Dance Of Death

THIRTY-SEVEN

Whit DeWinter III hunched over his fifteen-pound calculus textbook in the bowels of the Class of 1945 Library at Phillips Exeter Academy. He was staring at a formula made entirely of Greek letters, trying to pound it into his muddy brain. The midterm was in less than an hour and he hadn't even memorized half the formulas he'd need. He wished to hell he'd studied the night before instead of staying up so late, smoking weed with his girlfriend Jennifer. It had seemed like a good idea at the time… Stupid, so stupid. If he failed this test, his B in calculus would drop to a C, he'd have to go to UMass instead of Yale, and that would be it. He'd never get into medical school, he'd never have a decent job, he'd end up living out his miserable life in a split-level in Medford with some cow of a wife and a houseful of squalling brats…

He took a deep breath and dived once again into the tome, only to have his concentration broken by a raised voice from one of the nearby carrels. Whit straightened up. He recognized the voice: it was that sarcastic girl in his English lit class, the Goth with retro purple hair… Corrie. Corrie Swanson.

"What's your problem? Can't you see I'm studying here?" the voice echoed loudly across the sleek atrium of Academy Library.

Whit strained and failed to catch the calm, murmured answer.

"Australia? Are you nuts'?" came the raised reply. "I'm in the middle of midterms! What're you, some kind of pervert?"

A couple of shushes came from students studying nearby. Whit peered above the edge of his carrel, glad for the diversion. He could see a man in a dark suit leaning over a carrel a few dozen yards away.

"He told you that? Yeah, right, let's see some ID."

More murmuring.

"All right, hey, I believe you, and I'm all for a beach vacation. But right now? You've got to be kidding."

More talk. More shushes.

"Okay, okay. All I can say is, if I fail biology, it'll be Pendergast's fault."

He heard a chair scraping and saw Corrie Swanson rise from the carrel and follow the man in the suit. He looked like Secret Service, all buttoned down, square jaw, dark glasses. He wondered what kind of trouble Corrie was in now.

Whit watched her pass, her trim behind twitching invitingly in a slinky black dress with pieces of metal jingling from it, her purple hair falling in a thick cascade down her back, grading almost to black at the ends. Damn, she was cute, just as long as he didn't try to take her home to Father. The old man would kill him for dating a girl like that.

Whit turned his throbbing eyeballs back to the formula for finding the radius of curvature for a function of two variables, but it remained all Greek to him. Literally. The damn formula had so many squiggly letters it could be the first line of the Iliad, for all he knew.

He groaned again. His life was about to end. And all because of Jennifer and her magic bong…

A light snow had fallen on the white clapboard house that stood on the corner of Church Street and Sycamore Terrace in the quiet Cleveland suburb of River Pointe. The whitened streets were broad and silent, the streetlights casting pools of yellow light across thenocturnal landscape. The distant whistle of a train added a melancholy note to the silent neighborhood.

A shadow moved behind a shuttered window in a second-story gable-a figure in a wheelchair-barely outlined in the soft blue light that emanated from the depths of the room. Back and forth the figure went in silent pantomime, busy at some unknown task. Inside the room, metal racks stood from floor to ceiling, packed with electronic equipment: monitors, CPUs, printers, terabytes of hard drives, units for the remote seizure of computer screen images, cellular telephone scanner-interceptors, wireless routers, NAS devices, and Internet port sniffers. The room smelled of hot electronics and menthol.

The figure rolled this way and that, a single withered hand tapping keyboards, pressing buttons, turning dials, and punching keypads. Slowly, one by one, the units were being powered down, shut off, closed out. One by one, the lights went off, LAN and broadband connections were cut, screens went dark, hard drives spun down, LEDs winked out. The man known in the underground hacking community by the single name of Mime was shutting himself off from the world.

The last light to go off-a large blue flat-panel LCD-plunged the room into darkness.

Mime rested when he was finished, breathing in the unaccustomed darkness. He was now completely cut off from the outside world. He knew that, blacked out like this, he could not be found. Still, the information that had reached him from the man known as Pendergast, one of only two people in the world he trusted implicitly, made him uneasy.

Mime had not been cut off in many years from the vast torrents of data that washed over his house like an invisible ocean. It was a cold, lonely feeling.

He sat brooding. In a minute, he would turn to an entirely new set of controls, and new lights would come on in the room: the lights from a battery of video camera monitors and security readouts from a surveillance system set up around and within his house. It was a protective measure that had been installed years before, but that had never been needed. Until now.

Mime breathed in the darkness, and-for the first time in his life-he was afraid.

Proctor carefully locked the door to the great shuttered mansion at 891 Riverside Drive, looked around, then slipped into the waiting Hummer. The building was shut up tightly, every potential breach or entry point carefully sealed. Constance was still within, hiding in the secret spaces that had shielded her in the past, spaces that not even he-not even Pendergast-knew about. She had supplies, an emergency cell phone, medication: everything she needed.

Proctor accelerated from the curb, easing the enormous armored vehicle around the corner, moving south on Riverside Drive. Out of habit, he glanced in his rearview mirror to see if he was being followed. There was no evidence of it, but-as Proctor well knew- the lack of evidence of being followed was not evidence of a lack of being followed.

At the corner of 95th and Riverside, he slowed as he approached an overflowing public trash receptacle; as he passed, he tossed into it a sack of greasy, congealed McDonald's french fries almost completely coated with solidified ketchup. Then he accelerated onto the on-ramp to the West Side Highway, where he headed north, keeping to the speed limit and checking his mirrors frequently. He continued up through Riverdale and Yonkers to the Saw Mill River Parkway, then the Taconic, then I-90, and then I-87 and the Northway. He would drive all night and much of the next morning, until he reached a certain small cabin on a certain small lake twenty-odd miles north of St. Amand l'Eglise, Quebec.

He glanced to his right, where an AR-15 lay on the seat, fully loaded with 5.56mm NATO rounds. Proctor almost hoped he was being followed. He'd like nothing more than to teach the fellow a lesson he'd never forget as long as he lived-which in any case would not be long, not long at all.

As the sky paled and a dirty dawn broke across the Hudson River, and a freezing wind whipped scraps of newspaper down the empty streets, a lone derelict, shuffling along Riverside Drive, paused at an overflowing garbage can and began rummaging about. With a grunt of satisfaction, he extracted a bag of half-frozen McDonald's french fries. As he stuffed them greedily into his mouth, his left hand deftly pocketed a small piece of paper hidden in the bottom of the bag, a paper with a few lines written in a beautiful, old-fashioned script:

There is only one man in the world who meets your particular requirements:

Eli Glinn of Effective Engineering Solutions

Little West 12th Street, Greenwich Village, New York