Black Trump

"No shit, Sherlock," Ray said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The Fists flew her to London. Heathrow was a couple of hours of crowded boredom, questions from oh-so-polite customs officials, and another ramp into a plane, this one to Damascus. Zoe slept through most of the night, wrapped in her kilim, its folds bunched behind her neck to make a pillow. The plane reeked of tobacco, rosewater, and musky sweat.

Zoe Hazziz, an American-born Egyptian whose father had died in the '67 war, took a room in a hotel that had quarters for unattended women. The hotel provided a guide for her, Khaled a taciturn man, not young, who walked with a limp, so that she could walk the streets with some semblance of dignity. Her scarf had come to seem comforting, its folds at her neck a screen against appraising eyes, but she wasn't in full chador. It wouldn't have fitted her profile, western-trained, a modern woman.

Khaled led her to the address she had given him, but he stopped at the entrance to the alleyway, narrow and fetid. This was the Street of Doves? A dog's bloated carcass lay belly-up in the sun. The drone of flies feeding on it was louder than the noise of the streets behind them.

"This is not a good place," Khaled said.

"Still, I must go. I am expected." Expected for an interview, a response to a plea for employment, by Allah's mercy, for an orphaned daughter of one of the faithful - the letter drafted by Snailfoot, mailed from London to a merchant in Damascus, a man who was faithful to the Nur.

"This is not the dwelling of a merchant," Khaled said.

The blue door. She was to enter the blue door at mid-morning, in the Street of Doves. Zoe settled the straps of her pack on her shoulder, the kilim tied like a bedroll. Wrapped in it were a few toilet articles, a little jewel case that contained - something Snailfoot had given her, something she wasn't supposed to think about. She picked up her skirts and ran. Khaled did not follow her, or if he did, the bedouin standing in the suddenly opened doorway discouraged him from entering.

The bedouin motioned her toward a man in khaki who sat in a rattan chair in the shady room. Above his starched collar, his face was dead white, clean shaven. He needed a beard to disguise that weak chin, Zoe decided. A wooden ceiling fan stirred the air above his head, surprisingly cool. A latticework partition led to another room. It took Zoe a moment to realize that the statue next to the chair was not a statue, it was a giant man, motionless, in a motorized wheelchair. The back of the wheelchair was decorated with red and white satin tassels.

"Miss Hazziz," the man in the wicker chair said. "I am Samir Zahid."

Something was not right with his lower iaw. He didn't hiss, but the skin around his mouth seemed too generous, as if he were missing a lot of teeth. The Bedouin sank to the floor beside Zahid, so that the three of them stared up at Zoe in that intent way that still bothered her. She stayed on her feet. She could not sit down until she was invited to do so.

"Your brothers have not been dutiful. They are employed. Why are they not providing for you?"

"They are young men. Married, with children. I would not have their wives denied what my brothers can give them."

"Admirable," Zahid said.

Zoe kept her eyes down. A cockroach explored the gaudy carpet by her feet. New York had bigger roaches; this one looked half-starved.

"Why did you leave New York?" Zahid asked.

Now for the big lie. Remember Bjorn, say this as if you spoke of him. "My father. Abominations like those who killed my father, who now dwells in Paradise, walk the streets without fear. How could I live in such a place?"

"He died a fighter?"

"One of Allah's accursed killed him," Zoe said. That was true. But it wasn't a joker who had killed him, not a wild card victim.

The giant in the wheelchair spoke quickly in Arabic. Zahid nodded.

"It may be that Allah in his mercy has found a task that you might perform to earn your dowry, perhaps even to help avenge your father. It is risky, bringing westernized women into contact with the virtuous women we shelter in the desert, but - you are trained as a chemist? The work is highly secret. No one must ever know what it is that you will do if you work with us. Do you understand?"

Zoe nodded. The cockroach had wandered to the edge of the carpet.

"She might talk," the giant said.

"There are ways to gain silence, even from a woman. She might serve, Sayyid," Zahid said to the giant beside him.

This was Sayyid, the Nur's war leader? Snailfoot had said he was a giant, yes, but Snailfoot hadn't known if he'd survived that day in the desert when Hartmann had been shot. He'd been crushed by an ace power, Snailfoot had said. Every bone broken. His face was marked with deep lines of pain.

"Take her to Rudo, then," the giant said.

The bedouin rose to his feet.

"Wait! Search her," the giant said.

The bedouin took a step toward Zoe.

"Search me? I have no weapons," Zoe said. She backed toward the door, hoping Khaled hadn't left the alley, left her here.

"Weapons! Do you think we would fear a woman's weapons? No, but we must know that you carry no taint of abomination. We must know that you are not marked by the wild card." The giant clapped his hands.

A woman, veiled except for her eyes, came from behind the lattice.

"Strip," the giant said.

Zoe supposed it was meant to be humiliating. It wasn't. Let those fools see what a good body looked like, for once. She climbed out of her layers of black gauze, almost with a feeling of relief, and walked deliberately to stand in reach of the giant named Sayyid. The veiled woman reached for her as if to hold her back. Her eyes looked frightened.

"Don't fear for me," Zoe said. "These virtuous men will do me no harm." She raised her arms over her head, feeling their measuring eyes on her skin. Inches away from the giant, she turned full circle, slowly, and then arched her pubis forward. Nothing hidden. Zahid tapped his fingers against the arm of his wicker chair.

"I am no joker," Zoe said.

The bedouin hissed.

"Get dressed," Sayyid said. "We're leaving. Bring the truck into the alley, Izzat!"

The bedouin rushed for the door as if he were embarrassed.

The woman dropped her eyes and vanished behind the lattice. Zoe got her into her clothes and slipped her shoes on.

"Come," Sayyid said. "We're leaving now."

He motored his wheelchair to the door. Zoe squashed the roach under her heel and followed him.

Out in the bright sunlight, a van as tall as a double-decker bus backed into the alley, past the crumpled body of the guide named Khaled, flies already buzzing around the drying pool of blood that seeped out from beneath his belly.

"Our work is secret," Sayyid said.

Izzat hustled to the side of the van and let down a wheelchair lift. Sayyid motioned Zoe into the van. The lift groaned under his weight. The door closed.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray twitched as Harvest's blunt nails skittered down his back. He lay on her stomach, one of his legs thrown between hers, his thigh resting on their juncture. Her hair was tousled, her breath just returning to normal as she stared at the ceiling and idly ran her hand down Ray's muscular back, where the sweat was starting to dry.

"What're you thinking?" Ray asked.

"Hmmmm?" She looked at him. "I'm glad you had your face fixed. The photos in your file make you look like one ugly bastard."

Ray shrugged. "Never meant too much to me. It'll get battered again and I guess when it gets too bad I'll have it fixed again."

She put her hands on Ray's chest and pushed. He turned and flopped on his back and she straddled him, looking intently at his abdomen and chest.

"Remarkable," Harvest said.

"What?"

She traced a line with one fingernail from his pubic hair, up his flat, hard stomach to his ridged chest. "This is where Mackie Messer opened you up that time in Atlanta, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Ray frowned. It hadn't been his proudest day. The twisted ace with the buzz saw hands had gutted him like a tuna on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. But Ray had bought enough time for another assassin known as Demise to do the job on the little bastard.

"And not even a scar," Harvest said drawing him back to the present as she kissed his chest, approximately where Mackie's hand had punctured his stomach.

"I heal good and fast."

Harvest looked up and smiled at him. "You do have remarkable recuperative powers."

Ray nodded.

"Let's hope you'll just need them tonight, not tomorrow."

Ray shrugged. "I'll be ready, no matter what."

"I know you will."

Her tongue licked the spot she'd just kissed and worked its way down.

Ray smiled. He would be ready. No matter what.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas was in the New Territories, high on a hill at the top of a long crooked flight of steps that wound up from the Shatin Railway Station. The guidebook said there were 400 steps. It lied. There were 431 steps. Jay Ackroyd counted every one of them on the way up. It was a good thing he'd left Finn back at the hotel. He didn't think ponies did real well on steep, narrow steps.

The entrance to the temple was guarded by towering statues of huge, fierce, hideous Chinese gods. They didn't scare Jay. You saw a lot worse walking the streets of Jokertown every day. Inside the temple was dim and cool. The wall above the main altar loomed fifty feet high. It was painted a dark red and divided into a myriad of small niches, like a honeycomb. A miniature gold-and-black buddha sat in each niche, every one different from its brothers, all of them seemingly looking down on Jay.

"There are actually twelve thousand eight hundred of them," a familiar voice said quietly behind Jay, "but the Temple of Twelve Thousand Eight Hundred Buddhas' lacks a certain je ne sais auoi."

Jay turned toward the voice. "You mind telling me why I had to haul my ass out here and climb all those steps? What was wrong with the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel? You got something against comfortable chairs, Belew?"

J. Bob Belew smiled thinly. "Napoleon never let the enemy choose the battleground."

"Napoleon never had to hump all those goddamn steps."

"Prosperity is making you soft, Mr. Ackroyd," Belew observed. He was a compact man, shorter than Jay, but every inch of him was sinew and muscle. He was dressed in khaki-colored pants with a razor crease and a white safari jacket. His hair had started brown and gone gray; he cropped it close to his head, and compensated with an ostentatious walrus mustache.

Belew loved that mustache. He waxed its ends and played with it constantly, especially when dropping ban mots and quoting classical proverbs. Jay discovered that he found this just as irritating now as he had back in 1979, when he and J. Robert had almost died together on an abortive mission to rescue the hostages in Iran. Several other aces had died, including a man called the Librarian, who perished of a mortal wound that hadn't been mortal when Jay had popped him back to the medics at Desert One. "So where did you see the ad?" Jay asked.

"Everywhere," J. Bob said. "I hope you don't think you were being clever. You might as well have taken out a notice in the Card Shark Quarterly."

"Yeah, well, I would have just phoned you up, but when I looked in the Yellow Pages under Spies, you weren't listed."

"A bit out of your depth here, aren't you?" Belew said. "Love the little trade which you have learned, and be content with it. Marcus Aurelius. Were you aware that you were being followed from the moment you left your hotel? A man and a woman."

Jay looked around slowly. There was no one in the temple but monks and tourists. "Where?"

Belew stroked the bottom of his mustache with the back of his hand. "Not here. While they were following you, two of my men were following them. We made sure they missed the ferry. Shall we stroll?" He took Jay by the elbow and drew him out a side door onto the temple grounds. Outside, another flight of steps led further up the hill. Jay groaned. "Hong Kong is an invigorating city," J. Bob said as they climbed. "So much energy, so much activity ..."

"So much money," Jay said.

"Precisely. It gives the city a certain ideological purity. Nothing matters here but wealth. Even jokers are welcome, if they have the gelt. At the moment, they are pouring in by the thousands, fleeing the chaos in Saigon." There was a hint of sadness in Belew's voice at that. He stopped and gazed out across the valley. "You can see Amah Rock from here. Over there. The stone that looks like a woman with a baby on her back."

Jay took a look. Amah looked like a big lumpy rock to him, but if J. Bob wanted to say it was a woman, fine. Jay had once been hired to scour Mexico in search of a tortilla that looked like Jesus Christ. He never argued these things.

"Local legend has it that the rock was once a living woman, the wife of a fisherman who put to sea and never returned. She waited for him patiently, faithfully, never tiring, until one day the gods pitied her and turned her to stone."

"That was swell of them," Jay said.

"In a way it was," Belew said, twirling the waxed end of his mustache. "Chinese women go to Amah Rock to pray for patience and faithfulness. In the last decade, a good many jokers have gone there to worship as well."

"Swell," Jay said. "Only I didn't come halfway around the world to admire the hair on your lip and talk about rocks. I need to find our old friend O. K. Casaday."

J. Bob Belew turned back to face Jay. "If Casaday could be found easily, I would have found him years ago. Emerson said, Pay every debt; as if God wrote the bill."

"Imagine thinking up something like that in between making all those refrigerators," Jay said. "Look, I didn't figure Casaday was sharing your flat, but I thought you'd know how to track him down if anyone could."

"I have my resources," Belew admitted. "As does Casaday. At the moment, his are rather more extensive. He is still an operative in good standing with the Central Intelligence Agency, while I am a discredited former Minister-without-Portfolio of a country that will be a footnote to history in a matter of months. Poor Mark. Asia is hard on the innocents."

"The Card Sharks are a fuck of a lot harder," Jay said. "Mark Meadows is still alive."

For the first time, he saw a spark of interest in Belew's eyes. J. Bob stroked the underside of his moustache thoughtfully, and smiled. "You surprise me, Jay. How long have you known?"

"I didn't know until just now," Jay said. "I guessed. Talk to me, damn it. Was it Casaday?"

"Yes. One of his better efforts. Casaday has never been noted for the precision of his operations, but this time he outdid himself. He was even thoughtful enough to supply a brace of corpses to pass for Mark and Sprout. A gaunt occidental man of undetermined origins and a blond Danish teenager kidnapped from Singapore. I'm still not quite sure how he got them inside the Presidential Palace. They were both alive right up to the instant of the explosion. I blush to admit that had me fooled for a while, but Casaday made one small slip. The Danish girl was four weeks pregnant."

"How do you know that?" Jay asked.

"Let's just say I made certain arrangements and had my own autopsy performed," Belew told him.

"So what did they do with Meadows?"

"I've been trying to determine that," J. Bob said. "Thus far, without success, I'm afraid. Why kidnap him in the first place? The Chancellor had enemies, certainly, but it would have been much simpler to kill him than to stage this elaborate subterfuge. When I find that piece of the puzzle, the picture may come clearer."

"It wasn't the Chancellor they kidnapped," Jay said. Suddenly he saw it as plain as the mustache on Belew's face. "It wasn't Cap'n Trips either. It was Mark Meadows the lab rat they needed. The Sharks must be desperate for guys in white coats who know which end of the Bunsen burner to light. Faneuil and Clara were their big germ warfare gurus and both of them are out of the picture. So who do they have left? Rudo? He's a shrink. Michelle Poynter's a nurse. You need two Nobel Prizes and a note from Dr. Tachyon's mother before you're allowed to mess around with the Black Trump, and they have to brew up a shitload of it."

J. Bob was staring. "Black Trump?" he said, lifting an eyebrow quizzically. "Do tell."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

All that long day's drive, they said nothing to her. The van was enclosed and, mercifully, air-conditioned, Zoe could see glimpses of paved roads, trucks, donkeys through the driver's window, but later there were only twisting, rutted tracks where she feared Sayyid's great weight, swaying in his chair, would tip them over. They traveled west, and west, and they kept going and turning after the sun had set.

She found a numb place in her mind, where she finally stopped listing the dead, Bjorn, the skinhead, the warehouse manager, the man who looked so surprised, sitting there with the mark of Croyd's razor across his throat - Did Croyd forget people while he slept? The Escorts would get him to Anne, to his corner in the one-room flat.

There is a balm in Gilead, there is a bomb in -

She had made needles of sand and they had polished away a man's flesh, his life. A dead man lay beside a dog in an alley.

There is a balm in Gilead.

They had passed her a water jug, each of them drinking in turn before they gave it to her. She drank, trying not to taste the traces of their three different chemistries around the lip of the jug. The water was stale.

They stopped, once. The men stretched, and yawned and scratched, and then went to piss into a scrawny acacia before they got back in the van. Sayyid stood up for this, and walked a few steps. He wasn't paralyzed, then. Zoe went to the back of the van and pulled up her skirts to empty her bladder on the sand. No one stopped her, or seemed to notice.

Now, in the starlight, the van descended a series of hairpin turns, and stopped. Sayyid opened the side door, gripped the handles of his wheelchair, and levered himself down. He walked, slowly, toward a tent, followed by Zahid and the driver.

Zoe hauled her pack out of the van and followed them.

The tent loomed high against the stars, its size suggesting that it had been designed to accomodate the giant's height. Zahid stopped at the entrance and turned to Zoe. "Cover your face!" he whispered.

Zoe pulled her scarf over her nose. The voices inside were speaking English. Curiously accented English, and one voice was a whisper, a melodic whisper.

The whisperer was the Nur, and his light was green, green as an emerald. His skin glowed like a lamp. Sayyid made a laborious bow to him. A blond boy, pale as an angel, a young and beautiful boy, barely a man, folded his arms across his chest and watched the giant make his obeisance.

"Were you successful my friend?" the Nur asked. His voice was a resonant whisper, a compelling presence of muted sound.

"I have found a chemist," Sayyid said. "Unfortunately, she is a woman." The giant eased himself into a waiting wheelchair.

"A chemist?" the boy asked. "What sort of chemist? What is your training?"

The Nur looked at Zoe. "You may speak," he said.

Speak? If he asked, she would sing, she would talk until morning, tell all the stories that Sheherazade had ever told, and make up more. He was a fountain of wisdom, he was irresistible, this tired man with the scar across his throat, this battered pillar of Allah's will.

This is the enemy, Zoe told herself, an ace whose power is the charisma of his voice, his beautiful whispering voice. What must it have been like before his sister cut his throat?

"I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry," Zoe said. "From CCNY."

The boy laughed "Impossible!" he said to the Nur. "This is the team with which I am to work? A paramedic trained in Grenada who did not pass his examinations? This woman, who perhaps is trained to wash bottles, but knows nothing of biochemistry, of virology?"

"You will have the skills of Dr. Samir Zahid," the Nur said. Of course, Zoe thought, the great and wonderful skills of Samir Zahid. Why is this boy worried?

"Dr. Samir Zahid, an Afghan trained in Moscow, and we know how strong Russia's science was in her declining years. Yes."

She sensed the increased tension in Zahid but he said nothing.

"And your own skills," the Nur murmured. "Do not discredit them."

So calm, so soothing. This tent was so beautiful, lighted in celadon, emerald, glowing with his power. Zoe wanted the Nur to keep talking, to say anything at all.

"I am a psychiatrist. For long years I treated only diseases of the mind."

Pan Rudo? This boy was Pan Rudo, this innocent angel?

"You have this essence, this 'Black Trump,' and you have the expertise to multiply it. You will do so." The Nur picked up an inhaler, sprayed mist into his throat, and hawked discreetly into a large handkerchief.

"Go," he croaked.

"You have no questions for the woman, Najib?" Sayyid asked.

The Nur made a small motion with his hand. "She may leave with Dr. Rudo."

No questions. Why should there be? The Nur al-Allah would kill her, kill them all, Rudo, the angry Zahid, the failed paramedic from Grenada, once the Trump was readied for use.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray wasn't much of a churchgoing man, but even he had to admit that it was a damned impressive sight.

Westminster Abbey was packed. You could have probably squeezed in another mourner or two, but only if everyone took a deep breath and held it. It was not a good situation from a security viewpoint.

Westminster was laid out in the shape of a cross. The main entrance opened into what Flint had called the nave, a wide aisle that went from the base of the cross to where the arms met. The arms were called transepts. During normal services they would be mostly empty, but this was not a normal service. At the heart of the cross, the interaction of transepts and nave, was the sanctuary and high altar. The upper arm of the cross, the apse, was a maze of chapels with numerous tombs of dead kings and queens.

The nave was packed with mourners, from the entrance where the Unknown Soldier was interred in the floor, all the way back to the transepts. Five rows of portable wooden pews ran across each transept. Behind the pews was standing room only, as crowded as Ebbets Field during a pennant race.

The apse was as dark as a medieval abbey usually is, and deserted, except for lurking security men. Ray had the feeling that the trouble would come from there.

He circulated as best he could around the edges of the crowd. Heads of state and other foreign dignitaries sat in the front rows along with the Queen and whatever high-society Brit could wangle an invitation. Ray didn't recognize too many of the politicians, but Vice President Zappa was sitting in the front row near the Queen. Wild carders sat in the pews behind the politicians - among them Nephi Callendar - though Flint was in the command post coordinating security. If anyone noticed the odd figure in the tight, white fighting suit they gave no sign. Ray was starting to wish he'd worn his black suit instead of the white. The abbey was a lot dustier than he'd realized.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg looked up at the ornate vaulted roof of the medieval abbey and an image came to him. "All we need is Quasi."

"Wrong church, wrong country," a voice with a heavy East London accent answered Gregg. The joker's name was Alfred. Most folks call me Bowler, doncha know, he'd told them. The reason seemed obvious enough: a fleshy growth on the man's head, neatly blackened with matte paint, was a nearly perfect replica of an English gentleman's bowler hat. Dressed in coat, tie, and gloves, he could pass for gentry - until etiquette demanded that the hat be taken off or tipped, anyway. Alfred was the local contact for the Twisted Fists. "Besides, Westminster Abbey's a much nicer place than Notre Dame. I always sympathized with old Quasimoto, though."

"That's not who - " Gregg started to correct the man, but decided it wasn't worth it. He glanced at Hannah, but he had no shoulders with which to shrug. Instead Gregg lifted himself up on his rear legs to get a better view around them.

Far below them, the main expanse of the abbey was a sea of mourners. The space where Churchill's casket would eventually sit was a landscape of bright pointillistic dots of flowers at the juncture of the north and south transepts of the building. A fog of incense was thick in Gregg's nose and the organ pipes arrayed around them thundered with Mozart's Requiem, shaking dust down from the ceiling.

Gregg, Hannah, and Bowler were on a narrow catwalk behind the ranks of pipes, snuggled high above the floor and the galleries. "Getting a few of us in won't be problem," Bowler had promised them. "Keys, one of our people, works on the organ - he knows ways security won't check." Gregg was dubious, but Bowler had been right. Keys - a joker whose only visible sign of jokerhood had been his fingers, which had the too-white luster and stiffness of piano keys - had brought Hannah (blond, again) and Bowler in as his assistants; Gregg had been smuggled in inside a pipe case. Once inside the building, they'd made the long, dirty, and narrow climb to their eyrie; Keys had left later that morning, alone.

Outside, in the massive crowds filling Victoria Street, Brian, Cara, Two-Face, and some of the London Fists were scattered, watching for Rudo, Johnson, Horvath, or other known Sharks. As the invited mourners filed inside, Hannah and Bowler scanned their faces with binoculars, also searching.

What they were going to do in case they saw Johnson wasn't entirely clear, even to Gregg. They'd made hazy plans, but no one knew whether Johnson would be there himself or if some unknown local Shark might be used, or how the Trump virus might be released. For that matter, they weren't certain anything would happen, but the sour weight in Gregg's gut told him that he was right, that the Sharks would be unable to pass up this opportunity to infect wild carders from all over the globe.

It's what you'd do, after all, if you were one of them. It would be so tasty. Ahh, the glorious agony ...

If Brian and the others found Johnson before he got into the building, that was their best chance. If Johnson was spotted among the mourners within the Abbey, Bowler had lugged in a high-caliber rifle with a scope, but that would be the last resort. They'd tried to contact Popinjay, thinking to pop Johnson out of the crowd to somewhere safe, but no one seemed to know exactly where Ackroyd was. Two Fist sympathizers were down in the congregation itself, one of them - a deuce called Slumber - was hopefully capable of removing Johnson or some other Shark without drawing too much attention to the group.

They'd done what they could do. Gregg had the fear it wasn't going to be enough. Gregg lifted himself so he could peer over the organ pipes again, wishing they could have found a quieter hiding place. He peered down at the congregation. Toward the western entrance, he could see what looked to be a giant statue dressed in a uniform: Captain Flint, heading the security team. Even with Gregg's lousy vision, Flint stood out. Gregg swept his gaze over the congregation, to the flag-draped coffin, to the transepts leading off the main hall ... "Damn!" he said.

"What, Gregg?" Hannah asked.

"Look over by the right of the sanctuary, near the columns. Tell me what you see."

"What? The guy dressed - " Hannah stopped.

" - all in white," Gregg finished for her in a swirl of breathy organ crescendo. "Yeah. Billy Ray. Even as nearsighted as I am, I can tell. Trust Carnifex to wear his dress whites, even at a funeral."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"It's beginning," Flint's eerie whisper sounded even more ghostly coming from the tiny receiver plugged into Ray's ear.

Ray was stationed at the mouth of the south transept, among those lesser lights standing in Poet's Corner. Ray had a good vantage point leaning against the base of Shakespeare's statue. It was a pretty nice statue. At least Ray had heard of the guy, which was more than he could say for most of the other poetic geniuses whose monuments were all around him. It was a good place to keep an eye on the entrance to the apse, the darkness from which Ray was sure the trouble would come.

He looked around and caught Harvest's eye. She was sitting among the dignitaries, in an aisle seat on the third pew in the north transept. She looked great in black. Ray flashed on an image of her panting under him, her strong legs scissored across his back. He grinned at her and gave a thumbs-up. He saw her smile under her black veil.

"The coffin is coming down the nave," Flint reported, and Ray forgot about Harvest.

He began to breathe harder, smiling, as he felt his pulse speed.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Damn. Is he still after us?" Hannah's knuckles, gripping the pipe supports, had gone white, and Greg could smell the sudden fear in her.

"If he is, then we're in real trouble here." Gregg dropped down again. He felt exposed and trapped. "Keep an eye on Ray," Gregg said to Hannah. The coffin was making its slow way down the central aisle. "They're going to try it," Gregg said. "I know they are. Ray's handlers must think something's going to happen here, too, or he wouldn't be here. We just have to figure out how ..." Gregg went back to where Hannah stood. The ceremony was underway, the Archbishop of Canterbury in his robes and mitre droning in front of Churchill's casket, his amplified voice reverberating through the airy expanse. Gregg watched, trying to see something they might have missed before, the best way to bring in the Trump. Sending in infected people would work - let them cough slow death into the crowd. That would also kill those who brought the virus in, not that the Sharks would care, and worse, it couldn't guarantee wide-scale infection, any more than having someone in church with the flu meant that you'd catch it, too. No, Rudo and Johnson would want something more comprehensive than that. More certain.

What? What would I do?

Gregg scanned the abbey with squinting eyes, across the blurred faces of the assembly, up the gilded, fluted walls, across the domed ceiling. At the high altar, the ceremony continued. A priest emerged from gilded doors of the sanctuary, bearing a large crystal decanter and several golden chalices - wine for the communion.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The pallbearers deposited the casket draped with the Union Jack in the open area before the high altar, and stepped aside, melting into the shadows. An honor guard from every branch of the British military, they were more than just show. From the five-foot-tail gurkha dressed in khaki to the six-foot-four redcoat with bearskin hat, they were all Flint's trusted agents, but among them, Ray knew, there was probably a Shark or two. The question was, which one did he have to keep an eye on?

Ray didn't dwell on it, but marked their positions, ready to treat them as friend or foe as their actions demanded. He looked over the crowd, paying little attention to the priests and their ceremony. He was wired, on edge, ready for thunder and lightning to explode in the gloom of the dark cathedral.

But nothing happened.

The Mass droned on. The atmosphere was close and hot. The clouds of billowing incense didn't help any. Ray's sensitive nose was soon twitching. It seemed as if the Mass was going to last forever. Ray glanced away from the mouth of the apse. Before the high altar a couple of priests were puttering around with the communion wine.

That meant that things were winding down. Ray frowned. Maybe he was wrong. He'd felt sure that the Sharks would take advantage of the situation and pull off an outrageous stunt to galvanize their shattered movement. His feeling was rarely wrong. His instincts served him nearly as well as the battle computer that was his mind. He never -

"Sweet fucking Jesus," he whispered in sudden astonishment. It couldn't be!

"What is it, Ray?" Flint, ensconced in the choir loft, had picked up Ray's whisper through the transmitter Ray wore.

To the astonishment of the onlookers, Ray hauled himself up the face of Shakespeare's statue, put an arm around the playwright's neck, and hung there precariously for a moment.

"It's him," Ray said through clenched teeth. "The priest screwing around with the communion wine. It's General MacArthur fucking Johnson!"

"What?" Flint exclaimed.

Ray moved, his heart surging with genuine terror.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The priest, Gregg noticed was a black man. Clara said the virus would be soluble in water. Water ...

Suddenly, Gregg noticed Ray moving. Moving toward the priest. "Hannah!

"What, Gregg?"

"That priest. The one with the wine."

Hannah snatched up the binoculars, rolled the focus wheel. "My God," she said. "It's him. Johnson." Gregg could feel the shock hit her, a wave of nauseous yellow, and following it, the surging orange-red of fear as the realization hit her. "The wine ..."

"I can take him out," Bowler said. "Here, move ..."

Bowler started forward, adjusting the scope on his rifle. But Gregg saw the flash of white at the same time. Billy Ray had seen Johnson, too, and he was moving. Gregg wasn't sure how Ray had gotten there, but somehow he'd climbed up on a statue of Shakespeare, and now he leapt like Tarzan. Already there were shouts of protest, and Johnson looked up.

"Come on," Gregg said. "We have to get down there. All we need is for Ray to knock over the decanter in the middle of a fight ..."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray knew that the Black Trump was in the crystal decanter of wine that Johnson was patiently waiting to add to the large chalice. Ray knew he had to get to it before Johnson knew what was happening and just dumped it. Spilling it wouldn't be nearly as effective as having everyone drink the shit, but it would probably get the job done.

Ray's mind seemed to slow down as he swung into action. He knew that he was moving faster than any man could, but time was like liquid amber and he was an insect moving through it, seeing everything around him with total clarity and precision.

He jumped from old Will Shakespeare's statue to the next, barely hanging on. People were just starting to look up at him, but he moved on before they could finish pointing at him.

He flung himself off the next statue and he could see April Harvest stand and reach for the .38 that she carried holstered in the sweet hollow of her back and he almost shouted, "No! There's no shot!" because there were at least half a dozen priests between Harvest and Johnson, but he clamped his mouth shut because he didn't dare alert the Shark that they were on to him.

Flint was a screaming whisper in Ray's ear, but he ignored him. There were no more statues to jump on and his path to the high altar was still blocked by mourners.

He looked, figured vectors and velocity in his subconscious, then flung himself off his perch. He caught a bug-eyed bronze bust set high in a niche, prayed it would take his weight, noted the inscription "William Blake," then pushed off, extending desperately like a diver angling for the water.

Somehow he cleared the last rank of mourners. He crashed loudly onto the cathedral's flagstone floor. Everyone looked at him, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, including General MacArthur Johnson, and then he was on the move again. Harvest's pistol cracked. Everyone panicked and started screaming, but Ray was already in the clear area before the sanctuary. He sprinted past Churchill's bier and went up the stairs to the high altar.

Johnson lifted the decanter high to smash it down on the flagstone floor and Ray's mind went blank with panic. He dove desperately. His brain flipped back twenty years, reverting to simpler days. He wasn't a government agent anymore. He wasn't Carnifex, the name the Mechanic had hung on him during his first government mission all those years ago. He was just Billy Ray, a kid playing football for the University of Michigan and he had to get the ball, he had to catch the pass or there'd be a disaster of epic proportions. If he didn't get it they'd lose the game. There'd be no victory. There'd be no Rose Bowl, no pro contract. Hell, there'd probably be no bed full of cheerleaders after the game.

He hurled his body lengthwise, jaw clenched, joints aching as he stretched every possible millimeter.

The decanter crashed into his hands. A crazed light danced in Ray's eyes. He had good hands. The coach had always told him that. Real soft, good hands. They cradled the decanter and instinctively Ray curled into a ball as he crashed against the floor. It was a jarring collision, but he tucked the decanter against his stomach as he skidded, bounced down the stairs, and slammed against the base of Churchill's bier.

Jesus Christ, Ray thought. That had to be the best catch of my career.

He looked up. The pallbearer in the red jacket and bearskin hat was towering over him. Ray blinked sudden sweat from his eyes, and the redcoat stabbed down with the bayonet he'd had up his sleeve. He ran Ray completely through, blunting the bayonet's point on the flagstone on which Ray lay.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

They hit the first security man coming out of the tiny stairwell leading to the second story gallery. Gregg saw him first, radiating in the infrared as he stood in the shadows. The man seemed occupied by voices in his ears and the obvious ruckus on the main floor. "Hey - " Gregg said loudly, and began to run the other way. The man stared open-mouthed for a moment, then started to pursue.

He ran directly into Bowler's rifle-butt, coming around the corner of the stairwell, and went down hard as blood sprayed from his broken nose. Bowler tskked once and fished in the unconscious man's jacket, pulling out a small handgun from a shoulder holster. He held it to the guard's head.

Hannah jerked Bowler's hand away. "No," she said.

Bowler looked annoyed. "If we don't, he'll wake up and report us. No one will hear the shot, not with the organ's racket."

"Forget it," Hannah repeated, her hand still on Bowler's wrist. "He didn't do anything to us."

"Bloody right. I knocked him cold."

"Then leave him that way."

Bowler snatched his hand away from Hannah. "You with your girlfriend on this?" he asked Hartmann.

Gregg started. He'd been watching the confrontation with an odd horror. Choose, the memory of Cara's voice whispered in his mind. Choose who will die.

Let him do it, whispered the other voice. Taste it, Feel it.

Gregg shuddered. He reached out with the stubby hand and touched the unconscious guard. He could feel the strings. He could touch them.

Gregg pulled his hand away again.

"We're not Fists," he told Bowler. "We do things differently."

"Brian was right," Bowler muttered. "The two of you are looney. Here, then," he said, reversing the handgun and giving it to Hannah. "You make your own damn decision when to use it, then. If you can."

"You point with this end, right?" Hannah said in mock innocence.

Bowler frowned under the growth on his head. He took a small walkie-talkie from the man's suit pocket, and stepped on it. Plastic crackled under his heel. That'll have to do, I suppose," he said. "Lead on, caterpillar."

Fool, whispered the voice. Fool.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray screamed, pain and outrage combined. "Fucking Card Shark!"

His attacker looked down, somewhat appalled. He suddenly knew that he'd made a mistake. If he'd stabbed Ray through the heart he'd have killed him instantly. Even Ray's unnatural vitality couldn't have overcome a wound like that. A gut wound, painful as it was, just pissed him off.

Ray was on his feet before the Shark could jerk the bayonet free. Ray glared at him as blood ran down his legs, the bayonet poking through him like he was a beef kabob.

He wanted to rip the son of a bitch apart with his bare hands, but his mind screamed at him to hang onto the decanter. His dilemma was solved when someone grabbed the guard from behind and jerked his head up to look at the vaulted ceiling. A strong brown hand slipped a curved knife against the guardsman's throat and blood fountained upon the abbey's floor. The Shark dropped twitching to the flagstones.

The gurkha pallbearer was grinning at Ray. He gestured at him with his bloodstained kukri. "You one tough son of a bitch."

"You bet," Ray grunted. He grabbed the bayonet and pulled it out through the wound, catching his breath as it came free.

He looked around, shaking his head. It was panic and chaos combined and squared as the mourners ran around and screamed, knocking down wooden pews and trampling each other. Before the high altar the Archbishop and the other priests were staring at him, appalled by the blood and death that had entered the sacred space of their abbey, and perhaps even more frightened by the mask of pain and hate that was Ray's face.

But Ray broke into a grin. He couldn't believe his good luck. That bastard General MacArthur Johnson was still standing near the high altar, watching. Ray turned to the gurkha and shoved the decanter at him.

"Take this! Guard it with your life."

The gurkha saluted and took the crystal. Ray started to turn toward the dais, but someone slammed him, hard, in the back. Ray hit Churchill's bier and the coffin shifted. There were renewed screams and moans of anguish from the onlookers as someone landed on Ray's back and a muscular arm encircled his throat. Johnson, goddamnit, Ray thought. He couldn't breathe. He stood up, bearing Johnson's weight on his back.

"I've got you now, motherfucker," the Shark whispered in Ray's ear. His arm squeezed Ray's throat with the strength of a twenty-foot anaconda. The pain in Ray's stomach was excruciating and he couldn't breathe.

He growled wordlessly, reaching backwards, but he couldn't get a grip on Johnson. He tore the priest's robe from the man's back, but he couldn't tear the man from his own.

He started to stagger. He knew that if he fell he'd never get up.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

They emerged from St. Faith's chapel into the South Transept, down the stairs from which monks had once gone from their dormitories to the Choir for night offices. The massive Rose Window, filling the upper southern wall, threw fractured, multi-colored light down on a scene of chaos. On the high altar, Ray was fighting with Johnson; Gregg saw Harvest, the woman agent who'd been with Ray in New York, trying to push her way to the altar.

She was a salmon swimming upstream in a human flood. Half the people were scrambling away over a tangled landscape of chairs, trying to get away from the commotion in the center of the Abbey, while others stood and stared, or shoved back at the mourners trying to get through. Other fights had erupted around the floor - security people tried vainly to regain control of the situation. From the balcony, Gregg caught a glimpse of Brian, and the leprechaun let loose a burst of automatic gunfire that sent people diving for the floor. Gregg couldn't tell what the joker was firing at, but chunks of masonry flew from the railing in front of the Fist, and Brian ducked away. The roar of voices echoed as the choir stuttered to a halt and the organ abruptly choked off in mid-chord.

Gregg and Hannah seemed to have lost Bowler in the rush.

Gregg could hardly see as they moved into the loud confusion. The floor was a forest of black-clad legs. He hopped up and down, trying to get a clear view. "What's going on?" he screamed at Hannah over the din. "Can you see that decanter?"

"No!" Hannah shouted back. She pushed away a panicked lady in a hat that looked like Klaatu's ship. Gregg had given up hope of trying to fight the exiting crowd; he stayed in the lee of a statue. Across the hall, he could swear that he saw Quasiman perched on top of some unknown statesman's head. Gregg squinted, but people kept jostling him and he couldn't get a good look. "Isn't that Quasi?"

"Where?"

"Over ... Damn, never mind, he's gone." If Quasi had been there, he'd vanished already. "We really have a great bunch of allies."

"I thought ... Oh, shit!"

"What?" Gregg asked.

"Horvath," Hannah said. "I'm certain I just saw him, coming down from the altar and moving this way, but I've lost him again. Ray's fighting Johnson on the altar." Hannah righted one of the chairs, jumping up on it to see above the people spilling past them. "There's Horvath! Some short guy in a weird uniform had the decanter, and he just gave it to Horvath. He's on the other side of the transept, staying near the wall." Hannah leaped down again. "Gregg, Horvath's carrying that decanter like it's the damn Holy Grail. It's got to be the virus."

She started after Horvath, pushing into the crowd. A man yelled at her, pushing back, and Hannah went sprawling onto the floor in front of Gregg. Gregg could feel her confusion as she scrambled out of the way of the fleeing crowd and got to her feet again. "Got to get him, get the virus ..." she said, preparing to throw herself back into the whirl of people. Gunfire went off again, on the other side of the Church. People started screaming and pushing harder for the exits.

"Kick me," Gregg said.

"What?"

"Kick me."

Hannah looked at him, then grinned. "Oh," she said, and brought her foot back.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray's mind was no longer functioning on a conscious level when he shuffled backwards and slammed Johnson against Churchill's casket. He heard Johnson grunt with pain. He staggered away from the bier, then slammed into it again. The pressure around his throat lessened and his lungs sucked in a molecule or two of oxygen. It was all he needed. He slammed Johnson against the casket once again, breaking the Shark's hold. There were screams and moans from what was left of the onlookers as the coffin slid, tilted, and fell off the bier.

It crashed to the flagstones with a resounding boom. The lid popped open and Churchill rolled out. Ray, down on one knee and gasping for breath, looked at his waxy face. "This is one hell of a funeral," he told the remains.

Johnson had apparently decided on the better part of valor. He was heading for the darkness of the apse, holding his side like he'd cracked a rib. Ray hoped he'd cracked his fucking back. Johnson was fast, strong and agile, but Ray, even with a bayonet-sized hole through his gut, was an ace. He was up on his feet, running after him.

They passed history that Ray never even noticed, the tomb of Henry the Seventh, the massive blue-and-red stained glass window dedicated to the heroes of the Battle of Britain, the shrine of Saint Edward the Confessor, the last Saxon king and the man who had the church rebuilt in 1065, and the tombs of the cousins Mary and Elizabeth, queens both.

Ray knew they were heading toward the south transept. He lost sight of Johnson, and when he went around a corner and found himself in Poet's Corner again he skidded to a halt.

"Goddamnit," he said.

Johnson had blundered into Harvest, or perhaps vice versa. But Johnson clearly had the upper hand. He had Harvest around the throat, her gun pointed at her head.

"Stop right there, Ray, or she gets it."

"You've got more lives than a fucking cat."

"More'n you can take care of, anyway."

They were backing up, heading for the screened-off chapel that was the back wall of the south transept. Ray started to follow, but Johnson squeezed her throat harder.

"I'll kill her."

"You do and you've got nothing to bargain with. I'll be all over your ass."

"Don't worry about me," Harvest said. "The Black Trump!"

"What the hell about it?"

She pointed as best she could. "The goddamned caterpillar's after it."

Ray whirled to see Hartmann chasing Horvath. What the hell was Hartmann doing here? By the time Ray turned back Harvest and Johnson had disappeared through a door in the chapel's back wall. Ray was indecisive. "She can take care of herself," he finally said and started after Horvath, the caterpillar, and the decanter of virus-tainted wine. "I hope."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Hannah's kick, harder than Gregg expected, catapulted him into overdrive. For the first several seconds, he had no control at all over his direction. He slammed into the wall, scrambled up the stone front of some statesman's statue, and hurtled from the head to the fluted columns of the wall. Below him, the crowd had snapped into slow motion. As Gregg finally gained some control over his hyperactivity, he saw Horvath several yards away, heading for a small door to the right of the entrance to St. Faith's chapel. Near Poet's Corner, Billy Ray saw Gregg and pointed.

Someone had knocked over Churchill's casket; the old man's body was spilling out of the coffin, one pudgy arm flung wide as if inviting someone to join him.

Gregg leaped off the column, landing on the shoulders of a matronly woman in black dress and veil, and jumping from her shoulders to the top of a middle-aged man's head. He skidded - knocking the man's toupe awry - and leap-frogged toward Horvath across the heaving sea of heads as people reacted belatedly to his presence. Horvath, moving as if immersed in water, turned slowly to see what was causing the new uproar. He saw Gregg and began running toward the door, slipping through it as Gregg hopped down into the clear space near the far wall. Gregg managed to slither through the opening before the door shut.

The sounds of panic faded. Gregg was standing at the top of a flight of steps leading down; Horvath had turned a corner ahead of him, doubling back under St. Faith's chapel. The Hannah-given adrenaline rush was fading; Horvath seemed to be moving at normal speed now, and Gregg hurried after him. Gregg's nostrils were full of the scent of age, and he could hear Horvath's shoes clattering on stone flags as the man reached the bottom of the steps. Gregg half-ran, half-slid down the last flight of stairs on the evaporating edge of overdrive, and saw Horvath's back twenty-five yards ahead. The man had stopped and was staring at something ahead of him in the corridor. Staring at someone. Gregg saw a blurry figure step out of the shadows ahead of Horvath.

"Hannah Davis," Horvath said. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Gregg. "And Gregg Hartmann, too. I should have had you killed back in Belfast."

"Too late," Hannah told him - she must have come down from a stairway on the other side of the chapel. Gregg could see the gleam of metal in her hands: the handgun Bowler had given her. "Put down the decanter."

Horvath held it up, instead, swirling the dark red liquid inside. "So you know what this is," he said. He backed up a step.

"Horvath - "

"Shoot me, and I'll drop it. Shoot me and the virus spills right here. Then what do you do?"

"What happens? Then I shoot you, just for being obstinate. I'm a nat, Horvath. The virus won't hurt me.

"It'll kill Hartmann."

Hannah's gaze flicked over to Gregg, and he saw an azure affection there, and the muted gray of regret. "Yes. And I'd trade one life for the millions we'd save. That's a trade I'd make any day. Any time."

"I don't believe you."

Hannah smiled, and it was the coldest expression Gregg had ever seen on her face. "Then that's another mistake on your part, General. It's your move."

For long seconds, Horvath stared at Hannah. The virus swirled under the cut glass. Then he slowly set it down on the flags. "Gregg - " Hannah said. Gregg scurried forward and retrieved the decanter. Holding its slow death in his hand, he made certain to brush against Horvath as he passed. The eddying emotions around the man strengthened as he made the contact, letting him follow the welling emotions back to their source. His link made, Gregg moved back.

"Now what?" Horvath asked.

Hannah sniffed. "Now you tell us where Rudo is. That's not all the virus. There were three vials. My guess is that you got one. Where's Rudo? Where are the other two vials of Trump?"

"You think I'm going to tell you, just because you're holding a gun? You don't know me. You don't know me at all."

Gregg reveled in the confrontation, feeling the wild anger from the two of them. Hannah, he could tell, was beginning to waver, not certain what to do next. He found the strings to her anger, to all the resentment over what the Sharks had done to her over the last year, to the underlying rage over the death and pain they'd caused over the decades. He opened the channels to that fury, let it pulse and surge until it pushed aside the pale yellow, Hannah suddenly moved the muzzle of the gun; her finger convulsed on the trigger. The sound of the shot was deafening, and Horvath went sprawling, clutching at his right knee. Blood trickled from between his fingers. "You don't know me, either," Hannah told him. "Rudo destroyed my life, murdered my friends, and tried to kill me. Now you're trying to kill everyone infected by the wild card. You people want to play God. Well, I told you before; I'll trade one life for several any time, and if it's yours, I don't mind playing God myself. Now, where's Rudo?"

"I won't tell you," Horvath muttered through gritted teeth. He moaned. "I can't tell you because I don't know, Jesus, my knee ..."

Gregg reveled in the pain, and at the same time, yanked the strings of Hannah's rage once more. Hannah's finger moved, the gun barked, and Horvath rolled on the floor, smearing blood from a shoulder wound, "The next time, it's your balls," Hannah told him. "Rudo - where is he?"

"In Syria," Horvath said, nearly a scream. "With the Nur." Hannah stepped forward until she was standing over the man, pointing the blackened muzzle between his legs. The smell of gunpowder was almost overpowering, but there was another smell - Horvath had pissed his pants. "It's the truth, I swear it. Oh God, please ..."

"Does Rudo have the other vials?"

"One, yes." Horvath's eyes were wide, fixed on Hannah's weapon. Gregg could feel the pale tendrils of shock dimming the hues of his panic.

Gregg let go of the strings, his eyes closed as the orgasmic pleasure of the pain washed through him. You see, it's as good as you remember. So wonderful, so tasty ... Hannah blinked; she backed away from Horvath, the gun suddenly trembling in her hand, and she looked down at the wounded man, aghast.

It wasn't for the pleasure, Gregg told the voice. He's told us where Rudo is. That was the reason. I did it so we would know.

Sure you did, Greggie, Sure you did. Doing the wrong things for all the right reasons ...

Hannah took a deep breath. Gregg felt her push the rising guilt back, but he knew it would be there later: a snack. "All right," Hannah said. "Gregg, get the virus. We have to get out of here."

"What about me?" Horvath wailed. "I'm bleeding."

"We'll make sure someone finds you," Hannah said.

Gregg, his stubby hands wrapped around the decanter, stopped. He could sense someone else watching. Someone whose emotional matrix was very familiar.

"That won't be necessary," Billy Ray said, stepping out of the shadows behind Hannah. "Someone already knows."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The woman with the gun blanched when Ray stepped out of the shadows. His fighting suit was stained with blood and dust, his face was smeared with the same. Hartmann had the decanter full of death clutched in his clumsy-looking hands. Ray advanced slowly towards him and the woman with the gun. What was her name?

"Saw you at the airport, Senator, but you didn't stay to chat. When was the last time we had a chance to talk about things? Not since I spilled my guts for you in Atlanta, back in '88."

"Uh - " Hartmann started to back away, edging closer to the woman. She clearly didn't know what was going on. She waved the gun in Ray's direction, but he ignored her.

"You've got something I want, Senator. Something I've chased halfway across the world."

Ray advanced past Horvath, who was groveling on the floor with knee and shoulder wounds. Fucking Shark. He realized now that Churchill had probably been trying to warn him about Horvath when he'd thought the old man was telling him about Johnson.

"You just wait," Ray told him in passing. "You're next." Ray focused on Hartmann and the bimbo with the gun. "Give me the decanter, Senator."

"I - I can't, Billy. It's dangerous."

Ray felt something inside him explode. "Of course it's dangerous, you fucking idiot! It's full of the Black Trump!"

"I know! I know!" Hartmann said his ridiculous head bobbing up and down. "But it's safe in our hands. Trust me. We'll take care of it."

Ray laughed. "Trust you? I wouldn't trust you as far as I can fucking spit, Senator. I saw your handiwork in the pub."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"... I saw your handiwork in the pub."

Ray was talking to Gregg, but it was Hannah who answered. "We all make mistakes," she said. She swung around to face Ray, the gun held in both of her hands, the muzzle pointed at Ray's chest. The front of Ray's fighting suit was torn and covered with blood, but Ray seemed more amused than concerned. "Let's not make another one right now," Hannah continued. "We could use a little help."

"You act like you have room to bargain," Ray answered. "One part of my job was to find you two and bring you back to the States. I always do my job. Don't I, Senator? Even when I get no thanks and no recognition. Even when I get chopped to pieces protecting someone."

The violet resentment literally poured from the man, and Gregg plucked the familiar strings of Billy Ray's psyche. It was like fondling a favored much-handled instrument. There was a brilliant fury there, very recent - Gregg suspected from the extent of it that Ray's fight with Johnson had not gone as well as it could have. That's good. Ray will want to redeem himself. Underneath the violet, Gregg could still feel a deeply hidden small core of blue: respect for what Gregg once had been. Ray had enjoyed his years as Gregg's bodyguard. He'd loved the power and prestige the position gave him. That was still there, covered over now by years apart and Gregg's shabby treatment of Ray after the convention. Gregg set himself to repairing the damage, to fusing the strings once more and shoveling aside the neglect.

Billy," Gregg said as soothingly as he could, cursing the thin voice of his joker body. "Hannah's right. We're on the same side here."

"That's not the way I understand it."

"Here," Gregg said. He lifted the decanter. "This is what Horvath and Johnson were trying to release. Here's the Black Trump." Ray looked at it, and the hue of Ray's anger changed subtlely. "You know that Hannah and I have been telling the truth, don't you? You know what the Black Trump is."

"I've seen what it does," Ray said tersely.

"There were three vials," Gregg continued. "I don't think you know that. This is one. Horvath's told us that Rudo has one of the other two. And we know where he is."

With the words, Gregg yanked the strings, pulling hard. Ray seemed to sway for a moment with it, but then the thing inside Gregg pulled back at the strings. No, that's not the way. Ray's dangerous, remember? He's already tried to kill you. This isn't the way. It won't work. The coldness returned to Ray's voice. "What are you offering, Hartmann?"

This," Gregg said. "As I said, we're on the same side, really. I think we stand a better chance if we join forces. I want to trade Rudo's location for our freedom - and a ride to where Rudo is." Ray wasn't listening. Not any more. It didn't matter. Gregg found that he didn't really want Ray's cooperation. There was something else that would be ... tastier.

"Not a chance," Ray said. "I don't cut deals with assholes and murderers."

"Hey!" Hannah said, and at the same time, Gregg yanked at the strings of her emotions, hard. Her black-red intense anger was still there, and twin spots of color flared high on her cheeks at Ray's accusation. "Fuck you."

"Sure." Ray grinned nastily at her. "Any time you like, darlin'. Right before I take you both in." Still grinning, he started forward, and Gregg could feel his certainty that Hannah wouldn't fire, that she wouldn't pull the trigger.

So easy. So tasty ...

The gun jumped in Hannah's hand, the flash from the muzzle making Gregg blink. Ray gave a surprised "Hunh?" and staggered backward, crimson spreading out on the blood-dappled white uniform from a stomach wound. Hannah pulled the trigger again, and again, and again, as Ray went to his knees and then collapsed on the floor, as Gregg tugged at the strings and sucked at the sweet, joyous pain in Ray's mind. He let go the connection to Hannah, let her emotions drop back to normal.

Hannah dropped the gun, suddenly. She looked at Ray, at the moaning Horvath, at Gregg. "My God," she breathed. "Oh, my God."

"Come on," Gregg told her, relishing Hannah's guilt, a dessert after the twin feasts of Horvath and Ray. "We have to get out of here."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

TWO

The guidebook said that Jerusalem was a city of a thousand names, and proceeded to name a few of them: Shalem, Yerushalem, Yir'eh, Tsiyon, Jebus, Ir David. Gregg decided that one of them must translate as "City of Contradictions."

In their first day in the Holy City, Gregg and Hannah saw more suffering and poverty than either of them had ever glimpsed in the States; they also saw more riches and wealth than they might have thought possible - vast, gilded temples and palatial estates. The poor, if nothing else, were more numerous. They were of all races and religions, heads covered against the sun, their bodies dusted with dirt that had once clogged the pores and caked the heels of prophets, pilgrims, and conquerors.

But one couldn't eat history, couldn't take shelter in antiquity.

Gregg could taste the complex emotions of the city. The strands of violence and rage, of love and hope, of despair and sorrow, faith and devotion - they swirled in the heated winds off the fig-dotted hills, snaked around the pale stone buildings and twined in the narrow, winding streets. The seductive tendrils, so full of delicious hues and shades, pulled at Gregg. He wanted to call out to the driver of their taxi to stop, to let him out so that he could follow the emotions back to their source, so that he could make the connection that would let him play with the colors of Jerusalem's soul.

Given what they'd seen on their taxi tour of the city, they hadn't expected the Joker's Quarter to be anything less than squalid. Their taxi driver would not drive past the gates of the quarter - maybe it was the armed joker guards obviously on watch there, maybe it was simple fear of jokers: Gregg couldn't tell from the emotions wafting from the man.

"This is gonna be just great," Hannah said as she paid the man. She tugged at the robe she wore. "Even Mr. Greasy Hair here won't go in. Lovely." She glanced at the silent Fist guards with ill-disguised contempt. They watched as Gregg and Hannah walked into the Quarter.

They expected squalor. They were surprised. Certainly the buildings were old and run-down, certainly there was abject poverty here, misery and starvation, but there was also an ill-defined sense of order that had been missing outside. The streets were mostly clean, and people went about their business without seeming to worry about the others passing them on the street. They saw women and children moving about unescorted, something the taxi driver had mentioned as unusual in Jerusalem. Hannah was stared at more than Gregg. There were scowls directed at her, and an elderly woman - her fluttering veil revealing large tufts of hair protruding from her nostrils - hissed "Nat bitch" in passing.

Gregg decided that the hues of the quarter were as appetizing as those of Jokertown had been. Yes, the voice echoed. A lovely place. We must get to know it better.

They checked into a hostel near the Gate, taking what they were told was the only room available, on the first floor. The joker at the desk, his skin dappled with orange spots and blue stripes like some gaudy tropical fish, ignored Hannah and would only speak to Gregg. When Hannah asked for an extra key, he slid it across the counter to Gregg. He asked about luggage and sneered when told that they had none. "Enjoy your stay, sir," he said as they left the lobby. Gregg let himself savor Hannah's irritation as they made their way down the dark corridor to the room.

"Now what?" Hannah asked. There was only one bed; neither of them commented on the arrangement. She prodded the mattress with one hand, then bounced on it experimentally a few times. "No TV. Probably just as well. Brian said that he'd send word to the Dog that we're coming. Do we wait for him or do we go looking?"

... must get to know it better ...

"I think it'd be best if I go out alone," Gregg told her. "We've already seen how nats are treated here. Stay here and rest - try to take care of the jet lag. I'll see if I can make contact with the Dog." With the words, he slathered blue weariness over her unease. Hannah nodded.

"Be careful out there," she said. She leaned back and closed her eyes. "Maybe it's just because of the Fists, but I have the feeling that the violence is never quite buried here, that if you just scratch the surface of the city, it'll all come leaping out."

Gregg smiled. "I think you're right," he said.

A few minutes later, outside, he blinked in the fierce sunlight. He could see jokers wandering past the entrance to the hostel, his enhanced sense of smell could scent a thousand odors hanging in the still air, but he was searching with other senses.

There ... You feel it? Anger, laced with worry. Over this way ...

I don't have to do this, he told the voice firmly. I don't.

I know, came the soothing reply. That was the old Gregg, addicted to the power. But this time you can control it. Still, you need to use it, need to remember how it works. You'll need the power to find the virus and destroy it. That's the reason. That's the only reason.

Gregg hopped down from the worn steps of the hostel, turned left, and wriggled down a narrow side street, following the invisible trail. Here, the houses leaned out over the street toward their neighbors as if for support. Quickly, the sun was eclipsed behind ancient facades and laundry drying on lines, sending the occasional errant shaft down to expire on granite cobbles. Jokers loitered in the doorways, staying in the cool shadows and out of the midday heat. The city smelled of spice and a hundred noontime meals, of perfume and raw sewage. Through it, Gregg hunted the unseen radiance of frayed emotions. He ducked into an alleyway between two nondescript buildings, avoiding the fly-infested garbage cans. Yes. It's very close....

Gregg looked up. Through open windows a story above him, he could hear faint voices arguing heatedly in rapid-fire Arabic. The deeper, male voice held the same hues as the trail he'd followed - dark and richly red, like fine, raw meat; the shrill female voice that answered him was marbled with frustration and laced with fear: an old argument, then, one that had led the two into a physical confrontation before. As Gregg stood there, listening, the voice tugged at him.

Go on....

There's no connection. I can't feel him, can't control him without that.

Then we'll create the link.

It's dangerous. Stupid. I don't need this. I don't have to do it...

The voice seemed to sigh. The side door's open. Go up the stairs. Knock on the door. Say you're looking for someone, apologize for interrupting and shake hands with the man before you go. That's all. You'd have him. He'll taste good. I promise.

As Gregg stood there in indecision, he heard the scrape of leather on stone.

"Gregg Hartmann?"

Gregg started guiltily at the voice, his small body lurching upright in a defensive posture. A boy was standing in the dappled shadow at the alleyway's opening - a man-child, no more than fifteen, and the hands that dangled at his side were tipped with razor-like, gleaming claws. Like the city, he was a dichotomy: an innocent face underlaid with implied violence. There was a delicious torment in the child, a chaotic turbulence that Gregg suddenly wanted to touch. The sound of voices above was suddenly only sound. The hues and shades wrapped around them vanished, but he could see fresh colors around the boy, sharp and bright. He wanted to touch them.

"Who are you?" he asked.

I'm Needles," the boy said. He lifted his hands; the claws rasped with the motion. The voice held the accent of New York City. "I ... I was told you'd be here. I've come to take you and the woman to the Black Dog."

"You're with the Fists? You're American?"

A nod. The mingled colors swirled with the motion.

Gregg sniffed suspiciously. "I was told the Dog was difficult to see. Kind of strange that we're not here an hour before we get an invitation."

"He's been expecting you. He said to tell you that he knows about Westminster and the Trump." The boy shrugged, scuffed at a loose cobblestone. He looked sidewise at Gregg, brown eyes behind a ragged thicket of hair. "From what I've seen, it's not exactly politically correct to turn down an invitation from the Black Dog."

"Then I guess I'm glad you came to fetch me, Needles." Gregg held out his tiny hand. After a moment's hesitation, Needles's claws brushed Gregg's skin. Gregg snatched at the tendrils of emotion that clung to the boy, following them back, letting his mind run along the path of the youth's mind and set the linkages.

Yes.... We have him....

Needles's hand dropped. Claws clashed like a tray of flatware. "Come on," Gregg told him. "Let's get Hannah."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"I'll, pant, get, pant, I'll get you, pant, for this," Bradley Finn gasped back at him around the seventh or eighth mile, as the rickshaw jounced along through Hong Kong's teeming streets.

"Is it my fault you're out of shape?" Jay said, looking up from the map spread across his knees. "You ought to pay me for the workout. Besides, with the cost of malpractice insurance and all, you never know when you're going to need another trade."

Finn looked back over his shoulder and his broad hindquarters to where Jay lounged in the seat. "How come, pant, I have to, pant, pull, pant, and you, pant, get to ride?" Sweat had left rings under the arms of the centaur's baggy shirt and plastered his hair to his forehead in damp strands beneath the wide straw hat. A liquid tendril of brown was creeping slowly down one check.

"I told you," Jay told him, again. "Joker rickshaw boys pulling tourists around are a dime a dozen. This way, you blend right in, nobody looks at you twice. Just part of the local color. By the way, your disguise is running."

Finn took a hand off the rignt pole and wiped away the trickle of dyed sweat. His cheek was a kind of greenish brown where the dye had run. "You had to, pant, to get the, pant, cheapest brand." Finn was a palomino no longer; now he was more a muddy brown, with black patches, and a few red highlights. He looked like a mess, actually, but the bathtub in their hotel suite looked a lot worse.

Jay shrugged. "Hey, I was buying in bulk, the guy cut me a deal," he said. They crested a hill and began to plunge downward, accelerating rapidly. "He even threw in that swell coolie hat for free. Listen, after you drop me off, find a pay phone and check in with Peter. Have him tell Jerry and Sascha to stand by for new orders. If Belew's turned up a lead, we may need - Jesus, slow down!" A gaggle of camera-laden tourists was crossing the street ahead. Middle-aged American women scattered, shrieking, in all directions. They were all wearing T-shirts covered with ideograms. Probably Chinese for I'm a stupid tourist and I paid way too much for this ugly shirt.

A pothole the size of Cleveland gaped in front of the rickshaw. With unseemly malice, Finn guided the right wheel into it, bouncing Jay down and up again and leaving him with his kidney somewhere near his tonsils.

"Real good," Jay said through clenched teeth. The map flapped against his thighs. He smoothed it out, turned it around, and frowned, glancing back up at the passing scenery for the street Belew's message had specified. The Chinese ideograms on the signs were impossible to decipher in the first place, and the bumpy ride didn't make it any easier. "Turn right at that corner, and look for a shop with ducks in the window."

"All the shops have ducks in the window," Finn bitched, but he turned right, taking the corner on one wheel so that Jay had to hang on for dear life. The map went sailing away and plastered itself across the windshield of a huge antique Rolls Royce, whose chauffeur honked at them. Finn shot him the finger.

"Cut that out," Jay said. "You're supposed to be a humble joker rickshaw boy, not a New York City cabbie."

Finn was too busy panting to answer. The street veered uphill again, and finally Finn began to slow. They climbed up and up and up some more, and finally Jay saw ducks. "Ducks," he shouted. "Ducks at nine o'clock. Stop!"

Finn stopped, his mane leaking brown fingers all over the back of his shirt, his chest heaving. Jay climbed out of the rickshaw on wobbly legs. "I hope you don't expect a tip," he told Finn. He walked off before the centaur could gather the breath for a reply.

Inside the duck shop was dim and quiet, and full of delicious smells. The food in Hong Kong was fabulous, Jay had discovered, but it was better not to ask what it was that tasted so good as you were scarfing it down. It usually turned out to be fried tripe or crispy goose bills or sweet-and-sour panda testicles, and then you had to taste it again as it came back up.

An elderly Chinese man emerged from behind a bamboo curtain, took one look at Jay, and nodded silently. Jay nodded silently in reply and went though the curtain, down a narrow flight of steps, to a cool basement vault where J. Bob Belew was smoking a pipe of opium with a monkey the size of Orson Welles.

The monkey took a deep drag from the long pipe, and said, "And this is the famous Popinjay. Often I have wished to meet you, Mr. Ackroyd. You would have been a great success in my profession." The monkey spoke English with an Oxford accent, but the effect was somewhat spoiled by his tail, which swayed sinuously behind him in rhythm with his words.

"What profession would that be?" Jay asked, looking around for a chair. The basement was crammed with fakey lacquer screens, Ming vases, and lifesize funerary soldiers, cheap Hong Kong knockoffs of priceless Chinese antiquities.

"Lord Tung is a smuggler," Belew said.

"Smuggling is such a harsh word," the monkey demurred. He offered the pipe to Belew, who accepted it gravely. "I am only a trader and, in my own small way, one who fights for economic freedom for all. What a man wishes to buy, I sell to him. What a man wishes to sell, I buy." He smiled at Jay, and bowed his head.

Jay took another look around. Okay, so maybe the stuff wasn't cheap, fakey Hong Kong knockoffs. He was a detective, not a museum curator, what the hell did he know. "I'm real happy for you," he told the fat monkey-man with the sleepy eyes, "but maybe we could get to the point? The meter's running in my rickshaw."

J. Bob Belew took a pull from the opium pipe, and held it for a long moment. Smoke curled up from his nostrils when he finally exhaled. He looked completely at his ease here, but then, Belew always looked completely at his ease, no matter where he was or who he was with. "Lord Tung has some information for us," J. Bob said calmly, like they had all the time in the world.

"My house supplies advanced Western laboratory equipment to a number of pharmaceutical manufacturers throughout Asia," Lord Tung said. "Of late, one such concern has been making a number of rather eccentric purchases."

"A scanning-tunneling microscope is well beyond the needs of most Golden Triangle drug cartels," Belew put in.

"I am prepared to supply full details," Lord Tung said.

"Real good," Jay said. "Enquiring minds want to know." He reached back for his wallet. "How much?"

"Please, Mister Ackroyd, put your billfold away," Lord Tung said. "I have no need of your money. We are all friends here, are we not?" He smiled at Jay and offered the opium pipe.

Jay glanced at Belew. J. Bob gave him an almost imperceptible nod. Jay took the pipe. He didn't know quite what to do with it. "Friends," he said. "Right. Whatever you say." Lord Tung was watching him. Jay put the stem in his mouth. The pipe was almost as long as his arm. He felt like an idiot. He sucked in, got a lungful of sweet smoke, and coughed violently. "Smooth," he choked out, between gasps. What the hell were you supposed to say? Jay didn't know the etiquette of opium dens. Maybe it was like wine tastings, he thought. "A nice mellow bouquet, with just a hint of presumption," he tried. "Yum yum."

Lord Tung laughed like a child. An especially large and hairy child, but a child nonetheless. "I like you, Mr. Ackioyd."

"And I want to marry you and have your children, Mr. Tung." Jay returned. He passed the pipe off to Belew quickly, before they made him take another puff.

"Lord Tung," Lord Tung corrected, with a hint of steel in the high, dreamy voice.

"Whatever," Jay said.

The huge monkey-joker folded his hands over his belly like a big, hairy Buddha and smiled, yellow eyes blinking slowly.

J. Hobert Belew spoke up. "It is pleasant to know I have had some small part in bringing such good men together, and to witness the beginning of this great friendship. A new friend is as new wine; when it is old, thou shau drink it with pleasure."

Jay was still trying to work that through and see if it came out as a compliment when Lord Tung said, "I would never think of taking money for the information I have to share with you. It is ever a great joy for a friend to help a friend."

That one didn't take much working through. Jay was getting the idea. "Yeah, I love that too," he said. He tried to look helpful. "Anything I can do for you, Lord Tung?"

"Perhaps ... no ... I hesitate to ask ... it would be a crime to sully the serenity of this golden moment by imposing on your kindness and good will."

"I know Jay would think it no imposition, Lord Tung," J. Robert Belew said. "Nothing gives our Popinjay more delight than being of service to a friend."

"Boy, howdy," Jay said in a flat voice. "Fiddle dee dum, fiddle dee dee, helping pals is all for me."

"Why, then," Lord Tung said, "I will ask for only the smallest of favors, as a token of your esteem and affection. I would never wish you to inconvenience yourself on my behalf, but this is such a little thing, you need only to lift a single finger ..."

Jay got his drift. He lifted the single finger in question. "This little piggy went to market," he said. "I don't know if J. Bob here clued you in, but I can only pop things to places I've been. I need to picture the destination in my head."

"I am fully aware of the extent and limits of your power, my friend," Lord Tung said smoothly. "I have, oh, many good friends in New York who would be pleased to accept delivery at any location you would deem appropriate. Your offices, say, or your apartment in Manhattan."

"My offices," Jay said firmly. His wife was used to strange items popping up in the apartment, but the arrival of a midnight moving crew from Chinatown would probably throw even Hastet. He glanced around at all the lacquered screens, the Ming vases, the funerary soldiers. "So what do you want popped?"

"Why, all of it," Lord Tung said, with a huge smile that revealed a mouth full of yellow teeth. Then he laughed and laughed and laughed.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg wasn't certain what he expected the Black Dog to look like, but somehow the reality wasn't a disappointment. Nothing about the Hound of Hell was ordinary. Part of it was the atmosphere of the catacombs, this silent maze buried unguessed, beneath the tempestuous, quarrelling warrens of Jerusalem. Part of it was the Dog himself. He radiated Presence, something beyond the image brought by the black robe and mask, the tall muscular presence. His charisma was tangible, pulsing and hypnotic and undeniable. Dangerous.

As dangerous as I was. Once.

No, replied the voice. As dangerous as you are NOW.

Gregg didn't answer. Even in the old days, at the full height of his power, he'd been afraid of aces and those whose power he didn't know. The Black Dog had something, and that made Gregg uneasy.

"Gregg Hartmann," the black Dog said. His English had a trace of some accent Gregg could not place, and a smirk rode in the words. He gestured to the chairs set around the wooden table in the room. An enameled decanter of strong coffee sat in the center, under siege by empty china cups and pinned in the glare of a spotlight. Gregg thought the decanter looked good enough to eat.

"So good to meet you at last, Senator, even under these circumstances." The Black Dog turned to Hannah, and the eyes behind the mask regarded her with an intensity that had been missing when he looked at Gregg. "Ms. Davis. Even Arabic garb can't hide your beauty."

Gregg could have told the Dog that tactic was a mistake. He felt the arc of Hannah's irritation jab from under her surface colors.

Hannah looked at Gregg and sighed. "We don't have time for this polite shit," Hannah said, turning back to the Black Dog. Her voice sounded harsh against the mellifluous, deep tones of the Fists' leader; it brought Gregg's puppet-like head around, startled. If Hannah felt the pull of the Dog's presence, then his unwanted compliment - after the events of the past weeks - had shredded its power. "You've been told what almost happened in England - it could still happen. Do you understand the importance of this? If you do, then we need your help. We must find the other two vials of Black Trump, or even your little subterranean stronghold won't save you."

The Black Dog almost sounded amused. "You have a lot to learn about this society," he told her. "There are certain ways that things must he said before they are heard."

"In other words, I'm just a woman and a nat, so shut the fuck up?"

The voice acquired an edging of frost. "I'm only saying that this is not the States, and that someone with your intelligence will realize that she cannot act as if it was."

"And I'm sure that the Black Dog has the intelligence to realize that we are from the States," Gregg said before Hannah could speak, "and will understand our directness and forgive it."

The Black Dog sniffed behind the mask. "That was almost smooth, Senator. I see that you didn't lose your political instincts when you became a joker." The Dog glanced at the silent woman behind him, then back to Hannah and Gregg. "I understand more of the importance of recent events than the two of you believe or know. Unfortunately, your arrival here was a bit ... late, even if your presence in England turned out to be fortuitous. You see, my sources are very good, in nearly every country of the world, and I've known about the Sharks and the vials for some time."

"Then why haven't you done anything about them?" Hannah asked. "That's the most criminal thing the Fists have ever done."

The Dog glared at her. "I've done what I needed to do, and what I could do," he told them. "We always suspected that Jersualem was one place they would try to release the virus, and we were certain the Nur was a Shark. However, we weren't sure where Rudo was. Your information tells me that he managed to slip through our intelligence net and get to the Nur finally, and I know where the Nur is. So the puzzle pieces have fallen in place, and now we can act."

"Where is the Nur?" Gregg asked.

The Black Dog only raised his hand, but the gesture was sufficient to make Gregg go silent, as if rebuked. "I have already made my plans," the Black Dog said. "I know what to do to get the rest of the information we need. And I know what to do once I have that information."

"I'll bet it has something to do with lots of people losing their lives," Hannah said. "That seems to be about the only thing the Fists are good at."

The Black Dog almost seemed amused. "Perhaps. Actually, what I have in mind doesn't involve violence, only a threat of it. We believe that the Nur and Rudo are planning to release the Black Trump virus in Jerusalem. We also believe that the Nur's reverence for the holy city would make it impossible for him to damage a single stone of its streets. If the Nur is going to threaten jokers, then we will threaten to destroy the Dome of the Rock."

"The Nur has a whole damn army to protect the Dome. All he has to do is say the word."

The Black Dog shrugged under his robe. "An army means nothing. You see, The Twisted Fists have a nuclear device."

He said the words the way Gregg might have said I have a loaf of bread.

"What?" Gregg's voice broke in a screech. Alongside him, he could sense Hannah's speechless outrage.

"I think what I said was clear enough," the Black Dog answered.

"That's total insanity. What is this, the ultimate five for one nonsense?" Gregg continued. "A nuke set off in Jerusalem will kill millions, not to mention destroying some of the most sacred relics of western religion."

"Certainly, that's a worst case scenario," the Black Dog replied patiently. Calmly. "Senator, we don't intend to set off the bomb - not here, anyway."

"Of course not," Hannah said. "You just borrowed it."

The Black Dog turned to Hannah, and his voice was all at once swift, cold steel. "Ms. Davis, you seem to think that the Twisted Fists are nothing but thugs and murderers."

"Judging by what I've seen so far," Hannah answered defiantly, "that's an excellent description. I'd love to be proved wrong."

The Black Dog inclined his head slightly to her. "I don't think the Fists have anything to prove to you, to Senator Hartmann, or to Father Squid and your other friends. I answer to my own conscience and no one else's." For a moment, the tension held in the room, then the Black Dog let go a breath, and it eased.

"Let me try to explain. This is what we've learned in the last few days. The Nur has set up a portable lab for Dr. Rudo. It could be located in any of Nur al-Allah's nomadic camps in Syria, and we suspect we know which one. Once we locate it, then we can destroy the Trump by ..." The Black Dog paused, and seemed to smile under the mask. "... more conventional methods."

"What about the bomb?" Gregg persisted.

The Black Dog shrugged. "Senator, as much as I appreciate your concern, I think you can see why we need the nuke until the Trump is destroyed - it will be a very effective tool for coercing the Nur to cooperate. If for any reason the Nur decides to call our bluff, or if we are unsuccessful in destroying the virus in the desert, well ..." The Dog shrugged. "Then an effective and powerful backup system is necessary."

"Couldn't you think of anything except a fucking nuke?"

"God knows I tried," the Black Dog said. He almost seemed to smile. "And now for your part. Our nuke is useless unless the Nur knows that we have it. You know the Nur. You've met him, and you know his power. I think you and Ms. Davis would make good messengers, don't you?"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Burma," Jay Ackroyd bitched as he followed J. Bob Belew up the stairs from the empty vault in the basement "Fucking terrific."

"If we move fast and take them unawares, we have a chance," Belew said. "Casaday was always too impressed with his own cleverness. It makes him sloppy."

"That warms the cockles of my heart," Jay said.

Belew pushed through the bamboo curtain, with Jay right behind him. The old Chinese man was puttering around the shop. Belew stopped at the counter, gestured at the long row of hanging ducks, and said, "Two, please."

The little Chinese man bowed his head, climbed on a stool, unhooked two ducks, and began wrapping them in crisp white butcher paper cut from a roll. "What's that for?" Jay asked, baffled.

Belew brushed his mustache with his thumb. "Lunch." He accepted the package, bowed to the old man, and walked out into the sunlight. Jay came after him. The rickshaw was still sitting in front of the duck shop, but Finn was gone. Jay looked up and down the street. "Lose something?" Belew asked.

"Finn," Jay said. "I told him to find a pay phone and check in with my man in New York. I hope he didn't get lost."

"You would do well to lose the doctor permanently," Belew said. "Amateurs have no business in an operation like this."

"According to you, we're all amateurs," Jay said.

Belew smiled thinly. "True, but you and the rest of your operatives are amateurs with ace powers. Dr. Finn is not. He has no useful skills, he's conspicuous, he's too emotionally involved, and he argues when he should be taking orders."

Belew was right, but there was something about the way he made his pronouncements that pissed Jay off. "He's a doctor. We may need medical expertise somewhere along the line." He changed the subject quickly, before Belew could frame a reply. "Listen, how the hell are we going to do this? Casaday is going to have a small army guarding the camp, right?"

"Most likely," Belew admitted. "Give me forty-eight hours to contact certain persons in Yangon, and we can go in with a regiment of Burmese paratroops. It's not the way I normally do things, but under these circumstances I don't think we have much choice."

"Wrong," Jay said. "We go in there, guns blazing, with a bunch of your numbnuts, and Casaday whacks Mark before you can get to him. We'll do this my way. I'll get Creighton and Starfin back from Nam, tell Peter to hop a plane, and we'll sneak in before Casaday even knows we're there. All aces. Once we find Mark and his daughter, I can pop everyone else out and - "

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Santayana. We tried that plan fifteen years ago in Iran. You will recall how that ended. And you're forgetting something. This is not a rescue mission. Our task is to destroy Casaday's supply of the Black Trump. If we fail in that, the fate of Mark Meadows and his daughter becomes largely irrelevant."

"Spare me the Soldier of Fortune shit, Belew," Jay said. "I don't buy a word of it. You risked your own life to get me out of Iran in one piece, and you don't even like me. Meadows was your friend. There's no way you're going to abandon him."

"Iran was a different circumstance. Genocide was not in the cards. Don't delude yourself, Ackroyd. I like Mark Meadows, I even admire him in a way, but I will sacrifice him, if that's what the mission requires ... as I would sacrifice you, and Dr. Finn, and even Sprout, poor child. I have seen friends die before."

Jay looked at Belew. "Jesus, you're a cold bastard."

"I'm a professional. If it makes you feel any better, I'd risk my own life just as readily."

"Swell," Jay said sourly. He would have said a lot more - including a few things he might have regretted - but suddenly he heard the sound of hoofbeats, He looked back over his shoulder and there was Bradley Finn, galloping up the steep hill like Man O' War driving down the backstretch.

J. Bob stroked the underside of his mustache with the back of his hand. "A brilliant disguise," he said drily. "I would never have recognized Dr. Finn. Unless I was looking for a centaur."

Finn came panting to a stop in front of them, chest heaving, all sweaty and lathered, his shirt stuck to his skin. "They, pant, they found him, pant."

Jay exchanged a look with Belew.

"Perhaps you could you clarify that, Doctor?" Belew said.

Finn was almost hyperventilating. Jay put a hand on his shoulder. "Take it easy. Catch your breath first."

The centaur took a couple of deep breaths. "Jerry and Sascha. Found Casaday. Reading minds. Followed leads. Told Peter. The Black Trump. In Burma. Drug lab. Sascha saw it." He tapped his forehead. "In the mountains. Peter told me." He fumbled a damp paper out of his shirt pocket with fingers stained brown from wiping away cheap dye. "Here," he said, thrusting the paper at Jay.

Jay glanced at it, shrugged, and handed it to Belew. "Same latitude and longitude. Jackpot. Looks like I didn't need to play pattycake with the monkey after all. Jerry is turning out to be an honest-to-god detective." He grinned at J. Bob. "Hey, why not, I taught him everything he knows. We need to work out a rendezvous and plan our - "

Finn interrupted, shaking his head wildly. "No. No. You don't understand. Peter told Jerry to wait, but Jerry wouldn't listen, he said he and Sascha could handle it, he had a plan, they were going in, no time to waste. By now they're in Burma."

For a moment, Jay could not believe what he was hearing. "You're kidding right? You've got to be kidding. Tell me he wouldn't do anything so stupid."

"Why not?" Belew said. "You taught him everything he knows."

"Shit." Jay sat down in the back of the rickshaw and cradled his head in his hands. "Shit shit shit shit shit," he repeated in a furious burst of eloquence. He felt sick.

Belew crumpled up the paper and said crisply, "Well, that's done. Casaday will kill them both, most likely."

"If he doesn't, I'll kill them myself," Jay promised in a bleak voice. "We have to get to Burma."

"We will," Belew promised grimly. "We may even arrive soon enough to identify the bodies." He climbed into the rickshaw beside Jay. "Doctor, the airport, double quick, if you'd be so kind."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Monsoon season was past, but rain had returned to the mountains, as if to remind the human inhabitants of the power of the storm and keep them duly humble. At first Mark thought the sounds from outside, breaking through the white-noise roar of rain on his trailer to kick him out of sleep, were thunder.

But thunder didn't stutter with that knuckle-rapping cadence of Kalashnikov-series assault rifles, which had become so drearily familiar during the liberation of Vietnam.

His first reaction was to sit bolt upright in bed, crying, "Sprout!" Belatedly the combat self-preservation reflexes J. Bob had dinned into him kicked in. Realizing the thin-gauge metal walls around him wouldn't even slow metal-jacketed small-arms rounds, be rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Curiosity got him next. He belly-crawled to the window, elbows and hips dragging sheet-wound legs in a weird lamia slither. He knew the thing to do was to lie as flat as humanly possible and then some, and think thoughts of oneness with the rough, puke-colored carpet. But the fear was beginning to bubble within him, along with a clamor of voices.

Slowly - as if that made any difference to a stray bullet - he raised his head. Pushing flimsy curtains up with his forehead, he peered over the sill.

The night was black, the rain dense. Random muzzle-flashes lit the downpour like lightning. Mark couldn't tell if the fire was incoming or outgoing, but a lot was going somewhere.

"Sprout!" he screamed, and stumbled to his feet. Time for more gratitude to Belew, who had also insisted on teaching Sprout to hug the floor when she heard gunfire. She'd be as safe as possible.

For a while. The only reason Mark could conceive of for the sudden noisy outburst of nocturnal emissions, on his bare-legged scramble through the trailer, banging knees on furniture and scraping elbow on the walls, was that government troops were attacking the opium-army camp. Nothing he had heard about the forces of the socialist military junta in Yangon suggested they'd bother distinguishing between the Black Karens and their captives. He recalled talk about the games the Army liked to play with captured rebel women, and his throat filled with sour bile as he slapped frantically for the front-door knob.

A grenade crunched off somewhere as he yanked the door open. He didn't see the flash. Water hit him in the face as if a frat rat had been lurking in wait with a bucket.

This high in the mountains, rain was cold at night. Mark ran in a wild, high-stepping splashing dash toward Sprout's barred hootch, elbows pumping. To his left a muzzle flare danced. Bullets went past his head with a sound like a giant sheet tearing. He realized he made an ideal target: a great capering pale scarecrow, wearing white briefs that almost glowed in the dark.

He kept running. He had no room inside for fear for himself. All that mattered was his daughter.

No lights shone from Sprout's hootch. A broad lumpish figure stood before the door. It turned as Mark came splashing up.

It was Ditmar, wearing a black East German Army leather greatcoat. The legs of his pajamas had penguins on them. A Makarov pistol glinted in one chubby fist.

A smile spread across the torturer's face. "Ah, Herr Doktor. It seems both of our first thoughts were for your daughter."

A pale oval in the barred window. "Daddy!" Sprout cried.

"Baby, get down!" Mark exclaimed, gesturing frantically. He turned to Ditmar. "Get away from her, you perverted son of a bitch."

Ditmar shook his head and clucked reprovingly. "Ah, Doctor. Certainly it is imprudent to speak so to a man with a gun."

Mark gathered himself to leap on the German. The little Mak didn't have much stopping power, and Ditmar wasn't Layton; if Mark didn't take more than a round or two, he might be able to break the torturer's neck before he dropped. The odds weren't good, but then, once he was dead all decisions would be made, and the Sharks could no longer compel him to destroy his own kind ...

"Steady, there, Meadows," a voice rasped. O. K. Casaday came stilting out of the rain, white suit translucent and molded to his gaunt frame, what hair he had plastered to his great round Charlie Brown head. He had a government Colt .45 in hand.

Mark let a long breath out through bared teeth. The moment had passed. The fight had fled him.

Casaday turned to Ditmar. "All right, Fatso, shove off. I got this under control."

Ditmar blinked moist frog eyes. "Bitte?" His single black eyebrow hunched in the middle, like a cramping caterpillar. "Your voice - is something wrong?"

It was occurring about then to Mark that Casaday didn't sound at all like himself. The CIA spook turned his head and coughed into his hand.

"Gotta cold. Laryngitis. Just hit me. Now shag ass. Don't you know there's a battle on?"

The German stuck his side arm in a pocket and bustled off. Night and rain swallowed him in one wet gulp. Keeping his pistol pointed at Mark, Casaday went to the hootch door and pounded on it.

"Open up," he yelled. "It's Casaday." Mark heard metallic fumbling sounds familiar to any former New York dweller.

Casaday turned his head toward Mark and caught his eye. Then he winked.

The door opened. The round, brown face of Sprout's Black Karen duenna peered uncertainly forth.

"The girl," Casaday demanded. The woman expostulated in her own language. "Now."

The woman vanished. A moment later she came back, herding Sprout like a sheepdog, trying to twitch a pink terry cloth bathrobe closed over her T-shirt and panties.

"Daddy!" the girl exclaimed. She hurled herself at Mark and caught him with a stranglehold around the neck. Her pink Gund bear dangled from one hand.

"Baby, baby, it's okay," Mark said, feeling like a lying shit. Casaday gestured with the gun.

"Let's get a move on."

"Come on, honey." Mark disentangled himself as delicately as he could, caught her by the biceps and urged her into motion.

The firing seemed to be dying down. Mark had the impression most of it was now outbound from the compound, which might or might not be a good sign. If it was a government raid, it seemed to have been repulsed.

"Where are we going?" Mark asked.

The spook snowed him an odd lopsided smiled. It was an expression Mark had never seen out of Casaday before, and not one he would have thought him capable of. "Out of here, with any luck, Dr. Meadows."

They were among parked vehicles, the rain making tiny explosions on the hunched dark backs of the cars. "Got to be one with the keys in it somewhere," Casaday murmured. "Be a real pain to have to hot-wire one."

Mark stared at him. "What's going on here, man?"

Casaday chuckled. "There's more here than meets the eye, Doc," he said. "Here we go." He pulled open the door of a Jeep Cherokee and shoved Sprout in.

A spotlight nailed them from the concertina-wire perimeter like a Network death-beam. "Uh-oh," the CIA man said under his breath.

A squad of Black Karens approached at the trot, rifles at port arms. Casaday stood up straighter and stepped forward. "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded.

"I was just about to ask that frigging question," a voice said from behind the advancing Karens. O. K. Casadays voice, and no mistake.

The black-clad soldiers fanned out around the Cherokee, trying to point their rifles at Mark without aiming them at Casaday. Mark froze.

The tall figure of O. K. Casaday resolved out of the glare of the spotlight to stand confronting O. K. Casaday.

"All right. Meadows," the new Casaday said, "what the fuck kind of shenanigans are these?"

The Black Karens were gaping from one Casaday to the other. All Mark could do was the same.

"It's a fucking impostor," Mark's Casaday said. "Achoo! Shoot the son of a bitch and stand back."

The Karens muttered at each other, then stepped back to cover all four white people impartially. "You know," the new Casaday said conversationally, "if these dinks get too confused they're just gonna shoot us all and let Buddha sort us out."

"This is bullshit," the other said. He coughed consumptively. "Fuck this cold."

The newcomer cawed a laugh. "No shit. The question is, who's trying to bullshit which bullshitter?"

"Boss," Layton appeared with more rifle-toting Karens in tow. "We caught this motherfucker - "

He stopped. His head swiveled from left to right. His ponytail swung like a drowned mink. His eyes bulged.

"Don't throw your neck out, Layton," the new Casaday said. "What've you got?"

"We, uh, we caught this shithead sneakin' around outside the wire." A pair of Karens dragged an obvious Occidental forward. He wore a waterlogged white tropical suit like the ones on the Casadays. The right sleeve was stained dark from the upper biceps down.

The wounded man moaned, lifted his head a fraction. He had a pencil-thin mustache and no eyes.

Mark recognized Sascha, who used to work in the Crystal Palace when Chrysalis was still alive. The new Cassaday's lip curled. "A fucking joker. What is this, Meadows?"

Mark licked lips which were already as wet as they were likely to get. "I don't know," he said. "I swear to God."

"We got some kind of ace asshole playing cute tricks on us, Layton," the first Casaday said sounding more like the real thing. He jutted his lantern jaw at the other. "Shoot that puke and let's get out of the rain before we melt."

Layton's hand started inside his camouflaged bush jacket. "Don't be a bigger jagoff than usual, Layton," the second Casaday said.

The kickboxer stopped, let his hand slide back into the open. "Boss," he said, eyes flicking from one Casaday to the other. "Uh - how do I know which is the boss?"

"Don't be stupid, Layton," Mark's Casaday said. "Shoot."

"You got a good knockout punch, Layton," the intruding Casaday said. "Take your best shot. Coldcock us both and see what the fuck we turn into."

Layton was nothing if not obedient. He glanced from one Casaday to the other, then took a skipping step sideways, whipped his stiffened right leg back and around and up in a spinning reverse roundhouse kick to the jack-o'-lantern head of the Casaday who had just spoken. He flew out from under his hat and landed on his ass in a bow-wave of brown water.

Even for a kickboxer, a move like that took time. The Casaday of the first part took advantage. As the kick was getting underway he was diving into the driver's seat of the Cherokee and cranking the key.

The engine caught like a pool of spilled gasoline. Wheels spun, flinging a roostertail of mud that drenched Layton as he turned with a shout and dove for the Jeep. Outreached fingertips grazed the rear bumper, and Layton went facedown in red muck.

The Black Karens were watching these weird round-eye antics with undisguised fascination. The satellite dish never pulled in anything as entertaining as this.

Layton hauled his face out of the mud, spat some out, and screamed, "Don't fust stand there, you fucking little monkeys! Shoot the asshole!"

"No! Wait!" Mark jumped before their guns, capering and waving his hands as the angle-cut muzzle brakes came up, hoping they'd think he was the asshole. The Black Karens scowled at him and danced around trying to get a clear shot as the Cherokee busted the perimeter wire with a musical twang.

The second Casaday had picked himself up. He now wore a two-tone suit, red in front, white in back. He held a handkerchief to a blood-drooling mouth.

"I should have said, punch one of us, and bust the one you didn't pick," he said. "You're such a dumb fuck, Layton. It was inevitable you'd whack out the wrong one first."

"I'm not dumb!" Layton said. For some reason he looked to Mark as for support. "I'm not dumb."

Casaday shook his head. He was working his tongue around inside his mouth as if trying to dislodge a piece of food stuck between his teeth. He spat a broken tooth into his handkerchief, stared briefly at it, and threw tooth and handkerchief into a puddle.

From the night beyond the wire, a gout of yellow flame, outlining black brush. The whoomp of a gasoline explosion compressed their eardrums a second later.

"Sprout!" Mark screamed. He ran for the breach in the wire, not caring that he was inviting a burst in the back.

"Keep up with him, you jagoffs!" Casaday shouted. Layton and the Black Karens raced in pursuit.

The hurtling Cherokee had gouged a flattened half-tunnel down a brushy hillside. Mark went vaulting and slipping and sliding through, and if adrenaline didn't lend his lanky frame grace it gave him the wherewithal to make it througn more or less upright.

The Cherokee had nosed into a little gully that now ran with chocolate-colored water, runoff from the camp clearing. It was fully involved in a fire that didn't give a good goddamn for the torrent. Mark stopped dead, and was just wishing that God would stop his heart and get it the hell over with when he saw Sprout sprawled on the ground beside the wreck.

He slid on his knees in the mud, like a figure skater bringing home his routine, gathering his daughter in his arms. She was wet and hysterical, but unharmed. Her bear was gone.

They were on their knees, clinging to each other like clumps of seaweed and sobbing uncontrollably, when a Black Karen stepped up behind Mark and slainmed the back of his head with the heavy wooden stock of his AKM.

Mark didn't fuzz out right away. He lay on his back blinking at rain that kept trying to get in his eyes, while a torrent of voices poured through his head. He couldn't make out what they were saying, and drew a vague comfort from that. Then he went away.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray slept.

Despite his torn flesh, ruptured organs, and smashed bones, despite his pain and anger and grief, Ray slept. He dreamt of his childhood, of the countless roadhouses his mother dragged him to. He dreamt of the hundreds of cheap motels, the dozens of men, some kind, some angry, most indifferent, whom his mother lived with from time to time. They never abused Ray, not seriously, unless indifference could be called abuse. He dreamt of the doctors who diagnosed him as hyperactive and the drugs his mother was too scatterbrained to administer effectively.

When he dreamt of the first time he picked up a football, the dreams changed. He was no longer nobody. He was the first player to go from the Busted Butte Central High six-man football team to a major college, where he led the University of Michigan to the Rose Bowl in his freshman year, broke his leg in three places in the first half and his ace turned and he tried to get back into the game and people realized there was something strange about the boy nicknamed Kid Wolverine.

So it was government service rather than a pro-football career, and his first mission was the botched attempt to rescue the Iranian-held hostages. There Ray learned about the taste of blood and earned his second nickname, Carnifex, given him by the Mechanic, an ace agent with a classical bent, and God, was that almost twenty years ago?

Ray kicked ass for the government, never questioning, never thinking, just doing. He killed more than he could remember, and came close to death himself half a dozen times, at the claws of the werewolf clan in that not-so-sleepy little New Mexican town, at the buzz-saw hands of Mackie Messer, under the waters of New York Bay during the Battle for the Rox.

But there he learned that action itself wasn't enough. He needed something else. He needed meaning in his life. He needed, he now knew, April Harvest. He had never needed anyone, not even when he was a child. Not his mother, not that son of a bitch, Hartmann. No one. Never.

But now he knew he needed April. He would find her. Nothing would stop him.

Ray woke, his dreams over.

Captain Flint was standing in front of his hospital bed. He looked concerned, if a stone statue can possibly look concerned. Next to him, looking dwarfed and harried, was Nephi Callendar.

"We thought you were going to die," Flint whispered in his sepulchral voice. He sounded like a disappointed Grim Reaper.

"Me?" Ray asked with a grin that was only partly forced. "From a couple of bullet wounds?"

"You took seven rounds," Flint intoned. "Two pulped your liver. One shattered your right humerus. Two perforated your small intestine. One bisected your spleen. One lodged in your chest near your heart. I won't even mention the bayonet wound."

"Is that all?" Ray said. He sat up. "How long have I been out?"

"Only three days," Callendar said. "That's not very long, even for you."

Ray looked at the tubes feeding into his left inner elbow and pulled them loose. He swung his feet over the side of his bed.

"What about April?" he asked Callendar.

The agent sighed. "Johnson still has her ... we think. At least we haven't found a body."

"Hartmann and his bimbo?"

Flint and Callendar glanced at one another. Finally Flint reluctantly whispered, "They seem to have disappeared during the confusion."

Ray shook his head. "Jesus Christ. Great job, Flint. You and your boys deserve a big round of applause." He stood. Nausea punched him in the gut.

"Easy, Ray," Callendar said. "You've taken some bad wounds and lost a lot of blood."

"Fuck you," Ray snapped. He ripped his hospital gown off with one hand and tossed it on the bed. He examined his body. The entry wounds had all dosed, but the puckered scars still looked angry and raw. He knew that everything hadn't quite knitted together inside. Still, he could move, he thought. He took a tentative step, felt his stomach surge into his throat, and swallowed. "Get me some clothes," he told Callendar.

"Well, if you're feeling up to it," Callendar said. He looked at Flint, who looked back silently, "There's something we need you to do."

Ray was about to tell Callendar to take the mission and shove it up his ass, but something stopped him, some newfound sense of restraint and cunning.

"What?" he asked.

"The Black Dog has a nuclear bomb. He's got it in Jerusalem and he's threatened to use it."

"What, and blow up the whole city? Himself included? He's fucking crazy."

"He may very well be," Flint whispered. "Apparently he feels his back's against the wall. He's caught between the Nur and the Card Sharks."

"Jerusalem, huh?" Ray remembered Horvath's words to Hartmann and that bitch who'd gunned him down.

"One other thing," Callendar added. "There've been indications that Johnson's in the city and that he knows about the bomb and is trying to get it, either for the Sharks to use or simply to take it away from the Fists."

"Well, that would be a relief," Ray said. "I told you before, Nehi. Get me some clothes."

Callendar sighed. "That's Nephi. All right. But remember your mission. Forget about Hartmann for now. Recover that nuke at all costs. And arrest or terminate the Black Dog."

"Terminate. Jesus Christ, Nephi, you're starting to sound like one of those fucking bureaucrats. You mean kill, don't you?"

"Well, yes."

Ray nodded. But for once death and destruction weren't on his mind. He was thinking of April Harvest, of the heat of her body and the sweetness of her mouth, and he knew that he was in love.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Just what the hell went on back there, man?" Mark asked the eyeless man, almost shouting to be heard over the hum of the C-130's four big turboprop engines.

Sascha Starfin raised the Styrofoam cup two-handed to his mouth, snatched another convulsive gulp of the water Mark had given him when he woke up a few minutes before. A few drops of blood dotted a bandage wound around Sascha's upper arm. The round that hit him had punched a clean hole through muscle, missing bone. His eyeless face was bruised and puffy, and dried blood was caked on a split lower lip. Layton had worked on him, Mark guessed.

Nylon netting pinned crates holding notes, equipment, and the Black Trump cultures - including Mark's secret Overtrump - in the rear of the aircraft. The squat black-painted Hercules had dropped out of the rising sun's red eye to touch down on what looked like a wide stretch of road like a hippo ballerina coming down from a grand jete. The Black Karens loaded it like ants on meth and the plane took off without even cutting its engines.

"We were trying to rescue you," Sascha said dully. "Me and my, uh, partner." He took another hit of water, shook his head, "What the hell am I being cagey for? Me and Creighton. It's not like I didn't tell them everything."

"Don't worry about it, man," Mark said earnestly. "Anybody would have done the same thing. Once they start in on you, you're gonna talk one way or another." He nodded toward the front of the cavernous cargo compartment, where Casaday, Layton, and a couple of Occidental goons Mark hadn't seen before sat on the bench that ran down both sides. Dr. Carter Jarnavon snoozed near them with his head on a rolled-up lab coat, drooling. Colonel Ditmar noticed their attention and gave them a fat smile that glistened like oil in the dim light.

Mark remembered Osprey tied to a chair, the awful snick of bolt cutters, blood spurting, Osprey screaming ... and that exact same smile. He felt sick.

He glanced down at his daughter, filled with the irrational need to be reassured that she was - however momentarily - safe. She slept on the floor by his feet, wrapped in olive drab blankets.

Another wave of pain crashed through his gut. Sprout was acting strange. She was very stiff around her father, cool almost, pushing him gently but definitely away when he tried to enfold and reassure her. That evoked his greatest secret fear, that he had lived with since she was born: that one day she would awaken to the fact that he was a failure as a father and reject him.

Has it happened? Is she rejecting me? The fear was given additional torque by the realization that it was selfish, and emphasized his unworthiness all the more. He imagined the hand of God following the Herc across a map of Asia, pointing, and accompanying it the legend glowing in mile-high letters: MARK MEADOWS, FAILED FATHER.

Oh: AND GENOCIDE. Can't leave that out.

Sascha was talking again. "Sorry, man. My mind drifted."

The joker nodded accommodatingly. "I was saying my boss is an old friend of yours. Jay Ackroyd."

"Jay? He's looking for me? Why? I'm supposed to be dead. It was on CNN."

"Well, he wasn't. Not exactly. He's hunting one of the Black Trump containers. One trail led through Saigon. He sent me and Creighton to follow up. He asked questions and I read minds, so it didn't matter if they answered or not."

Mark blinked. Then he remembered what Sascha was. Cap'n Trips had never passed much time in the old Crystal Palace, but he'd been there.

"Anyway, we did some detective work. Some people down on the riverfront saw some pretty suspicious cargo being loaded on a sampan the night of the blast. No, they didn't say anything to us about it." A slight smile. "They didn't have to."

"I ... guess not."

Sascha rubbed soft, white hands together, interlacing the fingers as if scrubbing them. Mark thought he was still trying to wash away the guilt of spilling his guts. Then he stamped the thought back down where the skimming-telepath wouldn't catch it.

You're being a liberal weenie again, J J Flash told him from the cheap seats of his skull. Can you really afford to be that sensitive right now? You got better things to do with your mental energies.

Sascha was looking at him with those blank flesh patches over his eye sockets, Mark realized he was politely waiting for Mark's internal dialogue to get over.

Hey, Sascha, JJ thought, my man! How's it hangin'?

"Been better, JJ, I got to tell you," Sascha said. "How's by you?"

Same old same-old. Trying to get over.

Mark squeezed his eyes shut and kind of vibrated his head. Attention drew JJ Flash like sunlight draws a growing plant. He was old pais with Sascha; he had frequented a lot of places Mark stayed away from, including the Palace.

Okay, guys, Mark thought, cool it. I'm not gonna be odd man out of a conversation with my own multiple personality disorder.

Wrong again! a shrill thought came. True multiple personality disorders are prohibitively rare. You just don't want to admit that we're real people, trapped by your own irresponsible indulgence in drugs inside your -

Traveler, Mark thought pointedly, shut the fuck up.

"Anyway," Sascha said, turning his eyeless gaze away from Mark, "we hired some local talent and came for you. And I guess you know the rest of the story."

Yeah, but do you? Do you now what it might have cost me - Mark abruptly filled his mind with a giant image of a section of DNA twist.

"Good idea," Sascha said in a hoarse whisper. "Don't think anything around me you don't want them to find out."

Mark nodded, keeping his mind full of different-colored CATG balls, webbed together, DNA, ad infinitum. Deep down, he felt shocks of dread that Quasiman would lose track of him, not know where to bring the drugs ... if he even remembered them.

"Yeah," he said hoarsely. "So, uh, who was this partner of yours?"

"Guy named Creighton. He can make himself look like anybody he wants. I'm glad he made it out, anyway." After the downpour had washed away any tracks, the Jeep fire had died down enough for the Black Karens to discover there was no body in it. The shapeshifting ace and his hirelings had gotten away clean.

Mark tried hard to sit on bitter thoughts about a man who would scuttle off and leave Sprout captive. Sascha sighed and cast another Zen glance toward Casaday and company.

He stiffened. Mark looked up to see Casaday himself striding back toward them.

"So how's our new guest doing?" the CIA man asked. "Accommodations to your liking?"

"Well, I like it lots better now that that trained monkey of yours isn't beating on me any more."

Casaday laughed. "Better not let him hear you say that," he said. "I suppose you're both wondering why we're bothering to take Mr. Starfin along with us, instead of leaving him back on the Salween Plateau with a bullet in his head. Of course, it could be for the pleasure of rolling him out at about thirty-five thousand teet, which is our current cruising altitude, by the way."

He gave a shark's smile to Sascha. The eyeless joker got paler.

"But relax. We got a much better use in mind for you."

Sascha gasped. Casadav nodded. "That's right. The good doctor here might need a guinea pig to test out that extended-virulence Trump he's been putting together for us. We don't want to let all his good work go to waste, now, do we?"

Sascha turned an eyeless glare of accusation. "Meadows, you're not - oh, you son of a bitch!"

Mark buried his face in his hands.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray's plane landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport near the Mediterranean coast, about thirty miles west of Jerusalem. The plane was largely empty, though a few businessmen and tourists were still daring enough to visit the city that was so important to three of the world's great religions.

Ray blended into the crowd, sparse at it was, catching the first bus to Jerusalem. It was hot, but it was a dry heat. Somehow, though, that failed to make Ray feel any better. The bus was air-conditioned, but Ray was sweating and still more than a little shaky from the wounds he'd received in the Westminster Abbey imbroglio.

Callendar had sent him after the Dog, but Callendar wasn't pulling his strings anymore. No one was. His prime objective was to find Harvest. If she was still alive. No, he wouldn't even think about that. She was alive. She had to be. Then there was the matter of Hartmann and the bimbo with the automatic. Jerusalem, especially the Walled City where the wild carders hung out, was not a big city. Ray was sure to run into Hartmann and the woman. Sure to run into the Dog, too, and if it came to it he wouldn't be averse to a little animal training. But Harvest came first. Harvest and Johnson.

The bus passed through brown desert, several times skirting the crazy-quilt Palestine border and reached the suburbs of the New City almost before Ray realized it. Access to the New City was relatively easy. Wall-less, borderless, mostly Jewish, New Jerusalem was three hundred thousand strong and constantly growing. It was much more security conscious than the average American city. Soldiers and policemen were everywhere. But Ray's business wasn't in the New City.

He disembarked with the others, but bypassed the modern, multi-storied tourist hotel that was the bus's destination, He went to the cab stand, told the driver "Old City," and got in. He was sweating profusely and already felt washed out.

The Old City was still encompassed by Jerusalem's medieval walls. Part of it belonged to Israel, part of it to Palestine, but it really belonged to the people who lived there, fought there, and died there for it every day. Traditionally it'd been divided into Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian quarters. When the wild carders arrived they'd pushed out the least numerous, least powerful group and took that Quarter for themselves. The Armenians had either been absorbed by the others, or else disappeared into the dustbin of history, no one really knew.

People had been fighting and dying for their part of Jerusalem for the last fifty years, but it was just another city to Ray, maybe a little more crowded, dry, and dirty than most. The cab dropped him off at the New Gate, which was guarded by Israeli soldiers. They didn't really care much, since he was going in rather than going out, so he was only waved through the metal detector. He stepped through and entered another century.

The streets were twisty, the buildings crowded together, the smells foreign, somehow ancient. The first thing Ray did was find a small hotel off the main streets whose proprietor took cash and didn't ask questions.

The hotel room was so dirty that it made Ray's skin crawl. The walls were peeling and filthy with finger marks and hand prints. The unwashed carpet was worn clear through in several spots and stained almost everywhere else. It smelled of urine and vomit. Ray didn't look too closely at the bed.

But it was dark, quiet, and out of the way, which was what Ray needed. Time was obviously of the essence. He didn't have the time for a careful investigation, even if that was his style. He had to find Harvest fast.

There was only one way he could think of to do it. There was a war going on, and when there was a war you always needed soldiers. The easiest way to track down Johnson and find Harvest would be to join the Sharks, but there were problems with that. For one, he was pretty well known among them and, for two, Ray was sure that you couldn't just join up. They didn't exactly have recruitment offices on every street corner.

The alternative, Ray thought, was to go with the Twisted Fists. Not that they were the Rotarians, either. Normally it was difficult to join them, but the dossier Callendar had given him said that lately there'd been confusion in the organization. Now would be the time to join.

Of course, there were two little problems. The Fist leaders probably knew him. Even though he wasn't that famous and his face had changed half a dozen times over the years, there was no doubt that he'd be better off with a new face if he wanted to join the Twisted Fists. And he also had to be a joker.

He looked at his face in the rust-spotted mirror over the room's stained porcelain sink. He rubbed his jaw and grimaced. This was not going to be pretty. He sighed, took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

He smashed himself in the nose.

Involuntary tears of pain started from Ray's eyes as he felt cartilage break. He looked back in the mirror. His nose was flat, just how he wanted it. But the job wasn't done. He took the straight razor from his shaving kit and looked at it, grimacing.

"The face first," he said aloud. "Then the hands."

Before long he was crying again, but he didn't stop cutting. The tears ran down his slashed cheeks, diluting the blood that dripped freely into the sink below. When he was done with his face he started on his hands. Soon the razor was slippery with blood.

When he'd finished he bandaged his face and hands as best he could, then he lay down on the bed. He'd already put in a supply of water, fruit juice, and vitamins, and had straws to drink them through.

Twenty-four hours later he left the hotel.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Mark stood alone in a pool of light. The five petri dishes arranged in a neat line on the tin lab table told their story in a silent shout.

The Sharks' new hideout seemed to be a combination bomb shelter and emergency command post for the provincial communist party brass - Guangdong, way southern China, across the line from Hong Kong, at least until 1997, when the line would magically go away. The People's Republic of China was paranoid enough to still be testing thermonuclear weapons - if that was truly paranoid for a country trying to keep a lid on a numerous and vigorously oppressed Muslim minority - but with the collapse of the nation the Chinese leadership had always considered its true enemy, the USSR, the Guangdong CP evidendy felt safe enough to let the facility out for rent.

The lab was on a lower level, possibly the lowest, and seemed to have been set up for medical treatment rather than research. That didn't matter. The Sharks had brought everything Mark needed to complete his betrayal of the wild cards.

"Dr. Meadows."

At the sound of that hated voice Mark felt a wild urge to sweep the flat round jars off the table onto the floor. Go for it, JJ Flash's voice urged from the back of his skull. They'll never let us go anyway. Why not cop a quick exit?

But he didn't. He just held himself there, braced at the apex of the triangle of his arms like an asthmatic struggling to breathe.

Then Jarnavon was standing next to him, blinking down at the petri dishes through his thick horn-rimmed glasses. "These are the wild-card positive tissue cultures you introduced the tenth-generation Trump variant to, aren't they?" he asked in tones of cathedral reverence.

Mark's jaw muscles trembled. His teeth creaked. He nodded once, convulsively.

Jarnavon raised a hand as if to clap Mark on the shoulder. It hesitated in midair, hovered, and then the younger man shook hands with himself in an I'm-the-champ gesture.

"It works." The words came out of his narrow nose in a sort of giggling snort. "It works! Oh, Dr. Meadows, you've done it! Humanity will remember your genius forever!"

"Yeah," Mark rasped. "That's what I'm afraid of."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Gregg decided that if Jerusalem was the Disneyworld of religion, then Temple Mount was the Magic Kingdom. All they needed were street vendors hawking Crucifix ice cream bars, Yahweh's All-Kosher weiners or "I'm A Dome-Head" hats. The city was littered with ancient holy sites, the detritus left behind as one group after another had occupied the area in the centuries-long tidal swell of war and conquest. The ground was watered with martyr's blood, there wasn't a stone left that hadn't been part of some temple or shrine or church at one point or another. A miasma of holiness threaded through the streets like a glowing fog. You breathed sanctity and exhaled history. You could not escape it: the legacy of this city became part of your blood and heart and soul.

And the Black Dog was willing to blow it into atoms - or so he claimed.

Gregg and Hannah were at the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, watching the supplicants. Two rails partitioned the great Herodian limestone blocks of the lowest course into a section for men, a (smaller) area for women, and a (much, much smaller) area for jokers. All three areas were busy, the knot of people waiting longest, not surprisingly, at the joker section. Behind these ruins of the long-destroyed Second Temple - the edge of Temple Mount and perhaps Judaism's most sacred site - loomed the gilded presence of the Dome of the Rock, called Kubbat as-Sakrah in Arabic, the third most holy place in all of Islam. The rock enclosed by the Dome, the bared summit of Mt. Moriah, was said by the Muslims to be one of the stones from the Garden of Eden, and was the place from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. Those of the Jewish faith believed that this was the rock taken from underneath God's throne and thrown into the void, from which the very Earth was created. The Temple Mount was somewhat less sacred to Christians (though the Golden Gate behind the Dome was reputed to be where Jesus entered the Temple Mount after his descent from the Mount of Olives on Palm Sunday), but only a thousand or so feet to the west was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, containing within its walls Calvary, where Jesus was crucified, and the tomb into which his body had been placed.

A nuke wasn't going to leave much to worship but radioactive waste.

But would the Black Dog really push the button on all this if the Nur calls his bluff? Gregg wondered. Or is the nuke really for the Nur?

You'll find out, the voice answered him. That's your job.

"What's he doing?" Hannah asked. She gestured toward a man dressed in Hasidic black, who at their distance was just a blur to Gregg. Hannah realized it a moment later. "I'm sorry - you can't see that far, can you? The man's stuffing a little folded piece of paper into a crack between the blocks of the Wall. Why?"

"You put your prayer on a slip of paper," Gregg told her. "Sticking it into a crack here is making sure that God reads it directly. At least that's what I've been told."

"What's your brand of religion, Gregg? You've never mentioned anything about it."

"I was raised Catholic. I ..." Gregg stopped. "I kind of lost my faith somewhere along the line." Around the time I found Puppetman, he wanted to say, but didn't. Puppetman was my God, my own dark deity.

"Did you ever get it back after you lost it?"

Gregg shuddered, involuntarily. What's the matter; Greggie? the voice asked Answer her. "No. Though being here makes you think about things like that. What about you?"

"Methodist. I still believe, I guess, though I don't go to services regularly. And you're right, there's a feeling here." Hannah crouched alongside Gregg, her arm around his body, uncaring that people stared at them as they passed. A discreet distance away, openly watching them, was Needles. Needles was supposedly their guide while in Jerusalem; Gregg knew the boy was more guard than guide, making certain that the two of them did nothing to harm the Twisted Fists and reporting what they did back to the Black Dog. Sightseeing while they talked over the Black Dog's requests was relatively safe; contacting any of the authorities would probably get them killed. "Gregg, what the hell are we going to do? I can't believe that the Black Dog would ask you and me to go into the desert and talk to the Nur. Delivering his ultimatum to the Nur is only going to get us killed - maybe that's what the Black Dog wants. It certainly isn't going to get the virus destroyed; the Nur won't fall for that bluff."

But seeing the Nur is what you want too, isn't it, Greggie? When you heard the Dog say the words, you knew you wanted to go. The power ... the Nur ... "I don't know. I really don't know. He said he'd arrange for us to be under a flag of truce - we deliver the message, and we leave." The sun was hot on his back and sent shimmering highlights dancing from the Dome. And we take the Nur's strings with us.

"I don't think the Dog was bluffing, Gregg. You don't go to the trouble of buying a nuke unless you're planning to use it. It's a lousy conversation piece. He'll use it - if not against the Dome, then against the Nur."

"I agree."

"We can't let him do that."

Gregg glanced away from the Wall and the Dome, up toward Hannah's earnest face. "Do you have any ideas on how we can stop him?" His thin, high voice sounded more annoyed than he wished, and Hannah stood up abruptly without saying anything. Needles scowled in their direction. "Hey!" he called. "What you two talking about?" He took a few steps toward them. Gregg noticed that tourists were giving the three of them a wide berth.

"We're talking about stupidity," he told Needles. "The radioactive kind."

The kid blushed. Gregg could see the green-purple of embarrassment wash over his mind like a bruise. "Just shut up about that," Needles said. "The Black Dog knows what he's doing."

"That's exactly what we're afraid of," Hannah told him, and Needles' face reddened further.

"We need that nuke," Needles insisted. "Zoe wouldn't have helped him if it wasn't important." The voice was strong, but Greg could see the pale yellow underpinnings of uncertainty in his aura.

"Important for what?" Hannah continued. "Has the Black Dog decided that five for one is too low a ratio? Is he going for five thousand for one? Look, you're just a kid. I've seen this five for one revenge crap. I've seen it up close."

As Hannah spoke, he could see something change in Needles's face, in his odor, in his colors. "You have too," Gregg broke in abruptly. "Haven't you?"

"Yes," Needles admitted. He shuffled his feet, looked across at the Dome as if eye contact would burn him. "But I ... I ..."

"You didn't like it either, did you?" A tug at the strings ... Oh, yes, this is delightful. Needles' guilt filled Gregg like a fine meal, satisfying a hunger he hadn't known he felt. Yes ... So hungry, after so long ...

"It was necessary. We had to do it, to teach the nats not to fuck with jokers like us."

"Sure, that's what they told you. Just like with this goddamn nuke. But what did you feel?" Gregg persisted, enjoying the taste of the youth's discomfiture. Needles looked at his shoes, like a kid being scolded by a parent. "Did you enjoy it, Needles? Did you like feeling the pain? Did this guy scream nicely for you?"

That brought the youth's eyes up, angry. "What kind of monster do you think I am?" he said. "I'm not some sick creep. I don't enjoy hurting people."

The voice laugned and Gregg shuddered. I'm not either, he told it. I know I was, once. But not now. Not now.

"Right." Hannah sniffed her disapproval. "That's why you joined the Fists. So you wouldn't have to hurt people."

"I joined so that the people I love wouldn't get hurt," Needles told her, sweeping his hair back from his eyes. A child, still, Gregg realized. "So I could protect them. That's all. I joined because I thought they would help us: me and Zoe and the others."

"Who's Zoe?" Hannah asked, but Needles just shrugged. Gregg could feel a sadness settle around him like a veil. Just because he could, he deepened the colors, and was pleased to see tears well in his eyes. The youth blinked hard, suddenly looking away toward the Western Wall, to the supplicants placing their prayers into the cracks between the stones, his eyes bright, his mouth shut with his lips tight, and his hands clenched. Gregg knew what he was thinking by the colors of deepest aquamarine drifting around him.

Sudden bright white blossomed in the center of the sapphire melancholy. It tasted of anise to Gregg. "All right," Needles said. "So maybe I don't like the Fists much either, and I wish the Dog weren't keeping no fucking nuke in the catacombs. There ain't much we can do about it, is there?"

"I don't know," Hannah told Needles. "You have a piece of paper on you?" The boy plunged his hands into his pockets, pulling out a bedraggled slip that looked like a receipt. "That'll do," Hannah said.

"What are you going to do?" Needles asked.

"I'm going to borrow a pencil, and then we're going to take a walk," Hannah told him, pointing at the wall and the line of supplicants. "I'm going to stick the paper in there and ask Him what the hell we should do - ask for a sign. Anyone got a better idea?"

"Not really," Gregg told her. But down inside, the voice grumbled. Yes, you do, the voice told him. With me, you can make things right. All you have to do is use me, Greggie ...

"Come on, you two," Hannah said, interrupting his internal reverie. "We're in the Holy City; we may as well pray."

They wound their way through the crowds toward the joker section. As Gregg brushed against people, he caught snippets of their emotions. As they approached the back of the line, he was frowning. There was a hostile atmosphere in the area, one that made the voice inside perk up. "Hannah, why don't we head back for the Quarter?" Gregg said uneasily.

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know. It's just - "

Afterward, Gregg was never really sure how it started.

Suddenly there was shouting and a quick flurry of activity. Then screams, and the cough of a handgun.

People pushed against them. Needles unshouldered his rifle and sent an ear-shattering burst into the air. That earned them a brief clear spot as everyone in the vicinity dove for the ground or fled. All around the open area near the Wall, people were running, and the narrow lanes between the stalls were clogged. The scent of gunpowder was nearly overpowering. Hannah started forward, stopped; Gregg, trying to stay with her, bumped into her legs.

It was worse than Westminster. There was no focus to anything, and he couldn't see.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In the Joker Quarter, Ray felt eyes on him wherever he went. He prowled the streets, familiarizing himself with their sights and sounds and smells. He went from market to cafe to bazaar. He stopped at a dozen cafes, using a straw to sip heavily-sugared tea through what was left of his mouth. He inspected the goods in half a hundred shops, buying things here and there, listening and watching without seeming to.

By the end of the day he knew about the silent, black-clad guards who watched over the Quarter's streets. He also knew the streets themselves as well as he ever could and he was starting to get edgy even in his newfound patience. He considered half a dozen plans, all of which he knew would end in disaster, but, damn it, he had to do something, he just couldn't wander the streets from sunrise to sunset, watching, listening, and hoping.

He was considering going up to one of the Fist guards and doing something foolish when the sound of gunfire, echoing weirdly off the ancient stone buildings, sounded from a couple of streets away.

He smiled, though you couldn't tell it from what was left of his face, and hustled down a slop-filled alley toward the ratcheting gunfire. He stopped a moment to orient himself, went down another alley, crossed a street, cut through a small square filled with the carts of fruit vendors, and suddenly found himself on the edge of a large square that was packed with frightened, screaming people. Most of them had hit the ground. Some were desperately crawling for the pitiful cover afforded by a dozen or so food and souvenir stands scattered throughout the square. Some weren't moving or screaming at all, their blood staining the ancient cobblestones.

It was easy to tell the two sides apart. The Sharks were dressed in khaki spruced up with odds and ends of paramilitary geegaws, though, Ray noted, they didn't have the fruity berets favored by the last bunch he'd run across. The Fists were easy to pick out, too. They were the ugly-looking ones, and they were losing.

Thirty or more bodies lay in bloody pools on the pavement. Most were obviously by-standers caught in the crossfire, from the look of their clothes conservative or Orthodox jews. But some of the bodies were Fists, their black uniforms spattered red with blood.

As Ray watched one of the Fists was blown out from behind a fruit cart he'd been using as cover. There were four or five of the jokers left, facing twice that number of Sharks. Most of the Fists seemed to be trapped against a tall wall that formed one end of the square. They had no cover except for the cowering bystanders trying to squash themselves flat against the pavement.

Ray moved in to change the odds.

The first couple were easy. Their backs were to Ray and they were concentrating on the Fists in front of them. Ray wasted no time. He swooped down on them and smashed them with his clubbed hands before they even knew he was there. Unable to contain his frustration or anger and without a hint of pity for his targets, Ray's killing blows left the Sharks in crumpled heaps at his feet.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

For a minute or more, there was little they could do but try to avoid the fighting, trying to stay in the lee of the action. There were more gunshots, screams. Gregg could feel Hannah's panic and Needles' growing anger.

A new fight broke out not far to their right when they were nearly to the edge of the square. Through the moving screen of the crowd, Gregg saw two men grab a Joker whose head looked like it had been hit with a shovel and then frozen, the nose flat and his mouth welded almost entirely shut with scar tissue. Gregg saw the joker's hands come up, and the fingers were fused together like the mouth. Still, the Sharks had made a mistake in their choice of opponent; the joker took one in each hand and slammed their heads together with a sound like coconuts. When he let them go, both men dropped like rag dolls, blood streaming from noses and mouths.

"Assholes," the joker mumbled in an American accent, and the stitched mouth grinned in seeming satisfaction. "That was hardly worth the effort." The grin and the words sent a cold chill through Greg. He knew that lopsided smile, even with the changed and altered face. Jesus! the voice shrilled in his head. It's him! For a moment, the riot around them vanished. The world disappeared, focusing down to a universe that consisted only of the joker's face. Gregg could hear nothing, could see nothing else but those eyes and the hatred in them. The presence within him cowered, even as it searched for the strings to that fury. Ray! It's fucking Billy Ray! He's come after us! The strings burned in Gregg's mind, and he let them go, knowing he couldn't handle them.

"Come on!" Gregg shouted to Needles and Hannah. "Now!" With the word, he tugged hard at their strings. They followed, infected by his panic.

"Gregg?" Hannah asked as they pushed through the chaos, heading downhill toward the Quarter. Behind them, they could hear screams and wails and the sound of sirens approaching. The entire square was an unfocused melee, with more people rushing in toward the scene. Gregg, on all sixes, weaved through running legs. "Where are you going?" Hannah asked, trying to keep up with him. Needles panted alongside her.

"Anywhere that's out of Jerusalem," he shouted back over the din. "Looks like we got the answer to that prayer of yours."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray had them flanked. He took one of the dead Sharks' rifles in his clumsy hands, pointed it in the general direction of the other Sharks and triggered a long buret. It got their attention even though it only splattered the sandstone wall above their heads. Attacked from front and side, the Sharks chose discretion over valor and slipped back into the surrounding alleys.

For a moment there was stillness broken only by the frightened or pained weeping of the bystanders. The Fists checked their shot-up comrades, who were mostly ready for the grave. One of the jokers headed toward Ray with a peculiar, sliding sort of gait. He wore a black cotton cape and cowl and was built oddly, kind of roundly. As he approached, Ray could see that his body ended in a snail-like foot that left a broad smear of mucus in his wake.

"Well, chum," he said from behind his mask with an incongruous, cultured British accent, "you certainly saved our bums. Now just who the bloody hell are you?"

"They call me Mumbles," Ray said.

"What?"

"Mumbles. I said 'Mumbles.'"

"How apropos," the joker said.

The joker looked long and hard at Ray, but Ray bad no doubt that he could pass inspection. His nose was smashed almost flat. He had slashed his face with the razor, then held his lips pressed together until they'd fused, except for one small spot in the right corner of his mouth where he could shove in tiny bits of food and drink liquid through a straw. He'd sliced his hands the same way, cutting deep into the sides of his fingers and holding them pressed together so that the flesh grew into living mittens. It made his hands clumsy as hell, but that was something he could live with, though he didn't look forward to eventually correcting the problem.

"They call me Snailfoot, though my name is Reginald."

Ray didn't take the hint.

"Well," Snailfoot said after a minute, "been long in our fair city?"

Ray shook his head. "No. Not long. I've come to join."

"Join?" Snailfoot asked.

"The Black Dog. The Twisted Fists. I've come to fight."

There was a long moment's silence, then Snailfoot said, "Well, my friend Mumbles, you've certainly come to the right place. Come along - and mind the slime. It's damn slippery."

The other Fists had long since recovered their casualties and disappeared. No one in the crowd was inclined to stop Ray and Snailfoot, nor could Ray blame them. As they were heading toward an alley, a flash of color suddenly caught Ray's eye and he stopped and stared.

"What is it?" Snailfoot asked.

Ray shook his head. "Nothing," he said. "Just a caterpillar. A three-foot-long, yellow caterpillar."

"Stay here long enough, mate, and you get used to sights like that."

Ray nodded. He watched Hartmann and the bimbo mill around with the rest of the crowd. The Old City was a small place. They'd run into each other again. Ray knew they would.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Mark came awake in blackness, bolt upright, his body slimed with sweat quickly chilled by the overactive AC. His nostrils were dilated to the staleness of recycled air, and he felt the soft, incessant machines which kept the underground complex alive buzzing in his bones, like fluorescent-light shimmer made tangible.

He sensed a presence. Human nearness seemed to press against his damp, chilled skin.

"Who?" he demanded groggily. "Who's there?"

"Me," a voice said. A great hunched shadow sidled forward to let the soft, yellow glow of a night-light illuminate one trouser leg.

"Quasiman?"

The off-center head nodded.

"How'd you find me?"

"This was where you were," the joker said. "All places are ..." His voice drifted. Mark sensed powerful hands making vague circles in the air.

"Don't go drifty on me, man!" he said sharply, then, plaintive: "Please."

"All places are pretty much the same to me, Doctor. I'm sorry; my mind was wandering there. Sometimes it goes a place, and then it's a little while before my body follows."

"I've noticed that. Did you, like, bring the drugs?" He could barely bring himself to ask the question.

"Drugs?"

The uncomprehending reply hit Mark as if the superhumanly powerful joker had palm-smacked him on the forehead "Nooo!" he moaned. "You're not tracking me continuously, are you?"

"No, Doctor Meadows. That's not ... not the way ... my mind works."

Mark jumped off the lumpy bed threw on a light, grabbed a pad and felt-tip pen from the night stand Takis-ingrained reflex made him tear off the top sheet and put it on the bare tabletop before he started to write: no point leaving neat little impressions of everything he wrote on the sheets beneath. He had searched his little apartment, in his inexpert way, and had turned up no bugs. From what little he knew of them, the Communist Chinese were pretty low-tech, and less totally obsessive about security than the Soviets, so he thought there was a good chance they hadn't built AV surveillance into the room.

And if they have, he thought grimly as he scribbled, I'm screwed right this second anyway.

"Here!" he said, practically throwing the sheet of paper at Quasiman.

The joker frowned at the sheet. A general slackening of posture, the way the hand that held the paper floated downward toward the lumpy waist, told Mark he was losing his audience again.

"Listen," he said, hissing because he was afraid to shout, longing to grab the man by his thick biceps but uncertain what might happen if he were in contact with Quasiman when he phased out. "I gave you a list of the stuff I need. They're psychoactives, illegal as hell. Is that a problem?"

"Problem?" A drop of drool slid over the jokers lower lip and started rappelling from his chin. He held the paper up to his face, a handsbreadth before his eyes, like a child pretending to read.

"Psil-o-cybin," he read, picking over the syllables laboriously, as if he were trying to sort them in the palm of one hand "Di-hy-droxy-ace-tone. Complete sentences. Laws aren't a problem for somebody who ... can come. And go."

He went. Mark collapsed to his knees on the floor and beat his palms on thin orange carpet that smelled of strange Asian disinfectants.

I don't talk to you much, God, he thought, and I don't really even believe in you. But if you're there, man - please get him back here with the drugs before I have to choose between killing my daughter and playing Martin Bormann.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

A satellite scanning this part of the desert would see black goat-hair tents, a nomadic camp whose appearance would not have seemed unusual to the eyes of Suleyman the Magnificent. There was nothing remarkable here, only a smallish herd of goats, the jumbled stonework of an ancient well. The goats were tended by walking tents that were women in chadors, timeless, even to the water jugs on their shoulders.

The tents sheltered bubble domes made of translucent polymer. The groans of the camels tethered outside mingled with the sighs of compressors, the chug of buried generators, the clink of lab glassware.

Zoe worked, not in chador, but in a clean suit, double gloves, and a full-face hood with a transparent mask. A chador would have been cooler, even in the refrigerated domes, where work went on at all hours and odd hours. The dome was empty at the moment, her bosses napping in the midday heat. No one got enough sleep; their schedules were ruled by the time needed for viral generations, not for human sleep cycles.

Zoe yawned. Washing flasks. Setting racks in the autoclave. Taking them out again. Her tasks were simple and boring.

She worked under Zahid's orders, and tried to stay away from Paolo, the blond Brazilian medic, who seemed horny beyond even Latin cultural expectations. She was getting to be an expert at shifting her hips out of his way. Her work was boring, but the clock kept ticking and every hour, every cell replication, made the possibility of the Trump's release closer. These bastards were going to get the Trump ready before she figured out how to stop them, and damn it, how was she ever going to find out anything from Rudo if she couldn't get him to talk to her!

Rudo was here, yes, an uncanny presence, his controlled gestures and formal, almost military posture not quite in synchrony with his youthful face, his fine-textured creamy skin with its faint dusting of freckles. He was The Card Shark, Snailfoot had told her. He was an old man in a young man's body. He had been a powerful figure in the UN, a scholar in the service of world health with a twisted sense of eugenics.

Rudo worked with grim determination and spoke only with Zahid. Dr. Pan Rudo seemed impatient, hurried, but he kept his impatience in check and kept the motley crew hard at work with the skills of a trained diplomat - which he was.

Or had been.

"Don't kill Rudo," the Black Dog had told Zoe. "Rudo has the Trump with him but we don't know how much he has, or if he's split his stash. Stay with him until you learn what he knows. Then get out. We'll take it from there."

She had the pocket locator the Twisted Fists had oven her, a little marvel that gave geographic coordinates at the touch of a button. All she had to do was memorize the location of the camp and learn the location of every drop of the virus.

"Then what?" Zoe had asked, back in the echoing stone warrens of Jerusalem's catacombs.

"Find some way to make it seem as though you have sprained your left wrist. Wrap it in a bandage - a visible bandage. We will have someone in the camp who will know this signal and get you out."

She had tried to argue. But Jan had watched with pleading eyes, and Needles waited for her to fail, to betray his trust in her. And Anne? Anne knew only that she'd been asked to do something important.

"I still don't like the black hair bit," Anne had said.

"It's just a phase I'm going through," Zoe had told her. Right, ma. This little interlude of murder and terrorism is just one of those things. I'll come back and pull my shifts at Subtle Scents and we'll go shopping. Sure.

Zoe checked the temperature settings on the incubators, heated against the dome's air conditioning that protected the humans from the scorching heat outside. Inside the incubators, bathed in warm moist air, murky flasks of cell cultures waited to be infected. Dissolve the glass containers, diddle the incubator controls to flash-fry every nanogram of solution into sterile dust? Yes, certainly, she could do that.

But she didn't know if the flasks held all of the Trump, or if they held any Trump at all. There might be other flasks stored somewhere in fuming liquid nitrogen, waiting to release Hell itself on the world.

Zoe washed another Ehrlenmeyer flask and set it on the rack to drain.

She looked up as a hunchbacked joker materialized above the sink, his feet almost touching a rack of clean glassware.

"Watch out!" Zoe yelled.

He jerked sideways in the air and missed the counter. Zoe thought she saw one his feet detach and find its way to the end of his leg when he moved, but surely not. She blinked, and he stood beside her, his large hands held out as if to beg alms.

"How did you get here? Oh, never mind. Hello."

"I need things. For Mark."

"Mark? Who the hell is Mark?" He wasn't masked or gowned. All the cultures were stored, but she handed him a mask anyway.

"I have a paper." He pulled a scrap of waxy paper out his pocket. "Mark needs these. To help him kill the Black Trump."

Dihydroxyacetone, metal salts, phenol, a few organic acids - simple compounds, mostly. Why would anyone need this stuff? You could order it at any chemical supply house. Organic acids. Oh.

"Mark wants to trip out and forget about the Black Trump, it looks to me," Zoe said.

"He's locked up. They are hurting his little girl. Help him, Zoe."

The joker pleaded with his eyes, and she didn't know why, but she believed him. Somebody was hurting his kid? She'd had her absolute fill of that. Whoever this Mark was, if all he needed was a few chemicals, what the heck? She didn't mind stealing from Rudo and his gang. As fast as things were going here, it was unlikely that the thefts would be noticed.

"Can you - ?" read, she almost asked. There was no reason to believe this man was illiterate. "Can you carry a sack when you do your teleporation bit?"

"Sure I can."

"Good." She grabbed a wastebasket liner and some small ziplocs. "Help me, okay?" She handed him a bottle and grabbed a felt-tipped marker off the counter. "You fill, I'll mark. Hurry! Somebody could come in."

The hunchback worked as fast as he could, his clumsy-looking fingers skillful with the flexible sacks, the closures. They worked their way down the alphabetical rows of dark glass bottles, filling and stashing while Zoe listened for the hiss of the airlock door. The guards didn't come in here, ever, but Rudo did, and the rest of the science crew.

T is for tyrosine, V for vanadium powder - what the hell would this Mark person do with vanadium? He had some weird catalysis going, she figured. She portioned out some in a baggie. Air whooshed at the doorway.

"You've got to leave," Zoe whispered. She threw the vanadium in the plastic sack and shoved it at his shoulder.

"We don't have it all," he said in a perfectly normal tone of voice that seemed to come from a loudspeaker.

"I don't have any xanthine anyway! Get!" Zoe hissed.

"I have to help Mark! It's important!"

How did you shove someone into dematerialization? The inner door was half-open. She saw a plastic hood, behind it a shock of blond hair - oh, please, not Rudo.

"Please, go poof or die!" She turned to get between the hunchback and the doorway, trying to hide him. The cluttered counters stood between him and the intruder, but the joker was taller than Zoe was by a head.

Paolo stumbled through the door and giggled as it closed. He staggered toward her with a canteen in his gloved hand. "Jus' checking the supplies," he said. "Who ees your visitor, Egypt?"

He was heading for the five-liter jug of lab alcohol.

"What visitor?" Zoe asked.

The hunchback was gone.

"I thought I saw - Egypt, help me fill thees little jug, hokay? I am no Muslim, and sleeping is so hard here."

The Brazilian paramedic couldn't sleep? Maybe he had a shred or two of conscience left. Zoe helped Paolo fill his canteen and shooed him back out the door. Let Rudo find him drunk. She would like that.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"So how are you doing, honey?" Mark asked gently.

His daughter sat beside him on the bed, her blue-jean clad hip not quite touching his. She wore a baggy GUESS? sweatshirt. Her hair hung loose down her back, brushed to golden radiance. Sitting there with her hands clasped between her knees, her head tipped forward so that her face was all but hidden by her hair, she looked heart-achingly beautiful. Another man would likely have found her incredibly attractive. But to Mark her appearance was nothing but the mirror for what she was inside, innocent, pure, and beautiful of spirit. When he looked at her he saw her as she really was: perpetually four.

"Fine," she said in a subdued voice. She coughed into her hand.

He glanced around. This was his reward, his thirty pieces of silver; Casaday was so pleased with him that he'd given him a few moments with Sprout. "You like the room?" Mark asked.

"It's okay."

He felt as if his soul were draining away through the soles of his athletic shoes. He cast around, picked up a stuffed bunny. It was white and turquoise, with an ear that went off in a random direction and a scuff on its nose; a replacement for the Gund bear she'd loved so much, left behind in Burma.

"You like the bunny, sweetheart?" He dandled the animal on his lap. "I know you miss your pink bear. But this is a pretty cute bunny."

She brushed hair from her face, turned, accepted the animal, gave him a wan smile. "Yes, Daddy," she said. "It's a cute bunny." She hugged it to her breasts.

She sounds so grown up, Mark thought. Suddenly he was overcome. He gathered her into his great gangly arms, pressed her against his ribs, pressed his cheek to her hair.

"Oh, baby, baby," he moaned, petting her, feeling her hair go damp and matted from his tears. "I'm so sorry I got you into this. I'd do anything to get you out."

She squirmed in his arms. He ching the tighter. "I know I haven't been much of a daddy to you," he sobbed. "But I'll find a way to make it up to you. Somehow - "

With surprising strength she eeled out of his grip. He sat, staring at her in shock, and then his long face crumpled. He began to cry with the great gasping, bawling cries of a baby, face a red fist, tears pouring down like water from a backed-up pipe.

"Baby, baby, please don't turn away from me," he begged, reaching blind hands toward her.

She caught his hands, clung to them until the first volcanic upwelling of grief was gone. Then she pushed his hands back onto his thighs, firmly yet gently.

"There, Daddy," she said. "It's okay. Please don't cry. I ... I still love you, Daddy."

He sniffled, looking at her through a gauze of tears. That catch in her voice had snagged his soul and torn it. "Do you really?" he asked, knowing he was whining.

Blue eyes big and child-solemn, she nodded. "We'll be okay, daddy," she said. "Really. We'll be fine."

He sniffed loudly. "You really think so?" he asked, knowing it couldn't be, hating himself for the weakness of seeking reassurance from a child.

But she nodded again. "Oh, yes," she said, sounding too wise for her lisping child's voice. "Something is bound to turn up."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Nefertiti had not a more beautiful profile."

Zoe jumped. She hadn't heard Rudo over the clink of the glassware. The bastard moved like a ghost. Zoe grabbed a bottle brush and scrubbed at a gelatinous scrap of dried serum in the bottom of a beaker.

"You do not respond to my compliment," Rudo said. "I am a pariah here, it seems. None of the women will even look at me."

"In the Koran, the most abhorrent feature of the examiners - the angels who judge - is their blue eyes," Zoe said. Rudo's eyes were so pale they were almost colorless.

"Ah. So that is it. I am ugly."

"No," Zoe said. "You are not ugly." Thinking, you are anathema. You are a demon who plans to kill my people. You are my ticket to freedom, if you will tell me what you know. Talk to me. But Rudo was turning to leave.

"Dr. Rudo? I - "

"Yes? Haste, haste, we are busy here."

"I am so lonely here. I don't speak the language the women use. Thank you for speaking to me." Zoe looked at the flask she held. It would make such a satisfying noise if she broke it over this monster's head.

Rudo smiled. "Pack those flasks carefully once they are dry. We are moving the camp when darkness falls."

Zoe nodded. She caught a glimpse of what Rudo had been; his authority, his sense of command, permeated this young body he wore.

"Perhaps you would share my accomodations in the Land Rover," Rudo said. "Unless you prefer to ride in the bed of the truck with the other women, of course."

"Thank you," Zoe said.

"Such a tense little Egyptian," Rudo said. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. "But so lovely."

She kept her eyes downcast. Azma's lectures had taught her not to make eye contact with men, and this time it made sense. Maybe he wouldn't see that she really wanted to spit in his face. The hood made that idea impractical, anyway.

Ruao frowned at her. "You're off duty. Get some sleep. We will all be busy tonight."

Get some sleep, right. Zoe went to the stifling confinement of the women's tent and stretched out on her kilim in the close, fly-buzzing heat. Beads of sweat formed under her breasts and rolled down her sides. They felt like ants walking on her skin. She sat up, picked up her water jug and poured it over her hair, letting the water soak into the black cotton robe that was her required off-duty garb.

It helped. The brown-black shade of the tent became a moonscape and, dreaming, she flew between ivory minarets that sang with the clear, soprano voices of a boy's choir. They chanted the Faure requiem, unspeakable sorrow.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Jay Ackroyd shoved the bear under his jacket and peered around the back of the empty hutch. A detachment of small brown men with big black guns was crossing the open square in the center of the camp. The field was a sea of brown muck, and the men made sucking sounds with their boots as they marched. Jay pulled his head back, held his breath, and tried not to drown in his own perspiration. He waited until the Karens were past, took another quick peek, and slid quietly back into the bush.

Beyond the camp was nothing but roots and rocks and stinging flies and a hell of a lot more mud. Every step plunged him ankle deep in thick sucking muck that squished between his bare toes. He'd lost his right shoe near the perimeter going in, with no way to retrieve it except by hand, a process about as attractive as bobbing for turds, and likely to attract the attention of the Black Karens. It made more sense to abandon the other shoe, so he had.

More small brown men with more big black guns were patrolling the narrow rutted track that passed for a road. Jay managed to sneak past the first sentry, who was taking a dump behind the burnt-out shell of an overturned jeep. He never saw the second until a rifle was shoved in his face and the man started screaming at him in Burmese. He popped him off in mid-scream. By then the first guy was pulling up his pants and reaching for his gun, so Jay had to pop him away too. "Shit," he groused, shaking his head as he jogged down the road. He was getting rusty at this stuff.

The cave was a good mile and a half from the Black Karen camp. Two more small brown men with guns were outside, but these two were Belew's small brown men. Cambodians. "Hey, didn't I see you guys in The Killing Fields?" Jay had asked when Belew had first produced them. The Cambodians had just looked at him with flat, hard eyes, the same way they looked at him now as he came staggering out of the bush with his legs caked in mud halfway to the knee.

Finn was inside the cave, wearing a flak jacket and a Kevlar horse blanket that Belew had had made up for him. Where J. Bob got these things Jay would never know. Finn's dye job had aged badly, turning his mane a splotchy green. Against the back wall, three Black Karen captives had been neatly trussed and gagged and propped up against the rock.

Wordlessly, Finn handed Jay a canteen, Jay took a long swallow of lukewarm water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, "Jesus, it's so fucking hot out there even the bugs are sweating." He gestured toward the three captives in the back of the cave. "Our guests give you any trouble?"

Finn shook his head. "The first one screamed a bit. The other two were pretty docile. I tied them up as soon as they appeared. You get into the laboratory okay?"

"Piece of cake. Skulking was my major in detective school." Jay sat on a rock to scrape mud out from between his toes. "I'm getting sloppy, though. Too much desk work. They kept spotting me, it was embarrassing. The Karens are going to come up about a dozen short when they do roll call tonight. Aside from Moe, Larry, and Curly here, I popped them all to Freakers. Waived the cover charge and everything, they ought to be grateful. Where's Belew?"

"One of his Cambodians found something," Finn said. "He went to take a look. Did you find anything in the lab?"

"Lab stuff," Jay said. "Computers, test tubes, little brown guys in white coats. No Meadows and no Casaday, but they were here all right. I looked for steel drums labelled BLACK TRUMP and revealing notebooks full of plans for genocide and world domination, but I couldn't find any. I was looking for that scanning tunneling microscope too until I realized that I wouldn't know a scanning tunneling microscope from a Cuisinart."

"Then how do you know that Meadows was here?" Finn asked.

"I found this in an empty hutch." Jay pulled the bear out and handed it to Finn. It was pink plush, with button eyes; a child's stuffed toy.

The centaur physician looked at the plush toy in confusion. "What is this supposed to mean?"

"It means that Sprout Meadows was here until very recently, Doctor," J. Bob Belew said. Neither Jay nor Finn had heard him enter the cave, but there he was, looking impossibly crisp and cool in starched khaki, high leather boots, and a phojournalist's vest, like he'd just stepped out of the centerfold in Soldier of Fortune. Jay had to repress a sudden urge to shove him down in the mud.

Belew took the bear from Finn, and for a moment there was genuine emotion in those cool, gray eyes. Then he blinked, and just like that he was all business again. "Undoubtedly they moved out in some haste and certain nonessentials were left behind."

"Yeah, that's how I figured it," Jay said. "Where were you?"

"We found a body," Belew said. "A joker."

His words hit Jay like a physical blow. There had been no word from Jerry or Sascha since they'd decided to go off and play Rambo. Jay half-rose from the rock where he was seated. Finn threw him a glance and shuffled his feet anxiously. Jay tried to find the question, but his throat had gone very dry. "Was it ..."

"Not one of your friends, Ackroyd," Belew said. "One of mine. His name was Lou Inmon.

"Black Trump?" Finn's voice was anxious.

"No, Doctor. The instruments of death were more traditional. He was tortured. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Another debt to Casaday's account." Belew's eyes went to the captives in the back of the cave. "What do we have here?"

"Two lab technicians and a cook," Jay said. "I figured maybe they could be persuaded to tell us where Casaday moved his circus."

Belew looked them over thoughtfully, playing with his mustache. Finally he said, "Remove the gags."

Finn trotted oack to the Karens and pulled the cloth from their mouths, one, two, three. Belew stood in front of them. "Do any of you speak English?" Moe looked at the dirt. Larry shook his head. Curly pretended not to hear. Belew tried French. Nothing. Belew said something curt and cold in a language Jay did not recognize. The three men stared at him sullenly.

"Swell," Jay said. "We got See-No-Sharks, Hear-No-Sharks, and Speak-No-Sharks." He thought for a moment. "J. Bob, tell them that if they cooperate, they'll win a free trip to New York City. Times Square, Yankee Stadium, the Empire State Building. They'll all be eating hot dogs and driving cabs inside three weeks."

"Is that a bribe or a threat?" Finn wanted to know.

Belew ignored the exchange. "Doctor, ask the guards to step inside for a moment."

Finn looked at Jay, who shrugged, went out of the cave, and came back a moment later with the two Cambodians. The captives stared at them anxiously. Belew rattled off a long speech in Burmese or Chinese or Vietnamese or some such language. The only part of it that Jay recognized was Khmer Rouge, but the Black Karens seemed to understand well enough. Their faces grew anxious.

Then Belew snapped an order and the Cambodians took a step toward the captives, and Moe looked over wildly at Jay and said, "New York New York. Tell everything."

Jay grinned and made a gun with his fingers. "We're listening."

"Green card?" Moe added hopefully.

"Don't push it," Belew said sternly, and the cook began to sing.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The voices in her dream turned to howling winds. She woke choking, the air in the tent thick with powdery ocher dust. Zoe wrapped her hood around her face and helped strike the tent in the spring's first real sandstorm.

"The simoom!" a voice called out. Camels screamed outrage and tried to stay curled up on the sand. Goats bleated, unhappy about the wind and even more unhappy about being driven anywhere in it. Zoe fought her way toward an empty space the wind scoured in the air. She saw a woman's hand in deft motion, tying a styrofoam cooler to a camel's back.

"Can I help?" Zoe asked.

The woman kept working and did not answer.

"Over here, Egypt!" Rudo appeared, a white-skinned ghost wearing a white suit and a totally out-of-place pith helmet swathed in what looked like mosquito netting. He grabbed Zoe and pulled her toward the lee side of a bulky Land Rover. Zoe dragged her pack behind her, the kilim wrapped around her clean suit, her gold jewelry, and the precious locator under the seam of a red leather jewelry case. She tossed the pack through the opened door and climbed in after it.

The driver, a turbaned man Zoe hadn't seen before, nodded to Rudo and closed the partition between his seat and the passenger section of the car, leaving Rudo and Zoe in an enclosure of leather and burled wood - unexpected luxury. The driver gunned the motor and eased the heavy vehicle out into the swirling sand.

"This storm is good," Rudo said. "We will leave no tracks, and our change of location will be hidden from the satellite eyes. Until the wind dies down only, but the camp that appears in the morning will not look like the camp we are now leaving."

If only she could get him to tell her what she needed to know, she could be out of here, back in Jerusalem. She had to get him to talk. He'd said he was lonely. His young body would have needs. Hateful though he was, she had to charm him. "I understand so little of - our work here," she said.

"Knowledge can be dangerous. No matter. You would not be here if your hatred of the wild card had not driven you to seek us out."

That, in a twisted way, was true. Zoe tried to look like an admiring junior on her first date with a football hero. He was a pretty boy.

"This, ah, cleansing agent whose replication I am trying to oversee, against all odds in these primitive conditions, my hope that humanity can become free of the suffering caused by this hideous alien disease - I have been a prisoner of my obsession for years. Granted, Jerusalem's small, pathetic jokertown is not where the agent should be released," Rudo said. "So, well, I will have faith in the epidemiology of world travel. And even here, my goal will be accomplished."

"The righteous overcome adversity," Zoe said. She looked down at her hands, tightly folded in her lap, and prayed that what she had just said was true. But who was righteous?

He frowned, and the frown was a terrible thing, a disapproval that made her tremble. A man with the authority lent by many years of power looked at her through a youth's pale eyes. Zoe wondered if the vacated body Rudo wore still had memories, hopes, a capacity for outrage. No. The boy who had lived behind those eyes was gone forever.

"You grew up in New York," Pan Rudo said. "You are a twentieth century woman. Why do you quote platitudes?"

"When in Rome ..."

"Ah. But in this little space, so safe from prying eyes, you do not need to do that, Zoe."

Oddly enough, she did feel some of the tension leaving her shoulders. "Thank you. I really mean that. It's difficult, acting like a nonperson. I miss - New York."

"I miss access to a good research laboratory. I am not a virologist. Zahid works, but he is a frail reed, his knowledge barely adequate. This is such a tricky business, he tells me, working with this fragile virus. It resists multiplication to quantities that will be sufficient to the task."

"So that's what you're doing," Zoe said. "I really know so little about virology." Yikes, did that sound stupid! "I wanted to go on with my studies - biochem, virology. But my brothers' schooling took precedence." Her mythical brothers. Two? Three? She didn't remember how many she was supposed to have. Not a good direction to let this conversation drift, no.

Rudo smiled and patted her hand. "I have become a student in the field. Would you like to hear me recite my lessons? There is no pleasure greater than an interested listener. And we will be on this journey until nearly dawn."

The driver fought the wheel of the Land Rover and they lurched steeply down some unseen dune. The wind ground sand against the doors.

"Your - obsession - is to relieve suffering?"

"Ah. Yes."

"But the Black Trump will kill whoever gets it. At least that's what the lab workers say."

"They talk too much. The Black Trump will kill, yes, but there is no other answer. You think of the dying, but that is the softness of women. I do not hold it against you. Zoe, I have studied the workings of the human psyche for years. The healthy have courage. Ask any healthy human, like yourself, whether they would sacrifice themselves to avoid spreading a hideous plague to their loved ones, and they will say 'Yes!' With courage, with conviction! But with illness, with contamination, the psyche changes. The organism loses its higher functions, its courage, in a drive toward survival. The sick are sheep, animals who bleat and follow any leader."

And once a confused and frightened people had meekly marched into cattle cars, shocked and dazed by the unthinkable, trusting in the rules of civilization. They had believed in law, in decency. Never again. Since that time, no one could ever truly believe in law, or decency. Never again.

"At such times, the courageous must act for them. It is my destiny to be one of the courageous."

They had found a smooth track of some sort and the vehicle sped up, heading for the new camp in the night. In the murky darkness of the rocking jeep, Rudo almost glowed with purpose.

Well, the wild card virus had spread untold suffering. Some of its victims had suicided, from pain or self-loathing, or because they couldn't live with the changes in people who had once loved them. If all the jokers and aces in the world just went to sleep, painlessly - would that be so terrible? Had it happened in the fifties, Zoe Harris would never have been born, would never have lived to become a murderer, a woman manipulated by love into a theft that could kill millions. Would Rudo's solution be so terrible? No child would fear the wild card, ever again, if he succeeded.

"You are thinking of painful deaths, I tell you, Zoe, that need not happen. For normal humans, only a minor respiratory illness. With lots of sneezing, lots of dispersal potential, isn't that a nice touch? Once the disease is established to be universally fatal to those who are infested with the Takisian virus, then the suffering of the afflicted can be eased without guilt. I will work very hard to see that it is so."

Cyanide and morphine? How gentle, how reasonable. Zoe wanted to believe him. He looked so innocent, so clean, a white acolyte dedicated to purity, to peace, to health. Nat or no, he had charisma.

"How soon? When will this happen?"

"Don't be impatient, Egypt. Do you wish to leave our company so soon? Does not the Nur pay you well?"

Did he? Her salary didn't come to her, a mere woman. It went to her designated guardian, a fictional brother in Alexandria.

"I am a stranger here. I - don't like the food much."

"Mutton! My tongue is coated with the taste of mutton! And that dusty-tasting spice!"

"Cumin. It's in everything."

"I would give much for a good stein of dark beer."

"It's spring. In Manhattan, there will be places serving wild strawberries. The tiny ones, red as rubies.

Rudo licked his lips. His tongue was pointed and very pink. "With cream and a glass of May wine. Are you a gourmet, Zoe?"

"Sometimes." As if she watched a movie, she saw a never-again Zoe from years past, her hair loose in the wind. She hustled toward an afternoon class, her tongue busy with strands of rich, dripping mozarella on a slice of New York's finest pizza, hot enough to burn her fingers.

"We must console ourselves." Rudo reached into a pocket of his white safari suit and came out with a silver flask. Monogrammed.

"I - I'm supposed to be a good Muslim. From Manhattan."

"This is very good brandy." He looked almost hurt that she might refuse. "Tonight we drink. Tomorrow, Allah forgives."

Croyd had said that.

"Perhaps - " Perhaps she would throw up if she touched something this man's lips had touched. Remember the boy. Do this for the boy whose body this man inhabits. Do it for Jan, for Needles. Rudo unscrewed the cap, a heavy silver-shot glass lined with gold.

"A taste." Let's get you drunk, Zoe thought. Let's find out if this young body you're wearing can hold its liquor. Let's hope not. "To success." Zoe took a sip of the aromatic stuff, smooth and good, and passed the cup back to Rudo.

He tossed down the brandy and refilled the cap.

Zoe sipped at her portion and frowned.

"You don't like it?" Rudo asked.

"A hint of bitterness. Perhaps it's the silver I taste."

"Let me see." He took a good mouthful and rolled it on his tongue, and swallowed. "It's fine." He finished the second shot.

"Could I have some more?" Zoe asked.

For answer, Rudo reached forward and found a knob in the buried wood of the partition. He opened a compartment, a portable bar, complete with cut-crystal highball glasses and a selection of goodies.

"Oh, look!" Zoe reached for a tin of salted nuts. Let's make you thirsty, yes. She pulled the tab on the nuts.

"Here!" She fed him a salted almond and let her fingers linger on his soft lips. Again. And more cognac.

For herself, too, and she cooed at Rudo and hoped the flask was full enough. After the third shot, his cheeks went pink.

The Land Rover roared on through the night. His skin was perfect, an infant's silky skin, so fair. She remembered the boy who had lived in it, and tried to offer him what comfort she could.

As she stroked him, nuzzled him, made love to him, part of her screamed with outrage, and another part accepted, even craved, the humiliation.

This is what you deserve, slut. She heard the words so clearly. The sand was talking to her. You sleep with every man you meet. Why worry about one more?

I need to make this man talk, she told the voice. There are millions of lives at risk here! What's wrong with using sex as a weapon?

That explains Rudo. And I guess Turtle was part of your education. What about Croyd?

Croyd - was fun! Just plain fun, okay! Stop it, she told the voice in her head, knowing it for hallucination, and welcoming this evidence of madness, thinking, how wonderful. As soon as I can, I'll go completely mad. But not now, voice. I have to listen to Rudo. Don't bother me.

Rudo talked.

Then, his head lolling against the padded leather seat, and his flushed face slack-jawed with sleep and satiation, it seemed the ride would never end. Zoe rummaged in her pack and found a white scarf. She wrapped it tightly around her left wrist and hoped to hell the driver was a Fists agent.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The white mouse kicked furiously against the restraint of Mark's rubber-gloved fingers. Mark glanced over his shoulder. Carter Jarnavon sat perched on a stool by a wall of the lab, watching with rapt attention. They were at the stage of mass-culturing the Trump, preparatory to suspending it and loading it into pressurized canisters. The younger scientist was on hand to watch and make sure Mark didn't try any last-minute sabotage.

Feeling almost giddy, Mark kissed the mouse on its pink nose. He was continually taking samples from the main Trump culture, monitoring it to make sure it stayed viable. As far as Jarnavon knew the mouse was a control.

It wasn't. Some of Sascha's Xenovirus Takis-A positive tissue - taken under anesthetic, to Mark's surprised relief - had been implanted in it. It had then been injected with Black Trump II.

That was over twenty-four hours ago. The Overtrump worked.

And that wasn't all.

Mark held the mouse up, looked into its tiny red eyes. You and me, little guy, he thought. We have a secret.

Maybe I don't have to be Hitler after all.

Mark replaced the mouse gently in its cage. He started toward the mass-culture vat.

"Tsk-tsk, Doctor." Jarnavon wagged his finger. "Mustn't get too close. I'd hate to have to call a guard."

Mark turned away barely in time to mask his grin. He doesn't have a clue. He thinks I'm going to try to kill off the Trump.

If he only knew.

Mainly to distract himself from Cosmic Traveler's answering yammer of panic, be wandered to the incubator where the latest set of BT-II infected human-tissue cultures were. There were five petri dishes. The sixth was non-wild card positive tissue that had been infected as a control.

Mark glanced at it. His heart lurched. He turned to Jarnavon, face ashen.

"Get Casaday," he said. "Now."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Ray heard the messenger coming down the hallway leading to his room. Ray had changed hotels, moving into the Joker Quarter to be closer to his new chums, as Snailfoot put it. He actually found the inn by the Zion Gate to be rather to his liking. The room was small, but neat. It was relatively quiet for a room over a bar. Jerusalem jokers, it seemed, were peaceful drinkers.

There was a soft knocking at Ray's door and he called, "Come in," as clearly as he could.

The door opened to reveal a boy standing in the hallway outside. He was a teenager, thin and ratty-looking, with a handful of what looked like downy feathers around his ears.

"Snailfoot sent me," he said with the voice of a teen trying to be tough.

Ray nodded and got up from the bed where he'd been dreaming of Harvest.

The boy was as tall as Ray, but thinner. His eyes had a desperate sort of toughness about them and Ray knew that he was someone who didn't belong here, someone caught in the killing who would have been better off going to some nice high school, doing homework and dating cheerleaders and maybe playing basketball or something. But here he'd turned into a killer, and it didn't sit well with him.

Lucky, Ray thought, I never had that problem.

"You're new," the kid said.

Ray nodded. "That's right," he slurred from his mutilated mouth.

"My name's Owl."

Ray's face twitched into what his mouth allowed him of a smile. "Call me Mumbles."

"All right." The kid flashed a smile, man to man, happy maybe, to run into someone with a worse mutation than his own. He looked desperately young. "Snailfoot wants us."

They went out into the hall, down the stairs, and through the common room of the inn. Ray waved at his host, a blubbery blob of a joker who always had a smile on his moon-like face. But then the guy never moved very far from the beer tap, so maybe that was why he was always smiling.

"What's up?" Ray asked as they hit the street.

"Something pretty big, I think," Owl answered. He was excited and afraid, but tried to sound cool and unaffected. He almost succeeded. He lowered his voice. "I think we're going to hit the Sharks this afternoon. Take the fight to them.

Ray grunted "Good."

They headed northwest, toward the Christian Quarter.

"Via Dolorosa," Ray read from the street sign. "Weird name."

Owl glanced at him. "It's The Way of Sorrow," he said. "You never heard of it?"

Ray shrugged. "Lots of things I never heard of, kid."

"Well," Owl said, "it's a pretty famous street."

"Is it?"

"Sure. It's, you know, the street Jesus Christ carried his cross up when he was condemned to death. He was crucified there. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built on the spot." Owl pointed to a building on the left.

"No kidding?" Ray asked.

Owl shrugged. "That's what they say."

"You believe it?"

Owl shrugged again.

They were well into the Christian Quarter. The streets were crowded with people of all apparent religious persuasions. There were obvious tourists draped in cameras and polyester, Muslims in their robes accompanied by dark-eyed veiled women, and Jews of every type, from modern-dressing Sabras to Hasidim in their black suits and snappy hats.

The Church of the Sepulchre ddn't look like much. It was squarish, with a small dome over the middle of its roof. It was made from the same brownish sandstone that the entire Old City seemed to be built of. There were a lot of people crowded around it, apparently waiting their turn to enter.

Christ died there, Ray thought, if the stories were true. Ray wasn't sure they were. He didn't have any particular reason not to believe, but he'd never really thought about it. He'd never really thought about a lot of things, until recently.

He glanced at the kid walking determinedly at his side. Odds were that the boy wasn't going to get out of this alive. He practically had a bull's-eye painted right between his eyes. For a moment Ray wondered about his own odds of leaving Jerusalem alive, then he realized with a start that he'd never thought like that before. He'd never worried about odds. He'd just acted. He frowned, wondering if this was the first crack in the mental armor that had kept him alive through so many adventures on so many killing grounds.

He felt something tug at his sleeve and he whirled, hand high and ready to strike. He stopped barely in time as he saw Owl flinch back.

"Jesus, Mumbles, take it the fuck easy. What's wrong with you?"

"Sorry," Ray mumbled.

"Well, pay attention." Owl sniffed and looked at Ray with a new sort of caution in his eyes. "You move fast, man," he said in a wondering tone.

Ray smiled, because he knew the way it looked made people uneasy. "I hit hard, too."

"Well, don't be hitting me, man. We're on the same side. Anyway, we're here."

They were in front of another church, smaller, less kept-up, and a lot less of a tourist destination than the Church ot the Holy Sepulchre. The sign on its wooden double entrance doors told why.

OUR LADY OF THE SPASM, CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST, JOKER, it read in five languages.

Owl said, "Used to be Armenian Catholic. I guess we got the church when we got rid of the Armenians. Come on."

They went up the stone steps and through the double doors. Inside it was dim and cool. It had been a long time since Ray had been in a church - not counting Westminster Abbey - and it made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. There were a number of worshipers. Most were jokers, though a few tourists had wandered into the place.

"This way," Owl said in a whisper. The church seemed to affect him as well. He led the way down the pews, ignoring the supplicants praying there or simply resting out of the heat. A priest went by. He had a face like a wet, wrinkled mushroom, hair like just-watered moss. He ignored them as they went by the altar with its depiction of the two-headed Jesus Christ, Joker, nailed to the Helix.

"You know where you're going?" Ray asked a little louder then he intended.

Owl shot him a look of pure teen scorn. "Sure I do. The crypt is this way."

There was a niche in the wall behind the altar, with a stone staircase winding down. It was poorly lit and the stairs were worn by centuries of foot traffic.

"Careful," Owl cautioned.

They went down. The air became cooler, mustier. Infrequent naked bulbs of dim wattage lit their way. After a few moments the staircase bottomed out before a wooden door black with age.

"The crypt," Owl said by way of explanation as he opened the door and went in. Ray followed cautiously. His last underground experience had been somewhat unsatisfactory and he wasn't eager to duplicate it, but curiosity was starting to get to him. What the hell was going on, anyway?