarf was slipping again. She tied the knot tighter.

Croyd came out grinning. A man in a khaki uniform and a fez followed him, mustaches aquiver. The official called out a few quick words and a bystander ran to the steel door of a nearby building. In short order, a forklift appeared, driven at great speed. Six burly Turks accompanied it. Croyd and the official stood and watched, chattering away. The customs man pointed to the bus. Zoe heard the words "Mercedes," and "diesel," and "the Bronx," while the crew of dockworkers wedged the pump through the opened doors at the rear of the bus. The bus sank a couple of inches on its suspension.

They've blown it, Zoe thought. This thing will break through the floor, through the pier, and sink. We've had it.

Croyd's hands drew the curves of a fat, strong woman in the air. The bus accepted the weight. The official laughed. There were bows, and huge smiles, and more bows, and then Croyd turned away.

Balthazar vaulted into the driver's seat of the bus, his hand on the scratched metal knob that shut the swivel doors. The party climbed in. The diesel coughed to life and produced a largish fart of black smoke, and Balthazar eased the bus toward the road that led through the middle of the village and south.

"The customs guy has a cousin in the Bronx. Runs a Greek restaurant," Croyd said.

"He's a Greek?" Zoe asked.

"No. But there wasn't a Greek restaurant in six blocks, so that's what he opened. He says he uses his mama's recipes and New Yorkers can't tell the difference." Croyd's voice seemed normal enough, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. It wasn't hot, even in the bus. "It's funny how this language thing works. I don't know anything until somebody says something, and then it's like a movie comes on in my head I could see this customs guy when he was a kid growing up. He had a pet goat, and he pretended it was Trigger."

"Trigger?" Jan asked.

"Trigger was Roy Rogers' horse. He was a palamino. God I'm old," Croyd said. He twisted his back against the bench seat, crossed his arms, and stared out the window.

Balthazar eased the bus along that narrow asphalt road. A group of blond men with green eyes sat at the locanta, under a porch hung with pots of flowers and crowded with small tables. Their eyes watched the bus, the occupants, the morning. Smells of baking bread, coffee, and tobacco wafted through the air. They cleared the village, working their way past schoolchildren in dark uniforms walking in groups, past cars of all descriptions, many of them new and highly polished. Unperturbed by the traffic, a woman and her baby perched sidesaddle on a donkey led by a scowling man.

"Baksheesh?" Balthazar asked.

"A hundred for customs. Sixty for the forklift," Croyd said. "American."

"Not too bad," Balthazar said. He took off his mirrorshades.

Zoe winced. His eyelids were crusted with yellow gunk, swollen so that his eyes were half-closed.

"Balthazar? Your eyes?"

"Turmeric and olive oil, with a sprinkle of cayenne," the joker said. Zoe couldn't make herself focus on the damage, couldn't see past the swelling to look at his strange yellow irises. Balthazar steered around two men on horseback and dodged a green Citroen that seemed to have twenty people in it. His hands were tight on the steering wheel. "People don't stare at pus."

"Do they hurt?" Zoe asked.

"Yes."

"Why don't you just use makeup?" Zoe asked.

"We might get searched," Balthazar said.

Thank you, Zoe thought. For thirty seconds or so, I had managed to forget that possibility.

The morning was cool enough to be pleasant. An almond grove cast pools of black shade. Vineyards marched their rows across folded hills. The traffic thinned out.

Zoe tried to settle against the bench seat, one that had been designed to hold schoolchildren. The upholstery was lumpy and something dug at the small of her back.

Balthazar heard her sign and glanced up at the rearview mirror. "Sorry about the bumps," he said. "The upholstery is stuffed with lead aprons straight from hospital supply catalogs in the good old USA." Balthazar turned his head and spat out the side window.

"It's hot," Zoe said. "I can sense it."

"Yeah. I don't know about the safety margins. So I put the lead in. Can you tell how many rads we're getting, Zoe?"

"No. I can't." Zoe slumped down in her seat, getting as much lead between her and the back of the bus as she could. She felt small prickles at the back of her neck. Croyd tapped his heel on the floor of the bus, twitchy. Speeding already, or just scared.

"I'll pick us up some rad monitors when we get to Susehri," Balthazar said.

Susehri was a dot on the map. Zoe couldn't imagine it as a source for particle detectors, and couldn't imagine that buying one there wouldn't start gossip. Balthazar knew something she didn't, or maybe he was teasing her. She decided not to take the bait.

Jan, sitting beside her, stared at the joker with utter adoration. Zoe watched the girl watching him. Jan was in love. Jan had just turned fourteen. Balthazar was thirty, or close to it. Zoe felt some mothering instincts rising that she never knew she possessed. Balthazar was a dirty old man!

Balthazar, on reflection, probably didn't know Jan had a crush on him.

They had spent two weeks traveling together! Alone!

So? They were companions who had set off together to transport a nuclear device across hostile territory, and if they got caught, a quick death would be the kindest of outcomes. And, hey, Zoe Harris was in this mess, too. This wasn't a movie she was watching from the safe confines of an upholstered seat in a theater in Westchester. Zoe told her mother hen persona to shut up, at least until she could talk to Jan without anyone else listening.

The road climbed toward the mountains. Poppy fields looked like carefully tended gardens of nettles. Every passerby seemed to be a scout for the ambush Zoe was certain existed at the next curve in the road.

The tan Chevy Blazer behind them had followed them all the way from Ordu. She could see it in the rearview mirror. She could see Balthazar watching it, glancing up again and again to check its position. The road widened slightly. The Blazer pulled up next to the bus and Balthazar slowed.

The driver, a silver-haired man wearing a polo shirt and a turban, smiled and waved as he passed them.

Zoe sighed.

"This is the easy part," Balthazar said. "Relax while you can."

Relax? Oh, sure. Right, Zoe thought, relax. She looked down at her hands, at her fingers pinching tight pleats in the fabric of her skirt. She let go and tried to smooth the creases.

"I'm hungry," Croyd said.

"We'll get lunch in Susehri," Balthazar said.

Jan scooted closer to Zoe and listened while Croyd talked about foods he had known and loved, menus he had eaten his way through in one sitting, platters of bacon and eggs and stacks of pancakes and waffles and entire trays of danish, each described with painstaking attention to detail.

Follow the plan, Zoe remembered. The plan is we're all so fucking normal here.

By the time Croyd had finished a description of profiteroles with Grand Marnier chocolate sauce, Balthazar pulled the bus up to a pidecis, a roadside stand sheltered under fig trees, the figs were small and green, but an occasional lazy wasp investigated them anyway.

Wailing Turkish music clashed with recorded rap in the bazaar just up the road, a little square sheltered under awnings and hung with rows of kilims. Zoe and Jan stayed in the bus, and Balthazar and Croyd ordered food at the wooden counter. After a time, they brought rounds of flat bread baked with cheese and egg to the bus and handed them inside, and other pides covered with spiced ground lamb. And tea. Hot tea in a jar, with a service of tall glasses set in brass holders. Zoe sipped at hers. Balthazar reached into one of his generous pockets and produced a can of Coke for Jan. She smiled at him with adoration. Croyd opened a cardboard carton lined with squares of baklava, offered them around, and then settled himself on the fender of the bus.

"I'll be back real soon now," Balthazar said. He adjusted his mirrorshades and went toward the market. Not far from the bus, a shopkeeper brought out a kilim that looked to be a Konya design, cream with oval central medallions in pink and gray. Maybe a Kayseri.

Zoe stood on the embossed metal step of the bus and looked at the carpet's soft folds. "I'd like to shop a little," Zoe said, "I really would."

"You're still in tourist clothes." Croyd broke off a little square of baklava and fed it to Zoe. His fingers brushed against her lips and she shivered, remembering spending last night on a narrow bunk sheltered in Croyd's strong arms, remembering the pleasures of a lover who never slept.

Well, yes, she was in tourist clothes. But the rug was gorgeous.

"It should be okay if you take Jan with you," Croyd said. "Nobody's paying much attention to us."

"You'll watch the bus?" Zoe asked.

"Sure."

Zoe bought the rug. She didn't argue enough about the price, but she wanted it. She bought it with the Fists' money, but she figured it was a business expense. Anything that could distract her enough not to scream was a business expense.

When she turned away from the smiling rug seller, she saw the tourists from Odessa. The same ones. The man wore pink bermuda shorts that must have been made by Omar the tentmaker. The woman's khaki skirt exposed bare white legs that looked like they belonged on a Victorian piano. The pair wore matching floppy white canvas hats, sunglasses, and cameras. They were caricatures of tourists, they were too perfectly gross, and they raised their cameras toward the bus.

Zoe ducked inside and dropped the rug over the back of the low seat. "Croyd? We're being followed. I saw those people in Odessa!"

Croyd popped another piece of baklava into his mouth and looked at the pair. "Same ones, huh?"

"I think so. They look strange."

"Are you sure?"

"I don't - yes. I'm sure."

"Zoe, when was the last time you were in Atlantic City?" Croyd asked.

"I've never been to Atlantic City."

"Well, then you wouldn't know that all tourists look the same. Settle down. I'll take the glasses back if you're finished with your tea."

"I'm finished," Zoe said.

Balthazar ambled back toward the bus, holding up a wicker cage. He handed it in to Jan and swung into his seat. Croyd climbed back in and Balthazar maneuvered the bus back onto the road.

Two doves huddled inside the cage Jan held in her lap. She cooed at the birds and offered them crumbs of baklava. "Geiger counters," Jan said "Tres high-tech."

Jan twisted in her seat and found a way to hang the dove cage from the ceiling of the bus. The little birds swayed above the rows of boxes that separated the passengers from the pump, the real cargo.

The road twisted and climbed higher, toward the Euphrates and the disputed borders of Kurdistan, a place the Turks called part of Turkey, filled with people who called themselves Kurds, not Turks. Even Xenophon had trouble with the Kurds, Zoe remembered. That's why we're going there. Borders in dispute are safer places for us than peaceful lands. In turmoil and distrust, maybe we can slip through.

The Euphrates couldn't be real. It was a river only known in ancient books, a myth. Somewhere in the looming mountains above them was Ararat, where tradition said Noah's ark ran aground after the destruction of the world by an angry deity.

Zoe felt she swayed backward toward the past with every tilt of the bus on the twisting road. It seemed the four of them rushed down corridors of time, corridors that would lead them to the soiled stone altars of Mesopotamia and ancient rites of sacrifice. Gods with the bodies of men and the heads of beasts might appear on the narrow road at any moment. We've just presented a live offering to the monster that rides with us, she realized. Would it be accepted? Or burnt?

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Eric Fleming's yacht was a thing of beauty; polished wood, gleaming brass, huge canvas sails snapping in the wind. "There's not a bit of plastic on her," Fleming told Peregrine proudly as he stood on the forecastle or the poop deck or whatever it was, leaning on the rail with the blue of the ocean behind him. "She's a genuine antique, last of her kind. Before they went to those tacky twelve-meters, J-boats like Circe used to race for the America's Cup."

"She's so fast," Peregrine said admiringly, in a voice of equal parts honey and velvet, calculated to make any halfway functional male reach for the nearest lubricated condom.

Eric Fleming accepted the compliment with a manly smile. He was a big bull of a man with a windburned face and calluses on his hands. "Beauty and speed, that's what I look for in a yacht," he said. He smiled. "And in a woman."

The boat was fast. Jay had to admit. Eric-me-hearty had come popping over from his island in jig time once the editor of the TownsviBe Drover had rung him up to report that the world-famous Peregrine, herself, was there in Queensland, asking for an interview. He'd met them at the Townsville marina, all smiles and rough-hewn Aussie charm as Peri introduced her crew. Finn had the camera, Sascha had the sound equipment, and Jay had his hands in his pockets. "And what do you do?" Fleming had asked him. "Nothing," Jay had replied. "I'm the producer."

Some of the Circe's crew greeted Finn with badly-concealed distaste when the centaur trotted up the gangplank with the minicam on his back. One in particular - an older beachcomber type, barechested and tanned, with a week's growth of sandy beard that made an odd contrast to his silver-gray hair - stared at Finn with a near-homicidal loathing in his ice-blue eyes.

Yet neither he nor any of the others dared say a word. Fleming could scarcely object to Peri having a joker cameraman; technically, those huge wings made her a joker too. Jay suspected that Fleming was a lot more interested in Peri's tits than in her pinions. The tastefully understated bulge in the front of his white trousers tended to confirm that analysis, but the only bulges that concerned Jay were the ones under the Jackets of some of Circe's crew. He would have welcomed the opportunity to pop a few of them inconspicuously off to, say, the Tombs, but there were too damn many of them.

"We can begin whenever you're ready," Fleming said. "Remember, no questions about my love life. I never kiss and tell."

Peregrine gave a throaty laugh. "We'll save that for a more ... intimate ... moment." Then she ran the tip of her tongue along her lip in a way that reminded Jay of Ezili, which was no doubt where Jerry had swiped the gesture. "Ready, boys?" Peri asked her crew.

Finn hoisted the minicam to his shoulder and fumbled for the switch that turned it on. Sascha checked his sound levels and held up the boom mike over Eric Fleming's head. Jay took his hands out of his pockets and said, "Rolling," which sounded like something a producer would say.

Peregrine stepped closer to Eric Fleming and smiled dazzingly for the camera. Her long dark hair streamed in the wind as the Circe raced across the sea. "I'm here on the yacht Circe with Australian press mogul Eric Fleming," she said.

"Please, Peri," Fleming said, with an easy laugh, "I'm no mogul, just a fair dinkum Queensland rancher who happens to own a few newspapers."

Sascha's skinny arms were already trembling from the strain of trying to hold the boom over Fleming's head. "Boss, I'm getting a lot of background noise," he said.

Peregrine looked around sharply, her wings fluttering with sudden anxiety, and Jay felt a cold finger trace a path up his spine. That was the little code they had worked out to make use of Sascha's telepathy. So long as Fleming was telling the truth, the sound would be good. If he tried lying, Sascha would report trouble with tape hiss. And background noise meant danger.

Jay slid his hands back into his coat pockets and made the right one into a gun. He looked around nonchalantly. The Circe's crew were all around them, watching. "You know, Peri," Jay said, "maybe this boat isn't the best place to do the interview. Too much background noise. The wind and the sails and all."

"You may be right," Peregrine said. She spread her wings wide, as if to take off, but of course the real Peregrine flew by a kind of telekinesis and that was something Jerry Strauss could not mimic.

"I'm heartbroken," Eric Fleming said lightly. "I was really looking forward to our interview. Don't you want to ask me about the Card Sharks?"

Sascha dropped the boom mike to the deck. "Background noise," he said, ripping off his earphones. "It's all around us."

Jay had to admire the way his junior partner rose to the occasion. "What about the Card Sharks?" he-she asked with Peregrine's bedroom voice as Jay inconspicuously began to slide his hand out of his pocket. "Do they really exist? Are you one of them? Where is Brandon van Renssaeler?"

"Yes, yes, and right here," said a voice behind Jay. Something hard poked him between the shoulderblades. "And I'd keep that hand right where it is, Mr. Ackroyd."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg was driven across jokertown in the rear of a rusted panel van, crowded with plumbing supplies and two other jokers: Cara and Stand-in. Brian and Trio sat in front, the latter driving. Hannah was left behind, under guard by others of the cadre. "If they don't hear from me by sunset, they kill your Hannah. You understand, caterpillar?"

Gregg had looked hopelessly at Hannah's bleak face.

Gregg almost hoped they would be stopped by police and searched, but the short trip was uneventful. The van bumped to a stop and Brian opened the doors. "We're here," he said. "C'mon." Gregg noticed that the jokers were carrying duffel bags that sagged heavily. A burning knot settled deep in Gregg's body.

They moved quickly from the van to an alleyway. Gregg had a bare glimpse of the street: dirty, cobblestoned, with oil-filmed water pooled in the holes where the stones were gone. The houses nearest them seemed to lean toward each other as if needing support in their old age. Jokers moved in the street, most of them studiously ignoring the odd quintet who had appeared in their midst.

The alley ran between buildings for two blocks. A door suddenly opened and something resembling a small toilet brush waved at them. Gregg was escorted into a tiny, dark hall between the door and a screened door leading into a restaurant kitchen. The toilet brush turned out to be the arm of a joker, who was covered everywhere with bristly combs: head, face, chest, legs, and arms - the arms were covered with a fine lather of soapsuds, and from the screen came the clatter of dishes.

"Any other customers?" Brian asked the toilet brush.

"Just the one party you asked about," the brush said "The police."

Brian nodded. "And old Lang?"

"He's out, down at the pub. Won't be back until dinner rush."

Brian grinned. "Perfect. I think it's time you took a break, lad. Take the others with you. G'wan now."

The brush disappeared into the kitchen. A few moments later, he and three other jokers filed out of the kitchen. None of them looked at Brian, Gregg or the others. The door closed behind them, and Brian gestured toward the kitchen. "In with you, caterpillar. It's time."

Inside, Brian peered through a screen into the dining room, from which Gregg could hear laughter and the music of a guitar, fiddle, and bodhran. "Good. The captain's in there - it's the wedding party for his deputy's daughter." He looked at Gregg, who felt the knot in his stomach squeeze tighter. "Lang's is next street over from the Town," Brian told him. "A fashionable place for parties, where the nats can be waited on by jokers, who stay nicely in back except when needed, and who don't dare walk the street in front." Brian nodded to the woman. "Cara, Stand-in, you ready?"

They opened the duffel bags. Cara placed a hooded mask over her face. Stand-in - the mismatched joker - groaned as his body began to alter, morphing quickly into the image of a strawberry-headed young nat. Cara and Stand-in both slammed clips into their automatic rifles; Brian and Tripod also armed themselves. "Okay," Brian said. "Trio and I will cover the back. G'wan!" Cara and Stand-in moved quickly through the curtain into the dining room.

Gregg heard screams, china shattering on the floor, and Stand-in's brusque voice. The music came to an abrupt, discordant halt. "Don't move! Now, get out of your seats, move over against the wall! That's it; keep the hands where we can see em! The door, lassie - lock it." A few seconds later, Cara's voice sounded in Gregg's head; «Caterpillar, come on in.»

"Go on," Brian told him. "Cara will tell you what to do."

"I can't go in there. They'll see me - that's why you're staying back here, isn't it? Because you can't disguise yourself?"

"Aye." Brian grinned at him. "No sense in making it easy for Horvath when he comes looking for revenge. But you won't be here after you've gone to the Dog, will you? So let them spend their time looking for you."

Gregg went in. Cara and Stana-in had lined the patrons against the back wall of the dining room. The window shutters were pulled, the front door locked. Wedges of sunlight speared through the blinds and across the wall, limning them in harsh illumination: men and women, old and young, child to teen to adult to ancient, the bride in wedding white and lace, the groom in his dress uniform, and all of them nats. They stared at his entrance with frightened eyes. Gregg could smell the fear, like the scent of panicked cattle entering a slaughterhouse. Some of the children were crying, terrified, as they clung to parents. The faces of the adults ran the gamut from fright to a revulsion that he could almost touch.

Stand-in had his weapon against the captain, a bald-headed, portly man whose pants displayed a spreading stain of urine. Stand-in touched the trigger once; the gun coughed and the officer jerked backward as blood and brains splattered the wall behind him. He slumped to the floor as his wife screamed.

Gregg staggered himself. In the instant of the man's death, he felt ... something. For a moment, his vision clouded with a brilliant yellow-white, and with the hue came a feeling of ... pleasure?

"One," Stand-in said. "Four to go."

«Five for one,» Cara echoed in his head. «You choose the rest, caterpillar.»

"I can't," Gregg wailed, looking at the faces of the nats, their eyes. But you can, can't you? Didn't you feel it, when Stand-in pulled the trigger, didn't you taste it? Remember how good Scarlet Will tasted. Remember? This would have been a feast for Puppetman, a banquet of misery. The death, the fear, should have been orgasmic, but it couldn't be, shouldn't be. Puppetman was dead, all these many years. And the Gift he'd had for so brief a time had never let him feed, had never allowed him to partake of the emotions. He remembered how it had once felt, but that was only memory. Gregg looked, and he knew he should flee. A sense of temptation flooded him. This is a test, Greggie. This is your trial. "You can't make me do this. This is obscene."

Cara's head tilted under her mask. Then her quiet voice rang in his mind once more. «Now, I'm thinking that Brian would remind you that your nat woman is stiff with us. Choose now, or you've chosen her rather than any of these people. Brian actually fancies Hannah, but that won't stop him, not after what he's said. He's never been someone to confuse sentiment with business. If you force him, she will be one of the five.»

"No."

«Hartmann, you have thirty seconds. We can't stay here. Choose, or Brian will have us shoot three now and kill Hannah when we get back.» Then, gently: «I'm sorry, I know this is cruel, but it's no more cruel than what's been done to us.»

"I can't," Gregg said again, but it was only a whisper this time. He looked at the nats, their faces in soft focus because of his myopia. The captain's wife continued to sob over the body of her husband. How can I choose? These are children, mothers and fathers, grandparents. They're lovers and friends. They're innocent. How can I choose?

And the voice inside answered him: Because it will taste good, Greggie. That's how you coped with the cruelly and the horror. Deal with it the way you've always dealt with it - because it will give you pleasure.

«Ten seconds,» Cara said.

The children were wailing. One young man, one of the groom's men, had gone to his knees, sobbing. A woman held her infant against her shoulder, glaring at them defiantly as if her hand could shield the infant from the bullets. Gregg looked from face to face; he found he could hate none of them enough.

I never killed total innocents with Puppetman. This is slaughter. This is pure terrorism.

"Mummy, oh Mummy, I'm scared!" A young, pretty woman pressed her child against her body while she glanced at them from the side of her eyes. Her fear was bright green, and it pushed against Gregg like a tidal swell. He knew that if he could touch her, he could find the strings to that emotion. He could orchestrate her emotions; he could play her fright like a violin. "Hush, love," the woman whispered, "They're not going to hurt us ..."

«Choose now, Hartmann!»

Gregg looked at Cara, "I hate you," he told her. "This will just prolong the violence."

«Maybe so, but this will happen, regardless. Choose, or Hannah dies as well.»

You see, Gregg told the contending voices. I have no choice. This way I save Hannah. This way, I can save more lives than I take.

Then enjoy it, came the reply. Touch them as you choose. Take them.

Gregg glanced back at the nats. "Him," he said, pointing at an old man near the door. He scuttled up to the man, who pressed back against the wall, shaking his head. Gregg reached out with his stubby hand. The shock of the touch was like instant heat. He felt himself responding. The old man's terror was thin - Greg tugged at the strings and was pleased to see it swell and deepen. The old man moaned and the sound was like golden syrup.

"Him. Her." One by one, he pointed them out, touching each of them in turn, his cartoon voice and his toy fingers a mockery of Death. They were all older, the ones Gregg chose. As far as he could tell, none of them had family here to witness their executions.

Gregg told himself it was the least he could do. He hoped that mattered. He hoped that would ease the pain.

He knew it wouldn't.

«That's three, Hartmann. One more.»

Gregg looked at the groom. The man was trembling, whether from rage or fright or some mixture of both, Gregg couldn't tell. Him, the voice whispered. It would be so tasty, so lovely ...

No, Gregg told it. We've had enough pain here. Enough. He thought the words, but he found that he could not move. He stood in front of the groom, in front of the weeping bride, and he wasn't able to move.

«Hartmann ...»

You know you want him ...

"Him," Gregg said, the word a half-sob as he touched the man. The bride screamed, and the pain in her voice was exquisite. "A lovely choice," Stand-in told him, and he started forward, raising his gun. Gregg turned and scuttled from the room, not wanting to see, not needing to see. The strings, the mental connections, came with him. Behind him, he heard the first shots and the screams.

He sighed in the mingled pleasure and self-hatred the sounds gave him.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"That detective school of yours wasn't exactly Harvard, was it?" Dr. Bradley Finn snapped at Jay as a couple of salty nautical types trussed up his forelegs with a length of rope. His hind legs had already been tied up tighter than a Christmas goose.

Jay ignored him. "What are you going to do with us?" he asked Eric Fleming. They'd tied his hands together behind his back so tightly that he couldn't feel them.

Fleming squinted off at the horizon, then turned back to Jay. "In a few hours Circe will be out in the deep waters well beyond the reef. That's where we toss you in. You've shown a great interest in sharks, Mr. Ackroyd. Well, I understand there are quite a few in those waters. You'll be able to investigate to your heart's content."

Peregrine moaned, sounding almost like Jerry Strauss for a moment. "Not sharks," she said. "Please, anything but sharks. I must have seen Jaws a hundred times. Can't you just shoot us?"

"We're not killers," Brandon van Renssaeler snapped.

"Great moral distinction you got there," Jay observed.

Van Renssaeler looked distinctly uncomfortable. He turned away sharply and went below.

Fleming seemed much less perturbed. "Brand is a rare thing in this day and age," he observed. "A lawyer with a conscience. It does get in the way sometimes. Fortunately, I'm the next best thing to a journalist, and we all know that journalists have no qualms at all." He looked at his crew. "Let's get them below."

The sailors were all done practicing their knots. They hoisted them up one at a time and carried them below decks to the owner's cabin. It took eight men to manhandle Finn through the hatchway, and they were none too gentle about it. "Do all your plans work out this well?" the centaur asked Jay as they dropped him with a thump on the polished teak decking.

Jay would have shrugged, but shrugging was tough when you can hardly move your shoulders. "Hey, it worked. We found your boy Brandon, didn't we?"

"You shouldn't be too hard on him, Dr. Finn," van Renssaeler commented. "It was really your fault that we caught on to your little subterfuge."

When he spoke to the centaur, his tone was as cold as the blue in his eyes. Barechested and barefoot, his skin dark from the sun, his beard growing out and his hair uncombed and unkempt, Brandon looked like the island he'd fled was more likely Gilligan's than Manhattan, but those eyes were a dead giveaway. Jay would have kicked himself for not having noticed them sooner, except that his legs were tied together too.

"My fault?" Finn said with indignation. "What did I do?"

"We knew who you were the moment you were described to us," van Renssaeler said. "There are very few palomino-pony centaurs in the world, and only one who recently escaped from protective custody on Governor's Island. You see, I've taken a strong interest in you these past few weeks, Dr. Finn. It might have something to do with the fact that you're fucking my daughter."

"I love your daughter!" Finn said. "And Clara loves me. We want to get married."

"I don't think this is the best time to ask daddy for her hand," Jay said, but Finn wasn't listening.

Neither was Brandon. "I'm tempted to say, over my dead body, but in point of fact it's more likely to be over your body, if Eric has his way."

"Let's not let Eric have his way," Jay suggested.

Fleming tsked. "On Eric's boat, Eric always gets his way, Mr. Ackroyd. I'm surprised at you, suggesting mutiny like that."

"Understand, we have nothing personal against you or any other wild card," Brandon said. "If anything, I feel sorry for you."

"That's real comforting to know," Jay said.

Brandon ignored him. "None of you asked to get this virus ... but you did. You and I may think that's tragic, but there it is. You're diseased, Dr. Finn." He looked around the cabin at the other captives, at Jay, at Sascha slumped in his chair with his hair falling across his eyeless face, at their faux Peregrine. "All of you are diseased. You want to wed Clara, you tell me. Imagine if you had a daughter. Now imagine that a man with AIDS came to you and said that he loved her and wanted to many her. How would you feel? What would you say?"

"The wild card isn't AIDS," Finn said "It's not contagious and it's not necessarily fatal." The centaur tried to stand struggling against the ropes that held him, but it was hopeless.

"Not one hundred percent of the time, no," Eric Fleming added. "Would that it were. Then there'd be no need for the Card Sharks."

"I hear you're working on that," Jay put in. "The Black Trump, isn't that what you call it? Catchy name."

Fleming and van Renssaeler exchanged a look. "You know about that, then," Fleming put in.

"You think we flew down here to see the wombats, or what?" Jay said sharply. "Yes, we know about it."

Brandon van Renssaeler suddenly looked very unhappy. "I assumed you had come for me. To hunt me down, arrest me, or likely kill me. Isn't that what you people usually do to your enemies?"

Fleming said, "We had nothing to do with the Black Trump project. In any organization with the size and scope of the Card Sharks, differences of opinion are inevitable. I never signed on for genocide."

"Nor I. I opposed Rudo and Faneuil on this scheme since the beginning," Brandon said. His mouth was tight with anger. "They took my own daughter and used her as their tool. I will never forgive them for that."

"Then help us stop them," Bradley Finn pleaded. "Clara says that you're a decent man ..."

That was a mistake. "Don't you dare talk to me about decency. Pan was more than glad to tell me everything ... everything you did to her, to Clara, you filthy little ..."

"I didn't do anything to Clara," Finn snapped back, furious. "We made love. Together. It was great."

Brandon van Renssaeler strode forward as if he wanted to kick Finn to death right then and there. "Shut up!" he said. "Just shut up, do you hear me?"

"Easy, Brandon," Eric Fleming said. He stood up and put his hand on van Renssaeler's arm, pulling him back.

They were all shark bait unless they got the conversation off Finn's sex life real quick, Jay realized. He was groping for something to say when Jerry Strauss spoke up for the first time since they'd been taken below. "I'm a joker too, Eric," she said softly, "and you seemed eager enough to make love to me."

Fleming smiled sadly at her. "That's quite different," he said. Jerry was still Peri, and she looked delicious even in bondage. Fleming touched her lightly under the chin, lifting her face toward him. "You are very beautiful, you know. I'm sure I'll go to my grave regretting that your masquerade didn't go a little bit longer. We did seem to have a certain chemistry, don't you think?" He leaned over and kissed her very lightly on the lips.

They still think she's Peregrine! Jay realized with a start. And why not? It made perfect sense. Peri had been part of the campaign against the Card Shark conspiracy almost since the start. Gregg Hartmann had first broken the silence on Peregrine's Perch. And if they thought they had Peregrine ...

"She is beautiful," Jay blurted, vamping wildly. "Too beautiful to die. We're all too beautiful to die, even Sascha. A lot of people like flesh-colored eyes."

"You've given us no choice," Brandon said.

"There's always a choice," Finn said. "Help us stop Rudo. Help us find them before they release the Trump. You can save the world or you can stand by and watch a million people die, washing your hands like Pontius Pilate and pretending you had nothing to do with it. Clara said - "

Brandon hit him. A hard backhand across the face that snapped Finn's head around. "Don't mention her name!" he said. Then he turned and walked out.

Finn had struck home with the Pontius Pilate crack, Jay realized. Too damn close to home. Daddy Brandon had run rather than face up to it.

A long silence filled the cabin. There was only the sound of the ocean outside, the wind sidling in the high canvas.

"Peri, I am deeply sorry," Fleming said at last, with something that sounded like genuine regret. "I wish I could just cut those ropes and watch you fly off into the sunset, but ..." he sighed. "It realty makes very little difference what we do. When Rudo releases the Black Trump, all of you are doomed anyway."

"Hey, if it makes no difference, why bother?" Jay said. "You're no killers, you said so yourself. Let us go. The Black Trump will take care of us anyway, and you won't have nightmares about Peri getting chewed up like some extra in a Spielberg outtake. Look at those legs on her. Do you really want a school of Great Whites fighting over them like drumsticks?"

"Hammerheads, more likely," Fleming said with a shrug. Clearly he was less prone to qualms than his friend Brandon. He got up and moved toward the cabin door.

If Fleming left too, they were doomed. They'd sit here trussed and helpless until Circe was out past all hope, and then it would be time to play pattycake with the hammerheads. Jay was searching for something to say, some new appeal, anything that might give them a chance, when Sascha lifted his head and said wearily, "Don't bother, boss. The background noise is real bad in here."

Eric Fleming opened the door.

"Eric," Peregrine said. Fleming looked back. "Please," Peri said. Jay was startled to see that there were tears on her face, rolling slowly down her cheek. "Please, Eric, I know you don't dare let us go, but ... please ... as a favor ..."

"If there's anything I can do to make these last hours easier, you have only to ask," Fleming said gallantly. "What was it? Would you like a drink?"

"I ... please ..." Like a shy schoolgirl, she averted her eyes. Her voice was so soft it was practically a whisper. "I want you to make love to me, Eric. Please ... just once, before ..."

Fleming blinked at her, stunned. Then, slowly, a broad smile crept across his face. "No problems," he said.

The owner's cabin had the biggest bed. Fleming ordered Jay, Sascha, and Bradley Finn lugged back up on deck. As two of his sailors hoisted Jay up on their broad, manly shoulders, Eric-me-hearty Was gently untying Peri's ropes and undressing her with his eyes. Jay didn't need Sascha's power to read his mind.

Halfway up the steps, one of the salty dogs grinned and said, "Wouldn't I love to have me a peek in that porthole."

"You and me both, mate," said Jay.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The pub smelled of death. Ray was used to that, but this was the wrong place for it. This was usually a warm, cozy place, smelling of food and comfortable companionship. The bodies on the floor, lying in congealed pools of blood and brains and shit, were obscene.

Harvest was tight-lipped as she looked at them. Flint marched around the room like a haunted statue.

"Fist vengeance," he said in a sibilant, angry whisper.

"Old men and women," Ray said. He stopped in front of one body. "The groom?" he asked.

Flint nodded.

This was beyond obscenity. Ray had no word for it. He was a fighter, a fighter and a killer in fact, but these acts done in cold blood were utterly beyond his understanding and beneath his contempt.

"Fucking cowards," he muttered.

Harvest's blue eyes were as cold as the corpses laying at their feet. "I'll get them for this."

"We both will," Ray promised her.

She looked up at him briefly and then turned away.

"You should hear this, Ray, Harvest," Flint said.

Most of the witnesses had already gone. A few were still waiting in one of the small side rooms to give their statements. One stood in the doorway to the death room, talking to the constables, looking much like death himself.

"I'm tellin' you," he said as Ray come within earshot of his shuddering voice, "it was the bug that chose 'em."

"Bug?" Ray asked.

The man looked at him. He was an older man, much like the ones who had been gunned down, and Ray could see both relief and guilt in his eyes that he'd escaped their fate.

"Aye, sir," he repeated "All yellow and bug-like, with many pairs of feet and a hideous red bulb of a nose."

Ray looked at Harvest and Flint. "Hartmann! Hartmann picked out the victims!"

"No doubt, then," Flint said. "He's mixed up with the Twisted Fists."

Ray couldn't believe it. He'd been Hartmann's bodyguard for years. He'd seen him through personal and public tragedies, he'd almost died for the bastard when he stepped between him and that little fuck Mackie Messer! Now Hartmann was acting as the finger-man for a bunch of twisted shits who made war on old people. Hartmann didn't even have the guts to pull the trigger himself. Ray shook his head for the first time feeling really enthused about the idea of going after Hartmann and bringing him back to justice.

He looked at Harvest. It seemed as she looked at him, that she could almost read his mind.

"You're doomed, you bastard," Ray said aloud. "Your ass is mine."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Jay was propped against a mast and rolling with the motion of the Circe when Eric Fleming came back up on deck, barechested and whistling "Waltzing Matilda."

The helmsman called down, "So how was she?"

Fleming grinned like a cat who'd just had a big slice of canary pie a la mode. "I'll throw my shrimp on her barbie any day, mate," he said. Not the most fortuitous choice of metaphor. The helmsman looked a shade puzzled.

Fleming swaggered over to Jay. "How you doing, mate?"

"I've been better, all things considered," Jay replied. "I think I saw some fins circling around out there."

Fleming's head turned sharply, his eyes crinkling as they scanned the horizon. "Where? what kind of fins?"

"Tailfins from a '59 Caddy. Pink. It's probably Elvis."

"You're such a wiseacre," Fleming complained. He called over one of his crew. "Get that bloody rope off his legs."

"Sir?" The sailor looked confused.

"You heard me," Fleming snapped.

"No problems," the sailor said, kneeling. He pulled out a knife and deftly cut the rope off Jay's ankles.

Fleming yanked Jay to his feet. "You give me any trouble and you'll be hopping over the side quick as a wallaby. You got that, mate?" He shoved him roughly. Jay stumbled ahead of him, down the steps, as pins and needles pricked his feet with the sudden return of circulation.

"Enough with the goddamn Aussie talk," Jay hissed when they were safely out of sight. "Christ, Jerry, for a moment there I thought you were going to break into 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.'"

"Sorry," Fleming said. He looked behind him anxiously as he opened the door to the owner's cabin, but no one was following. Quickly and quietly, he ushered Jay inside, then bolted the door.

The real Eric Fleming was sprawled across the bed, naked and unmoving, with Peregrine's white silk panties shoved in his mouth and secured by a couple of lengths of tape.

"He's not dead," the other Eric assured him as he untied the ropes around Jay's wrists.

"I didn't think he was. Dead guys don't usually need panties in their mouths to keep them quiet."

"Knickers," Jerry-Eric said nervously. "Down here I think they call them knickers."

"I thought that was England," Jay said. "Hey, what do I know from lingerie? It's all just silky bits you've got rip off to get to the good stuff underneath." The ropes fell away. Jay massaged his wrist with his numb fingers. His hands hurt. His face hurt too, a dull throb from the broken nose. He looked over at the Fleming on the bed. "How did you - "

"We had a nude pillow fight. Once I got the pillow over his face, I turned into Arnold. What are we going to do with him?"

"This," Jay said. He pointed a finger at Fleming, dropped the hammer of his thumb. Pop. "Now you're the only Eric Fleming aboard Circe. Congratulations."

"Won't they notice that Peregrine is missing?"

"They'll just figure the boss is keeping her around for sloppy seconds." Jay grabbed Jerry-Eric by his ears and kissed him on both cheeks, "Remind me to get you an Oscar. Oooh, Mister Fleming, please fuck me just once before we die ..."

Jerry beamed visibly. "I was convincing, wasn't I? I remembered what you said in the van, about always betting on the dick, and I figured it was worth taking a shot."

"You should listen to me more often," Jay told him.

"So what now?" Jerry asked, with an eagerness that sounded a shade too young for Fleming. "Can you pop away the crew?"

"There's got to be forty of them," Jay said. "I don't like those odds. Besides, if I got rid of the crew, who the hell is going to drive the fucking boat? This thing is like the Titanic with sails. No, we have to keep up the charade that you're really Eric Fleming. Where's van Renssaeler?"

"In his cabin."

"I'll take care of him," Jay said. "You go up and have Sascha brought down. Say as little as possible. You're the boss, you don't have to explain yourself."

"What about Finn?"

"Let's leave Romeo the Love Pony up on deck," Jay told him as he headed for the cabin door. "The salt air will do him good, and we're fresh out of knickers."

As Jerry-Eric headed bade up the steps, Jay checked out the other cabins. Brandon van Renssaeler was behind door number three, which Jay figured was a real good sign that the time had come to play Let's Make A Deal. Brandon was stretched out on a narrow bed with a damp washcloth across his eyes. There was a nice little blue-steel automatic on the bedside table.

Jay slipped silently through the door and picked up the gun. Then he gave the bed a little kick. "Up and at 'em."

Brandon rolled over and grabbed for the pistol that was no longer there. "Pretty fast, for a lawyer," Jay said. "This what you looking for?" He dangled the automatic to give Brandon a good look, then opened the porthole and tossed it out. There was a faint, reassuring splash.

Brandon stood up. "Quite dramatic, Mr. Ackroyd but now we're both unarmed."

"I wouldn't say that." Jay made his hand a gun, pointed his finger at the center of van Renssaeler's chest.

Brandon came along quietly to the owner's cabin. A moment later, Eric the Impostor Joined them with Sascha. Jay bolted the door while Eric was cutting Sascha loose from his ropes. Brandon van Renssaeler watched the proceedings curiously. "What's wrong with this picture?" he said at last "Eric, what are you doing?" When he got no answer, he frowned. "You're not Eric. Who are you?"

"Nobody," Jay told him. He pulled over a chair, sat down in it backward, inches from van Renssaeler. "I could threaten you, I suppose, but you don't look like the kind of man who'd respond well to threats. We came down here looking for you, yes, but only because we need your help. Your daughter thinks you have a conscience. I hope to hell she's right, because we don't have a prayer of stopping the Black Trump without you. So what do you say?"

There was long silence as Brandon van Renssaeler looked deep into Jay Aclaoyd's eyes. "He's thinking about it," Sascha put in. "Part of him wants to help, he - "

"I'll speak for myself, thank you," van Renssaeler interrupted sharply, "what did you do with the real Eric Fleming?"

"I popped him off to Freakers, a joker strip bar in Manhattan. He was buck naked with a pair of knickers in his mouth, so I figured he'd fit right in."

Van Renssaeler nodded. "I suppose that was ... kinder than what he had planned for you."

The faux Fleming shuddered "Sharks ..."

"All right," van Renssaeler said "I'll tell you what I know, on these conditions. First, no harm will come to me or anyone else aboard Circe."

"If you'll help us bring off the masquerade and get this tub back to Townsville, that shouldn't be a problem."

"Agreed. Second, you and your friends will do nothing to harm my daughter. Whether you stop Rudo or not, Clara's name must be kept out of this. The world must never know about her role in the creation of the Black Trump."

"Part of the world knows already," Jay pointed out. "The rest isn't going to find out from us, I can promise you that much."

"I suppose that will have to do. There's one final condition. You must swear that Dr. Finn will never see my daughter again."

Jay had to think about that one for a moment. He gave a shrug. "I don't know how we do that," he admitted.

Sascha said, "He wants this bad, Jay. If you turn him down, he's thinking we can all just get fucked and die."

"You're a real prick, van Renssaeler."

"I've been quite a successful attorney for a long time, Mr. Ackroyd," Brandon replied crisply. "I'd like an answer, please."

"We don't have to play this game," Jay pointed out. "Sascha is a telepath. So maybe I'll just ask the questions and let him pluck the answers from your head."

"If Sascha was that good a telepath, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Brandon said, with a certain smugness.

Sascha looked gloomy. "He's thinking about ... law. Cases, precedents. All these whereases and wherefores."

"You can't keep that up for long," Jay said.

"You don't have long," van Renssaeler returned. "Rudo is out there right now with the Black Trump."

Jay kicked over his chair in frustration.

Jerry-Eric said, "This guy is starting to remind me of Loophole Latham."

"All lawyers are alike in the dark," Jay said, disgusted. "All right, counselor, you win. If we survive, I'll pop Dr. Finn off to Takis. A hundred light-years, give or take a few. I can't get him any further away from your precious, darling daughter than that."

"I want it in writing," van Renssaeler said. "I'll draft it myself. If you fail to perform, there will be stringent penalties. I'll take everything you own."

Jay threw up his hands. "Fine, whatever. Jesus. Jerry, find him some paper." He stuck a finger in Brandon's face. "If you think you're going to get it notarized, you're shit out of luck."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

At first he thought the lizards had awakened him.

The little pudgy lizards who clung to the outside of the trailer were known locally as taukte. It was what the locals thought they were saying. To Mark's ex-Joker Brigade bodyguards back in the 'Nam, they'd been fuck-you lizards, betraying a certain subtle difference between Western and Eastern ears.

And they were out there in the night, saying whatever the hell it was they said. But that wasn't what roused him.

He wasn't alone.

A silhouette against the star gleam diffusing through the cheap curtains of the bedroom window; a deformed shadow in darkness, but still identiflably human.

"Quasiman?" Mark asked, in a voice not unlike the lizards' taukte.

Quasiman looked at him. From the way he held his head he seemed ... lucid but distracted.

"How'd you find me, man?" Mark asked, struggling to sit up. He wore a T-shirt and briefs, both of which were soaked with sweat that turned to instant ice in the blast of the air conditioning.

"You're important. You were more important once." Quasiman looked at him and frowned. "No. No, that isn't right. You've been important, but you're going to be more important. I think that's it."

"You've got to help me, man!"

But Quasiman was frowning, and the alert set of his shoulders was melting away. "It's all jumbled up in my head. If only I could get ... things straight. But time is like - "

He turned toward Mark, held up both his hands. And faded.

Mark lunged at him, as though he might prevent him from teleporting by grabbing him. All he did was bang his chin and give himself a rug burn on the elbows.

Quasiman was gone.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

FOUR

They stopped at a roadside camp on the banks of the Euphrates. There were other campers there, tents and fires against the chill night, smells of wood smoke and roasting lamb. Zoe heard the hum of the road in her ears. Somewhere in the distance, a child laughed. There was food to be cooked, a woman's job in this setting. Were she and Jan expected to pitch the tent, too? Balthazar was unloading stuff from the bus, and the motions his arms made brought back a kinetic memory of the twisting road, the high passes. Zoe closed her eyes and tried not to stagger when she climbed down to solid ground.

"You'll need to change, Zoe," Balthazar said. He handed over a plastic bucket filled with folded clothes.

"Did you pick these out?" Zoe asked.

"I did," Jan said. She finished layering charcoal into a little brazier, handed it to Croyd, and brushed her hands on her skirts. "Let's go wash up."

The river was a dark expanse of hushed water, held quiet by the Kehan dam. Jan tossed a bar of soap toward Zoe and matter-of-factly stripped out of her layers of clothes. Jan's breasts had budded but her hips were still narrow, her thighs thin and childish, pale in the moonlight reflected up from the river.

Balthazar and Croyd tended the fire, both of them pointedly looking in the other direction.

Zoe stripped out of her sedate georgette Carole Little, her Vasarette bra, and the last pair of Hanes Silk Reflections she expected to see in along time. She knelt and dipped her hand in the river. It was melted ice. "I can't!" Zoe yelped.

Jan laughed and waded in, standing knee-deep in the black river and sluicing up armfuls of water. So Zoe did. The soap smelled good. Zoe scrubbed at her skin until it roughened with goosebumps, and then the air felt warmer than it had and the prospect of getting into those awful clothes didn't seem quite so terrible.

"Aren't they the worst?" Jan asked. "I mean, I'm not into style, but these rags are to gag."

Ankle length cotton trousers printed with roses on white, like antique pajamas. Long black dresses with long sleeves. Zoe's was covered with printed bouquets of some strange flower. She couldn't see the colors well in the moonlight. She figured that was a blessing. Jan climbed back into her plain black cotton and layered her two short boleros over it.

Zoe bundled her clothes and climbed the rocky shore back to camp. Balthazar looked up and smiled. He was turning meat and skewered vegetables on the grill. Zoe pointed to her bare feet. "What about shoes?"

"Sneakers," Balthazar said. "You'll need to wrap your heads, both of you."

"Oh, sorry," Jan said. "I keep forgetting." She pulled a pair of voluminous headscarves out of the bottom of the bucket. "Which one you want, Zoe?"

"Just toss one over," Zoe said. It came sailing, stripes on black. She tried for the look she'd seen in port, folds of fabric puffed around the face and draped down one shoulder. The scarf was slick. She was never going to get the hang of this.

"What do we do with the clothes I took off?" Zoe asked.

Balthazar held out his hand. Zoe gave him the bundle. She watched meat sizzle on the brazier and tried not to watch while Balthazar folded a rock into the package and used her perfecdy good pair of pantyhose to knot it together. He walked away. She heard a splash.

About twenty yards from the bus, Croyd worked on getting a pop-up tent popped up. They were to set watches to make sure no one came near the bus. They were not to sleep in the bus unless they had no choice. It was part of the plan.

Balthazar went inside the bus and rummaged around before he came back to the fire. "Here," Balthazar said. "There's more that goes with your outfits, ladies."

He gave them each a dowry in gold jewelry, his hands spilling over with chains and coins and filigree work, earrings and bracelets and ankle bracelets.

Croyd finished with the tent and helped fasten Zoe into her cache, chain after chain after necklace, his fingers moving skillfully to fasten clasp after tiny clasp, while Balthazar tended the grill.

"It looks nice," Croyd said.

"I feel like a belly dancer," Zoe said. She felt exotic, earthy. Not because the clothes had beauty, for they certainly didn't. She felt costumed for primeval struggles, for feminine mysteries of dignity and power. Jan seemed to change before her eyes. No longer a gawky adolescent, she suddenly moved with the quiet grace of a woman. To keep the gold silent, Zoe realized. She knows instinctively that moving silently might save her life sometime. Poor baby.

They sat around the brazier and ate lamb skewered with vegetables and seasoned with fresh thyme and scatterings of some hot vinegary sauce that Balthazar pulled out of a hamper, all rolled in rounds of fluffy, thin bread.

Jan stayed close to Balthazar's side. She swung her bracelets at him and they shared a murmuring conversation in the dusk. Pheromones rose from them like a cloud. Jan's eyes glowed at a low intensity, not much more apparent than the simple gloss of young love. Zoe started to chide her for it, but the camp was sheltered between large boulders, out of sight of any other humans, and Croyd walked its perimeter like a nervous bloodhound.

Zoe felt like an intruder. Should she do anything to stop this? Balthazar wouldn't rape the child but he might have to tell her a definite "No" at some point. Zoe dreaded the storm of hurt feelings if that happened. This group couldn't afford hurt feelings.

Zoe jerked when sleep made her slump forward. And saw, as Croyd led her toward the tent where she would sleep and he would not, Jan bringing the caged doves out of the bus to sleep inside the tent. Beside Balthazar's bedroll, she bent from the waist in one of those impossible moves the young and limber can make, and kissed him. He reached up his arms to her and whispered something Zoe couldn't hear. Jan came inside with tears on her cheeks, smiling like a sunrise.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Harvest looked into the mirror, focusing on Ray's image, as he stood behind her. "Not now, Ray," she said flatly.

Ray had kissed the back of her neck, softly, fleetingly, holding her sweep of blond hair cupped in one hand. "What's the matter, babe? You've been sitting and staring into the mirror for over an hour now."

She stared longer. Just when Ray had given up all hope of her speaking, she did. "Did you know my father, Ray? My father or my mother?"

Ray frowned. "I don't think so. Should I have?"

"I should have. But they were killed in 1976 after the Jokertown Riots. They were killed by Twisted Fists avenging joker deaths in the riot. I was six years old. My father and mother had never hurt a joker. They'd never hurt anyone."

Ray didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry."

He didn't know what to do so he kissed the back of her neck again, then again, and again. He felt her shiver as his lips brushed a particularly sensitive spot.

"I can't stop thinking about them."

Ray didn't know if she meant her parents or the people they'd seen slaughtered in the pub.

"It's in the past, babe. You can't change it, why relive it?"

"Don't you ever think about the past?"

Ray shook his head. "Never. Only in dreams sometimes."

"Can you make me forget?"

He slid a hand down her chest, inside her blouse. Underneath she wore only a silk teddy over her bare breasts. He cupped one. It was firm and warm to his touch. He felt her nipple stiffen as he rubbed it.

She sighed, shifted in her chair. Ray moved his other hand to a silk-clad thigh. She opened her legs, giving him better access. Her head slipped back, she found her mouth with his. Her mouth was as sweet as the rest of her body. She sighed into his mouth, and the doorbell rang.

"Damn," she said, almost biting Ray's tongue. She stood up, pulling away from Ray and straightening her clothes. "Come in," she said aloud.

Damn, Ray thought, wasn't the word for it. He stared narrow-eyed at the door as Flint, stooping to get in under the lintel, ponderously entered the room.

"Good evening," he said in his customary whisper.

"It was going to be," Ray muttered.

"What can we do for you?" Harvest asked, silencing Ray with a glance.

"Sir Winston has requested Agent Ray's presence for a private interview," Flint said.

"Churchill?" Ray asked.

"We don't know any other Sir Winstons," Harvest said impatiently. "What does he want?"

There was a grinding sound as Flint shrugged his massive shoulders. "I imagine it's private."

"I see. All right. If you'll just excuse us for a moment, Captain."

Flint bowed decorously. "Certainly," he said, and navigated through the doorway, pulling the door shut after him.

"What do you think he wants?" Harvest asked.

Ray shrugged. "You're asking me? Maybe he knows something. Maybe he wants to stir things up. Churchill is England's most powerful wild carder. Oh, sure, Flint stomps around looking grim and whispering like a goddamned ghost, but Cnurchill knows how to get things done."

"Remember what the President said," Harvest reminded him. "Don't mention the Trump."

Ray hesitated. "I don't know. Maybe I should. Everybody's waltzing around like this is some kind of picnic. Well, it's not. Maybe it's time to light fires underneath some butts."

Harvest frowned. "President Barnett said to keep it a secret."

"President Barnett's not here."

"I could order you to keep quiet."

Ray grinned. "You could."

Harvest stared at him. "Okay. Do what you think is best."

"I always do."

"But you better be right on this."

He kissed her, quickly. She seemed unenthusiastic. Ray hoped he could relight the fire under her butt after his meeting with the geezer was over. "Ever know me to be wrong?"

"Hmmmmm."

Flint was waiting in the hallway outside. Ray followed him to the elevator where the British ace punched for the top floor. Two men were waiting for them when the elevator finished its trip. One was huge, though not as mountainous as Flint. He stood nearly six six and his turban made him look even taller. His chest was deep, his shoulders broad. He had a full, flowing beard and carried a long knife in a jeweled sheath. The other man was taller than Ray, but he looked small in comparison to his companion. He was lean and quiet in a menacing sort of way.

"These are two of my best men from the Silver Helix," Flint said. "Rangit Singh - the Lion."

"I have heard of you, of course." Singh spoke with a British accent. "Someday we shall perhaps test each other." He flexed his huge hands and grinned broadly.

"Yeah, sure," Ray said. "When my dance card's not so full."

"And this," Flint said, indicating the other agent, "is Bond, James Bond."

Ray looked at him and frowned. "You're kidding?"

"No, he's not bloody kidding." Bond, James Bond seemed aggravated. It seemed to be his habitual state. "So my parents had a bloody sense of humor, didn't they? Could I help that?" he asked aggressively.

Ray shook his head as Flint knocked on the door to Churchill's suite. "Nope."

"Come," Churchill called.

Ray followed Flint into the room. He turned at the last moment and looked at Bond. "I'll let you know when SPECTRE shows up," he said, then closed the door.

The room was posh, elegant, and dimly lit. It also stank of cigar smoke. Expensive cigar smoke, but stinking cigar smoke nonetheless. Churchill was sitting behind an antique desk, smoking. He wore the same outfit he'd worn the night before. He struggled to his feet as Ray approached, and leaned on a cane as he offered the agent his ancient hand.

It was spotted with age and shrunken down to nothing but bone and sinew, but the oldster still had surprising strength in his grip as he took Ray's hand. Ray was careful not to squeeze, afraid that he would crumble the bones to dust.

Churchill leaned forward, aggressively on his black, silver-handled cane, his face wreathed in puffs of cigar smoke.

"Sit down, sir," he rasped at Ray, waving in the general direction of the chair across the desk from him. He waited until Ray had taken the seat, then plumped down with a satisfied "Oooomph" in his own chair. He stuck a finger inside his tight collar and tugged.

"Getting too old for this nonsense."

"Yes, sir."

Churchill's eyes were those of an ancient reptile, cold and unreadable.

"Too old to waste time, entirely too old," he said after a long, uncomfortable silence.

"Yes, sir," Ray replied, wondering what the old fart expected him to say.

"So what's this I hear about a Black Trump?" Churchill barked.

Ray sat back in his chair. Not a cagey person at the best of times, Ray was totally bewildered by the unexpected question.

"Who told you about that?" he blurted.

"Hartmann did when I spoke to him last. Before that nasty business at the gate."

Ray nodded. There was the sound of geologic movement behind him and a huge shadow suddenly engulfed his chair.

"What's this Black Trump?" Flint asked.

"A killer virus, Brigadier, created by the Card Sharks and aimed at killing all wild carders. Gregg Hartmann told me all about it. I was satisfied that he told me the truth." Ray felt Churchill's eyes bore into his, and found himself nodding. He didn't know if it was an ace power, or simply the force of the politician's will that made him spill the secret. "What exactly do you know about it?"

Ray wet his lips. There was no percentage now, he thought, in holding back. "I saw it. I saw it in action - "

Churchill leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Ray, his face wreathed in smoke.

Ray stopped suddenly, and looked around.

"What's that sound?" he asked, and the world exploded around them.

The room's windows shattered in a blast of automatic rifle fire as Ray hurled himself, chair and all, backward. He twisted his head and saw a helicopter hovering outside the ruined window. The blades were muffled, but Ray had nonetheless heard the silenced whup-whup-whup of the chopper's approach. In a nice bit of flying, the pilot held the chopper a steady three feet from the blown-out windows, and the man in black who had shattered the panes with a burst of gunfire leapt from the chopper's belly into the room. He hit the carpet, rolled, and came up shooting.

"Noooooooo!"

Flint's whisper notched up into an agonized roar as he took a slow-motion step toward Churchill. Before he could get into place Ray lifted and threw his chair, smashing the gunman in the chest and knocking him backward as two others leapt daringly into the room. The door flew open and the Helix agents joined the action.

Ray glanced toward the desk. Churchill was down, out of sight. Two of the gunmen were shooting fruitlessly at Flint. Their bullets ricocheted off his body, striking sparks. The first gunman was dazed by the impact of Ray's chair. He staggered around the room, toward the British agents.

Flint held up his right hand and snapped his fingers with a sudden, popping sound. One of the gunmen staggered as a blossom of blood sprouted on his chest. He fell as Flint snapped his fingers again. The second gunman collapsed, his right eye gone.

Ray looked out the window. The chopper was still hovering. Ray locked eyes with the pilot.

"Goddamn," he said. It was General MacArthur Johnson. The first gunman lifted his weapon, but he was too close to Singh. The ace roared like a lion - Ray wondered if that was how he'd gotten his name - grabbed the gunman by shoulder and crotch and hurled him out the window, right at the chopper. The human projectile screamed as he few through the air and struck the glass bubble of the chopper's canopy. He bounced off, leaving a smear of blood on the canopy, and screamed all the way to the ground. Johnson fought the controls for a moment, then smiled at Ray, gave him the finger, and flew away into the night.

Ray tensed, standing in the shattered window frame, then something told him, no, don't do it. No chance. He pulled himself back from the edge and turned back into the room.

The other gunmen were dead. Flint had shot them with bits of his own fingers, deadly as any stone arrowhead. Flint was turning back toward Churchill. Ray moved quickly and smoothly around him.

He knelt by the fallen man. Churchill had been stitched across the chest. His beautiful smoking jacket was torn and bloody, as was the flesh under it. His eyes focused on Ray. His lips moved, but Ray couldn't hear what he was trying to say. He gathered the ancient, shattered body into his arms and put his ears close to Churchill's mouth.

"What is it, sir?"

"Ge ..." Churchill said. "Ge ... Gen ... er ... al."

"I know, sir," Ray nodded. "Try to rest. The doctor - "

Ray put his lips together and frowned. Churchill was gone. Ray looked up at Flint, looming over him. If it were possible for a statue to look stricken, Flint did.

Ray shook his head, all insouciance drained from him. "He's dead."

"What did he say?" Flint asked.

Ray shook his head. "Tried to tell me that General MacArthur Johnson was responsible for the attack. But I'd already recognized the bastard piloting the chopper."

"My God," Flint said heavily. "What will we all do now?"

Ray had no answer for the stricken ace.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Dr. Meadows?" O. K. Casaday's voice called from the lab's far end.

Mark looked up from the workstation, on which he was trying to unravel the intricacies of WordPerfect 6.0. It was lunchtime. Jarnavon and the quietly helpful platoon of lab-coated technicians, Asian and Occidental, who acted as interface between Mark and the array of still largely mysterious equipment were nowhere to be seen.

"Take a break," Casaday said. "Give the eyebones a rest."

The CIA man was not in the habit of offering idle invitations. Mark figured that, had he been a real hero - like Mel Gibson in those movies he tried not to watch - he'd come zapping back with some cleverly defiant banter. Of course, the result would still be the same: Casaday had a gun, an army of heavily armed guerrillas at his beck and call, and Mark's only daughter as hostage; he would get his way. But he'd know what was what.

What really was what was that Mark was no hero, not without his friends. He was tired, scared, and utterly over his head. He stood up and nodded. "Okay."

They walked outside. The clouds were piling up over the mountains to the east, day by day. Monsoon was coming. But until the rains arrived there was nothing to mitigate the sun, which slammed down on Mark's head like a Stooge's frying pan when he stepped out into its domain.

The camp bustled with its usual activities - soldiers drilling, trucks moving back and forth between the compound and the poppy fields that paid the bills. Nearby an officer was instructing a group of what Mark took to be recruits in the fine points of shooting down government helicopters with American-made Stinger missiles.

"So how's the work coming?" Casaday asked. He strode across the huge camp as if he had a destination in mind. Mark, seeing no alternative to following, saw likewise no point in asking what that destination was. He didn't really care. It wasn't going to be anyplace he wanted to be.

"Slow, man," he answered. "I'm not real up to speed on all this stuff. Scanning - tunneling microscopes, that kinda thing. All new to me."

But the techs were ready, willing, and able to operate the arcane gimcracks for him. All he had to grasp was what uses they could be put to, and the courteous and efficient staff would do the actual dirty work. Damn them anyway.

"Yeah," Casaday said skeptically. They were walking toward a largish hootch, out kind of by itself near the rolled German razor tape that formed the perimeter. "I still can't believe you don't know how to use a personal computer. I mean, you're supposed to be a trained scientist."

"I got trained a long time ago," Mark said defensively. "I ran a head shop. I never had anything to do with computers."

"How did you keep your accounts, that kind of crap?"

"Somebody did the books for me." That somebody was Susan, one of the pair of surly, brushcut CUNY students he had hired in to help him back in the vanished Cosmic Pumpkin days. He found himself missing his clerks, even though they had despised him, rather as one might miss a pit bull who had wandered into the yard and whom one had adopted out of a combined sense of Good Samaritanism and intimidation.

Casaday snorted "Yeah. I guess." He looked at Mark sidelong. "You're a smart guy, Meadows. That's why I brought you here. That's why I figure you wouldn't try to bullsnit me about kitty-cat crap like that."

From the hut ahead came a scream. Sprout's scream, shrill and desperate.

Mark burst into a run, loose-legged and gangly, scattering the inevitable crows. He went booming in the door of the hootch. Dimness, a flash of movement in his peripheral vision, and then impact. He went sailing back out to land on his butt on the hard, red earth.

Casaday sauntered up, looking cool in his linen suit and white straw fedora. "Looks like Layton got a bit overenthusiastic again," he said. "I'm going to have to have words with that boy."

He reached a helping hand down, which Mark was not too proud to accept in his frenzy to help his daughter. Ribs aching, he lunged back into the hut.

To one side a grinning Layton held Sprout by the arm. She wore a T-shirt tied up to bare her midriff and cutoff blue jeans. She struggled Helplessly.

On the other side of the single room Lou Inmon sat, bound to a chair.

Gunther Ditmar stood beside him with a butcher's apron on over his mildewed suit. He held some kind of shiny metal implement. Several men in black pajamas stood watchfully by the wall.

The bound joker raised his head and looked at Mark. His great golden eyes were swollen almost shut.

"Sorry, boss," he said. "I thought I could help you, but things don't always work out like we plan, do they?"

"How'd you like my side kick, Doc?" Layton asked.

Mark bared teeth at him and lunged for his daughter. Layton did a fancy little sidestep between Mark and the girl, grinning. A pair of Black Karens grabbed Mark's arms and hauled him back.

"What's the hell's going on?" Mark demanded, struggling futilely. "Sprout, honey, what's the matter?"

"Oh, Daddy, they were gonna hurt Unca Louie!" she wailed.

"And we still are," said Casaday, strolling in the door. He stopped and looked down at the captive joker. "Some people don't know when they're well off, Doctor, can you imagine that? This poor sucker was set up as President pro tem and in prime position to make it a permanent deal. But he just couldn't let things go."

"What are you doing? Why do you have Sprout here?"

"Object lesson," Casaday said.

"Are you out of your mind? She - she's a child, Casaday. What do you expect her to get from an 'object lesson'?"

"Not her," Casaday said. "You."

Mark deflated. It was humiliating to be held immobile by two guys who didn't come up to his shoulder, but he could not break free. They were strong.

He wasn't.

"Okay. Then let her go. Him, too. You've made your point, believe me."

Casaday shook his great round head. "No way, Jose. This - thing - caused us trouble, Doctor. We want you to see what happens to those who make trouble for us. Herr Ditmar, you may proceed."

Ditmar clicked his heels, nodded. He brandished the implement, which proved to be a pair of wire cutters with yellow plastic handles.

"Many times you encounter someone who has an unusually high pain threshold, or an unusually strong will," the German said didactically, as if Mark had wandered into the middle of his lecture. "It is common to believe that such people are immune to physical persuasion." A smile. "In fact, such is seldom the case."

He reached down and took the pinkie of Osprey's right claw, raised it. The skin was yellow and lightly scaled, like a bird's. The talon was black. The joker glared at him.

"Casaday," Mark said between teeth clenched so hard he could feel them creak, "get her out of here."

Casaday smiled. With the air of a gardener pruning his champion roses Ditmar reached down and snipped the tip of the finger off at the first joint.

Osprey vented a great eagle-scream of fury and pain. Sprouts terrified shrieks mingled with his as his blood sprayed the yellow teddy bear embroidered on her shirt.

Mark fought like a mad thing. He could not get free of the two compact men hanging onto his arms.

"Don't bother fighting them, Dr. Meadows," Casaday said. "They practice the local martial art, bando. Boarmen, they call themselves, because it's boar-style bando that they do. No, not as in Martin Bormann, Ditmar; don't get a hard-on, here."

Ditmar giggled. He was wiping blood from his glasses with his handkerchief.

"I could take 'em, though," Layton said. "They're not really that tough."

"Layton, shut the fuck up," Casaday said conversationally. Mark vomited on the floor, and had the almost-subconscious gratification of seeing the two boar boys hop back.

Casaday covered his nose with his own handkerchief. "Christ," he said in annoyance. "Get him out of here."

The boarmen stepped forward and pitched Mark into the yard. He finished returning his breakfast to Mother Earth. A hand caught him by the hair at the front of his head and hauled him up onto his knees.

Casaday hid hold of him. He and Ditmar stood over Mark. Layton held Sprout in the hootch's doorway. She seemed to have passed out, and hung limp in his grasp.

"And that is the way to break even the toughest-willed subject," Ditmar continued as if there'd never been a pause in his narration. "You start with the smallest of joints - first fingers, then toes - and work your way upward. The body has a surprising number of joints, Dr. Meadows. Sooner or later, one proves to be the straw that breaks the camel's back."

Mark decided to have the dry heaves for a while. Casaday made a disgusted sound and let him go.

"Finished?" the spook asked when the spasms subsided. Mark nodded miserably. "Get him some water and a fucking towel."

Mark climbed to his feet, reeled. Ditmar was nowhere to be seen. The sun was poking through his eyelids like steel needles, jabbing through his eyes and out the back of his skull. "You sadistic son of a bitch," he choked.

"No, that's Ditmar," Casaday said. "I am a son of a bitch, but a practical one."

As if on cue, another scream shook the walls of the hut behind Casaday.

"What are you talking about?" Mark asked through a sudden torrent of tears.

"You're a smart boy, Meadows, like I said before. Obviously you got it doped out that young Carter isn't in your league, as far as this recombinant-DNA bulljive goes. So it might've occurred to you that you could string us along forever, saying you just couldn't figure out a way to make any progress, and we'd never be the wiser. Right?"

Mark glared at him. Layton grabbed Sprout by the left buttock, pinched. She came awake and screamed.

Mark hurled himself at the kickboxer. Casaday stiffarmed him onto his butt. He hit his tailbone on hard ground making sparks explode behind his eyes, and then the ever-helpful boarmen had his arms again.

"Layton," he said, "you're a dead man."

"Who's gonna kill me, Meadows? Your ace friends? You're jack shit without your drugs, asshole, and we all know it." He put back his ponytailed head and laughed. His teeth were perfect.

"Don't jack me around Meadows," Casaday said. "You've thought of trying us on for size. Admit it, or I'll see what else Layton can pinch."

Sullenly, Mark nodded.

"Okay. So here's the deal. We're working to a deadline. That means you're on a deadline too - or, more correctly, your baby girl is. You have three weeks to show us some results in the lab. Results Carter-baby can verify. Otherwise - "

He laughed. "Well, your girl's quite a hot little honey, but I have to admit she isn't my type; not enough vitamins. She is Layton's type. He likes his women white and not-so-bright; hell, your foxy little 'tard's his dream girl. You blow your deadline, I give her to him. But don't worry - you get to watch."

By this point Mark was back in control of himself enough that he didn't give Casaday the satisfaction of watching him struggle in vain. He just stared. His eyes were a blue much paler than the furnace sky, and infinitely colder.

"We are operating at zero tolerance, here, just like your buddies in the DEA. You try to run, I give her to Layton. You try something smart, like sabotaging our main culture of the Trump - same thing. And if you really, truly fuck up, and don't deliver the goods at all - " A big old used-car salesman's smile. "I give her to Ditmar. You read me, Doctor?"

A Karen had arrived with a gourd full of water and a coarse towel with VALE OF KASHMIR HOTEL, TEHRAN embroidered on it in green. Mark rinsed his mouth, spat, mopped his face. "I can't promise results, Casaday. You have to know that. I'm not up-to-date on the science. I don't really understand half the equipment you have. What you want may not even be possible, man!"

Casaday snorted. "Tough. It's the reality fucking sandwich, Doctor: bon appetit."

Yet another scream from the hut. Casaday smirked. "Sounds like the Colonel's worked his way up to the knuckle," he said. "Your joker pal still has five fingers and two thumbs left. That's what? Twenty-one joints on just the hands? Fuck. I was never any good at math."

"But it's not fair!" Mark cried.

The CIA man sneered at him. "Fair's where they give colored ribbons to hogs and pumpkin pies," he said.

A commotion inside the hut, an outburst of trumping, a squeal of surprise and outrage. A moment more and Lou Inmon lunged through the doorway, knocking Layton and Sprout sprawling to the hard-packed earth. The joker had managed to break the straps which fastened his legs to the legs of the chair.

"Listen, boss," the joker gasped. The feathers of his head were matted scarlet with blood "I fucked up. Sorry."

Layton jumped up, started for Osprey. Sprout lunged away, scrambling on all fours. Cursing, the kickboxer turned to pursue her.

"Just remember," the joker said. "You ain't been forgot!"

"Fuck," Casaday said. "I'm in a Three fucking Stooges movie." He reached inside his jacket, drew his .45, snapped it out to the full extension of his arm and fired. The bullet hit Inmon on the right brow ridge. He dropped like a bundle of rags in the doorway.

Casaday turned back to Mark, tucking his pistol into his shoulder holster. "Now get your ass back in the lab, Meadows, or I'll tell Layton to get out his Kama Sutra Love Oil ahead of fucking schedule."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Croyd woke them before dawn. They traveled the valleys downward and east, past Diyarbakir and east again, heading for the border at Al Qamishli. Looking like Kurds, or so Croyd said. If there was fighting in the hills, they didn't see it. Villages changed from Turkish to Kurdish control sometimes at gunpoint, but the Turkish government tried to keep news of the rebellions hushed. Turkey is one country, they insisted. Come visit. But not that town, please. Not this season.

Balthazar stopped once at a roadside phone, an incongruous orange intrusion from the twentieth century. He spent a long time there, feeding in coins, and came oack to the bus with a grim expression.

"We want to get across this afternoon," he said, answering questions none of them asked "We'll have more trouble at night. Different set of guards then. We're going to visit our Kurdish cousins about ten miles south of town. We're taking the pump to them and going back home for the summer. That's the story, anyway."

"Give me the names of these cousins," Croyd said.

Balthazar did, a genealogy complete to the oldest uncle and the newest child of a family that had been resettled into Syria, displaced across the border after a battle in Iran.

"I don't think we'll get much hassle from the Turks or the Syrians," Balthazar said. "The Turks don't really care if Kurds cross the border going out of the country. The Syrians won't bother us because they think we're going back. We don't look rich and we don't look indigent. You can handle it, Croyd."

Croyd's attention seemed to be on the roadside, intent on fields and the clumps of trees. He watched as if he looked for snipers or maybe snakes. He was never still. Always, a finger tapped, a foot. He shifted in his seat with quick, restless motions.

"This gets me to Rudo?" Croyd said. "Tell me that's really going to happen, Balthazar, or whatever your name

"This gets you to Rudo. Wherever he ends up. Last the Fists heard, it was Europe again. We're after him, Croyd."

"You've lost him?" Croyd twisted in his seat, as far away from Balthazar as he could get. He looked as if he might cry. "You bastards. You've lost the trail. I could be looking for him myself. You could be lying to me about this jumper stuff. Maybe I killed him after all and he stayed dead. Why the hell should I believe you?"

"You sound paranoid. What's the matter, man?"

"I do? Yeah, I guess I do. I'm getting sleepy. It's too early. I don't want to get sleepy yet."

The road, barely two lanes if you were imaginative, widened and curved. Squat silver tanks and a maze of fat pipes marked an oil field. Yellow arrows on the road and signs in several languages marked the approach of the border.

"Jan?" Balthazar asked.

She lifted a satchel from the floor, rummaged in it, and handed a muslin sack of rice to Croyd.

"What's this?" he asked.

"In there," Jan said.

Croyd stirred the grains and brought out a ziploc full of rainbow capsules.

"We need you awake," Balthazar said. "Take one of those and get us past the border. We'll talk about this other stuff when we're in Syria."

"I hate speed," Croyd said. He picked an orange and black capsule front the sack and dry-swallowed it. "I never wanted to go to Syria."

"My name really is Balthazar. Always was, even back in Alabama." The joker brought the bus to a stop, its diesel rumbling in idle. Croyd passed the rice sack back to Jan and climoed down to meet the border guards.

There were men with guns. There were papers for Croyd to hand over, questions and answers. Croyd flicked his hand toward the bus and Balthazar got out and stood beside him. The building was concrete block, its windows barred, its perimeter surrounded with chain-link fence. A board painted with black and white diagonals hung across the road. Zoe stared at it, willing herself not to see the three guards, not to evaluate their strength against that of Croyd and Balthazar, not to think of the photographs of hemmorhagic flesh and staring eyes, the glossy prints the Hound of Hell handed over so casually. Black Trump victims, so he said.

We're stopping that hell with the threat of another, she thought. We aren't bad people. They won't stop us here. Please.

When Croyd turned and beckoned for her and Jan, she was able to get up and get out of the bus without shaking too much. She led Jan close to the barrier while two of the guards climbed into the bus.

The third one was still talking to Croyd. If Croyd was sane enough to do his job, they were talking money.

He would manage. He wasn't crazy yet, she had to believe it. Jan squinted into the sun, her eyes, as ever, on Balthazar.

Something clanged against metal in the bus and Jan flinched, a quickly controlled jerk of her shoulders. The guards were moving back and forth in there, looking for whatever, looking at the damned pump. Croyd's guard took a step toward the bus. Balthazar's mirrorshades watched the guard. The sun glanced off his lenses and struck Zoe's eyes as he turned to look back at the road from Turkey. A brown, dusty Ford Bronco chugged up behind the bus and stopped.

Croyd's guard yelled something. The two guards in the bus climbed out again. One flicked his right hand in a quick gesture and Croyd's guard disappeared with Croyd behind the barred door of the border shed. The pair who had rummaged through the bus went back to talk to the couple in the Bronco. Zoe turned toward the gate, too fast, making her skirts whirl, damn it, and sighed a precautionary sigh at the little motor that lifted the barrier.

"What?" Jan whispered.

"Insurance. Let's get in the bus, Jan." For under the floppy white canvas hats, it was the tourists from Odessa who sat in the Escort, sweating in the afternoon heat and staring at the back of the bus without moving a muscle.

Jan reached for Balthazar's hand and led him into the bus. He patted at her arm, his attention on the door of the shed.

We could die here, Zoe thought. We could die here or tomorrow or at any place on this road at any moment. I'll be damned if I'll stand in the way of love, of comfort between these two. What love had Jan ever known? Jellyhead's dad had died, but she knew who he was. Jan didn't remember ever having a father. Or a mother. No one, until she'd found the Escorts.

As soon as I get Balthazar alone, I'll tell him - it's okay. Don't wait. Don't wait until Jan is eighteen. She may never be eighteen.

Croyd stepped outside the shed door in the middle of a conversation, waving both arms and chattering rapid-fire Turkish. He stopped in midsentence as the barrier lifted and Balthazar rolled the bus forward. Croyd ran for the step and swung inside as they passed the barrier.

Croyd stuck his arm out the window and waved goodbye. One of the guards waved back and then stopped. His attention seemed to be diverted by the sight of the barrier, which lifted and sank, lifted and sank again and again, faster and faster, while the old, blue bus chugged into Syria.

"What the hell did you do that for?" Croyd asked.

"The tourists," Zoe said. Her teeth were chattering. "From Odessa. Didn't you see them?"

"The Odessa Ovoids? No. I didn't see them."

"They pulled up behind us," Balthazar said. "Now y'all hold on, hear? I think we're going to do a little evasive maneuvering about now."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Read it back to me," Jay Ackroyd said. "I want to make sure you got it right."

"I got it, I got it, I just don't understand it," Peter Pann complained. The overseas connection made his voice sound even smaller and thinner than it did in person. "KNAVES OF HEARTS," he read. "That part is all in caps. Sharks schooling in Asian waters. Fishing should be OK, and you want just the letters O and K, not o-k-a-y. Meet Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong, asap, or we're all Librarians. Signed Your Stud Buddy Finger."

"That's it," Jay said. "Have them box off the ad so it stands out more. If they can, I want it bordered with suit symbols, you know, hearts, spades, clubs. Heavy on the hearts."

"I always knew you were a romantic. How long do you want this to run?" Peter's voice was faint and far-away. It was still night back in New York, and he sounded sleepy.

"Three weeks," Jay said. "After that, it won't make any difference. I want it running in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Jokertown Cry, the International Herald-Tribune, the Times and the Guardian in England, USA Today, the Los Angeles Tribune, and any other papers you can think of. Oh, and some magazines. Soldier of Fortune, Rolling Stone, and Variety."

"I'll be on it first thing in the morning."

"Be on it right now. It's already morning in some of the places we need to reach. How's Topper doing?"

"They're still holding her out at Governor's. I've been keeping an eye on her with a tink. Her old friend Straight Arrow paid her a visit. They yelled at each other some, but when he left he didn't know anything he didn't already know when he arrived."

"Remind me to give Melissa a raise," Jay said.

"Screw Melissa, give me a raise," Peter came back. "I never understood why Topper needs a salary anyway. She can reach into that hat and pull out doubloons, silver certificates, bearer bonds, the Hope diamond, anything her little heart desires. Why work?"

"Damned if I know," Jay admitted. He said his goodbyes, hung up, and checked the coin return for loose money. No such luck. It wasn't his day.

He had stashed the rest of his crack investigative team at a Pizza Hut down the street. He walked back with his hands in his pockets, stopping just long enough to buy Sascha a new pair of shades from a street vendor.

An elderly aborigine was standing outside the door to the Pizza Hut, rocking on his feet and wearing Eric Fleming's clothes. He was tall and very black, with white hair and wrinkled skin and sad eyes that saw deep into the vanished dreamtime. "How's Peter?" he asked as Jay opened the door.

"He said to tell you that he's really enjoying your wine cellar," Jay replied. He went inside. Abo Jerry hurried after. Sascha was in a booth, scarfing down what remained of a large anchovy and green pepper pizza while Finn grazed at the salad bar; the booths were not designed to accommodate centaurs. Every eye in the restaurant was on the two jokers.

Jay slid in across from Sascha and flipped him the sunglasses.

"What's the plan?" Sascha asked, as he put on the glasses over the blank space where his eyes should have been.

Finn clomped up to listen, his rear blocking the aisle between the booths. Abo Jerry was looking at Jay intently. Jay had a headache. His nose was throbbing, the world was about to end, and he was trapped in a Pizza Hut with Larry, Moe, and Mister Ed.

"We know that the Sharks started with three flasks of Clara van Renssaeler's original cultures," Jay said carefully. "Brandon claims that Rudo divided them up. One for him, one for General MacArthur Johnson, one for that spook bastard Casaday."

Jerry heard the venom in his voice when he said that last name. "You sound like you know Casaday."

"Our paths have crossed," Jay admitted. "I only saw him twice, but I remember him real good. He set me up to die. Things like that stick in your memory. Question is, is Casaday a rogue or is the whole fucking CIA compromised? Call me paranoid, but I think the best policy right now is we trust nobody except other wild cards, and I'm not so thrilled about them." Jay scratched his bandage. "This is where we split up."

Sascha and Jerry nodded gravely in unison. Finn said, "Is this another one of your fabulous plans, Ackroyd?" He was in a terrible mood for a guy who had just avoided being eaten by sharks.

"Afraid so," Jay admitted. "So long as we stay together like a giant charm bracelet, we're a little fucking conspicuous." He gestured. "Look around you. These people are all trying so hard not to stare at us that their eyes are crossed."

Abo Jerry turned his head and looked around, nodding.

Sascha's shades stared right at Jay. "I'm seeing Vietnam in your thoughts. Some bar in Saigon."

"Rick's Cafe Americaine," Jay told the telepath. "An old hangout of the Joker Brigade. I spent some time in Saigon after the war, looking for a Joker MIA. Never found mm, but I got to know Rick's pretty good. That's where you and Jerry Fred should start. Brandon said Casaday is the CIA sector chief for Nam, if we have half a prayer of picking up his trail, it's going to be there."

Jerry's head whipped back around. "There's a war going on in Free Vietnam, don't you read the papers? They starting having coups and countercoups and purges five minutes after Mark Meadows died."

"You bet they did," Jay said. "And that smells of Casaday all the way. Saigon is full of jokers, you two will blend right in. Just keep asking questions. They won't talk, but Sascha can pull the answers out of their minds. Ask about Meadows too."

"Meadows?" Jerry said. "Why? Do you think Casaday had something to do with his death?"

"Just ask, okay? And if you find out anything about anybody, phone Peter and wait until you hear from me."

His junior partner nodded. "I used to do a great Charlie Chan. What do you think, Warner Oland or Sidney Toler?" He snapped his fingers. "No, Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, he was great!"

Jay said, "Here's an idea. Try a real Asian."

"I need a mirror," Jerry said. He sprang up out of the booth and dashed off to the men's room.

Jay sighed. In the silence that followed, Finn asked quietly, "Where am I going?"

Jay almost said Takis, but thought better of it. They'd all agreed not to lay that on him just yet. "Home," he said instead. "At least Sascha can slip into a pair of sunglasses. No offense, doctor, but you stand out like a horse's ass."

"I know what I look like," Finn said stiffly. "I don't care. I'm in this thing to the end."

"This is the end, so far as you're concerned."

"Do I have to remind you that it's my dad's plane at the airport?" Finn said, like a kid saying It's my football, I get to play quarterback if I say so. "Nobody's going anywhere without me."

Jay just shook his head. "We don't dare go back to the Learjet. Fleming's people know about it by now. Doc, you've done everything you can, but right now you're more of a liability than an asset."

"You think you're going to find the Black Trump without me?" Finn challenged. "You could be in the same room with it and you wouldn't know what to look for. The three of you don't know a retrovirus from a retrorocket. You think Rudo is going to have the stuff in a big drum with BLACK TRUMP stenciled on the side? Maybe a foaming beaker with a skull-and-crossbones on it?" the centaur's blond tail was lashing back and forth in anger. "And what do you plan to do with it when you find it? Flush it down the toilet?"

Jay had started to shape his hand into a gun to pop Finn back to the safety of Jerry's wine cellar, but now he hesitated.

"There's nothing for me in New York," Finn went on. "If I show my face at the Clinic they'll just pick me up again. I can't work or walk the streets or go home. What do you expect me to do, sit around Creighton's watching CNN until I hear that the Black Trump's been released? Fuck that, Ackroyd. You pop me back to New York and I go straight to the authorities. I have a lovely singing voice."

Jay lowered his finger and sighed. "You win. I'm going to Hong Kong. You'll go with me. We'll disguise you somehow. Glasses, maybe. I don't know."

The door to the men's room opened. An old thin, stooped Vietnamese man came out wearing Eric Fleming's clothes, walked over to the booth, and sat down. "How's this?" he asked.

Jay Ackroyd looked him over. "Ho Chi Minh visits Ho Chi Minh City, Swell. That ought to make all the newspapers. Of course, they may wonder why you can't speak Vietnamese ..."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

A mud-walled town, narrow streets, a mosque, stands of fig trees in irrigated fields, a boy herding three goats and four younger siblings, all moving by so fast that they seemed frozen in stop-motion. Four fat geese and a sharp turn around a windowless shade. A steep traverse into a wadi, and a climb back up the other side, fat tires crunching over boulders the size of a child's head. They topped the wadi and came out on a flat plateau, no shelter, no stands of trees, hours of daylight left. The long silver snake of a pipeline led southeast. A road, or at least a well-tended track, ran beside it. Balthazar put the pedal down and they lumbered toward Damascus at a hearty fifty miles an hour, the bus swaying on its strange suspension and the doves cooing startled protests.

"Eee-hah!" Croyd yelled. "I like this!"

"Don't mind it myself," Balthazar said.

Zoe unfolded her new kilim to tuck over her lap. They reached the Euphrates again and went south along its banks for half the night.

The campsite was a stand of date palms, their fronds rustling in the night wind. The camp was below the roadway, near the level of the river, but the bus couldn't be seen from the road and a little ridge gave a good view to the east. Zoe helped Balthazar set up the tent while Jan and Croyd unloaded the sleeping bags from the bus.

"I'll sleep outside," Zoe said. "You and Jan can have the tent."

"Ma'am?" Balthazar asked.

There wasn't going to be any graceful way to phrase this. Balthazar would understand or he wouldn't. "You're alive. Jan's alive. That could change any minute. Love her. Let her love you. Its okay, Balthazar."

"Have you talked to Jan?" he asked.

"I'll let you do that." Zoe smiled at Balthazar and turned away.

She spotted Croyd pacing the ridge about a hundred yards from the camp and went to intercept him. They sat for a long while, watching the river, the trees, the broken little hills. The stars were very bright.

Now and again, the walls of the tent glowed with a firefly light.

Croyd talked. He got up at times and paced back and forth, and he never stopped talking.

"Algebra," he said. "Zoe, do you know these people invented algebra?" He waved his hand at the empty landscape. "They even invented the zero. Can you imagine inventing a zero?"

Zoe shook her head, realized Croyd couldn't see the motion because she was sitting by the brazier with her sleeping bag pulled up over her head. "No," she said, a garbled no that was mixed with a yawn.

"Do you think they're lying about Rudo?"

"I don't know. I think the Fists would lie if they thought they needed to."

"That's no answer."

"There's a bomb in the pump. They aren't lying about that."

"How do you know?"

"I can sense molecular structures, Croyd. There's a big heavy dose of fissionable stuff in there. Really."

"Then maybe they'll get Rudo for me. I have to believe that, I guess. Or I could just go to sleep somewhere and try to get back to New York."

"I wouldn't go back," Zoe said. "No way." She yawned again.

"You're tired. Rest. Sleep. I'll be quiet." Croyd fiddled with the last of the coals in the brazier and didn't say anything for a while. Zoe drifted into half-sleep, dreaming of Spanish dancers with castanets. They whirled around and around, and under the black lace of their mantillas their faces were white bone -

"Zoe?" Croyd whispered, his lips close to her ear.

The castanets were palm fronds, clicking in the night's wind. She jumped, "Guess I was drowsing," Zoe said.

Croyd kissed her. It was a hungry kiss, a speedy kiss. It roused her to total alertness. She got her sleeping bag unzipped with one hand and pulled Croyd in with her. It was a single bag. They were a tight fit. She wondered if Croyd had waked Balthazar to stand watch, but the thought wasn't a high priority at the moment. She tried rolling on top. That was fun. The knot on the waist of her trousers was proving difficult, and she giggled, trying to keep her voice quiet.

A bright, orange blossom flared behind the date palms. The shot struck the bus, a sound so loud it was a white gap in her ears. She heard a zinging richochet.

Croyd's foot kicked at her shoulder as he backed out of the sleeping bag at near-light speed. Zoe embraced the sand beneath her and found she was worming her way toward the tent, flat on her belly.

Had they hit the bomb?

It wouldn't blow up. The Permissive Action circuitry was coming to Jerusalem in a different package, or so Snailfoot had told them. Even if you shot through the metal casing around the damned thing, or cracked it open, all that would happen would be that a few pounds of fissionables would get scattered around.

I'm glad Snailfoot told me that, Zoe thought. Another shot slammed into the bus, this one from the little ridge where she and Croyd had kept watch for a time.

The optical ghost of the first shot hung in front of her eyes, a bright, orange blur that wouldn't blink away. Through it, she saw a man behind a palm tree, a white blur of headdress bent toward the sights of a rifle, aiming across her toward the bus. Sand. Glass. Kill him. Zoe blew at the sand beside her face. It rose, a dustdevil made of tiny needles, and whirled toward the rifle barrel.

She heard the diesel grind over. And stop.

"Zoe!" Jan yelled. Zoe rolled and saw Jan in the door of the bus, crouched over a rifle. "This way! Run!"

The diesel coughed again. Jan's gun staccatoed a cluster of shots toward the ridge. A rifleman fell, his cloak deflating around him like a struck tent.

"Shit!" Croyd yelled. "I almost had him!" He was halfway up the ridge, naked, and he fell backward - hurt? No, rolling down the sand of the ridge faster than a man could run. He got his legs under him at the bottom of the slope and scuttled toward the bus.

The starter ground and the diesel coughed and died.

"Get it going, Balthazar!" Croyd yelled. "There's headlights coming! There's more of them!" Croyd leaped the steps and crashed into his seat. "Who were they? Who? Start this bus, man!"

"Shut up! I'm trying!" Balthazar yelled over the whine of the starter.

The engine turned over. Over. It chugged into life. The fat wheels ground sand and crested the ridge.

The world began to move with desperate slowness. From the north, a pair of low headlights came inevitably forward. The biggest, shiniest lorry in the world was headed into the car's path, just there all of a sudden, and silent as death. Its sound track is missing, Zoe thought, but then engine noise blasted her ears, the roar of a huge motor and a wail of abused tires as the lorry twisted off the road, its headlights broadsiding the bus that Balthazar was frantically trying to aim toward some invisible space that would let him miss both the lorry and the car. The lorry fishtailed and skidded over the ridge toward the river, its horns bellowing. Date palms snapped like toothpicks. Balthazar braked the bus to a stop. He threw himself out the door on some mission Zoe couldn't understand following Croyd. A couple of white-robed men scrambled away from the lorry's path, robes aflutter and rifles blasting every which way. The big truck's cab tipped at the edge of the bank. It balanced and rocked back and forth. The trailer slewed sideways and rolled into the river. In slow motion, it pulled the cab down with it. Jan, seeming utterly calm, sighted on one gunman, pulled the trigger, and swept her sights to the other. "Squeeze. Don't pull," she whispered to herself, and the second rifleman went down. Croyd still naked scrambled toward the riverbank, and a brown Ford Bronco pulled off the road and cautiously followed the lorry's path through the trees. The car stopped and two people got out.

Zoe wasn't sure hew she got there, but she found she was standing on the bank, watching in total amazement as Ms. Odessa removed her floppy hat and her camera, pulled off her skirt, and made a perfect shallow dive into the river. Mr. Odessa pulled a spare tire out of the Ford and tied it to a length of rope. He whirled it over his head and sailed it into the water.

"Mother will get him out," Mr. Odessa said, while a man's voice yelled. "Put me down." Splutter. "Let go! Bloody hell!"

"Hush!" Ms. Odessa said. "Quit fighting me or I'll be forced to strike you. Silly fellow anyway, showing up in the middle of the road like that. I should let you drown!"

"That's all of them," Croyd said, jogging past. He'd grabbed his pants en route, and he held them in one fist. He had a rifle in the other. Where had the guns been hidden? Zoe didn't really want to know.

Mr. Odessa was reeling in the tire and the pair who clutched it. He grunted, and Zoe grabbed the rope and helped him pull.

"Here you go. We're on solid ground now." Ms. Odessa crouched down and tucked her hands under the armpits of a stocky man in a streaming wet windbreaker and a soggy cap that streamed water over his face. She heaved. The man got to his feet. He coughed and climbed up to the pod of light made by the Bronco's headlights. He had a stogie in his mouth, utterly limp. The man blinked at his rescuers, at the guns that Croyd and Jan held. He turned, looked at the overturned lorry, and threw his soaked black cigar away.

Ms. Odessa climbed into her clothes while Mr. Odessa stowed the tire and the carefully coiled rope in the Bronco. "Well, Mother," he said. "I think we should be on our way. I'm sorry about your truck, young man, but I'm sure these folks will give you a ride."

The lorry driver nodded, looking dazed. Young man? He was forty, at least.

Ms. Odessa fastened the waistband of her skirt and climbed into the Bronco. It backed away.

Mr. Odessa's voice came from the open window. "They'll never believe this in Omaha," he said.

"That fellow isn't a very careful driver," Ms. Odessa said.

The Bronco paused at the edge of the deserted road, signaled a right turn, and drove into the night.

"Bloody hell," the lorry driver said. "Oh, bloody hell." He pulled his soggy Andy Capp hat off, wrung it out, and settled it firmly over his bald spot. "There's no way to get my rig out of the water. There's a roadblock about twenty miles down the road. Some bloke told the Syrians you're carrying a bloody load of heroin in this bloody bus of yours. Now those ruddy do-gooder Yanks will tell them where you are. Oh, bloody hell!"

The man began to trot uphill toward the bus, his boots squishing with every step. "I had a proper winch in the rig. Could have lifted your little item out and stowed it in no time. 'A simple little job,' those bastards said. 'Just go load this hot pump these blokes are carrying and bring it to Jerusalem,' that's what they said."

Zoe followed him, Jan behind her with her rifle. On the ground, beneath broken palm fronds, Zoe saw an array of white bones, a skeletal hand still clutching the stock of a rifle. Its barrel was polished away. So was the arm that had held it. Zoe shuddered and kept going, watching the silent countryside, the empty road.

"Bloody pakis shooting up the countryside, bloody Yank tourists out where they shouldn't be," the lorry driver muttered.

Balthazar stood on the bus steps, holding a bulky gun. The lorry driver strode toward the nose of the old Bluebird. Croyd intercepted him, suddenly in position between the man and the bumper. Croyd wove a net in the air with his arms, dancing barefoot like an NBA guard. "Who the hell are you?" Croyd asked.

"John Bruckner. The Highwayman. Put your pants on, whoever the hell you are, and open the bonnet so I can see what I'm stuck with driving!" Bruckner shoved Croyd aside.

"I have a gun," Croyd said.

"Yes, but do you have a torch? In case you haven't figured it out, mate, this bloke called the Hound of Hell sent me to get you into Jerusalem. Now, we're not moving until I look at this effing rig of yours, and if we don't move in about five minutes flat, your little teaparty is over."

"Torch?" Croyd asked.

"He needs a light," Jan said.

"Do it, Jan!" Balthazar called from the steps of the bus.

Jan flashed her eyes over the "bonnet." Croyd lifted it. The Highwayman examined the engine, his thick hands intimate with hoses and seals. He grunted something, climbed down off the bumper, and slid underneath the bus on his back. Jan followed him. Zoe, dazed, watched the glow from Jan's eyes move toward the rear end of the bus until Bruckner and Jan climbed out from under.

"Well, close her up!" Bruckner barked in Croyd's direction. The stocky man climbed up on the fender, reached for the high end of the exhaust pipe, and passed his fingers across it. He sniffed his fingers and licked them and then climbed down, shaking his head and muttering.

"It will have to do," Bruckner said. "I suppose I can't leave you. Not quite the decent thing, the nobs would say. But I won't have anyone in front with me, d'ye hear? Get your asses aboard. We're rolling."

"Balthazar?" Croyd asked. "Can we trust this guy?"

"He'll get us there if anyone can." Balthazar climbed over the driver's seat and pulled Jan close to his side. "Get in, Croyd. Zoe. Just don't look out the window, or if you do, ignore what you see."

The engine caught at the first touch of the starter. It had never sounded quite like it did now. It purred. Zoe pushed Croyd into one of the too-small bench seats and climbed in beside him. She pulled her kilim out of his way and stuffed it behind the seat.

"Headquarters said they couldn't get you here. They said there was some sort of trouble in Ireland," Balthazar said.

"There's always trouble in Ireland." Bruckner babied the bus out to the road. The gleaming silver of the Euphrates rippled past. The Highwayman nursed the diesel toward speeds that seemed impossible. "It's time for a little 'short cut' now," Bruckner said.

"Croyd?" Balthazar asked. "Why don't you put the gun down and put your pants on? Okay?"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg had often replayed deaths in his mind before, mostly for the pleasure the memories would bring him. But never before had death stalked him, never had it sunk iron talons in his soul and torn him open inside.

Gregg would have cried, but his joker body had no tears. One of the voices inside would have cried with him, but the other ... The other would have laughed.

For three days after the murders in Belfast, the Fists had holed up in an abandoned mine in the Wicklow Hills, far to the south, near Dublin. The property belonged to a nat whose son, a joker, had died in the riots of '78. The land was gorgeous, hills painted with emerald and jade and perfect cottages of pristine white, like a picture postcard.

And the landscape was haunted. Gregg stood under the eaves of a stand of oak trees, on a hill overlooking a sheep-gnawed pasture and the owner's cottage, but he saw none of it. Another, more visceral, scene filled his vision.

"Oh, God" Gregg breathed "God."

"Mummy, I'm scared," the child was crying, but then Gregg was no longer standing there before the row of frightened nats. Instead, Gregg was the child huddled against the breast of his mother, and Cara aimed her weapon at him. He tried to reach her with Puppetman, tried to use the power, the Gift, to make her turn away, but Puppetman was locked away somewhere hidden and the Gift was silent, though Puppetman's faint evil voice laughed and mocked Gregg. He pulled away from his mother and tried to run, but his joker body refused to cooperate. He screamed as the cold steel muzzle pressed against his head, a scream that was echoed from elsewhere in the dining room as Stand-in fired and Gregg waited for his own death to come. He looked up at Cara, ready to plead for his life, but other features rode the blank mirror of Cora's face, appearing one after another after another: Ellen, Sara Morgenstern, Peanut, Misha, Mackie Messer, Succubus, Andrea ...

And he LOVED it. He felt their pain. He reveled in it, ate it like candy.

"Gregg? Gregg, I'm here ..."

"Hush, love. They're not going to hurt us," his mother said, but the hands of all his old victims tore him away from her, and she screamed in terror. They were chuckling as they crowded around him, as they pressed the cold steel muzzle to his head, as he closed his eyes and wondered whether he would hear the sound of the shot, whether he would feel any of the pain, and whether the pain would taste good ...

"Gregg ..."

Hannah held him, and there was no shot. Slowly, the waking dream began to fade, and Gregg shuddered in her arms as she clutched him. "It's okay," she said. "You're remembering again?"

"Yes," he said. The warmth of her hands was almost painful. He could feel her fingers on his skin, could feel beyond them, into Hannah's body. As with the murders in Belfast, he could feel her, could sense her sympathy like a wave of cobalt blue, shot through with a pale white that was her revulsion and the primal scarlet of her caring, that allowed her to overcome that distaste. He could see the emotions, he could taste them, as he once had. You have a connection ... Gregg continued to talk, but his mind was on the sudden merging.

"I killed them, Hannah," Gregg said desperately. Touch the scarlet.... See how it builds under your hands, Greggie? See? Tell her what she wants to hear and watch the reaction. "I pointed at them and they killed them. I keep hearing the screams whenever I fall asleep, Hannah. I can't dream of anything else, and it even hits me when I'm awake. I keep trying to figure out what I could have done to stop it from happening, but I can't think of anything. I keep thinking I should have at least tried."

The scarlet surging. The pale white nearly gone. The blue so bright, so sweet ...

"There was nothing you could do."

"Then why do the dreams keep coming?" Tell her what she wants to hear ... "Hannah, I'm useless. Rudo destroyed me when he jumped me; he just didn't have the decency to actually kill me. I don't know what I can do, I don't know how to help, I feel totally useless and I'm just ... just scared." The red pulses with the word, awakening echoes in her. She knows fear, and the sharing of it makes her one with you. The white is gone, hidden. Yes ...

Hannah's arms went tight around him and Gregg relaxed into her embrace. Her skin was warm, deliciously fragrant. She didn't pull away, not this time. Inside her, Gregg would not let her. "I didn't want to do it, Hannah. I didn't have a choice." Pulsing, rising. Oh God, I can taste her ...

"I know." Softly. "I know. Gregg, you can't torture yourself this way. We did the wrong thing, going to the Fists. Maybe we could have gone public and forced the government to find Rudo and the vials. Now we're relying on a band of joker guerrillas. We've had a taste of the Black Dog's philosophy. They worship death, not life."

"Hannah, they're reacting as they see the world react to them. I think ... I think I can understand how they feel." Gregg pulled his head back. Hannah was looking down, her dyed hair curtained around her cheeks and a curious expression on her face. She looked very different from the Hannah who had come into his office a year ago: thinner, no makeup, wearing dirty, worn overalls and a dingy T-shirt, her hair stringy and in need of a shampoo. Somehow, she'd never looked more attractive. He caught a glimmer of the revulsion from her again, and pulled a blanket of scarlet over it.

It worked. Gloriously, it worked.

Gregg, is this what you want to become, once again? Are you sure ...

"And you forgive them?" Hannah was asking.

Gregg paused. "I understand them," he answered as softly as the breeze across the meadow. "I don't know about forgiveness." The things I could tell you about me, Gregg thought What would you think if I laid out all of my past for you? I wonder if you could understand them? Could you forgive me? I don't think so ...

He'd forgotten the ghosts of the restaurant, reveling in the pleasure of being inside Hannah's emotions. The pleasure had its physical response as well. He could feel the erection growing low on his body. Hannah noticed it also. Her hand, trembling touched it, just for an instant. In that moment, the scarlet affection paled, and when Gregg tried to bring it back, tried to pull those strings, they snapped. He went tumbling back into himself.

Hannah was looking at him. She still held him, but her caress had gone empty and slack.

"Well, 'tis indeed a pleasant sight, this."

"Goddamn!" Hannah let go of Gregg entirely. "Brian, you're a son of a bitch, you know that?"

The joker gave Hannah a momentary, mocking smile, then his face fell into serious lines. "There's news you need to know. If you're not otherwise occupied."

"What news?" Gregg asked. The odd erection had vanished like a broken rubber band.

"Not here. I'll tell you back at the mine. Come on," Brian said.

The mine was shallow, a mere hole in the side of the hill. Ancient oaken trusses held up the earth; toward the rear, rock glistened where the vain effort to find a vein of fabled Irish gold had ended. Cara and Stand-in busied themselves around the fire in the back, from which the odor of stew wafted.

Brian was watching them when they entered. Hannah scowled at him. "So what's this news?" Gregg asked.

"Don't worry, caterpillar. It's important enough to warrant the interruption." All the sardonic amusement left the tiny joker's face, leaving behind a face emptied of all emotion. "A bulletin just came over the radio a few minutes ago: Churchill's been assassinated. The old man's dead"

"What happened?" Hannah asked. "How?"

"During a meeting with some American ace. The assassins were Army officers; they're dead of course. Horvath is promising a complete investigation."

Gregg stood there, shocked. Brian sniffed, as if in justification. "Churchill couldn't even protect himself," he said.

«A hell of a coincidence, don't you think?» Cara mentally piped in from the rear of the cave. «You two go to see Churchill about Horvath and your Black Trump, and now the man himself is shot to death.»

"Aye," Brian said, "I thought that, too."

Hannah leaned against the wall of the cave. Gregg could sense wild emotions coming from her: shock, grief, sadness, unfocused rage. "Horvath and Johnson must have felt threatened," she said. "That's the only thing that makes sense. Churchill did something that made them feel they were in danger of being exposed." Her voice caught and Gregg felt the surging purple sorrow. "The poor man. He was so sure he couldn't be harmed ..."

Churchill dead ... It seemed that even an immortal could fall prey to a terrorist. Churchill's funeral would draw thousands upon thousands of mourners, and dignitaries from every country in the world would be there to pay homage ...

Gregg could not breathe. The realization hit him like a hammer blow. The funeral... Johnson ...

"It makes too much sense," Gregg said. "My God, it makes all the sense in the world."

"What?" Brian asked him.

Gregg could barely hold his body still. The whole world seemed to vibrate in his myopic eyes. "Brian, there's just been a change of itinerary. We have to get to England."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The lab was dark except for light pools beneath a few hooded lamps, and pilot lights growing like tiny demon eyes. Mark was working late. Again.

When he did retreat to his trailer it wasn't so much to rest as to escape the lab, and especially the constant, hovering presence of Dr. Jarnavon. The youthful scientist had two modes: worshipful chatter and worshipful silence. After a few days, the second wore on him as much as the first.

It wasn't as if Mark was sleeping much. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw faces of the dead. People he'd gotten killed - Osprey going down with a bullet through his great eagle's head - but worst than that, all the wildcards he'd ever known: Doughboy, Peregrine, Jay Ackroyd. The people I'm condemning to death.

Nuances in the lab journal abraded him with the suspicion that the nameless researcher was a woman. He hoped that was just some kind of sexist stereotyping on his part, or stress-fueled imaginings: he preferred to think of women as gentle, nurturing. He knew better; he'd seen what Vietnamese village women did to secret-police agents of the former communist regime who had caused some of their menfolk to disappear. But still ... Mark chose to cherish some illusions.

Like the one that I'm a hero. That he could recapture the purity and glory of the Radical, the golden revolutionary ace into whom he had turned the first time he tried LSD, in time to save the lizard King and the kids in People's Park from the National Guard and the Establishment ace, Hardhat. All his subsequent forays into chemically-opened reaches of his own mind had sprung from the quest to bring Radical back; the "friends" he had learned to summon had been to his mind pale substitutes, ultimately unsatisfying.

If he really had been the Radical. He had long since begun to doubt it. He had a few vague tachistoscope flashes of recollection that might have belonged to the Radical - and might just as easily been cobbled together by his subconscious, out of the few flashes of the People's Park confrontation he'd caught before he reeled into an alley and passed out, and from after-the-fact accounts. Usually he had clear recollections of what his alter egos saw and experienced and thought, just as they were generally aware of what befell the baseline Mark persona.

And although he was denied them, his friends were making their presence felt. At least, JJ Flash and Cosmic Traveler did. Starshine and Moonchild were gone, possibly beyond recall. Aquarius took little notice of anything any landling did. But the remaining two weren't backward about nagging him from the cheap seats of his head.

As if his conscience needed the help. How can I feel superior to whoever it was who created the Trump? he wondered bitterly. I'm making it deadlier ... to my own kind.

He had an excuse, of course: he was doing it to save his daughter. And what demons drove the first researcher? The printouts gave few clues. Obviously, whoever he or she was, they had compelling reasons too.

A scrape behind him, lost soul or shoe sole. He spun and saw it was both.

"Dr. Meadows," Quasiman said.

His eyes looked clear. "You've got to help me," Mark said in a rush, trying to pack what he could into whatever window of lucidity the joker ace had. "Do you know what they're doing here?"

A pause that almost stopped Mark's heart, then a nod. "I've ... been a lot of places, seen ... a lot of things. I know."

He's still tracking, Mark thought, trying not let the flood of relief distract him, as much as he ever does.

"Will you help me?"

A nod.

"I need two things. First, you have to get Sprout out of here. Can you do that? Can you take her with you?"

Quasiman frowned, considering that. Mark dug his fingers into his thighs to keep from grabbing Quasiman and trying to shake loose a reply.

"Yes," Quasiman said. "It hurts. But ... I can do it."

If he remembers, JJ Flash's voice said in Mark's mind. He's on a whole 'nother plane than the rest of us, and it spends a lot of time in tailspins.

"Another thing," Mark said. "I need drugs."

"Drugs?" Quasiman asked. His voice sounded dreamy.

"Drugs. Illegal drugs. Cocaine, speed LSD, psilocybin - anything, stimulant, narcotic, hallucinogen, whatever. If it's psychoactive, I can use it. Can you get me some?"

Quasiman nodded.

"Please, man. Bring them as quick as you can. A whole lot's riding on this!" He was on his feet now, hands beseeching before his narrow chest.

Quasiman had continued nodding. It was beginning to take on a metronomic quality. "Sure, I'll help you," Quasiman said. "Or did I already?"

"Jesus! Listen to me. Focus, please focus! You have not rescued my daughter. You have not brought me drugs. You still have to do those things - "

Quasiman's face went slack. A drop of saliva welled over a loose lower lip and ran down his chin. He smiled beatifically. "Glad I could help, Doctor," he said. "If you need anything else - "

He vanished. "Wait!" Mark shouted. "Oh, holy Christ! Wait!"

"Wait for what?" a voice said. "Who are you talking to, Doctor?"

Mark jumped. Jarnavon had come into the lab and was walking right toward him. He felt sweat enfold him like clammy Saran wrap.

Jarnavon walked up crisply, swiveling his head left and right. Green and yellow and red pilot lights danced across the lenses of his horn-rims.

"Hm," he said. "I thought you might be calling to a technician, but I don't see anybody."

He reached up to tip the glasses forward on his nose. "Who were you calling, Doctor?"

Mark collapsed into the swivel chair, feeling like a wrung-out bar rag.

"Ghosts," he said.

"Ghosts?" Jarnavon tittered. "Whose ghosts?"

"All the people you want me to murder."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Nothing about the Mae Lang particularly recommended the ship, except for the fact that she was owned and captained by one Paddy O'Neal, whose daughter, Gregg learned, was Cara, the mouthless joker. If Captain O'Neal knew that Cara and her joker friends were Twisted Fists, he gave no indication of it. There were jokers among his crew, and O'Neal treated them no differently than any of the rest. Gregg and Hannah were given a cabin together. Brian had smirked as he'd told them; Hannah shrugged, but she'd also made certain that she and Gregg had no time together, that they were always with someone else. Gregg and Hannah had explored what little there was of the freighter in the first day of the passage. As a cruise ship, the Mae Lang was a miserable failure, but Hannah had feigned interest in everything. When they'd finally come back to the cabin, late that night, she'd immediately said how exhausted she was, and had fallen asleep in her clothes.

Because you're ugly. Because you're a worm and she's a nat ...

The voice had laughed all through his dreams.

Hannah wasn't in the cabin when Gregg woke up. For a minute, he lay there, curled up like a cat in the scratchy woolen coverlet at the foot of the bed, taking in the slow roll of the cabin and the briny smell of the sea. Gregg wasn't sure what time it was: early morning, by the slanting, swaying wedge of sunlight drifting across the room. He could see someone standing near the porthole, but his vision seemed worse than normal - he couldn't tell who it was.

"Hannah?" he called softly.

"No," answered a voice that Gregg recognized all too well.

"Quasi," he said. "You show up in the strangest places. What are you doing here?"

"Shopping," the hunchback said.

"Great place for it." Greg wriggled and stretched, then let his long body droop to the floor of the cabin until he was standing on his lower pair of legs. The rest of him followed, and he paddled over to the hunchback. Gregg looked up at the hunchback, who was staring vacantly into space. "Quasi?" Greg called again, louder. "Hey, Quasi!"

Quasiman blinked. Otherwise, there was no reaction. His right leg disappeared, and he toppled over as stiff as a marionette, leaning at an angle against the cabin wall.

"Great," Gregg muttered. "Hannah's gone, and Quasi's stuck in neutral." Gregg went over to the door. Hannah hadn't latched it - it opened. As he started out, he heard a pop behind him. When he looked back, Quasiman was gone.

The narrow corridor smelled of the cattle crowded into the decks below. Rust bled through most of the riveted seams of the wall, staining white paint gone yellow with age. At the end of the corridor a grimy window in another door showed the bobbing gray sea horizon. Gregg went through it.

Cold wind damp with salt spray hit his clown nose, fragrant with decay and cow dung. The decking was wet and slippery. A steel railing drooped rusty chains along the flank of the ships superstructure, blurred in Gregg's vision. Gregg sniffed, smelled nothing out of the ordinary. He went right.

Gregg heard the voices before he turned the corner around the stern: Hannah and Brian. Gregg wasn't sure what made him stop there, the words or the harsh tone of Hannah's voice.

"... back off. Now."

"Now, lass, I saw you with the caterpillar. I can't be less a man than that."

Brian. For a moment, Gregg thought the man's voice sounded like that of Puppetman, oily and sinister in Gregg's head, and a queasy and strangely jealous fright settled deep in him. Gregg didn't wait to hear more. He came around the corner to see a blurred Brian pressed close to Hannah, his head no higher than her waist. Brian saw Gregg at the same time - the joker turned toward the intrusion. "Hey - " Gregg began, raising up on his hind legs.

Brian kicked him.

The blow, entirely unexpected, came from an out-of-focus left field. Gregg felt the world snap into slow motion around him as his body jolted backwards into overdrive. Six legs pumped wildly and out of control. Gregg went skidding madly up the side of the ship, careened upside down across the metallic overhang and back down one of the supports. Fighting for control, he skittered along the rail like an insane tightrope walker on speed, balanced precariously on the edge of a drop into the rolling, greasy waves of the sea below. He shot past Hannah and Brian ("Mother of God! I've never seen the like of that ...") and slammed headlong into the next roof support. That dropped Gregg back onto the deck and redoubled his speed. He shot past the two going the other way, bounced off the low bar of the railing, and bulleted along the walkway like a ball down a pinball chute. He hit another support near the forward turn, and went tumbling down a set of metal stairs to the deck. He felt none of it; the body simply kept moving, the legs flailing.

He passed Captain O'Neal, out on morning inspection, somewhere on the forward lower deck. The man watched Gregg with wary eyes as he slid into the greasy anchor chain and reversed direction, finally starting to gain some control over his wild retreat. "Do you exercise like this every morning, man?"

Gregg didn't answer. Furious with himself, he pointed himself in the direction of the stairs and headed back toward Hannah. By the time he reached the stern again, he had slowed to normal.

He could also hear Brian screaming.

"Let me go, you crazy woman! Are you insane?" Gregg squinted. Hannah was holding Brian out beyond the railing by the front of his shirt, high above the foaming wake of the Mae Lang, his jacket half-off. His legs kicked wildly, and even in Gregg's near-sighted vision, he could see the red veins popping in Brian's emerald face. "Damn you, woman!"

Hannah's anger arced like fire in his head. He could taste it, rich and sweet, and he could also sense the control she had of it, iron wrapping the flames. "You want me to let go, Brian?" Hannah asked all too sweetly. "No problem ..."

"No!" Brian shrieked, and his fingers dug into Hannah's forearms. "Blood of Christ, bring me in! Bring me in! I can't swim!"

You could take away that control. You could stoke the flames so they melt the iron....

"You're going to leave me alone? You're going to behave?"

"Woman ..."

"Swear it," Hannah said. The wind threw salt spray into Brian's face; the joker sputtered.

Do it now, hissed the voice. Do it now. She hates the man, hates everything he stands for. It would be so easy, and his death would taste good. And afterward, her guilt for dessert ...

"I swear," Brian shouted. "I'll leave you be. Just put me down."

Do it!

No! Gregg shouted back. I won't listen to you. I don't know you.

Oh, you know me, Greggie. You could even give me a name, if you weren't so afraid.

No! Gregg forced the voice out of his mind. He sagged, and his link with Hannah suddenly dissolved. He could feel nothing from her; he was only watching.

"All right," Hannah was saying to Brian. She brought the joker back over the railing and set him on the deck. Brian shrugged his jacket back around his shoulders. He glared at Hannah, at Gregg, watching them. Gregg thought the man was going to say something, but the look on Hannah's face seemed to stop him.

Brian brushed at his shirt where Hannah's fingers had wrinkled it, and stalked silently away.

"I guess he wasn't in the mood for a dip," Hannah said. Gregg looked away from Brian's retreat to see Hannah gazing at him. He dropped his gaze.

"Yeah. I noticed," Gregg said, and the exhaustion in his voice surprised him. The adrenaline high was gone, and what energy he had left had gone in the mental battle. The bland, ugly grayness of the morning matched his thoughts.

"Gregg? What's the matter?"

"I'm ..." I'm haunted. I'm visited by the ghosts of dead things. Gregg groped for words, trying to define the boundaries of his feelings. "I used to know what I was there for, what I could do." Yes, and look at what you did with those powers ... It was the softer voice this time. "At least, I thought so. But now ..."

"Gregg," Hannah said softly, crouching down beside him so that he could see her face, sharply focused against the blurred background of the frothing sea. "You wanted to be my knight in white armor just now? Is that it?"

"No. Well, maybe." Gregg sniffed a loud liquid sound from the clown nose. "If you had needed me, I'd've been a hell of a lot of help, wouldn't I?"

I could have helped. From deep inside. Bitter.

Hannah smiled, and he hated the gentleness of it. "I don't know. You were quite a distraction, actually."

"Hannah - "

"I'm sorry," she said. The smile faded on her lips. "Gregg, I ... I've always believed that things happen for a purpose. There was a reason I was dragged into this with the church fire; there was a reason that we found out about the Sharks before they could finish the Trump. And there's a reason why you're still alive."

There's a reason why the old power is returning. But Gregg, you have to control it this time. You cant listen to it. You have to be the one in charge ...

"Even as a joker?" Gregg asked, and he wasn't sure whether he was talking to Hannah or the voice.

"Even as a joker " Hannah answered quietly. Her hand started toward him, hesitated, and finally brushed along his long spine. "You're alive, Gregg. You could just as easily be dead. From what you've told me, you should be. And there's a reason. I know it."

"I wish I did," Gregg told her. "I really wish I did."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Mark fanned the STM pictures on the black tabletop like a hand of cards. Dr. Carter Jarnavon leaned over his shoulder to peer at them. The smell of his hair cream was like fingers poking up Mark's nostrils.

Mark had a single straw to cling to, to keep his sense of self afloat. If only this jerk doesn't see it.

"We're making progress," he said, tasting bile at the back of his throat. "Cobbling together the BT virus without the transposon is reducing the DNA recombination rate, just the way the lab notes say."

Jarnavon bent close to peer at the images. Mark felt sweat bead along his hairline. "And how are the cultures doing? Is this really leading to more viable strains?"

Mark struggled. "Sometimes." He tapped a computer screen aglow with tables. "Some variants survive as long as seven generations. But it's, like, a crapshoot, man. They're more likely to die out after one or two, or even fail to reproduce; the average is two generations. Which isn't what you're looking for."

"No," Jarnavon said, shaking his head gravely. "Mr. Casaday wants no limits at all."

Mark sighed and swiveled his chair to face him. Inside he was just a big bag of wet matted blackness. Since Quasiman's visit to the lab Mark had replayed the ace's parting words over in his mind daily. Hell; hourly, more like it, awake or asleep.

And every iteration drove another nail of certainty through his skull: He's not coming back. He thinks he already has, thinks he's rescued Sprout, thinks he's brought the drugs so I can whistle up one of my friends and save the day. By the time Quasiman got his jingle-jangle time-sense squared away, all the world's wild cards were likely to be just another odd historical interlude, like communism, but even briefer.

"Like I've told him," Mark said, not forgetting to whine, "he can just shoot me now, then. It's like the nature of this thing to instable. An average generation span of six, seven, maybe ten at the way outside is the best we can shoot for."

His lips twisted. "That should give him what he wants, anyway. After seven generations, the only wild cards left will be the ones isolated from the rest of humanity. Out on mountaintops and stuff." Like Fortunato. Can he avenge us? Will he bother?

"Or quarantined, of course," Jarnavon said. "As you will be, Doctor."

Mark turned away.

Jarnavon shook his head. Pungent cream slimed down his brief rusty-brown hair, but a cowlick poked stubbornly up in back.

"Doctor, Doctor," he said, "you're a good man. You want to do the right thing. That's one of the things I've always admired about you."

"I guess we admire those who are what we aren't," Mark said.

It was as if a shutter slammed shut before the youthful face, like a Navy signal lamp. You bloody fool! Trav chimed from the back of Mark's skull. Don't bait him! He can expose your whole mad scheme! I told you no good would come of this....

The researcher recovered quickly, smiled. One of those hail-fellow trying-to-be-one-of-the-guys smiles, as of a nerd who doesn't yet realize the reason all the jocks are laughing is that one of them has covertly set his shoestring on fire.

Mark had been there. Only he had moved on.

"Heh," Jarnavon said, "heh-heh." He shook his head. "Don't you see, Doctor? What we're - what you're doing here is right. It's for humanity."

He felt anger rise like lava inside him, fenced it behind his teeth. "Murdering all the jokers and aces in the world is for humanity?" he demanded. "Give me a break!"

Behind thick lenses Jarnavon's eyes glowed with apostolic fervor. "But it is. In a few generations most of the population of the Earth will be jokers - sad, twisted, tortured souls. Long before that the aces will have taken over. Nats will be nowhere; they'll be slaves, then cattle, and then extinct. I know you're not working toward that, Doctor, but overall it's inevitable. It's biology.

"I know what we're doing, what we're asking you to do, seems harsh. But it's necessary to save humanity - the nat majority. You used to be a hippie, Doctor. Remember that old slogan, power to the people?"

He raised a hand as it to give Mark a brotherly pat on the shoulder, caught the look in Mark's eye, dropped the hand back to his white-smocked side.

"Think of it," he said, "as the greatest good for the greatest number."

Mark turned away. He had no answer. He had believed that once, too. Experience had shown him with brutal clarity where such false compassion culminated: in long lines marching to the showers, lumps of pumice they had been told was soap clutched in their hands.

Squeaks and rustles as the younger man bobbed in his shiny black shoes. "Speaking just for myself, I'm pleased at the progress you're making. More than pleased - amazed. You really are a genius, Doctor."

Mark swallowed and shut his eyes.

"Mr. Casaday has high expectations," Jarnavon said. "But he also has a great grasp of the realities. I'm glad I'll be able to tell him you're making good progress."

He hesitated, dropped his voice to a near-conspiratorial murmur. "I'd hate to see him give your little girl to Layton or Ditmar, Doctor. Really I would."

Mark's shoulders knotted. For a few moments he listened to Jarnavon breathing heavily behind him, and then the squeak-squeak-squeak of the younger man walking away.

When the lab door closed he relaxed in a shuddering expellation of breath.

Yes! he exulted silently. His pulse became thready with something like triumph. He didn't more than glance at the imaging. Although he doubted Jarnavon had the skill to read what was truly here, Mark had feared. Profoundly.

Because that was the unwitting favor the Trump creator had done Mark. Along with showing the way to turn the virus into an even greater evil, the unknown researcher had also provided the perfect camouflage for Mark's other project, which might save the wild cards - and, incidentally, Mark's vision of himself as a decent human being.

Because there was a way to beat the Black Trump: overtrump it.

The pictures lying on the back rubberized tabletop showed a strain of the Trump paired to a highly infectious but generally mild flu - a simple process, basically a reprise of work already done. But this was a special species of Black Trump: a scorpion without its sting. To the body's immune system, it looked like the Trump.

But it was no more lethal than the common cold.

The Overtrump could be used to create vaccine. Riskier but quicker would be to release it deliberately as a counter-infection, like fighting a forest blaze with a back-fire.

It was an edge-hanging game Mark played. He dared not document his real work; he had to keep everything in his head, and concoct a reasonable cover tor his Overtrump development. That was just possible by carefully compartmentalizing the tasks he assigned the techs who actually ran the lab's advanced equipment; none of them knew enough to piece together what he was doing, or had any reason to question it.

Of course, they might talk among themselves, and some bright boy - his helpers were exclusively male - might make a connection. Or Dr. Carter Jarnavon might have a brainstorm.

The worst danger was that Jarnavon's adulation for the older scientist might overcome his apparent natural laziness, lead him to go systematically over all Mark's work. He did know enough to spot that a number of Mark's experiments were apparently superfluous, and he could probably take it from there.

Keeping all the data in his brain, and covering it with reams of hardcopy counterfeit, made Mark's head hurt. The strain of his double game kept the hum of low-level stress constant in his ears. He fought ceaseless blinding headaches, could barely keep down food. He longed for the shelter offered by his old girlfriend Mary Jane, but that was denied him - his opium-growing hosts disapproved of smoking dope.

He even longed for that release which, except for a few weeks after Sprout was taken from him by a New York court, never had much appeal for him: to crawl into a bottle and hide. But while his captors didn't object to booze, and were more than willing to provide him with it - or anything he might ask for, except drugs or freedom - he didn't dare drink, He couldn't afford the mental fog - or the risk of lubricating his lips.

It was a desperate game, a three cornered bet: his daughter, the wild cards, his own humanity. A slip could lose all three.

And he wasn't even sure the game could be won. Creating the Overtrump was nothing: Jarnavon could have done it. It was much easier than the stable Trump Casaday demanded.

But even if Mark made an Overtrump, he had no idea of what good it might be. In the unlikely event Casaday failed to kill him as soon as his usefulness was done, the Card Sharks would certainly keep him under wraps until his gene-crafted horror had run its course. How he might release the Overtrump in time he had no clue.

Of course, if Quasiman suddenly gets his act together... Savagely he quelled the thought. Futile hope just distracted a mind in need of total focus. Thinking acid-edged thoughts about the only game in town, he began once more to leaf through his stack of images.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The bus was a mouse and the sphinx that loomed before them was a giant cat, a cat the size of a mountain. It watched the bus with blind eyes of crumbling sandstone. Bruckner rammed the old Bluebird straight between its paws. The creature opened its mouth and took them inside. The diesel roared into the wide desert that was the beast's belly, where red stars streaked across a limitless dome of black sky. The twisted starlight sleeted into the back of Zoe's neck in silent pulses or quantum outrage.

"Where are we?" Jan asked.

"On a shortcut," Bruckner said. "We're going from point A, where my truck landed in the sodding river, to point B. Point B is the last stretch of open road from Jordan into Jerusalem."

Croyd seemed calmer than he had been. His muscular tension had changed in subtle ways. The twitchy restlessness of sleep deprivation had been replaced by a purposeful alertness, a sort of myofibrillar hum. "It feels like that was good speed I took," he said. "High octane speed." He stared out the window, where a row of solemn, massive bulls lumbered past, burdened with garlands of blood-red blossoms. "Good speed doesn't do this. Can these guys get in here, Bruckner?"

"Haven't yet," Bruckner said.

The blossoms opened to show hearts of glass needles. They exploded from the flowers like darts and chattered against the sides of the bus, but that was behind them now.

A blizzard of white salt drifted against the windows. The sweep of the windscreen wipers ticked against the beating of Zoe's heart. Out on the endless plain, pyramids of quartz the size of pearls or mountains vanished and appeared, synchronized with her pulse. Not quartz, the pyramids were shiny handfuls of pills that Croyd held counting out the varieties in a bemused and distant voice. "Black mollies, hexagons, sexamyls, spansules," chuckling as he counted them, but when Zoe looked at his hand it was empty.

"Did you see that statue?" Bruckner asked.

Zoe didn't see a statue. She saw kaleidoscope patterns of silver teeth, biting at the night. "That statue was a giant copy of my award that was. The Order of the Silver Helix," Bruckner said. "Di pinned the medal on me herself, she did after I trucked those chaps to the Falklands. Proudest day of me life, but it didn't cut the alimony payments by one whit, nor the ruddy child support. Child support. Never got it from my dad. Never knew who he was.

A black tornado of a djinn bowed at the waist to let Bruckner pass. Zoe felt something cold at her waist. A tendril of black smoke snaked through a bullet hole in the side of the bus. She yanked her headscarf off and stuffed it in the hole, forcing the djinn back into the void.

Terrible white heat filled the bus, brighter than the sun, hotter than ice, a nanosecond's light where motes of dust circled and one of them cried with Anne's voice. It was a whirlwind, and it sucked them all into its vortex, the dead man from Odessa, Jellyhead, whose soft skull made a tiny, sucking pop as it imploded, a lamb with milk-white fleece that turned its huge goat-eyes to Zoe with sad reproach and burst into flames.

Bruckner sent the bus into a screeching turn. Its tires wailed protest. "Behind us! Cover us, Goatboy!" he yelled.

Balthazar twisted toward the rear of the bus, the barrel of his rifle swinging over Jan's head to aim at something back there. "Nothing," Balthazar said. "I see nothing!"

"It was after us. Ohmigod. Spooks and devils and roads made of broken bones, I've never seen the like. Sit tight. I think we can dodge it."

"It?" Zoe asked.

"There are things out here that don't bear thinking about," Bruckner said. He floored the accelerator and locked his hands on the wheel, steering the lumbering bus through an unseen maze with small, measured motions of his hands and shoulders.

Don't think, he'd said. Zoe tried not to.

Between her and Croyd, a man's solid weight shifted the springs of the seat. Hunchbacked, he smelled of Old Spice and sweat. His sad face seemed so kind.

"You're not Hannah."

"No," Zoe said. She couldn't hear herself speak, and wondered if she spoke at all, or if she had entered a dream space where speech was impossible. Her muteness gave her a sudden rush of hope that she might someday, somehow, wake.

"No," she said again. This time her voice was her own, harsh, loud. But the man was still there.

"You'd like Hannah. Everyone likes her." He patted Zoe's hand, his fingers warm and solid.

The man got up and leaned over Bruckner. "Do you have any drugs?"

"Hey, guv'nor!" Bruckner growled. "No hitchhikers, now!"

"Sorry," the hunchback said. In moments, he had faded away.

There was nothing outside the bus but sand, endless dunes, and starlight. Zoe wrapped herself in her kilim. Croyd patted the seat of the bus with his palms, drumming out a complex rhythm. After a time, Zoe's heart slowed to something like a normal rhythm.

"I'm so tired." Jan sounded like a fretful toddler. "Needles, I'm hungry too, but I've been on the street all day and I'm so tired. Let me stay. Please?"

"Hush," Balthazar said. "That's over, Jan. I'm here. Hold on, honey." He held her close as the bus swayed as if rocked in a giant hand.

Alabaster minarets grew before them, thick as nettles in a field, an impenetrable maze. They crawled through it forever, missing the delicate spires by millimeters, Bruckner cursing as he drove. Days? Months? The sun never rose.

The bus moved slower than the camel plodding along past the window. A square tent decorated with fringes made of shredded bank drafts sat atop the camel. A hand wearing no rings lifted the curtain of the tent. The warehouse manager from Odessa stared at Zoe, his eyes polished spheres of granite.

"Why did you come to Baghdad?" Balthazar asked in wondering tones. He stared at something out the windows on his side of the bus. "I was to meet you in Damascus."

Jan covered his eyes with her palms and crooned to him. Croyd had curled up into a ball, his head sheltered beneath his crossed arms. He chuckled to himself at times.

"Well, we're past Damascus," Bruckner said. "Damascus was those minarets and such like. We're outside Amman now."

They were braking to an intersection, a road cut into the scoured earth of Jordan, a dark night.

"Forty miles to go," Bruckner said. "You'd think the Holy Lands would be a bit larger, now wouldn't you?" He jerked the bus around a donkey carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle twice its size. "Ruddy beast should have headlights," Bruckner said.

"Did we make it?" Zoe asked.

"We aren't through the gates yet," Bruckner said.

"Is there another border?" Croyd uncurled and sat up. "I hate borders."

"Not a border. Just the Allenby Bridge," Balthazar said.

A sheik in silks trotted by on a magnificent chestnut mare. Lean hounds loped beside him, sniffing at the road. A jeep cruised past carrying four soldiers in camo, guns at the ready. The soldiers waved and smiled. Wherever we were, Zoe thought, we're still there. Humans and beasts streamed up toward Jerusalem, coalescing into a thick stew of bodies and vehicles that crowded toward the Allenby Bridge, ready for morning and a day's business.

Bruckner eased the bus toward the checkpoint, a busy place where the UN flag hung limply over the crowds. He cranked open the window on the driver's side and leaned his head out. "We are residents," he said. "These people are, anyway. Me, mate, I'm a British subject loyal to the Queen, and I'm taking this besotted vehicle in to a garage for them. Breakdown, don't you know?"

Brisk, bored soldiers climbed aboard. The guns of the night had vanished somewhere. There was a rustle of papers, frowns, a thorough examination of baggage. One of the soldiers cooed at the dovecage. Jan smiled at her. The sun struck the yellow stones of the city walls and turned them to gold. Going home.

The guards waved them through. Zoe had even forgotten to be frightened, or her level of terror was now peaked at a maximum dull roar and nothing as minor as a bunch of soldiers peering at the pump could bother her any more. She didn't know which. Her eyelids felt sanded and the bright morning hurt her skin.

Halfway across the bridge, Croyd leapt for the door of the bus. "That's him! Let me out! It's Rudo!" He slammed his elbow against the swivel doors on the bus and jumped out into the crowd.

"What's with that chap?" Bruckner asked.

Croyd dodged through the crowds, heading into the Jewish quarter, his turbaned head bobbing up and down.

"Pharmaceutical psychosis," Zoe said. Just what we needed. "Let me out, Bruckner! I'll go hit him or something."

"Bring him back, Zoe," Balthazar said. "We have to stay with the bus."

"I know," she yelled, out the doors and trying to keep her eyes on the entrance to the alley where Croyd had disappeared.

Zoe fought her way around a flock of wooly lambs. She felt exposed suddenly, and realized her headscarf was still stuffed in the wall ot the bus. No matter.

She jumped into a space in the center of a display of brass teapots, leaped again and came down poised on one foot, got to the corner in two fast jogs, remembering games of hopscotch in front of the stoop and Bjorn laughing while she played.

Croyd sprinted toward a group of businessmen in dark suits, unremarkable except that all their calfskin attaches seemed to match. Croyd was half a block ahead of Zoe, and the alleyway was filled with awnings, vendors, and morning crowds. Zoe pushed her way toward him. Someone yelled. On tiptoe, she could see an eddy in the crowd, a wave of humanity moving out of the way. An orange peel sailed through the sky and landed on the green-and-white stripes of the awning beside her. Zoe pushed forward shoving people out of the way. Yes, Bjorn, she told her dead father. I'm being rude.

Croyd lay stretched on his back, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and slow. A woman knelt beside him, dark hair, power suit in a gorgeous shade of spring green, calfskin attache with a discreet UN insignia. She was feeling for Croyd's carotid pulse.

"What happened?" Zoe asked. "I'm his friend. What did you see?"

"He slipped on an orange peel. I didn't see him hit his head or anything like that; he fell on his - butt, to be clear about it. Then he just stretched out like this. He's breathing okay, but he doesn't respond to anything. I even slapped him. Gently."

How soon did Croyd start to change after he went into one of his sleeps? Zoe didn't know. She had to get him off the street before he began to metamorphose or whatever it was that he did.

"It's a - seizure disorder. He needs his medicine. Fast. I have to take him to it. Help me with him, would you?" Zoe knelt beside him, trying to figure if she could carry him by herself.

"You can't move him!" the woman protested.

But I have to, Zoe thought. She ran her hands down the back of Croyd's neck as if she knew what she was doing. "His neck's okay," Zoe said. "Really. It's safe, and I have to - cool him down. He gets hyperthermic when he's like this."

Sneakers, black cotton skirts, Jan's feet. Next to her, Balthazar stood with Zoe's kilim folded over his arm. Bruckner had inched the bus to the mouth of the alley and a blare of horns and curses announced that he'd stopped it there, traffic or no.

"With four of us, it should be easy to carry him," Balthazar said. He flipped the corners of the rug open and spread it on the street. Jan helped him roll Croyd over on it. "If you'll just take that corner, Miss - ?"

"Davidson," the woman said. "Sheila Davidson."

"Miss Davidson. When I count three. One. Two." Sheila Davidson hooked the strap of her attache over her shoulder and grabbed her corner of the rug. "Three," Balthazar said.

They hauled Croyd to the bus and laid him on one of the bench seats. He put his thumb in his mouth and curled into a fetal ball, smiling.

"He'll be fine," Balthazar said. "There's no need to stay. We'll take care of him."

"Well. I'm late for work as it is," Sheila Davidson said.

"Thank you," Balthazar said.

Bruckner did at least wait until she had both feet on the ground before he rolled the bus forward. In three turns, they were through the gate and in the packed, busy turmoil of the Joker Quarter.

No hurrahs. The guards, impassive, watched them drive in. Balthazar spoke briefly with one of the Fists, and they carried Croyd away somewhere - asleep, to awake changed. Zoe wondered if she would ever see him again. And if she did, who would he be? Bruckner and Balthazar talked briefly and then Bruckner was gone. The bus vanished into a side street and might never have existed. Balthazar and Jan and Zoe stood in the souk and business swirled around them. Business as usual.

"Now I can go hug Anne," Zoe said. "And I can shower! And I can get out of these clothes! Jan? I'll race you home."

"I don't think so," Jan said.

Zoe felt the guard's presence before she saw him next to her, grim, determined a man with orders and a gun.

"Miss Harris? This way, please."

"No!"

"Tell her, Balthazar," the guard said.

Balthazar sighed. "It's not over, Zoe. The Black Dog wants to see you. Now."

But I don't want to see the Black Dog, Zoe thought. Never, ever again.

Run? But Balthazar's hand held her right arm just above the elbow and Jan flanked her other side, urging her toward the door in the shadow of the gate, and two of the Fists guards up on the walls turned on some unheard signal, their attention suddenly on Zoe Harris.

What could the bastard want this time? Wasn't one nuke enough for him?

"I'll tell Anne you're back safe," Jan whispered. She darted away with Balthazar, their night-black robes fluttering through the passageways in quick flickers of motion. Images of carrion birds came up from somewhere and faded again. Strobe effect. That was fatigue. Zoe felt as though she'd been taking some of Croyd's speed.

"You did well," the Black Dog said. He sat at a conference table and motioned for her to sit down. There was a chair by the door. Zoe took it, sitting at his insistence but not where he pointed.

"Am I supposed to say 'Thank you?' Fuck that. I want to go home."

"Soon. Soon. We've just moved into a worst-case scenario. The Nur al-Allah has the Black Trump."

"Who?"

"A desert fanatic. A damaged ace who thinks he speaks with the voice of Allah himself."

Snailfoot slithered into the room, a sheaf of printout clutched in his hand. The Black Dog seemed to expect him and offered no greeting. Snailfoot sat down and began to sort papers.

"The Nur hasn't made the news much lately, but he's got followers, he's got funding," the Black Dog said. "Anyone who keeps hatreds alive in the Mideast gets money, and the Nur al-Allah hates the wild card. He will use any weapon he can find to destroy it, even plague. Jihad, he's thinking. The holiest of wars."

"He's an ace? Then how does he figure he won't die of the Trump once it's loosed?"

"If it's loosed," Snailfoot said. "Please."

"He thinks aces are blessed of Allah and jokers are cursed. He thinks no plague would touch him," the Black Dog said.

"However, er, skewered, his grasp of bioscience may be, he knows he needs some western devil science to multiply enough agent to be useful." Snailfoot's words were for the Black Dog, he ignored Zoe. "Rudo's a psychiatrist, so he can't do the work himself. They've picked up an Afghani virologist, a bent medic from Grenada - they're looking for others."

"Rudo?" Zoe asked. "Does Croyd know about this yet?"

"No," the Black Dog said. "I can't let him know, not until we've found out how to get the Trump away from him. Croyd wouldn't let reason keep him from killing Rudo if he got the chance."

"Go the UN! Tell them! Surely it's time to do that now!"

"Don't be a fool, Zoe Harris. Tell die UN that a dead ex-official of theirs is working on a genocidal plague? By the time the bureaucracy digested that news, we'd all be dead. We've got a few people in the Nur's camp. I figure he's got a few in ours. In fact, I plan to make sure he does. He needs to find out we've got the bomb, but not until we know we can destroy his stash of Trump."

Snailfoot squared a stack of papers on the desk. "We've prepared a dossier for your new identity, Zoe, plausible reasons for your Western education and your hatred of the wild card. You're the only chemist we have available at the moment." He slipped a paperclip over the stack and slid it across the table in Zoe's direction.

"Oh, no. I'm a chemist, not a virologist! I don't know anything about this stuff."

"The Nur won't know that you don't. And Rudo needs help fast. He won't argue. The man's in a hurry," the Black Dog said.

"I can't!" Zoe said. "Please. I want a shower. I want to go home."

Azma slipped through the door, soothing plump Azma, concern on her face when she saw Zoe. "You're getting roots," the woman said, her soft touch gentle on Zoe's hair. "We'll have to do a touch-up."

"I want to see Anne," Zoe said.

"Before you leave," Azma crooned. "Of course you will."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

THREE

Ray looked all around, turning in a circle and shaking his head.

"It's big," he finally said. "It'll be a bitch to keep an eye on everyone when it's crowded."

"I've never heard Westminster Abbey described quite like that," Flint whispered, his words echoing weirdly in the cathedral's cavernous interior. Only Flint, Ray, and Harvest were present, though probably a platoon of spies could have been hidden among the statues, monuments, and screens scattered around the ancient cathedral.

Harvest smiled. "He has the soul of a poet."

Ray grinned himself. "You don't need poets for this business, you need guys like me."

Flint looked down on them gravely. "It took some serious campaigning on my part before I could get Her Majesty's Government to accept your presence in the security contingent."

"Well," Ray said, "I could see why you wouldn't want us screwing up Churchill's funeral. You guys did such a swell job guarding him when he was alive."

Flint frowned. "Enough of that. I got the Secretary to agree to your presence by insisting that it was Sir Winston's wish that you be included in anything which might deal with Card Sharks. I did it to have someone on the job I knew I could trust. Don't make me regret my decision."

"What do you mean, someone to trust?" Harvest asked.

"Sir Winston believed that our security net had been punctured by Card Sharks. He was going to name names at the meeting, but ... well, you know what happened. He trusted Ray, because he's an outsider and a wild carder. He was going to accept Ray's judgment of you. By the way - I suppose I should make this official. Do you think Agent Harvest is trustworthy?"

Ray looked at her. "Trustworthy?" he asked. He hesitated only a moment. Ray was beginning to suspect that he loved her. He supposed that he trusted her. "Hell, yes!"

She smiled at him.

"Very well. The problem is that I don't know whom to trust among our own people. With representatives from nearly every nation in the world arriving tomorrow for the funeral, we can't allow a successful Card Shark attack."

"It would be a hell of a time to release the Trump," Ray said. "The diplomats would bring it back to their own countries, spreading it around the world in a heartbeat."

Flint nodded creakingly. "My thoughts exactly. I don't think they'd be daring enough to disrupt the ceremony - but we can't afford to take any chances. You two will be my aces in the hole, my trump for the Trump, so to speak. If Johnson and the Sharks do assay an attack they must be stopped. The fate of the entire world is in our hands."