Mount Dragon

PART THREE

Carson met de Vaca’s eyes.

“Let’s go,” he hissed, powering down the terminal with a stab of his finger.

They eased out of the radiology lab, closing the door quietly behind them. Quickly, Carson scanned the immediate area. Quartz emergency beacons had come up along the perimeter fence. As he watched, Carson saw klieg lights snap into ivory brilliance, first in the front guard tower, then in the rear. The twin beams began slowly scanning the compound. There was no moon, and large sections of the facility were sunken in pools of impenetrable darkness. He urged de Vaca forward into the shadow of the machine shop. They crept along the base of the building and around a corner, then scurried across a walkway to a dark area behind the incinerator building.

They heard a shout and the distant running of feet.

“It’ll take them a few minutes to get organized,” Carson said. “This is our chance to get the hell out.” He patted his pocket, ensuring that the CDs and the evidence they contained were still safe. “Looks like you’ll get a chance to test your hot-wiring skills, after all. Let’s grab a Hummer while we still can.”

De Vaca hesitated.

“Let’s move!” he urged.

“We can’t,” she whispered fiercely in his ear. “Not without destroying the stocks of X-FLU first.”

“Are you crazy?” Carson snapped.

“If we leave X-FLU in the hands of these nuts, we won’t survive even if we do escape. You saw what happened to Vanderwagon, what was happening to Harper. All it takes is one person to walk out with a vial of X-FLU, and you can kiss your ass good-bye.”

“We sure as hell can’t take them with us.”

“No, but listen. I know how we can destroy X-FLU and escape at the same time.”

Carson saw dark figures running across the compound, guards holding ugly-looking assault weapons. He pulled de Vaca farther into the shadows.

“We have to enter the Fever Tank to do it,” de Vaca continued.

“The hell with that. We’ll be trapped like rats.”

“Listen, Carson, that’s the last place they’ll be looking for us.”

Carson thought for a moment. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Even a madman wouldn’t go back in there right now.”

“Trust me.” De Vaca grabbed his hand and pulled him around the far side of the incinerator.

“Wait, Susana—”

“Move your ass, cabrón.”

Carson followed her across a dark courtyard to the inner perimeter. They dropped into the shadows of the operations building, breathing heavily.

Suddenly a shot rang out, cracking across the desert night. Several others followed in rapid succession.

“They’re shooting at shadows,” Carson said.

“Or perhaps each other,” came the reply. “Who knows how far gone some of them are?”

A klieg light was making a slow arc toward them, and they ducked into the darkened operations building. After a hurried reconnoiter, they ran down the deserted hall and into the elevator that led to the BSL-5 entrance.

“I think you’d better tell me your plan,” said Carson as they descended.

She. looked at him, violet eyes wild. “Listen carefully. Remember old Pavel, who fixed my CD player? I’ve been meeting him in the canteen for backgammon. He likes to talk, probably more than he should. He told me that, back when the military funded this site, they insisted on the installation of a fail-safe device. Something to safeguard against a catastrophic release of a hot agent within the Fever Tank. It was taken off-line after Mount Dragon went private, but the mechanisms were never actually dismantled. Pavel even explained how easily it could be reactivated.”

“Susana, how could—”

“Shut up and listen. We’re gonna blow this whole chingadera up. The fail-safe device was called a stage-zero alert. It reversed the laminar airflow of the air incinerator, flooding the Fever Tank with thousand-degree air, sterilizing everything. Only a few of the old-timers, like Singer and Nye, know about it.” She smirked in the dim light of the elevator. “When that superheated air hits all the combustibles in there, it should make a nice explosion.”

“Yeah, right. And fry us, too.”

“No. It’ll take several minutes for the airflow to reverse. All we have to do is set the alert, get out, and wait for the explosion. Then we can snag a Hummer in the uproar.”

The elevator door whispered open on a shadowy corridor. They moved quickly to the gray metal door leading into the Fever Tank. Carson spoke his name into the voice-recognition box and the door clicked open.

“You know, they could be watching us right now,” he said as he struggled into his bluesuit.

“They could,” de Vaca said. “But considering all the hell that’s breaking loose up there, I think they have more important cameras to monitor.”

They checked each other’s suits for safety, then stepped into decontam. As Carson stood in the sheets of poisonous liquid, staring at the dim alien figure of de Vaca standing beside him, a sense of unreality began to creep over him. There are people looking for us. Shooting at us. And we’re walking into the Fever Tank. He felt the creeping claustrophobic fear settling around his chest once again, squeezing him like a vise. They’ll find us. We’ll be trapped like rats, and ... He sucked at his air hose, filling his lungs with panicked gasps.

“You all right, Carson?” The calm voice of de Vaca over the private intercom channel shamed him into rationality. He nodded, stepping into the antechamber that housed the drying mechanism.

Two minutes later, they entered the Fever Tank. The global alarm droned quietly in the empty corridors, and the distant drumming of the chimps sounded like a muffled riot. Carson looked up at the white walls, searching for a clock: almost twelve-thirty. The corridor lights were on low, and would stay that way until the decontamination crew entered at 2 A.M. Only this time—with a little luck—there wouldn’t be anything left to decontaminate.

“We have to access the security substation,” came de Vaca’s voice. “You know where it is, right?”

“Yeah.” Carson knew only too well. The Level-5 security substation was located on the lowest level of the Fever Tank. Directly below the quarantine area.

They moved quickly through the corridors to the central core. Carson let de Vaca descend first, then grabbed the handrails and went down the tube himself. Above his head he could see the huge uptake manifold that, in a few minutes, might be spewing superheated air throughout the facility.

The substation was a cramped circular room with several swivel chairs and a low ceiling. Five-inch terminal screens marched in orderly rows around the curve of the walls, showing a hundred views of the empty Fever Tank. Beneath them, a command console jutted into the room.

De Vaca took a seat in front of the console and began typing, slowly at first, then more rapidly.

“Now what the hell do we do?” Carson asked, thrusting a fresh air hose into the valve of his suit.

“Hold your water, cabrón,” de Vaca said, lifting one gloved hand to press her communications button. “It’s just like Pavel said it would be. All the safeguards here are to prevent a breach from occurring. They never thought to install safeguards against someone deliberately triggering a false alarm. Why should they? I’m going to bring the stage-zero crisis parameters back on-line, and then initiate the alert!”

“And then we’ll have how long to get out?”

“Plenty of time, believe me.”

“How long is that, exactly?”

“Stop bothering me, Carson. Can’t you see I’m busy? Just a few more commands, and we’re in business.”

Carson watched her type. Then he spoke again, more quietly. “Susana, let’s think about this a moment. Is this really what we want to do? Destroy the entire Level-5 facility? The chimps? Everything we’ve worked for?”

De Vaca stopped typing and turned to face him. “What other choice do we have? The chimps are goners anyway, they’re all exposed to X-FLU. We’ll be doing them a favor.”

“I know that. But a lot of good has come out of this facility. It would take years to reproduce the work that’s been done in here. We know what’s wrong with X-FLU now, we can correct the process.”

“If we get our asses shot off, who’s going to fix X-FLU?” came de Vaca’s angry voice in his headset. “And if some nut gets his hands on the stuff, who’s going to care about the damage we do to GeneDyne’s bottom line? I’m going to—”

“Carson,” came the severe tone of Nye. “De Vaca. Listen to me carefully. Effective immediately, your employment at GeneDyne is terminated. You are now trespassers on GeneDyne property, and your presence in the Level-5 facility must be assumed a hostile act. If you decide to surrender, I can guarantee your safety. If not, you will be hunted down and dealt with. There is no possibility of escape.”

“So much for the video cameras,” de Vaca muttered.

“He might be monitoring the private channel,” Carson replied. “Say as little as possible.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m there.” De Vaca’s typing slowed. Then she reached over and, lifting a hinged security grille protecting a bank of black switches, flipped the topmost switch.

Immediately, a loud tone sounded above the wail of the emergency siren, and an array of warning lights in the ceiling began to blink.

Attention, came a calm feminine voice in his headset that Carson had not heard before. A stage-zero alert will initiate in sixty seconds.

De Vaca threw a second switch, then stood back, kicking over the console with one gloved foot for good measure. A shower of sparks leapt across her suit.

Fail-safe activated, the feminine voice said. Alert commit sequence bypassed.

“Now you’ve done it,” Carson said.

De Vaca punched the emergency global button on the communications panel of her bluesuit, broadcasting her words across the Mount Dragon PA system. “Nye? I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

“There’s nothing for you to say except yes or no,” Nye replied coolly.

“Listen up, canalla! We’re in the security substation. We’ve initiated a stage-zero alert. Total, unprejudiced sterilization.”

“De Vaca, if you—”

“You can’t back it down, I’ve already initiated the commit. Do you understand? In a few minutes Level-5 will be flooded with thousand-degree air. The whole damn place will go up like a Viking funeral. Anyone within a three-hundred-yard radius will turn into beef jerky.”

As if in punctuation, the calm voice returned on the global channel: Stage-zero alert initiated. You have ten minutes to evacuate the area.

“Ten minutes?” Carson said. “Jesus.”

“De Vaca, you’re more insane than I thought,” came the voice of Nye. “You can’t succeed. Do you hear me?”

De Vaca barked a laugh. “You’re calling me insane?” she said. “I’m not the one out there every day in the desert, in pith helmet and ponytail, bobbing up and down like a goddamn dragoon.”

“Susana, shut up!” Carson barked.

There was dead silence over the intercom.

De Vaca turned toward him, brows knitted in anger. Then her expression quickly changed.

“Guy, look at that,” she said on the private channel, pointing over his shoulder.

Turning, Carson faced the wall of video monitors. He scanned the countless small black-and-white images, uncertain of what had caught de Vaca’s attention. The laboratories, passages, and storage areas were still and deserted.

Except one. In the main corridor just beyond the entrance port, a single figure was moving. There was a stealth and deliberation to the figure’s movements that chilled Carson’s blood. He moved closer to the monitor, staring intently. The figure was wearing the kind of bulky biosuit with extended internal oxygen used exclusively by the security staff. In one hand was a long black object that looked like a policeman’s nightstick. As the bulky biosuit moved closer, walking directly beneath the camera, Carson could see that the object was a double-barreled pistol-grip shotgun.

Then he noticed the figure’s gait. Every now and then there was an odd hitch in the walk, as if a leg joint had momentarily come loose.

“Mike Marr,” de Vaca murmured.

Carson moved his glove to his sleeve to reply, then stopped. His instincts told him that something else was wrong; terribly wrong. He stood motionless, trying to figure out what had triggered his subconscious alarm.

Then the realization hit him like a hammer.

Throughout the countless hours he’d spent in the Fever Tank—through all the many communications beeps, tones, and voices that had sounded in his headset—there had run one steady, continuous sound: the reassuring hiss of the air hose connected to his suit.

Now the hiss was gone.

Reaching down quickly, Carson disconnected the air hose from his suit valve, grabbed for another line, snapped it home.

Nothing.

He turned to de Vaca, who had been watching his movements. Comprehension grew in her eyes.

“The bastard’s turned off the air supply,” came her voice.

You have nine minutes to evacuate the area.

Carson held a gloved finger up in front of his visor to simulate silence.

How long, he mouthed.

De Vaca held up a single hand, the fingers splayed. Five minutes of reserve air in their bluesuits.

Five minutes. Christ, it took that long just to decontaminate. ... Carson struggled to push back the panic that was growing inside him. He glanced back at the video screens, searching for Marr. He spotted the security officer again, moving now through the production area.

He realized they had only one chance.

Disconnecting the useless air hose from his suit, Carson gestured for de Vaca to follow him out of the security substation and back to the central core. Carson grabbed the metal rungs of the ladder, craning his neck upward. He could make out the huge uptake manifold five levels above, hovering like a grim promise at the very pinnacle of the Fever Tank. No sign yet of Marr. Grabbing the rungs of the ladder, Carson climbed as quickly as he could, past the generators and backup labs to the second-level storage facility. With de Vaca at his heels, he ducked quickly behind an oversized freezer bay.

Turning toward de Vaca, he made a suppressing movement with his hands, then concentrated on slowing his own breathing, trying to conserve his dwindling oxygen supply. He peered out from the darkness of the storage area toward the central core ladder.

Carson knew there was no way to leave the Fever Tank without passing through decontam. Marr would know this, also. He’d look for them first at the exit hatchway. Finding they weren’t there, he would assume they were still in the security substation. After all, Marr knew that nobody would be foolish enough to waste time in any other section of the Fever Tank, with their air supply running out and a massive explosion due within minutes.

At least, Carson hoped Marr knew that.

You have eight minutes to evacuate the area.

They waited in the darkness, eyes riveted to the core ladder. Carson felt de Vaca nudge him urgently from behind, but he motioned her to stay still. He wondered, idly, what terrifying pathogen was stored in the freezer that stood mere inches from him. The seconds continued to tick by. He began taking shallow breaths, wondering if his plan had condemned them both to death.

Suddenly, a red-suited leg came into view on the ladder. Carson pulled de Vaca deeper into the shadows. The figure came fully into view. It paused at the second level, looking around. Then it continued downward toward the security substation.

Carson waited as long as he dared. Then he moved forward into the dim red light, de Vaca behind him. He cautiously peered over the edge of the central core: empty. Marr would be on the lower level by now, approaching the security substation. He’d be moving slowly, on the chance that Carson was armed. That gave them a few more seconds.

Carson urged de Vaca up the ladder to the main floor of the Fever Tank, motioning her to wait for him by the exit air lock. Then he moved quickly down the corridor toward the Zoo.

The chimps were in a frenzy, keyed to a fever pitch by the incessant droning of the alarms. They looked at him with angry red eyes, hammering on their cages with a terrifying ferocity. Several empty cages stood as mute testimony to recent victims of the virus.

Carson moved closer to the rack of cages. Then, careful to avoid the thrusting, probing hands, he pulled the cotter pins from the cage doors one by one and loosened the faceplates. Enraged by his proximity, the creatures redoubled their banging and screaming. Carson’s suit seemed to vibrate with their desperate screams.

You have seven minutes to evacuate the area.

Carson raced from the Zoo and down the hall to the exit air lock. Seeing him approach, de Vaca opened the rubber-sealed door, and the two moved quickly into the decontamination chamber. As the sterilizing agents began to rain down on them, Carson stood near the hatchway door, looking through the glass plate back into the Fever Tank. By now, he knew, the force of the chimps’ pounding would have shaken free the faceplates and opened the cage doors. He imagined the creatures, sick and angry, racing through the darkened facility, over lab tables, along corridors ... down ladders ...

You have five minutes to evacuate the area.

Suddenly, Carson realized his lungs were no longer drawing in air. He turned to de Vaca and made a chopping movement across his neck. If they continued trying to breathe, they would simply inspire carbon dioxide.

The yellowish bath stopped and the far hatchway opened. Carson moved into the next air lock, struggling against an overwhelming desire to breathe. As the immense driers roared into life, a terrible need for oxygen set fire to his lungs. He looked over at de Vaca, leaning weakly against the wall. She shook her head.

Was that a shotgun blast? Over the hum of the drying mechanism, Carson couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly the last air lock opened and they tumbled into the ready room. Carson helped de Vaca remove her helmet, then tugged desperately at his own, dropping it to the floor and gulping in the fresh, sweet air.

You have three minutes to evacuate the area.

They struggled out of their bluesuits, then left the ready room, moving down the hallway and into the elevator leading up to the operations building. “They may be waiting for us outside,” Carson said.

“No way,” de Vaca gasped as she gulped in large lungfuls of air. “They’re going to be running like hell to the other side of the compound.”

The hallways of the operations building remained dark and empty. They raced down the corridor and through the atrium, pausing briefly at the front entrance. As Carson cracked the door open, the frantic blatting of emergency sirens rushed in to meet them. He looked around, then moved quickly into the shadows outside, motioning de Vaca to follow him.

Mount Dragon was in chaos. Carson could see several small knots of people huddled together, talking or yelling among themselves. In a pool of light outside the residency compound, several scientists were standing—some clad in pajamas—talking excitedly. Carson could see Harper among them, shaking a raised fist. Figures could be seen, marching and sometimes running between the probing beams of the klieg lights.

They moved quickly through the deserted inner perimeter gate and into the shadow of the incinerator. As Carson scanned the far end of the compound, his eyes fell on the motor pool. Half a dozen armed guards surrounded the Hummers, brilliantly spotlighted in a bank of lights. In the center of the group stood Nye. Carson saw the security director gesture in the direction of the Fever Tank.

“The stables!” Carson shouted in de Vaca’s ear.

They found the horses standing in their stalls, restless, alert to the excitement. De Vaca led the horses to the tack room while Carson ran ahead to secure the blankets and saddles.

As Carson turned toward Roscoe, saddle in both hands, the earth suddenly shuddered beneath his feet. Then a flash of intense light illuminated the inside of the stables in a stark, unyielding glare. The explosion began as a muffled thump, followed by an endlessly building roar. Carson felt the wave of overpressure rock the stables, and the windows along the far wall burst inward, scattering shards of wood and glass across the barn floor. De Vaca’s Appaloosa reared in terror.

“Easy, boy,” said de Vaca, catching the reins and stroking the animal’s neck.

Carson looked quickly around the stables, saw Nye’s saddlebags, grabbed them and tossed them to de Vaca. “There should be canteens inside. Fill them in the horse trough!” he shouted, throwing on the blankets and reaching for the saddles.

When she raced back, he was tightening Roscoe’s flank cinch. Carson slapped the saddlebags on the skirts and tied them with the saddle strings as de Vaca mounted.

“Wait a minute,” Carson said. He ran back and grabbed two riding hats from their pegs in the tack room. Then, returning, he climbed onto Roscoe and they moved through the open door.

The heat of the fire slapped against their faces as they stared at the devastation outside. The low filtration housing that marked the roof of the Fever Tank was now a ruined crater from which gouts of flame licked skyward. The concrete roof of the operations building had buckled, and a reddish glow rose from its interior. In the residency compound, curtains whipped crazily through a hundred shattered windows. An intense fire roared out of the incinerator, coloring the surrounding sand a brilliant orange.

The path of the blast had cut a swath of destruction through the compound, peeling back the roof of the canteen and flattening a large section of the perimeter fence. “Follow me!” Carson shouted, giving his horse the heel. They raced through the smoke and fire to the blowdown, jumped the twisted wreckage of the perimeter fence, and galloped across the desert toward the welcoming darkness.

When they were half a mile from the compound and beyond the glow of the fire, Carson slowed his horse to a trot.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said as de Vaca pulled up alongside. “We’d better take it easy on these horses.”

As he spoke, another explosion rocked the ruins of the operations building, and a massive fireball arose from the hole in the ground that had been the Fever Tank, roiling toward the sky. Several secondary blasts slapped the darkness like aftershocks: the transfection lab crumbled into nothingness, and the walls of the residency compound shuddered, then collapsed.

The lights of Mount Dragon winked out, leaving only the lambent flickering of the burning buildings to mark the remains of the complex.

“There goes my pre-war Gibson flathead,” Carson muttered.

As he turned Roscoe back into the well of blackness ahead, he saw pencil beams of light begin to stab across the desert. The beams seemed to be moving toward them, blinking in and out of sight as they followed the bumpy terrain. Suddenly, powerful spotlights snapped on, illuminating the desert in long yellow lances.

“Qué chinga’o,” said de Vaca. “The Hummers survived the explosion. We’ll never outrun those bastards in this desert.”

Carson said nothing. With any luck, they could evade the Hummers. He was thinking, instead, about their almost total lack of water.

Scopes sat alone in the octagon, examining his state of mind.

Carson and de Vaca were all but taken care of. Escape was impossible.

He had intercepted their transmission and cut off Carson’s data feed almost immediately. True, the transparent relay he’d used as an alarm would not have stopped the initial part of the data transmission. It was within the realm of possibility that Levine—or whoever Levine was using to hack into the GeneDyne net—would pick up the aborted transmission. But Scopes had already taken the steps to ensure that such unauthorized entry would not happen again. Drastic steps, perhaps, yet necessary. Especially at this delicate time.

In any case, very little of the intended download had gotten through. And what Carson had sent seemed to make little sense. It was all about PurBlood. Even if Levine received the data, he would have learned nothing of value about X-FLU. And he was now so thoroughly discredited that no one would pay attention to any story of his, whatever it might be.

All bases had been covered. He could proceed as planned. There was nothing to worry about.

So why the strange, subtle, anxious feeling?

Sitting on his comfortably battered couch, Scopes probed his own mild anxiety. It was a foreign feeling to him, and the study of it was very interesting. Perhaps it was because he had misjudged Carson so thoroughly. De Vaca’s treachery he could understand, especially after that incident in the Level-5 facility. But Carson was the last person he would have suspected of industrial espionage. Another might have felt terrible, even overwhelming anger at such a betrayal. But Scopes felt merely sorrow. The kid had been bright. Now he would have to be dealt with by Nye.

Nye—that reminded him. A Mr. Bragg from OSHA had left two messages earlier in the day, inquiring as to the whereabouts of that investigator, Teece. He’d have to ask Nye to look into it.

He thought again about the data file Carson had tried to send. There wasn’t much, and he hadn’t looked it over carefully. Just a few documents related to PurBlood. Scopes remembered that Carson and de Vaca had been messing around in the PurBlood files just the other day. Why the sudden interest? Were they planning to sabotage PurBlood, as well as X-FLU? And what was all this Carson had said about everyone needing immediate medical attention?

It bore closer looking into. In fact, it would probably be prudent for him to examine the aborted download more carefully, along with Carson’s on-line activities of the last several days. Perhaps he could find the time after the evening’s primary order of business.

At this new thought, Scopes’s eyes moved toward the smooth, black face of a safe set flush against the lower edge of a far wall. It had been built, to his own demanding specifications, into the structural steel of the building when the GeneDyne tower was constructed. The only person who could open it was himself, and if his heart stopped beating there would be no way to open it short of using enough dynamite to vaporize every trace. As he pictured what lay within, the odd sense of anxiety quickly melted away. A single biohazard box—recently arrived via military helicopter from Mount Dragon—and inside, a sealed glass ampule filled with neutral nitrogen gas and a special viral transport medium. If Scopes looked closely at the ampule, he knew he would be able to make out a cloudy suspension in the fluid. Amazing to think such an insignificant-looking thing could be so valuable.

He glanced at his watch: 2:30 P.M., eastern time.

A tiny chirrup came from a monitor beside the couch, and a huge screen winked into life. There was a flurry of data as the satellite downlink was decrypted; then a brief message appeared, in letters fifteen inches tall:

TELINT-2 data link established, lossy-bit

encryption enabled. Proceed with transmission.

The message disappeared, and new words appeared on the screen:

Mr. Scopes: We are prepared to tender an offer of three billion dollars. The offer is non-negotiable.

Scopes pulled his keyboard over, and began typing. Compared to hostile corporations, the military were pansies.

My dear General Harrington: All offers are negotiable. I’m prepared to accept four billion for the product we’ve discussed. I’ll give you twelve hours to make the necessary procurements.

Scopes smiled. He’d carry out the rest of the negotiations from a different place. A secret place in which he was now more comfortable than he was in the everyday world.

He resumed typing, and as he issued a series of commands the words on the giant screen began to dissolve into a strange and wondrous landscape. As he typed, Scopes recited, almost inaudibly, his favorite lines from The Tempest:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Charles Levine sat on the edge of the faded bedspread, staring at the telephone propped on the pillow in front of him. The phone was a deep burgundy color, with the words PROPERTY OF HOLIDAY INN, BOSTON, MA stamped in white across the back of the receiver. For hours he had spoken into the mouthpiece of that receiver, shouting, coaxing, begging. Now he had nothing more to say.

He rose slowly, stretched his aching legs, and moved to the sliding glass doors. A gentle breeze billowed the curtains. He stepped out to the balcony railing and breathed deeply of the night air. The lights of Jamaica Plain glittered in the warm darkness, like a mantle of diamonds thrown casually across the landscape. A car nosed by on the street below, its headlights illuminating the shabby working-class storefronts and deserted gas stations.

The telephone rang. In his shock at hearing an incoming call—after so many excuses, so many curt rejections—Levine stood motionless a moment, looking over his shoulder at the telephone. Then he stepped inside and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” he said in a voice hoarse from talking.

The unmistakable rumble of a modem echoed from the tiny speaker.

Quickly, Levine hung up, transferred the jack from the telephone to his computer, and powered up the laptop. The phone rang again, and there was a flurry of noise as the machines negotiated.

How-do, professor-man. The words rushed immediately onto the screen without the usual introductory logo. I assume it’s still appropriate to call you professor, is it not?

How did you find me? Levine typed back.

Without much problem, came the reply.

I’ve been on the telephone for hours, talking to everyone I can think of, Levine typed. Colleagues, friends in the regulatory agencies, reporters, even former students. Nobody believes me.

I believe you.

The job was too thorough. Unless I can prove my innocence, my credibility will be gone forever.

Don’t fret, professor. As long as you know me, you can be assured of a good credit rating, if nothing else.

There’s only one person I haven’t spoken to: Brent Scopes. He’s my next stop.

Just a minute, my man! came Mime’s response. Even if you could talk to him, I doubt he’d be interested in hearing from you right about now.

Not necessarily. I have to go now, Mime.

One moment, professor. I didn’t contact you just to present my condolences. A few hours ago, your Western homeboy Carson tried to send you an emergency transmission. It was almost immediately interrupted, and I was only able to retrieve the initial section. I think you need to read this. Are you ready to receive?

Levine replied that he was.

Okay, came the response. Here it comes.

Levine checked his watch. It was ten minutes to three.

Carson and de Vaca rode through the velvety blackness of the Jornada del Muerto, a vast river of stars flowing above their heads. The ground sloped downward from the compound and they soon found themselves in the bottom of a dry wash, the horses sinking to their fetlocks in the soft sand. The light of the stars was just enough to illuminate the ground beneath their feet. Any moon, Carson knew, and they would have been dead.

They rode down the wash while he thought.

“They’ll expect us to head south, toward Radium Springs and Las Cruces,” he said at last. “Those are the closest towns besides Engle, which belongs to GeneDyne anyway. Eighty miles, more or less. It takes time to track someone in this desert, especially across lava. So if I were Nye, I’d follow the track until I was sure it was heading south. Then I’d fan out the Hummers until the quarry was intercepted.”

“Makes sense,” came the voice of de Vaca in the gloom.

“So we’ll oblige him. We’ll head south, like we’re going to Radium Springs. When we hit the Malpaís, we’ll ride up onto the lava where tracking is difficult. Then we’ll make a ninety-degree turn east, ride a few miles, and reverse direction. We’ll head north instead.”

“But there’s no town to the north for at least a hundred and forty miles.”

“That’s exactly why it’s the only way we can go. They’d never look for us in that direction. But we won’t have to ride as far as a town. Remember the Diamond Bar ranch I told you about? I know the new ranch manager. There’s a line camp at the southern edge of the ranch we can head for. It’s called Lava Camp. I’d say it’s about a hundred and ten miles from here, twenty or thirty miles north of Lava Gate.”

“Can’t the Hummers follow us onto the lava?”

“The lava’s sharp, it would tear any ordinary tires to ribbons,” Carson said. “But the Hummers have something called a central tire inflation system that can raise or lower tire pressure. The tubes are specially made to allow miles of continued travel after a puncture. Even so, I doubt if they could stay on the lava for long. Once they’re sure of our direction, they’ll get off the lava, move ahead to the far side and try to cut us off.”

There was a silence. “It’s worth a try,” de Vaca said at last.

Carson turned his horse southward and de Vaca followed. As they came over the rise on the far side of the wash, they could still see, in the distance to the north, the flickering yellow glow of the burning complex. Midway across the dark sands, the circles of light had grown measurably closer.

“I think we’d better make tracks,” Carson said. “Once we’ve thrown them we can rest the horses.”

They urged their horses into a hand gallop. In five minutes, the jagged outline of the lava flow loomed up before them. They dismounted and led their horses up into the flow.

“If I remember correctly, the lava veers around to the east,” Carson said. “We’d better follow it for a couple of miles before turning north.”

They walked their horses through the lava, moving slowly, allowing the animals time to pick a trail through the sharp rubble. It’s damn lucky, Carson thought, that horses have much better night vision than humans. He couldn’t even make out the shape of the lava beneath Roscoe’s hooves; it was as black as the night itself. Only scattered yucca plants, patches of lichen and windblown sand, and clumps of grass growing from cracks gave him an idea of the surface. Difficult as it was, movement was easier here near the edge of the flow. Farther in, Carson could see great blocks of lava, sticking up into the night sky like basaltic sentries, blotting out the stars.

Glancing back again, Carson could see the lights of the Hummers rapidly approaching. Periodically the lights would pause—presumably when Nye got out to check the tracks. The lava would slow them, but it wouldn’t stop them.

“What about water?” de Vaca spoke suddenly out of the immense darkness. “Is this going to be enough?”

“No,” Carson said. “We’ll have to find some.”

“But where?”

Carson was silent.

Nye stood in the empty motor pool, alone, looking out into the darkness, his fiery shadow playing across the desert sands. The ruined hulk of Mount Dragon burned out of control behind him, but he ignored it.

A security officer came running up, gasping and out of breath, his face smeared with soot. “Sir, the water pressure in the hoses will be exhausted within five minutes. Should we switch to the emergency reserves?”

“Why not?” Nye replied absently, not bothering to look at the man.

He had failed massively; he knew that. Carson had slipped from between his fingers, but not before he’d destroyed the very facility Nye had been charged with protecting. Briefly, he thought of what he could say to Brent Scopes. Then he pushed the thought from his mind. This was a failure like none other in his career, even worse than that other, the one that he no longer allowed himself to think about. There was no possibility of redemption.

But there was the possibility of revenge. Carson was responsible, and Carson would pay. And the Spanish bitch, as well. They would not be allowed to escape.

He watched the lights of the Hummers recede into the desert, and his lip curled with contempt. Singer was a fool. It was impossible to track anything from inside a Hummer. One had to keep stopping, getting out, and scouting the trail; it would be even slower than going on foot. Besides, Carson knew the desert. He knew horses. He probably knew a few simple tracking tricks. There were lava flows in the Jornada so mazelike that it would take years to explore every island, every “hole in the wall.” There were sandy flats where a horse’s track would be all but erased by the wind in just a few hours.

Nye knew all these things. He also knew that it was virtually impossible to completely erase a trail in this desert. There was always a trace left, even on rock or in sand. His ten years working an Arabian security detail in the Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, had taught him all any man could know about the desert.

Nye tossed his now-useless radio communicator into the sand and turned toward the stables. As he walked, he paid no heed to the desperate cries, the rushing sound of flame, the shriek of collapsing metal. Something new had occurred to him. If Carson had escaped, perhaps the man was more clever than he’d suspected. Perhaps he had been smart enough to steal or even disable his horse, Muerto, on the way out. The security director quickened his pace.

As he walked through the shattered barn door, he glanced automatically toward the locked tack box where he kept his rifle. It was still there, untouched.

Suddenly Nye froze. The nails that normally held his old McClellan saddlebags were empty. Yet the saddlebags had hung there yesterday. A red mist crept in front of his eyes. Carson had taken the bags and their two gallon canteens; a pitiful amount of water against the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death. Carson was doomed by that fact alone.

It was not the loss of the canteens that bothered him. Something else was missing; something far more important. He had always believed that the saddlebags had provided an unobtrusive hiding spot for his secret. But now Carson had stolen them. Carson had destroyed his career, and now he was going to take from him the last thing he had left. For a moment, the white heat of Nye’s anger rooted him, motionless, to the spot.

Then he heard the familiar whinny. And, despite his rage, Nye’s lip curled in a half smile. Because he knew now that revenge was not only a possibility, but a certainty.

As they moved eastward, Carson noticed the lights of the Hummers drifting farther to their left. The vehicles were approaching the Malpaís. At that point, with any luck, they would lose the trail. It would take an expert tracker, moving on foot, to follow them through the lava. Nye was good, but he wouldn’t be good enough to follow a horse trail through lava. When he lost the trail, Nye would assume they had taken a shortcut across the lava and were still heading south. Besides, with the tainted PurBlood working its way through his veins, Nye was probably becoming less and less of a threat to anyone but himself. In any case, Carson thought, he and de Vaca would be free. Free to get back to civilization and warn the world about the planned release of PurBlood.

Or free to die of thirst.

He felt the heavy cold canteen on his saddle horn. It contained four quarts of water—very little for a person crossing the Jornada del Muerto. But he realized this was only a secondary problem.

Carson halted. The Hummers had stopped at the edge of the lava flow, perhaps a mile away.

“Let’s find a low spot and hide these horses,” Carson said. “I want to make sure those Hummers keep going south.”

They led the horses down a rubble-strewn crevasse in the lava. De Vaca held the reins while Carson climbed to a high point and watched.

He wondered why his pursuers hadn’t turned off their lights. As it was, they stuck out like a cruise ship on a moonless ocean, visible for ten miles or more. Odd that Nye hadn’t thought of that.

The lights were stationary for a minute or two. Then they began moving up on to the lava flow, where they paused again. For a moment Carson worried they might somehow pick up his trail and come toward him, but instead they continued southward, at a faster clip now, the lights bouncing and sweeping over the lava.

He climbed back down.

“They’re going south,” he said.

“Thank God for that.”

Carson hesitated. “I’ve done some thinking,” he said at last. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to save this water for the horses.”

“What about us?”

“Horses require twelve gallons of water a day in desert conditions. Seven, if they ride only at night. If these horses collapse, we’re finished. It won’t matter how much water we’ve got, we wouldn’t get five miles in lava or deep sand. But if we save this for the horses, even a little bit does some good. They’ll be able to go an extra ten or twenty miles. That will give us a better chance to find water.”

In the darkness, de Vaca was silent.

“It’s going to be extremely hard to avoid drinking when we get thirsty,” Carson said. “But we must save it for the horses. If you want, I’ll take your canteen when the time comes.”

“So you can drink it yourself?” came the sarcastic remark.

“It will take great discipline when it starts to get bad. And, believe me, it’s going to get bad. So before we continue, there’s another rule about thirst you should know. Never, ever mention it. No matter how bad it gets, don’t talk about water. Don’t think about water.”

“Does this mean we’re going to have to drink our pee?” de Vaca asked. In the darkness, Carson couldn’t tell if she was serious or merely baiting him again.

“That only happens in books. What you do is this: When you feel like urinating, hold it in. As soon as your body realizes it’s getting thirsty, it will automatically reabsorb the water. And your desire to urinate will vanish. Eventually you’ll have to, of course, but by that time there will be so much salt in the urine it’ll be useless to drink, anyway.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I grew up in this kind of desert.”

“Yeah,” said de Vaca, “and I bet being part Ute helps, too.”

Carson opened his mouth to retort, then decided against it. He’d save the arguments for later.

They continued eastward through the lava for another mile, moving slowly, leading the horses by the reins and letting them pick their own way. Occasionally a horse would stumble in the lava, its shoes sending out small flashes of sparks. From time to time, Carson stopped to climb a lava formation and look south. Each time, the Hummers had receded farther into the distance. At last, the lights disappeared completely.

As he climbed down for the last time, Carson wondered if he should have told de Vaca the worst news of all. Even with the two gallons all to themselves, the horses could barely make half the distance they needed to go. They were going to have to find water at least once along the way.

Nye tightened the cinch on Muerto and checked the horse’s saddle rigging. Everything was in order. The rifle was snug in its boot, slung under his right leg where he could extract it with one smooth motion. The metal tube carrying his USGS 1:24,000 topographical maps was secure.

He tied the extra saddlebags behind the cantle and began packing ammunition into them. Then he filled two five-gallon flaxen desert water bags, tied them together, and slung them over the cantle, one on each side. It was an extra forty pounds of weight, but it was essential. Chances are it wouldn’t be necessary for him to bother tracking Carson. Carson’s having a mere two gallons of water would do the job for him. But Nye had to be sure. He wanted to see their dead, desiccated bodies, to reassure himself that the secret was once again his and his alone.

To the saddle horn, he tied a small sack containing a loaf of bread and a four-pound wax-covered wheel of cheddar cheese. He tested his halogen flashlight, then placed it in the saddlebags, along with a handful of extra batteries.

Nye worked methodically. There was no hurry. Muerto was trained as an endurance horse, and was in far better shape than the two specimens Carson had taken. Carson had probably pushed his horses in the beginning, galloping or loping to escape the Hummers. That would start them off badly. Only fools and Hollywood actors galloped their horses. If Carson and the woman expected to get across the desert, they would have to take it slow. Even so, as their horses began to suffer from the lack of water, they would start lagging. Nye figured that without water, traveling only at night, they could go perhaps forty-five miles before collapsing. If they attempted daytime travel, they’d make perhaps half that. Any animal lying motionless on the desert sands—or even one that was moving slowly or erratically—immediately attracted a spiraling column of vultures. He could find them by that alone.

But he wouldn’t need vultures to tell him where they were.

Tracking was both an art and a science, like music or nuclear physics. It required a large volume of technical knowledge and an intuitive brilliance. He had learned a great deal about it during his time in the Empty Quarter. And years of searching the Jornada del Muerto desert had honed that knowledge.

He gave his outfit a final check. Perfect. He lofted himself into the saddle and rode out of the barn, following Carson and de Vaca’s hoofprints in the glow of the fire. As he moved into the desert and away from the burning complex, the glow lessened. From time to time he switched on his flashlight, as he traced their route southward, just as he thought: they had been running their horses. Excellent. Every minute of galloping here would be a mile lost at the far end. They had left a trail that any moron could follow. A moron is following it, Nye thought with amusement, as he saw the myriad tire tracks crisscrossing in confusion as they pursued the hoofprints southward.

He paused for a moment in the darkness. A voice had suddenly murmured his name. He swiveled in his saddle, scanning the infinite desert around him for its source. Then once again he urged his horse into a slow trot.

Time, water, and the desert were all on his side.

Carson paused at the far edge of the lava flow and looked northward. The great arm of the Milky Way stretched across the sky, burying itself at last below the far horizon. They were adrift in a sea of blackness. The faintest reddish glow to the north marked Mount Dragon. The blinking lights atop the microwave tower had long since disappeared, winking out when the generators failed.

He inhaled the fragrance that surrounded them: dry grasses and chamisa, mixed with the coolness of the desert night.

“We’ll need to erase our tracks coming off the lava,” he said.

De Vaca took the reins of both horses and, walking ahead, led them down off the lava and into the darkness. Carson followed her to the edge of the flow; then, turning around and removing his shirt, he got down on his hands and knees and began crawling backward on the sand. With each step he swept the sand before him clean with his shirt, obliterating both the hoofprints and his own marks. He worked slowly and carefully. He knew that nothing could completely erase marks in the sand. But this was pretty damn good. A Hummer would drive right past without seeing a thing.

He continued for over a hundred yards, just to make sure. Then he stood up, shook out his shirt, and buttoned it on. The job had taken ten minutes.

“So far so good,” he said, catching up with de Vaca and climbing into his saddle. “We’ll head due north from here. That’ll give us a three-mile berth around Mount Dragon.”

He looked into the sky, locating the North Star. He urged his horse into a slow, easy trot—the most efficient of gaits. Beside him, de Vaca did the same. They moved in silence through the velvety night. Carson glanced at his watch. It was one o’clock in the morning. They had four hours to dawn; that meant twenty-four miles, if they could keep up the pace. That would put them twenty-odd miles north of Mount Dragon, with close to another hundred still ahead of them. He smelled the air again, more carefully this time. There was a sharpness that indicated the possibility of a dew before dawn.

Traveling during the heat of the day was out of the question. That meant finding a low place to hide the horses, where they could move around and do a little grazing.

“You said your ancestors came through here in 1598,” Carson spoke into the darkness.

“That’s right. Twenty-two years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.”

Carson ignored that. “Didn’t you mention something about a spring?” he asked.

“The Ojo del Águila. They started across the Jornada and ran out of water. An Apache showed them this hidden spring.”

“Where was it?”

“I don’t know. The location was later lost. In a cave, I think, at the base of the Fra Cristóbal Mountains.”

“Jesus, the Fra Cristóbals are sixty miles long.”

“I wasn’t planning to make a land survey at the time I heard the story, all right? It was in a cave, I remember my abuelito saying, and the water flowed back into the cave and disappeared.”

Carson shook his head. The lava and the mountains were riddled with caves. They would never find a spring that didn’t surface to the light of day, where it would generate some form of green plant life.

They continued to trot, the only sounds the clink of the saddle rigging and the low creak of leather. Once again, Carson glanced up at the stars. It was a beautiful, moonless night. Under any other circumstances, he might have enjoyed this ride. He inhaled again. Yes, there would definitely be a dew. That was a stroke of good fortune. He mentally added ten miles to the distance they could travel without water.

Levine skimmed the last, incomplete page of Carson’s transmission, then quickly saved the data.

Mime, are you sure about this? he typed.

Yup, came the response. Scopes was very clever. Humblingly so. He discovered my access and grafted a transparent software relay onto it. The relay triggered an alarm when Carson attempted to access us.

Mime, speak English.

The wily bastard rigged a tripwire across my secret path, and Carson tripped over it, falling flat on his virtual face. However, his aborted data feed remained on the net. I was able to retrieve it.

Any chance you were discovered? Levine typed.

Discovered? Me?

? I don’t understand.

‘Rolling on floor, laughing.’ I am too well hidden. Any attempt would bog down in a maze of packet-switching. But Scopes does not appear to be trying to find me. Quite the opposite. He’s put a moat around GeneDyne.

What do you mean, a moat? Levine asked.

He’s physically cut off all network traffic out of GeneDyne headquarters. There’s no way to dial into the building by phone, fax, or computer. All remote sites have been cut off.

If this transmission is true, PurBlood is contaminated in some terrible way, and Scopes himself is a victim. Do you suppose he knows? Is that why he sealed off the access?

Not likely, came Mime’s response. See, when I realized Carson was trying to reach us, I entered GeneDyne cyberspace myself. A few moments later, I saw what had gone down. I realized our access had been discovered. I couldn’t log out without making my presence known. So I put my ear to the door, listening to all the unprotected net chatter. I learned some very interesting things before Scopes cut off all outside links.

Such as?

Such as Carson seems to have had the last laugh on Scopes. At least, that’s what I think. Fifteen minutes after Scopes terminated the data feed, there was a big ugly net crash and all communications from Mount Dragon ceased. A real patty melt.

Scopes shut down all communication with Mount Dragon?

Au contraire, professor-man. The head office tried frantically to reestablish communications. A facility such as Mount Dragon would have redundant emergency backups up the ying-yang. Whatever happened was so devastating it knocked out everything at once. Heap bad medicine. Once Scopes realized that he could not get through to Mount Dragon, he broke off the GeneDyne net.

But I _must_ communicate with Scopes, Levine typed. It’s vital that he stop the release of PurBlood. Nobody on the outside will believe me. It’s critical that I convince him.

You ain’t been listening, professor-man. Scopes has physically severed all links. Until he decides the emergency is over, there’s no way to call into the building. You can’t hack across clear air, professor. Except...

What?

Except that there is ONE channel out of GeneDyne Boston. I discovered its data signature as I was poking around the edges of the moat. It is a dish uplink from Scopes’s personal server to the TELINT-2 communications satellite.

Any chance you can use that satellite to get me in contact with Scopes?

No way. It’s a dedicated two-way link. Besides, whoever Scopes is chatting with is using a highly unusual encryption scheme. Some kind of end-to-end block cipher that stinks like military to me. Whatever it is, I wouldn’t go near it with anything short of a Cray-2. And if it’s a prime factorial code, all the CPU time in the universe wouldn’t crack the mother.

Is there traffic on the link?

A wee bit here and there. A few thousand bytes at irregular intervals.

Levine looked curiously at the words on the screen. Though the insolence still shone through, the prancing, boastful Mime he usually encountered was abnormally muted.

He sat back a moment, thinking. Could Scopes have shut everything down because of PurBlood? No, that didn’t make sense. What was happening at Mount Dragon? What of that other dangerous virus Carson had been working on?

There was no way around it: he had to speak to Scopes, warn him about PurBlood. Whatever else he might do, Scopes would never allow the intentional release of a dangerous medical product. It would destroy his company. And then, of course, if Scopes had been a beta-tester himself, he might need immediate medical treatment.

It is imperative that I communicate with Scopes, Levine wrote. How can I do that?

Only one chance. You’ll have to physically get inside the building.

But that’s impossible. The security on that building must be massive.

No doubt. But the weakest element of any security system is the people. I assumed you might make this request, and I’ve already begun making preparations. Months ago, when I first began hacking the GeneDyne net for you, I downloaded their network and security blueprints. If you can get your ass into the building, you may be able to reach Scopes. But I’ll need to take care of a little business first.

I’m no hacker, Mime. You’ve got to come in with me.

I can’t.

You must be in North America. Wherever you are, you can be on a plane and in Boston in five hours. I’ll pay for your ticket.

No.

Why the hell not?

I just can’t.

Mime, this isn’t a game anymore. Thousands of lives depend on it.

Listen to me, professor. I’ll help you get into the building. I’ll show you how to contact me once inside. There are numerous security systems that will have to be compromised if you want to get close to Scopes. Forget doing it in real space. You’ll have to make the trip by cyberspace, professor-man. I’ll send you a series of attack programs I’ve written explicitly for GeneDyne. They should get you inside the net.

I need you there with me, not as some long-distance support service. Mime, I never thought you were the cowardly type. You’ve got to—

The screen went blank. Levine waited impatiently, wondering what hacker game Mime was playing now. Suddenly, a picture materialized:

Levine stared blankly at the screen. The image was so unexpected that it took him several seconds to realize he was looking at the structural formula for a chemical. It took significantly less time to realize what the compound was.

“My God,” he whispered. “Thalidomide. A thalidomide baby.”

It was suddenly clear to him why Mime could not possibly come to Boston. And it was also clear—for the first time—why Mime hacked the big pharmaceutical companies with such vengeance; why, in fact, Mime was helping him at all.

There was a rap on the hotel-room door.

Levine opened it to see a disheveled-looking valet in a red suit that was several sizes too small. The valet held up a hanger containing two pieces of dark brown clothing, wrapped in protective plastic.

“Your uniform,” he said.

“I didn’t—” Levine began, then stopped. He thanked the valet and closed the door. He had not ordered any dry cleaning.

But Mime had.

From the welter of tracks at the edge of the lava flow, Nye could see that Singer and his Hummers had stopped and milled about. For quite some time, apparently; they had managed, in their ineptitude, to obscure Carson’s and de Vaca’s own tracks. Then the vehicles had moved up onto the lava itself, scraping and scratching along. The bloody yob didn’t know the first rule of the tracker was never disturb the track one is following.

Nye stopped, waiting. Then he heard the voice again, clearer now, murmuring out of the lovely darkness. Carson hadn’t continued straight south. Once on the lava, he had either gone east or west, hoping to shake his pursuers. Then he would have doubled back north, or doglegged south again.

Nye gave Muerto the whispered order to stand. Dismounting, he climbed onto the lava, flashlight in hand. He walked a hundred yards west of the mess left by the Hummers, then turned and cut for sign, playing his beam among the lava rocks, looking for the telltale marks of shoe iron on rock.

No track. He would try the other side.

And there he saw it: the whitish crushed edge of a lava rock, the fresh mark of a shoe. To make sure, he continued searching until he found another whitish streak against the black lava, and then another, along with an overturned stone. The horses had stumbled here and there, striking the rocks with their iron shoes, leaving an unmistakable trail. Carson and the woman had made a ninety-degree turn and were heading east.

But for how long? Would they turn south again, or double back north? There was no water in either direction. The only time Nye had seen any water in the Jornada was in the temporary playas that formed after heavy thundershowers. Except for the freak rain shower on that day he’d first suspected Carson was after his secret, there hadn’t been any rain in months. There probably wouldn’t be any more until the rainy season began in late August.

South seemed the obvious route, since the northward journey would be much longer and would cross more lava fields.

No doubt that’s what Carson thought his pursuers would assume.

North, said the voice.

Nye stopped and listened. It was a familiar voice, cynical and high, laced with the salty Cockney tones that no amount of Home Counties public schooling could erase. Somehow, it seemed perfectly natural that it should be speaking to him. He wondered, in a detached way, whose voice it was.

He returned to Muerto and remounted. It was better to be absolutely sure of Carson’s intentions. The two would have to come down off the lava field at some point. And that’s where Nye knew he could pick up the track.

He decided to ride along the northern edge of the lava first. If he didn’t pick up the trail, he’d cross the lava field and ride along its southern edge.

Within half an hour he had found the pathetic marks in the sand where Carson had tried to brush away their tracks. So the voice was right: They had turned north, after all. There was a regularity to Carson’s sweepings that set them apart from the irregular patterns of windblown sand. Nye painstakingly traced the brushed marks back to where the trail began again, as clear in the deep sand as highway markers, heading straight for the North Star.

This would be easier than he thought. He’d catch Carson around sunrise. With the Holland & Holland, he could take Carson down from a quarter mile. The man would be dead before he even heard the shot. There would be no final confrontation, no desperate pleading. Just a clean shot from six hundred yards, and a second one for the bitch. Then he would finally be free to find the one thing that meant anything to him now: the Mount Dragon gold.

Once again, he did the calculations. He had done them innumerable times before, and they felt comfortable and familiar in his head. The amount of gold that could be carried on a pack mule was between 180 and 240 pounds, depending on the mule. In either case, well over one million in bullion alone. But the gold would probably be in the Pre-Revolt stamped bullion bars and coinage of New Spain. That would drive its worth up ten times or more.

He was free of Mount Dragon now; free of Scopes. Only Carson—Carson the traitor in the dark, Carson the sneak thief—stood in his way. And a bullet would take care of that.

By three in the morning, the sharpness in the air had intensified. Carson and de Vaca came over a rise and rode down into what appeared to be a broad, grassy basin. It had been almost two hours since they passed the glow of Mount Dragon on the horizon, heading north. They had seen no sign of lights behind them. The Hummers were gone for good.

Carson drew to a halt. He dismounted and bent down, feeling the blades of grass. Side oats grama, high in protein: excellent for the horses.

“We’ll stop here for a couple of hours,” he said. “Let the horses graze.”

“Shouldn’t we keep going while it’s still dark?” de Vaca asked. “They might send helicopters.”

“Not over the Missile Range,” Carson said. “In any case, we won’t travel far in daylight without finding a place to hole up. But we have to take full advantage of this dew. You’d be surprised how much water the horses can take in grazing dewy grass. We can’t afford to let this pass. An hour spent here will give us an extra ten miles, even more.”

“Ahh,” said de Vaca. “A Ute trick, no doubt.”

Carson turned toward her in the darkness. “It wasn’t funny the first time. Having a Ute ancestor doesn’t make me an Indian.”

“A Native American, you mean,” came the teasing reply.

“For Chrissakes, Susana, even the Indians came from Asia. Nobody’s a ‘Native American.’ ”

“Do I detect defensiveness, cabrón?”

Carson ignored her and removed the lead rope from Roscoe’s halter. He wrapped the cotton rope around Roscoe’s front hoof, tied a knot, gave it two tight twists and looped it around the other hoof, tying a second knot. He did the same to the other horse. Then he took off the flank cinches and looped them through the O-rings on the halters, so that the buckled ends dangled loosely together.

“That’s a clever way to hobble them,” de Vaca said.

“The best way.”

“What’s the cincha for?”

“Listen.”

They were silent a moment. As the horse began to graze, there was a faint sound as the two buckles of each cinch clinked together.

“Usually I bring a cowbell with me,” said Carson. “But this works almost as well. In the still of the night, you can hear that clinking three hundred yards off. Otherwise, those horses would just vanish in the blackness and we’d never find them.”

He sat back in the sand, waiting for her to say something more about Ute Indians.

“You know, cabrón,” de Vaca said, her disembodied voice coming to him out of the darkness, “you surprise me a little.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, you’re a hell of a fine person to cross the Jornada del Muerto with, for one thing.”

Carson blinked in surprise at the compliment, wondering for a moment whether she was being sarcastic. “We’ve still got a long way to go. We’re barely one-fifth across.”

“Yeah, but I can already tell. Without you along, I wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Carson didn’t respond. He still felt there was less than a fifty-percent chance they’d find water. That meant a less than fifty-percent chance of survival.

“So you used to work on a ranch up there?” De Vaca spoke again.

“The Diamond Bar,” said Carson. “That was after my dad’s ranch went broke.”

“Was it big?”

“Yep. My father fancied himself a real wheeler-dealer, always buying up ranches, selling them, buying them back. Usually at a loss. The bank foreclosed on fourteen sections of patent land that had been in my family for a hundred years. Plus, they got grazing leases on two hundred sections of BLM land. It was a hell of a big spread, but most of it was pretty burnt up. My father’s fancy cattle and horses just couldn’t survive in it.”

He lay back. “I remember riding fence as a kid. The outside fence alone was sixty miles, and there were two hundred miles of interior fencing. It took me and my brother the whole summer to ride fence, fixing it as we went. Damn, that was fun. We each had a horse, plus a mule to pack the roll of wire, staples, and stretcher. And our bedrolls and some food. That jack mule was a mean son of a bitch. His name was Bobb. With two bs.”

De Vaca laughed.

“We’d camp out as we went along. In the evening, we’d hobble the horses and find a low spot to lay out our bedrolls and light a fire. The first day out we always had a big steak, carried frozen in the saddlebags. If it was big enough, it’d just be thawed out by dinnertime. From then on, it was beans and rice. After dinner we’d lie around, faces to the stars, drinking camp coffee as the fire died down.”

Carson stopped talking. It seemed like a vague dream of centuries ago, those memories. And yet the same stars he’d looked at as a kid were still there, above his head.

“It must’ve been really hard, losing that ranch,” de Vaca said quietly.

“It was about the hardest thing that ever happened to me. My whole body and soul was part of that land.”

Carson felt a twinge of thirst. He grubbed around in the sand and found a small pebble. He rubbed it on his jeans, then placed it in his mouth.

“I liked the way you lost Nye and those other pendejos in the Hummers,” de Vaca said.

“They’re idiots,” Carson replied. “Our real enemy is the desert.”

The offhand comment made him think. It had been an easy task to lose the Hummers. Surprisingly easy. They hadn’t turned off their lights while tracking him. They hadn’t even divided up to search for the track when they reached the edge of the lava flow. Instead they had just barreled southward like lemmings. It surprised him that Nye could be so stupid.

No. Nye wouldn’t be so stupid.

For the first time, Carson wondered if Nye was with the Hummers at all. The more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed. But if he wasn’t leading the Hummers, then where the hell was he? Back at Mount Dragon, managing the crisis?

He realized, with a dull cold thrust of fear, that Nye would be out hunting them. Not in a loud, ungainly Hummer, but on that big paint horse of his.

Shit. He should have taken that horse himself, or, at the very least, driven a nail deep into his hoof.

Cursing his own lack of foresight, he looked at his watch. Three-forty- five.

Nye stopped and dismounted, examining the tracks as they headed north. In the strong yellow glow of his flashlight, he could see the individual grains of sand, almost microscopic in size, piled up at the edges of the tracks. They were fresh and precarious, and no breath of wind had disturbed them. The track could not be more than an hour old. Carson was moving ahead at a slow trot, making no further attempt to hide or confuse his trail. Nye figured the two were about five miles ahead. They would stop and hide at sunrise, someplace where they could rest the horses during the heat of the day.

That’s when he would take them.

He remounted Muerto and urged him into a fast trot. The best time to catch them would be just at dawn, before they even realized they were being followed. Hang back, wait for enough light for a clean shot. His own mount was doing fine, a little damp from the exertion but nothing more. He could maintain this pace for another fifty miles. And there were still ten gallons of water.

Suddenly he heard something. He quickly switched off his light and stopped. A gentle breeze blew out of the south, carrying the sound away from him. He stilled his horse, waiting. Five minutes passed, then ten. The breeze shifted a little, and he heard voices raised in argument, then the faint tinking of something that sounded like saddle rigging.

They had stopped already. The fools figured they had shaken their pursuers and could relax. He waited, hardly breathing. The voice—the other voice—said nothing.

Nye dismounted and led his horse back behind a gentle ridgeline, where he would be hidden and could graze unmolested. Then he crept back to the lip of the basin. He could hear the murmuring voices in the pool of darkness below.

He lay on his stomach at what he estimated was three hundred yards. The voices were clearer now; a few yards closer and he’d be able to make out what they were saying. Perhaps they were planning how to dispose of the gold. His gold. But he wasn’t going to let curiosity spoil everything.

But even if they saw him, where were they going to go? At some earlier time, he might actually have enjoyed alerting them to his presence. They would have to run off immediately, of course, with no chance to retrieve their horses. The chase would make good, if brief, sport. There was no better shooting than in an open desert like this. It was little different from hunting ibex in the Hejaz. Except that an ibex moved at forty-five miles an hour, and a human at twelve.

Hunting down that bastard Teece had proved to be excellent sport, much better than he could have anticipated. The dust storm had provided an interesting element of complication, and—when he’d left Muerto standing riderless in the path of the oncoming Hummer—made it easier for him to hide while enticing the investigator to leave his vehicle for a moment. And Teece himself had been an unexpected surprise. The scrawny-looking fellow proved much more resilient than Nye expected, taking cover in the storm, running, resisting to the end. Perhaps he’d been expecting an ambush. In any case, there had been no death-fear in his eyes to savor, no groveling pleas for mercy, there at the end. Now the nancy-boy was safely under several feet of sand, deeper than any vulture’s beak or coyote’s paw could ever probe. And his filthy sneaking secrets were entombed with him. They would never reach their intended destination.

But all that had taken place a lifetime ago. Before Carson had escaped with his forbidden knowledge. Nye’s unique brand of loyalty to GeneDyne, his blind dedication to Scopes, had been incinerated with the explosion. Now, no distractions remained for him.

He checked his watch. Three-forty-five. An hour to first light.

GeneDyne Boston, the headquarters of GeneDyne International, was a postmodern leviathan that towered over the waterfront. Although the Boston Aquarium complained bitterly about being in its shadow throughout most of the daylight hours, the sixty-story tower of black granite and Italian marble was considered one of the finest designs in the city. During the summer months, its atrium was crowded with tourists having their pictures taken beneath the Calder Mezzoforte, largest free-hanging mobile in the world. On all but the coldest days, people would line up in front of the building’s facade, cameras in hand, to watch five fountains trade arching jets of water in, a complex and computerized ballet.

But the biggest draw of all was the virtual-reality screens arranged along the walls of the public lobby. Standing twelve feet high and employing a proprietary high-definition imaging system, the panels displayed pictures of various GeneDyne sites throughout the world: London, Brussels, Nairobi, Budapest. When combined, the displays formed one massive landscape, breathtaking in its realism. Since the images were computer-controlled, they were not static: trees waved in the breeze in front of the Brussels research facility, and red double-decker buses rumbled in front of the London office. Clouds moved across skies that lightened and darkened with the passing of the day. The displays were the most public example of Scopes’s advocacy of emerging technologies. When the landscapes were changed, on the fifteenth of each month, the local news broadcasts never failed to run a story on the new images.

From his parking place in the access road along the rear of the tower, Levine craned his neck upward, gazing at the spot where the unbroken facade suddenly receded, in a maze of cubes, toward the building’s summit. Those upper floors of the building, he knew, were Scopes’s personal domain. No camera had penetrated them since a photo spread in Vanity Fair five years earlier. Somewhere, on the sixtieth floor, beyond the security stations and the computer-controlled locks, was Scopes’s famous octagonal room.

He continued to look speculatively upward. Then he ducked his head back inside the van and resumed reading a heavy paperbound manual titled Digital Telephony.

True to his word, Mime had spent the last two hours preparing Levine, turning to his connections within the byzantine hacker community, reaching out into remote information banks, threading mysterious datastreams. One by one, like some modern-day league of Baker Street Irregulars, strangers had arrived at Levine’s hotel-room door. Boys, mostly; urchins and orphans of the hacker underground. One had brought him an ID card, identifying him as one Joseph O’Roarke of the New England Telephone Company. Levine recognized the photo on the card as one of himself that had appeared in Business Week two years before. The card attached to a clip on the front pocket of the phone-company uniform that the valet had delivered earlier.

A kid with an impudent curl to his lip had delivered a small piece of electronic equipment that looked somewhat like a garage-door opener. Another had brought several technical manuals—forbidden bibles within the phone phreaking community. Lastly, a slightly older youth had brought him the keys to a telephone-company van waiting below in the lot of the Holiday Inn. Levine was to leave the keys under the dashboard. The youth had said he’d be needing the van around seven in the morning; for what, he had not said.

Mime had remained in frequent modem contact: downloading the building blueprints to Levine and walking him through such security arrangements as he’d been able to ascertain, providing background on the cover Levine would use to gain access to the building. Finally, he’d transmitted a lengthy program to Levine’s computer, with instructions on its use.

But now, Levine’s laptop was on the seat next to him, powered down, and Mime was in some remote unguessable location. Now, there was nobody but Levine himself.

He shut the manual and closed his eyes a moment, whispering a brief prayer to the close and silent darkness. Then he picked up his laptop, stepped out of the van, and shut its door loudly, walking away without glancing back. The brisk harbor air had a faint overlay of diesel. He tried to move at the ambling, unhurried pace of technicians everywhere. The weight of the orange line-testing telephone bounced awkwardly against his hip. In his head, he once again went over the various paths the upcoming conversation could take. Then he swallowed hard. There were so many possibilities, and he was prepared for so few.

Stepping up to an unmarked door in the building’s backside, he pressed a buzzer. There was a long silence in which Levine struggled to keep from walking away. Then came a squawk of static and a voice said, “Yes?”

“Phone company,” Levine said in what he hoped was a flat voice.

“What is it?” the voice did not sound particularly impressed.

“Our computers show the T-1 lines as being down at this location,” Levine said. “I’m here to check it out.”

“All external lines are down,” came the voice. “It’s a temporary condition.”

Levine hesitated a moment. “You can’t shut down leased lines. It’s against regulations.”

“It’s a done deal.”

Shit. “What’s your name, son?”

Long silence. “Weiskamp.“

“All right, Weiskamp. Regulations require that leased point-to-point communications be kept open once established. But listen, I’ll tell you what. I don’t want to have to go back and fill out a lot of paperwork on you. And I know you and your supervisor don’t want to give a long explanation to the FCC. So I’ll put a temporary terminator on the lines. Once you bring the system back up, the sites will be reopened automatically.” Levine hoped he sounded more convincing to the disembodied voice inside than he did to himself.

No response.

“Otherwise, we’re going to have to pull those circuits manually, from the external junction. And they won’t be there when you go live again.”

A sound like a sigh came through the small speaker beside the buzzer. “Let’s see some ID.” Levine looked around, spotted a camera lens set inconspicuously above one edge of the doorframe, and angled the badge hanging from his breast pocket in its direction. As he waited, Levine wondered idly why he’d been given the name O’Roarke. He hoped to hell that a Jewish professor from Brookline could imitate a Boston Irish drawl.

There was a loud click, followed by the sound of something heavy being rolled back. The door opened and a tall man peered out, long blond curls falling onto the collar of his gray-and-blue GeneDyne uniform.

“This way,” the man said, nodding Levine inside.

Cradling his laptop carefully, Levine followed the guard down a long flight of corrugated iron stairs. From below his feet came the throaty hum of a huge generator. The concrete walls sweated in the humid air.

The guard opened a door marked AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY, then stood back, letting Levine enter first. Levine walked into a room crammed floor to ceiling with what he assumed to be digital switches and network relays. Banks of MAUs were arrayed in countless rows on metal racks. Although he knew that the real brain of GeneDyne—the massively-parallel supercomputer that fed the monstrous global network—was housed elsewhere, this room held the guts of the system, the Ethernet cables that allowed the building’s occupants to interconnect in one vast electronic nervous system.

Up ahead, he saw the outlines of the central relay console. Another guard was sitting at one end of the console, staring at a monitor built into its frame. He turned as Levine stepped in. “Who’s this?” he asked, frowning and looking from Levine to Weiskamp.

“Who do you think, fuckin’ Tinkerbell?” Weiskamp replied. “He’s here about the leased lines.”

“I’ve got to put a temporary terminator on them,” Levine said, placing his laptop on the terminal and scanning the complex controls for the jack Mime had told him was sure to be there.

“I never heard nothing about that,” the guard said.

“You’ve never cut them off before,” Levine retorted.

The guard mumbled something threatening about “cutting them off,” but made no move to stop him. Levine continued to scan the controls, a small warning tone sounding in his head as he did so. This second guard was trouble.

There it was: the network access port. Mime had told him the GeneDyne headquarters was so heavily networked that even the bathroom stalls sported outlet jacks for busy executives to use. Quickly, Levine turned on his laptop and connected it to the access port.

“What are you doing?” the guard at the terminal said suspiciously. He stood up and began to walk toward the laptop.

“Running the termination program,” Levine replied.

“Never seen one of you guys use a computer before,” the guard said.

Levine shrugged. “You change with the times. Now, you can just send a termination signal down the line to the control unit. Completely automatic.”

A phone-company logo popped up on the laptop screen, followed by scrolling lines of data. Despite his nervousness, Levine suppressed a smile. Mime had thought of everything. While the screen was busy displaying complicated nonsense to entertain the guards, a program of Mime’s own design was being inserted into the GeneDyne network.

“I think we’d better tell Endicott about this,” the suspicious guard said.

The alarm began to ring louder in Levine’s head.

“Put a sock in it, will you?” Weiskamp said irritably. “I’ve heard enough of your noise.”

“You know the drill, pal. Endicott is supposed to okay any maintenance work being done on the system from outside.”

The laptop chirped, and the phone company logo reappeared. Levine quickly yanked the cable out of the network jack.

“See?” Weiskamp said. “He’s done.”

“I’ll see myself out,” Levine said as the other guard reached for an internal phone. “Accounting will send a completed work order once you go back on-line.”

Levine returned to the hallway. Weiskamp had not followed him. That was good; one less role he’d have to play later on.

But that other guard, the suspicious one, was probably calling Endicott. And that was bad. If Endicott—whoever he was—decided to call the phone company and check out an employee named O’Roarke ...

At the top of the stairs, Levine turned right, then moved down a short hallway. The bank of service elevators lay directly ahead, just as Mime had assured him they would.

He entered the nearest service elevator and took it to the second floor. The door whisked open onto an entirely different world. Gone were the drab concrete spaces, the four-foot lengths of fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceilings. Instead, a plush indigo carpet rolled back from the elevator doors and along an elegant corridor. Small violet lights in the ceiling threw colored circles on the thick nap. Levine noticed large black squares lining the walls at regular intervals. He was puzzled until he realized the black squares were actually flat-panel displays, currently dark. During the day, the panels no doubt displayed digitized works of art, floor directories, stock-market quotations—almost anything imaginable.

He stepped out of the elevator, down a deserted corridor, and around another corner to the public elevators. As he pressed the Up button, a chime sounded and one of the bank of black elevator doors whispered open. Looking around one last time, he stepped in. The elevator was carpeted in the same lustrous indigo as the hallway. The side walls were lined in a light, dense wood Levine assumed was teak. The rear wall was glass, affording a spectacular pre-dawn view of Boston Harbor. Countless lights shimmered far below his feet.

Floor, please, said the elevator.

He had to work quickly now. Locating the network hub beneath the emergency telephone, he plugged his laptop into the metal receptacle. Quickly, he turned on the computer’s power and typed a short command: curtain.

He waited as Mime’s program disconnected the video feed for his elevator’s security camera, recorded ten seconds of the adjoining car’s video, and patched it in as a loop. Now the security camera would show an empty elevator: appropriate for one that was about to be placed out of service.

Floor, please, said the elevator.

Levine typed another command: cripple.

The elevator lights dimmed, then brightened again. The doors hissed shut. Levine watched the passing floors light up above the door. As the seventh floor slid by, the elevator coasted to a stop.

Attention, please, the voice announced smoothly. This elevator is out of service.

Unclipping the portable orange phone from his belt, Levine sat down, his back against the elevator door, the laptop balanced on his knees. Reaching into a pocket, he brought out the odd-looking device the hacker had given him earlier in the evening and attached it to the serial port of the computer. From one end of the device, he untelescoped a short antenna. Then he typed another command: sniff.

The screen cleared, and the response came almost immediately. My main man! I assume that all has gone well and you are now safe in the elevator, between floors seven and eight.

I’m between floors seven and eight, Levine typed back, but I’m not sure all has gone well. Somebody named Endicott may have been alerted to my presence.

I’ve seen that name before, came the response. I think he’s head of security. Just a moment. Once again, the screen went blank.

I’ve done a brief survey of net activity within the GeneDyne building, Mime replied after several minutes. All seems quiet in the enemy’s camp. Are you ready to proceed?

Against his better judgment, Levine replied: Yes.

Very good. Remember what I told you, professor-man. Scopes, and Scopes alone, controls the computer security of the upper floors of the building. That means you have to sneak into his personal cyberspace. I’ve told you what I know about it. It will be like nothing you could possibly imagine. Nobody knows much about Scopes’s cyberspace beyond the few working images he showed years ago at the Center for Advanced Neurocybernetics. At the time, he spoke of a new technology he was developing called ‘cypherspace.’ It’s some kind of three-dimensional environment, his private home base from which he can surf his network at will. Since then, nada. I guess the thing was so bodacious he wanted to hog it all for himself. I’ve determined from the compiler logs that the program runs to fifteen million lines of code. It’s the Big Kahuna of coding, professor-man. I know where the cypherspace server is located, and I can provide a navigation tool that will allow you access to it. But nothing more. You need to be physically inside the building to jack in.

But can’t I bring you along, using this remote link?

NFW, came the response. The omnidirectional infrared unit attached to your laptop allows us to communicate only through the standard net, and only from a roaming-enabled access point. GeneDyne’s internal transceiver is located on the seventh floor, within spitting distance of your elevator. That’s why I parked you there.

Isn’t there anything else you can tell me?

I can tell you that the computing resources this Scopes program soaks up makes the SAC missile-trajectory routines look like bean-counters. And it takes up entire terabytes of data storage. Only massive video archives would require that. It may well be much more real than you can imagine.

Not likely, on a nine-inch laptop screen, Levine replied.

Have you been sleeping through my lectures, professor-man? Scopes is working with much larger canvases in his headquarters. Or hadn’t you noticed?

Levine started blankly at the words. Then he realized what Mime meant.

He looked up from the laptop. The view out of the elevator was breathtaking. But there was something odd that, in his haste, he hadn’t noticed when he first entered. The stars in the eastern sky hung over the quiet scene. He could see the harbor spread out below him, a million tiny pinpoints of light in the warm Massachusetts darkness.

Yet he was only on the seventh floor. The view he was seeing should be from a much higher vantage point.

It was no wall of glass he was staring out of. It was a wall-sized flat-panel display, currently showing a virtual image of an imaginary view outside the GeneDyne building.

I understand, he typed.

Good. I have marked your elevator as being out of service and under repair. That should keep prying eyes away. However, I would not stay longer than necessary. I’ll remain on the net here as long as I can, updating its repair status from time to time, to avoid any suspicion. That’s all, I’m afraid, that I can do to protect you.

Thank you, Mime.

One more word. You said something about this not being a game. I would ask you to remember your own advice. GeneDyne takes a dim view of intruders, within cyberspace or without. You’re embarked on an extremely dangerous journey. If they find you, I will be forced to flee. There will be nothing I can do for you, and I have no intention of being a martyr a second time. You see, if they find me, they’ll take my computers. If that happens, I might as well be dead.

I understand, Levine typed again.

There was a pause. It is possible that we may never speak again, professor. I would like to say that I have valued this acquaintance with you.

And I as well.

MTRRUTMY;MTWABAYB;MYBIHHAHBTDKYAD.

Mime?

Just a sentimental old Irish saying, Professor Levine. Good-bye.

The screen winked to black. There was no time now to decipher Mime’s parting acronym. Taking a deep breath, Levine typed another brief command:

Lancet.

“What is it?” de Vaca asked as Carson sat up abruptly.

“I just smelled something,” he whispered. “I think it’s a horse.” He licked his finger and held it up in the drifting air.

“One of ours?”

“No. The wind’s from the wrong direction. I swear to God, I just smelled a sweaty horse. From behind us.”

There was a silence. Carson felt a sudden cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was Nye. There was no other explanation. And the man was very close.

“Are you sure—?”

Quickly, Carson covered her mouth with one hand, and with the other drew her ear close to his lips.

“Listen to me. Nye is waiting out there somewhere. He didn’t go with the Hummers. Once dawn breaks, we’re dead. We’ve got to get out of here, and we’ve got to do it in utter silence. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” came the strained reply.

“We’ll move toward the sound of our horses. But we’ll have to walk by feel. Don’t just plant one foot in front of the other; let it rest an inch above the ground until you’re sure you have a clear step. If we step on some dry grass or a piece of brush, he’ll hear it. We’ll have to untie the hobbles without making a sound. Don’t get on your horse at first—lead it away. We’d better go east, back toward the lava fields. It’s our only hope of losing him. Head ninety degrees to the right of the North Star.”

He felt, more than saw, de Vaca’s head rise and fall in a vigorous nod.

“I’ll be going the same way, but don’t try to follow me. It’s too dark for that. Just try to maintain as straight a course as possible. Keep low, because he might glimpse you moving against the stars. We’ll be able to see each other at first light.”

“But what if he hears—?”

“If he comes after us, run like hell for the lava. When you get there, ditch your horse, whack him on the ass, and hide as best you can. Like as not he’ll follow your horse.” He paused. “That’s the best I can do. Sorry.”

There was a brief silence. Carson realized that de Vaca was trembling slightly, and he released her. His hand groped for hers, found it, squeezed.

They moved slowly toward the linking sound of the horses. Carson knew that their chances of survival, never good, were now minute. It had been bad enough without Nye. But the security director had found them. And he’d found them very quickly—he hadn’t been fooled for a moment by their detour on the lava. He had the better horse. And that damned wicked rifle.

Carson realized he had grossly underestimated Nye.

As he crept across the sand, a sudden image of Charley, his half-Lite great-uncle, came back into his mind. He wondered what synaptic trick had brought Charley to mind, now of all times.

Most of the old man’s stories had been about a Ute ancestor named Gato who had undertaken numerous livestock raids against the Navajos and U.S. cavalry. Charley had loved to recount those raids. There were other stories about Gato’s tracking exploits, his skill with a horse. And the various tricks he’d used to throw off pursuers, usually of the official variety. Charley had recounted all these stories with quiet relish, there in the rocking chair before the fire.

Carson found Roscoe in the dark and began untying his hobbles, whispering soothing words to forestall any inquiring whinnies. The horse stopped grazing and pricked up his ears. Carson gently stroked the horse’s neck, slipped off the lead rope, and carefully removed the cinch from the halter. Then, with infinite care, he clipped the bullsnap on the halter and looped the lead rope around the saddle horn. He stopped to listen: the silence of the night was absolute.

Guiding the horse by the halter strap, Carson led him westward.

One of his legs had gone to sleep, and Nye carefully shifted position, cradling the rifle between his arms as he did so. The faintest glow was appearing in the east, over the Fra Cristóbal Mountains. Another ten minutes, maybe less. He glanced around into the darkness, satisfying himself once again that he was well hidden. He looked back behind the rise and saw the dim outlines of his horse, still standing at attention, awaiting his next command. He smiled to himself. Only the English really knew how to train their horses. This American cowboy mystique was bollocks. They knew next to nothing about horses.

He turned his attention back to the broad, shallow hollow. In a few minutes the ambient light would show him what he needed to see.

With infinite care he slid back the safety on the Holland &. Holland. A stationary, perhaps sleeping, target at three hundred yards. He smiled at the thought.

The light grew behind the Fra Cristóbals, and Nye scanned the basin for dark shapes that would indicate horses or people. There was a scattering of soapweed yucca, looking damnably like people in the half light. But he could see nothing large enough to be a horse.

He waited, hearing the slow strong beat of his heart. He was pleased at the steadiness of his breathing, at the dryness of his palm against the rifle’s buttstock.

It slowly began to dawn on him that the basin was empty.

And the voice came again: a low, cynical snicker. He turned, and there was a shadow in the half light.

“Who the hell are you?” Nye murmured.

The chuckle built in intensity, until the laughter echoed across the landscape. And Nye recognized the laugh as being remarkably like his own.

In an instant, Boston faded to black.

The breathtaking view from the elevator was gone. The landscape had seemed so real that, for a horrible instant, Levine wondered if he had suddenly been struck blind. Then he realized the subdued lights of the elevator were still on, and it was merely the wall-sized display in front of him that had gone dark. He stretched his hand forward to touch the surface. It was hard and opaque, similar to the panels he had seen in the GeneDyne corridor but much larger.

Then, suddenly, the elevator was twice as large as it had been. Several businessmen in suits, briefcases in hand, stared down at him. Levine almost knocked the computer from his lap and jumped to his feet before he realized that, again, this was simply an image projected on the display: an image that made the elevator deeper, and populated it with imaginary GeneDyne staffers. Levine marveled at the video resolution necessary to create such a lifelike image.

Then the image changed again, and the blackness of space yawned before him. Below, the gray surface of the moon spun lazily in the clear ether, revealing its pocked surface without shame. Behind it, Levine could see the faint curve of the Earth, a blue marble hanging in the distant black. The sensation of depth was profound; Levine had to close his eyes for a minute to allow the vertigo to pass.

He realized what was happening. As Mime’s lancet program drilled into Scopes’s private server, it must have interrupted the normal routine of the software bindery controlling the elevator images. Temporarily without control, the various available images were being displayed one by one, like a fantastically expensive slide show. Levine wondered what other vistas Scopes had programmed into the display for the amusement or consternation of the elevator passengers.

The image changed again, and Levine found himself staring at a bizarre landscape: a three-dimensional construction of walkways and buildings, rising from a vast, apparently bottomless space. He appeared to be gazing at this landscape from a terrazzo platform, tiled in muted browns, reds, and yellows. From the end of the platform, a series of bridges and walkways led in many directions: some up, some down, and some continuing horizontally, falling away in various directions to spaces inconceivably vast. Rising among the walkways were dozens of enormous structures, dark with countless tiny illuminated windows. Running between the buildings were great streams of colored light that forked and flickered into the distance, like lightning.

The landscape was beautiful, even awe-inspiring in its complexity, but in a few minutes Levine grew impatient, wondering what was taking Mime’s program so long to access GeneDyne cyberspace. He shifted his position on the floor of the elevator.

The landscape moved.

Levine looked down. He realized that he had inadvertently moved the rolling trackball that was built into the keyboard of his laptop. Placing his hand on the trackball, he rolled it forward.

Immediately, the terrazzo surface in front of him fell backward, and he found himself balanced on the very edge of space, a slender walkway ahead of him, floating like gossamer in the black void. The smoothness of the video response on the huge display made the sense of forward motion almost unbearably real.

Levine took a deep breath. He wasn’t simply looking at a video image this time: he was inside Scopes’s cyberspace.

Levine removed his hands from the laptop for a minute, steadying himself. Then, carefully, he placed one hand on the trackball and the other on the cursor keys of his laptop. Painstakingly, he began the task of learning how to control his own movement within the bizarre landscape. The immensity of the elevator screen—and the remarkably lifelike resolution of the image itself—made comprehension difficult. Always, he was troubled by vertigo. Though he knew he was only in cyberspace, the fear of falling off the terrazzo platform into the depths below kept his movements excessively slow and deliberate.

At last, he set the laptop aside and massaged his back. Idly, he glanced at his watch, and was shocked to learn that an hour had gone by. One hour, and he hadn’t moved from the platform he’d started on. The fascination of this computer environment was both amazing and alarming. But it was time to find Scopes.

As his hands returned to the laptop, Levine became aware of a low, sighing sound, almost like singing. It was coming from the same speakers the elevator had used to announce the floors. When it had started, Levine could not say; perhaps it had been there all along. He was unable to take even a remote guess at its purpose.

Levine found himself growing concerned. He had to find Scopes in this three-dimensional representation of GeneDyne cyberspace, reason with him, explain the desperate situation. But how? Clearly this cyberspace was too vast to just wander around in. And even if he found Scopes, how would he recognize him?

He had to think the problem through. Vast and complex as this landscape was, it had to serve some purpose, have some design. In the past several years, Scopes had been extremely secretive about his cyberspace project. Little was known beyond the fact that Scopes was creating it to make his own extensive journeys through the interconnected network of GeneDyne computers easier.

Yet it seemed obvious that everything—the surfaces, shapes, and perhaps sounds—represented the hardware, software, and data of the GeneDyne computer network.

Levine took a walkway at random and moved carefully along it, trying to accustom himself to the bizarre sense of motion imparted by the vast screen in front of him. He was on a bridge without a railing, tiled in its own complicated pattern. The pattern would mean something, but he had no idea what: different byte configurations, or sequences of binary numbers?

The walkway snaked between several buildings of differing shapes and sizes, ending at last in a massive silver door. He moved to the door and tried to go through it. The eerie, floating music seemed to get louder, but nothing happened. He returned to an intersection and took another walkway, which crossed one of the rivers of colored light that streamed between the buildings. He stepped into the river, and it became a torrent of hexadecimal code, streaming past at a dizzying rate. He quickly stepped out of the stream.

He had discovered one thing: The streams of light were data-transfer operations.

So far, he had used only the trackball and cursor keys of his laptop. The cypherspace program would certainly recognize keystrokes of one form or another: mnemonics, commands, or shortcuts. He typed the sentence universally used by coders trying out new computer languages: Hello, world.

When he hit the enter key, the words “Hello, world” sang out in a musical whisper from the speakers. They echoed and reechoed through the vast spaces until dying away at last beneath the strange musical sighing.

There was no answer.

Scopes! he typed. The word rang out, dying away like a cry. Again, no answer.

Levine wished Mime were there to help him. He looked at his watch again; another hour had passed, and he was just as lost now as he’d been at the beginning. He looked away from the screen, and around the tiny elevator. He did not have unlimited time to explore. He’d wandered about long enough. Now he had to think fast.

What did one do when one was stuck in an application? Or in a computer game?

One asks for help.

Help, he typed.

Ahead of him, the landscape changed subtly. Something formed out of nothing, appearing at the far end of the walkway. It circled, then stopped, as if noticing Levine. Then, it began moving toward him with remarkable speed.

When he felt he had put sufficient distance between himself and the basin, Carson released Roscoe’s halter and climbed into the saddle. He found himself going over, again and again, his first confrontation with Nye in the desert. He remembered the cruel laughter that had floated over the sands toward him. He found himself waiting to hear that laugh again—much closer now—and the sharp sound of a rifle bullet snugging into its chamber. To distract himself he turned his thoughts back to his great-uncle and his stories about Gato. He remembered a story about his ancestor and the telegraph. When at last he’d figured out how it worked, Gato cut the wires, then strung them back up with tiny thongs of leather to conceal the break. It had driven the cavalry crazy, his great-uncle told him.

Gato had a lot of tricks to throw off trackers. He would ride down streams and then ride out of them backward. He would make phony horse trails across slickrock and into dangerous trap canyons. Or over cliffs, using a horseshoe and a stone ...

Carson racked his brains. What else?

It was growing light in the eastern sky. At any moment Nye would discover them gone. That gave them a half hour’s lead, at most. Unless Nye had learned of their deception already. He was too damn close; they had to make time.

As the light came up he scanned the horizon. With enormous relief, he made out the small figure of de Vaca, gray against black, trotting perhaps a quarter mile ahead of him. He turned toward her, urging Roscoe into an easy lope.

The real problem was that, even in lava, iron horseshoes left clear impressions on the stones. A horse weighed half a ton, and was balanced on four skinny iron shoes that left sharp white marks all over the rock. Once you knew what to look for, it didn’t take any special talent to track a horse over rock; it was far easier, for example, than tracking a horse in shortgrass prairie. Nye had already demonstrated he had more than enough talent. But at least the lava would slow Nye down.

Carson slowed, matching the gait of de Vaca’s horse. The image of his great-uncle returned: old Charley’s face, laughing in the glow of the fire as he rocked back and forth. Laughing about Gato. Gato, the trickster. Gato, the bedeviler of white men.

“God, am I glad to see you,” de Vaca said. She grabbed his hand briefly as they trotted.

The warmth of her hand, the touch of another person after the long creeping journey in the dark, brought a surge of renewed hope to his soul. He scanned the lava flow that lay before them, a black, jagged line against the horizon.

“Let’s move well into that lava,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”

The object stopped directly in front of him. Levine noticed with disbelief that it seemed to be a small dog, apparently a miniature collie. Levine stared, fascinated, marveling at the lifelike way with which the computer-generated animal wagged its tail and stood at attention. Even the black nose glistened in the otherworldly light that surrounded it.

Who are you? Levine typed.

Phido, the voice said. It raised its head, displaying a collar from which a small name tag hung. Looking closer, Levine saw the engraved words: PHIDO. PROPERTY OF BRENTWOOD SCOPES. Almost despite himself, Levine smiled. Scopes’s interests, after all, had a lot in common with hackers and phone phreaks.

I’m looking for Brent Scopes, Levine wrote.

I see, said the voice.

Can you take me to him?

No.

Why not?

I don’t know where he is.

What are you?

I am a dog.

Levine gritted his teeth.

What kind of program are you? he asked.

I am the front end for an AI-based help system. However, the help system was never enabled, so I’m afraid I really can’t provide any assistance at all.

Then what is your purpose?

Are you interested in my functionality? I am a program, written by Brent Scopes in his own version of C++, which he calls C³. It is an object-oriented language with visual extensions. It is primarily used for three-dimensional modeling, with built-in hooks for polygon shading, light-sourcing, and various rendering tools. It also directly supports wide-area network communications, using a variant of the TCP/IP protocol.

This was getting Levine nowhere. Why can’t you help me? he typed.

As I said, the help subsystem was never implemented. As an object-oriented program, I adhere to the tenets of data encapsulation and inheritance. I can access certain base classes of objects, like the AI subroutines and data-storage algorithms. But I cannot access the internal workings of other objects, just as they cannot access mine without the necessary code.

Levine nodded to himself. He wasn’t surprised that the help system had never been completed; after all, Brent wouldn’t need help himself, and nobody else was supposed to be wandering around his Cypherspace program. Probably Phido was one of the first elements Brent had put together, back in the early days before he’d decided to seal the lid of secrecy on his creation. Before he’d decided to keep this incredible world to himself.

So what good are you? Levine wrote.

From time to time, I keep Mr. Scopes company. I see you are not Mr. Scopes, however.

How do you see that?

Because you are lost. If you were Mr. Scopes—

Never mind. Levine thought it better not to move in that direction. He still did not know what kind of security mechanisms, if any, were built into Cypherspace.

He thought for a minute. Here was an object-oriented companion with artificial-intelligence links. Like the old pseudo-therapeutic program ELIZA, taken to the ultimate limit. Phido. It was Scopes’s idea of a cyberspace dog.

Can’t you do anything? he typed.

I can offer deliriously cynical quotes for your enjoyment.

That made sense. Scopes would never lose his obsessive love of aphorisms.

For example: “If you pick up a starving dog, and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” Mark Twain. Or: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Gore—

Please shut up.

Levine could feel his impatience growing. He was here to find Scopes, not bandy words with a program in this endless maze of cyberspace. He glanced at his watch: another half hour wasted. He followed the path to another juncture, then took one of the branching paths, wandering among the immense structures. The small dog followed silently at his heels.

Then Levine saw something unusual: a particularly massive building, set well apart from the others. Despite its immense size and central location, no colored bands of light played from its roof toward the other structures.

What is that building? he asked.

I do not know, Phido replied.

He looked at the building more closely. Although its lines were almost too perfect—the work of a computer’s hand, within a cybernetic world—he recognized the famous silhouette without difficulty.

The GeneDyne Boston building.

An image of the building inside the computer. What did it represent? The answer came to him quickly: it was the cyberspace re-creation of the computer system inside the GeneDyne headquarters. The network, the home-office terminals, even the headquarters security system, would be inside that rendering. The buildings around him represented the various GeneDyne locations throughout the world. No streams of colored light were flowing from the headquarters roof because all outside communications with the other GeneDyne installations had been cut off. Had Mime been able to learn more about the workings of Scopes’s program, perhaps he could have placed Levine inside, saving valuable time.

Levine approached the building curiously, taking a descending pathway to the base of the structure and approaching the front door. As he maneuvered himself against it, the strange music changed to an offensive buzz. The door was locked. Levine peered through the glass into the lobby. There, rendered in breathtaking detail, was the Calder mobile, the security desk. There were no people, but he noted with amazement that banks of CRT screens behind the security desk were displaying images from remote video cameras. And the feed he was viewing was undoubtedly live.

How do I get inside? he asked Phido.

Beats me, Phido said.

Levine thought for a moment, combing his spotty knowledge of modern computing techniques.

Phido. You are a help object.

Correct.

And you stated you were a front end to other objects and subroutines.

Correct.

And what does that mean, exactly?

I am the interface between the user and the program.

So you receive commands and pass them on to other programs for action.

Yes.

In the form of keystrokes?

That is correct.

And the only person who has used you is Brent Scopes.

Yes.

Do you retain these keystrokes, or have access to them?

Yes.

Have you been to this location before?

Yes.

Please duplicate all the keystrokes that took place here.

Phido spoke: “Insanity: A perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.” Laing.

There was a chime from the speakers. Then the door clicked open.

Levine smiled, realizing that the aphorisms themselves must be security pass phrases. Yet another use for The Game they had once made their own. Besides, he realized, quotations made excellent passwords; they were long and complicated and could never be hit upon by accident or by a dictionary attack. Scopes knew them by heart, and therefore never had to write them down. It was perfect.

Phido was going to be more helpful than even Phido realized.

Quickly, Levine maneuvered himself inside with the trackball and moved past the guard station. He paused a minute, trying to recall the layout of the headquarters blueprints Mime had downloaded to him earlier in the evening. Then he moved past the main elevator bank toward a secondary security station. Inside the real building, he knew, this station would be heavily manned. Beyond was a smaller bank of elevators. Approaching the closest one, he pressed its call button. As the doors opened, Levine maneuvered himself inside. He typed the number 60 on the numeric keypad of his laptop: the top floor of the GeneDyne headquarters, the location of Scopes’s octagonal room.

Thank you, said the same neutral voice that had controlled his elevator. Please enter the security password now.

Phido, run the keystrokes for this location, Levine typed.

“One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.” Heine.

As the cyberspace elevator rose to the sixtieth floor, Levine tried not to think about the paradoxical situation he was immersed in: sitting cross-legged in an elevator, stopped between floors, jacked into a computer network within which he was moving in another elevator, in simulated three-dimensional space.

The virtual elevator slowed, then stopped. With the trackball, Levine moved out into the corridor beyond. At the end of the long corridor, he could see another guard station under the watchful glare of an immense number of closed-circuit screens. Undoubtedly, every location on the sixtieth floor and the floors immediately beneath was under active video. He approached the monitors, scrutinizing each one in turn. They showed rooms, corridors, massive computer arrays—even the very guard station he was at—but nothing that could be Scopes.

From Mime’s security blueprints, Levine knew that the octagonal room was in the center of the building. No window views for Scopes; the only view he was interested in was the view from a computer screen.

Levine moved past the guard station and veered left down a dimly lit corridor. At the far end was another guard station. Moving past it, Levine found himself in a short hallway, doors flanking both sides. At the far end was a massive door, currently closed.

That door, Levine knew, led to the octagon itself.

With the trackball, Levine maneuvered down the corridor and against the door itself. It was locked.

Phido, he wrote, run the keystrokes for this location.

Are you going to leave me now? the cyber-dog asked. Levine thought he sensed a plaintiveness to the question.

Why do you ask? he typed.

I cannot follow you through that door.

Levine hesitated. I’m sorry, Phido, but I must continue. Please play back the keystrokes for this location.

Very well. “If all the girls who attended the Harvard-Yale game were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” Dorothy Parker.

With a distinct click, the massive black door sprang ajar. Levine paused, took a deep breath, and steadied his hand on the trackball. Then, very slowly, he maneuvered himself forward into what he knew must be Scopes’s mysterious Cypherspace.

Nye stood in the center of the basin, Muerto’s reins in his hand. The story of his humiliation was written clearly in the sand and grass. Somehow, Carson and the woman must have sensed his presence. They’d snuck over to their horses and led them away—without his hearing a bloody thing. It was almost inconceivable that they could have pulled it off. Yet the tracks did not lie.

He turned. The shadow was still by his side_s but when he looked at it directly it seemed to disappear.

He walked to the edge of the basin. The two had headed east toward the lava beds, where, no doubt, they hoped to lose him. Although riding through the lava beds was slow work, Nye would have little trouble tracking them. With two gallons of water, it was only a matter of time before their horses would start to weaken. There was no hurry. The edge of the Jornada desert was still almost one hundred miles away.

Nye swung into the saddle and began to follow. They had walked their horses for a while and then mounted. The tracks gradually separated—was it a trick?—and Nye followed the heavier set of impressions, knowing they must be Carson’s.

The sun broke over the mountains, throwing immense shadows toward the horizon. As it boiled up into the sky, the shadows began to shrink, and the smell of hot sand and creosote bush rose in the air. It was going to be a hot day. A very hot day. And nowhere was it going to be hotter than in the black lava beds of El Malpaís.

He had plenty of water and ammunition. Their hour or so of lead time couldn’t amount to more than four or five miles. That gap would narrow considerably as the lava slowed them down. Though he no longer had the advantage of total surprise, their awareness of his presence would force them to travel during the heat of the day.

A half mile from the lava, the two tracks joined again. Nye followed them to the base of the flow. Without even dismounting, he could see the whitish marks on the basalt where the iron shoes had scrabbled onto the rock. Now that the sun was up, following these marks would be easy.

It was still early morning, and the temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees. In an hour it would be a hundred; in another hour, a hundred and five. At four thousand feet of altitude, with a clear sky, the sun’s heat would be overwhelming in its intensity. The only shade anywhere was the shadow under a horse’s belly. If he didn’t get them by nightfall, the desert would.

The lava bed lay ahead in great ropy masses, stretching into the limitless distance. In places there were pits of broken lava, fractured hexagonal blocks where the roofs of subterranean tubes had collapsed. In other areas there were pressure ridges where the ancient flow had shoved up rafts and blocks of lava into enormous piles. Already the ground was shimmering as the black basalt absorbed the sunlight, reemitting it as heat.

Muerto picked his way across the flow with care. The horse’s hooves rang and clattered among the rocks. A lizard shot off into a crack. Thinking about Carson and de Vaca in this heat with so little water made Nye thirsty. He took a satisfying drink from one of the water bags. The water was still cold and had a faint, pleasing taste of flax.

The shadow was still there, walking tirelessly beside his horse, visible only indirectly. It had not spoken again. Nye found himself taking comfort in its presence.

After a few miles, he dismounted to follow the marks with greater ease.

Carson and de Vaca had continued eastward toward a low cinder cone. The cone was open at the west end and almost flush with the lava flow, its sides rising like two points into the fierce blue sky. The tracks headed straight for the low opening.

Nye felt a spreading flush of triumph. Carson and the woman would be going into the cinder cone for only one reason: to take refuge. They thought they had shaken Nye by retreating back into the lava. Realizing that crossing the desert during daylight was suicide, they were going to wait in the cinder cone until darkness, and continue their journey under cover of night.

Then he noticed a wisp of smoke curling up from the inner side of the cinder cone. Nye stopped, staring in disbelief. Carson must have caught something, most likely a rabbit, and they were busy feasting. He examined the trail very carefully, and then cut for sign, checking for any possible tracks or tricks. Carson had proven to be resourceful. Perhaps there was a trail out on the far side.

Leaving Muerto at a safe distance, Nye moved cautiously, with infinite patience, remaining hidden as he circled the cinder cone. The smoke, the tracks, could be a trap of some kind.

But there was no sign of a trap. And there were no tracks leading away. The two had ridden into the cinder cone and not come out.

Immediately, Nye knew what he must do. Climb the back side of the cinder cone, where the walls of lava reared upward in jagged thrusts. From that height, he could shoot down anywhere into the cone. There would be no place to take cover.

Returning for Muerto, he moved in a slow arc, leading the horse around to the southeastern end of the cone. There, in the close and silent shadows, he ordered Muerto to stand. With great care, Nye began to creep up the side of the cinder cone, his rifle slung over his back and an extra box of ammunition in his pocket. The cinders were small and hot beneath his hands, and they rustled as he moved up the slope, but he knew that the noise would not reach inside.

Within minutes, he neared the lip of the cone. Easing the safety off the Holland & Holland, he crawled to the edge.

A hundred feet below, he could make out a smoldering fire. Draped on a chamisa bush was a bandanna that had apparently been washed and let out to dry. A T-shirt was hanging next to it. It was definitely their camp, and they had not moved on. But where the hell were they?

He glanced around. There was a hole in the side of the cinder cone, lying in deep shadow. They must be resting in the shade. And the horses? Carson would have left them hobbled some distance away to graze.

Nye sat down to wait, easing the curve of his cheek into the rifle stock. When they came out of the shade, he would pick them off.

Forty minutes went by. Then Nye saw the shadow that was now always at his side begin to stir impatiently.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“You are a fool,” the voice whispered. “You are a fool, a fool, a—”

“What?” Nye whispered.

“A man and a woman, dying of thirst, use their last water to wash a bandanna,” the voice said in a mocking tone. “In the hundred-degree heat, they light a fire. Fool, fool, fool ...”

Nye felt a prickly sensation race up his neck. The voice was right. The rotter, the bloody thieving rotter, had managed to slip away a second time. Nye stood with a curse and slid down the inside of the cinder cone, no longer making any attempt to conceal his presence. The shadowy hole in the side of the cone was empty. Nye walked around the camp, taking in at first hand its obvious phoniness. The bandanna and the T-shirt were two expendable items, designed to make him think the camp was occupied. There was no evidence that Carson and de Vaca had stopped at all, although he could see marks indicating that horses had been inside for a brief period. The fire had been hastily built with green sticks of greasewood, guaranteed to smoke.

They were now an hour and forty minutes ahead. Or perhaps a little less, considering the time it must have taken to arrange this irritating little tableau.

He returned to the opening of the cinder cone and began trying to discover where they had gone, fighting to keep anger and panic from making him sloppy. How could he have missed their exit tracks?

He moved around the periphery of the cone until he came again to the marks going in. He carefully examined the vicinity of the entrance. He followed the entrance marks, then traced them backward away from the cinder cone. Then again, and yet again. Then he cut for sign a hundred yards from the cinder cone, circling the entire formation, hoping to pick up the trail that he knew must lead out.

But there was no trail leading out. They had ridden into the cinder cone, and then vanished. Carson had tricked him. But how?

“Tell me, how?” he said aloud, spinning toward the shadow.

It moved away from him, a dark presence in the periphery of his vision, remaining scornfully silent.

He went back into the mock camp and checked the nearby hole again, more carefully this time. Nothing. He stepped backward, examining the ground. There were some patches of windblown sand and cinder fields on the floor of the cinder cone. To one side there was a small disturbed area that he had not examined before. Nye carefully knelt on his hands and knees, his eyes inches from the sand. Some of the marks showed skidding and twisting. Carson had done something to the horses in this spot, worked on them in some way. And here was where the tracks ended.

Not quite. He found a faint, partial imprint of a hoof in a patch of sand a few yards away. It showed, very clearly, why there were no longer any marks on the rocks.

The son of a bitch had pulled the iron shoes off his horses.

Within a few miles, Carson figured, they should reach the edge of the lava. He knew that it was critically important to get the horses onto sand again as soon as possible. Even though they were leading the horses rather than riding them, the horses’ hooves would quickly get sore. If they walked on lava long enough without wearing shoes, they would go lame. And then there was always the very real possibility of catastrophe—a horse cracking a hoof to the quick, or perhaps bruising the frog, the soft center of the hoof.

He knew that the naked hooves also left marks on the rock: tiny flakes and streaks of keratin from the hooves; the odd overturned stone; the crushed blade of grass; the stray imprint in a small patch of windblown sand. But these marks were extremely subtle. At the least, they would slow Nye down. Slow him considerably. Still, Carson dared remain on the lava only a few more miles. Then they would have to put the shoes back on or ride in sand.

He had decided to head north again. If they were to get out of the Jornada alive, they really had no choice. Instead of going due north, however, they had trended northeast, making sharp turns, frequent zigzags, and once doubling back in an effort to confuse and irritate Nye. They also walked their horses some distance apart, preferring two fainter trails to a single more obvious one.

Carson pinched the skin on his horse’s neck.

“What’s that for?” de Vaca asked.

“I’m checking to see if the horse is getting dehydrated,” Carson replied.

“How?”

“You pinch the skin on the neck and see how fast the wrinkle springs back. A horse’s skin loses elasticity as he becomes thirsty.”

“Another trick you learned from this Ute ancestor you told me about?” de Vaca asked.

“Yes,” Carson replied testily. “As it so happens, yes.”

“Seems you picked up a lot more from him than you’d like to admit.”

Carson felt his irritation with this subject growing. “Look,” he said, “if you’re so eager to turn me into an Indian, go ahead. I know what I am.”

“I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what you don’t know.”

“So now we’re going to have a session about my identity problem? If that’s your idea of psychotherapy, I can see why you failed as a psychiatrist.”

Immediately, de Vaca’s expression became less playful. “I didn’t fail, cabrón. I ran out of money, remember?”

They rode in silence.

“You should be proud of your Native American blood,” she said at last. “Like I am of mine.”

“You’re no Indian.”

“Guess again. The conquistadores married the conquistas. We’re all brothers and sisters, cabrón. Most old Hispanic families in New Mexico have some Aztec, Nahuatl, Navajo, or Pueblo blood.”

“Count me out of your multicultural utopia,” Carson said. “And stop calling me cabrón.”

De Vaca laughed. “Just consider how your embarrassing, whiskey-drinking great-uncle is saving our lives right now. And then think about what you have to be proud of.”

It was ten o’clock, the sun climbing high in the sky. The conversation was wasting valuable energy. Carson assessed his own thirst. It was a constant dull ache. For the moment it was merely irritating, but as the hours passed it would grow constantly worse. They had to get off the lava and start looking for water.

He could feel the heat rising from the flow in flickering waves. It came through the soles of his shoes. The plain of black, cracked lava stretched on all sides, dipping and rising, ending at last at a sharp, clean horizon. Here and there, Carson could see mirages shimmering on the surface of the lava. Some looked like blue pools of water, vibrating as if tickled by a playful wind; others were bands of parallel vertical lines, distant mountains of dream-lava. Still others hovered just above the horizon, lens-shaped reflections of the rock below. It was a surreal landscape.

As noon approached, everything turned white in the heat. The only exception was the surrounding expanse of lava, which seemed to get blacker, as if it were swallowing the light. No matter which way Carson turned, he could feel the sun’s precise angle and location in the sky, the source of an almost unbearable pressure. The heat had thickened the air, made it feel heavy and claustrophobic.

He glanced up. Several birds were riding a thermal far to the northwest, circling lazily at a high altitude. Vultures, probably hovering over a dead antelope. There wasn’t much to eat in this desert, even for vultures.

He looked more carefully at the black specks drifting high in the sky. There was a reason why they were circling and not landing: it meant there might be another scavenger on the kill. Coyotes, perhaps.

That was very important.

“Let’s head northwest,” he said. They made a sharp turn, staying apart to confuse Nye and heading toward the distant birds.

He remembered being extremely thirsty once before. He had been working a remote part of the ranch known as Coal Canyon. He’d ridden down the canyon tracking a lost bull—one of his dad’s prize Brahmans—expecting to camp and find water at the Ojo del Perillo. The Ojo had been unexpectedly dry, and he’d spent a waterless night. Toward morning his horse became tangled in his stake rope, panicked, and bowed a tendon. Carson had been forced to walk thirty miles out without water, in heat nearly equal to this. He remembered getting to Witch Well and drinking until he threw up, drinking again and throwing up, and still being utterly unable to slake his terrible thirst. When he finally got home it was old Charley who came to his rescue with a foul potion made out of water, salt and soda collected from a salt pan near the ranch house, horsehair ash, and various burned herbs. Only after he drank it did the unbearable sensation of thirst leave his body.

Carson realized now that he had been suffering from an extreme electrolyte imbalance brought on by dehydration. Charley’s evil potion had corrected it.

There were plenty of salt pans in the Jornada desert. He would have to remember to collect some of the bitter salts for that time when they found water.

His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden buzzing sound in the lava directly ahead. For a moment he wondered if he was already hallucinating from thirst. But then Roscoe’s head jerked up, and the horse, shaken out of his lethargy, began to prance in anxiety.

“Easy,” Carson said. “Easy, boy. Rattlesnake up ahead,” he warned in a louder tone.

De Vaca halted. The buzzing became more insistent.

“Jesus,” she said, backing up.

Carson searched the ground ahead with careful eyes. The snake would be in the shade; it was far too hot in the sun, even for a rattlesnake.

Then he saw it; a fat diamondback coontail coiled in an S-curve, backed up against the base of a yucca about twenty feet away, its head a good twelve inches off the ground. It was a medium-sized rattler, perhaps two and a half feet long. The snake’s coils were slowly sliding against each other while it held steady in striking position. The rattling had temporarily stopped.

“I’ve got an idea,” Carson said. “This time, one of my own.”

Giving his horse’s lead to de Vaca, he walked carefully away from the snake until he found a suitable mesquite bush. Breaking off two forked branches, he removed the thorns and stobs, then walked back toward de Vaca.

“Oh my God, cabrón, don’t tell me you’re going to catch the hijo de perra.”

“I’m going to need your help in just a second.”

“I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

“We used to catch snakes like this all the time on the ranch. You cut off their heads, gut ’em, and coil them in the fire. Taste like chicken.”

“Right, with a side of Rocky Mountain oysters. I’ve heard those stories before.”

Carson laughed. “The truth is, we tried it once but the damn snake was all bones. And we burned the shit out of it in the fire, which didn’t help.”

Carson approached the snake. It began buzzing again, coiling into a tense spring, its head swaying ever so slightly. Carson could see the forked tongue flickering a deadly warning. He knew the maximum length of the strike was the length of the snake: two and a half feet. He stayed well beyond that, maneuvering the forked end of the stick toward it. It was unlikely the snake would strike at the stick. They struck only when they sensed body heat.

He moved quickly, pinning the snake’s middle in the fork of the stick.

Instantly the snake uncoiled and began thrashing about. With the second stick, Carson pinned the snake at a second place closer to the head. Then he released the first stick and carefully pinned it even closer to the head, working his way up the body until it was pinned directly behind the neck. The snake, furious, opened its mouth wider, a pink cavern, each fang glistening with a drop of venom. The tail whipsawed back and forth.

Keeping the snake well pinned, Carson reached down gingerly and grabbed it behind the neck, careful to keep his thumb under the snake’s- head and his index and middle fingers wrapped firmly around the axis bone at the neck. Then, dropping the sticks, he held the snake up for de Vaca.

She looked back at him from a safe distance, her arms crossed. “Wow,” she said without enthusiasm. Carson feinted the snake in her direction, grinning as she shrank away. Then he stepped to one side, still holding the thrashing reptile. It was twisting its head, trying unsuccessfully to plant a fang in Carson’s thumb.

“Walk the horses past me,” he said. “As you go, scuff up the ground and turn over a few rocks.”

De Vaca moved the horses past. They pranced by Carson, keeping a wary eye on the snake. When both animals were safely past, Carson grabbed the snake’s tail with his other hand.

“You’ll find a flint arrowhead in the left front pocket of my pants,” he said. “Take it out and cut those rattles off. Be sure you get them all.”

“I think this is just your clever way to get my hand in your pocket,” de Vaca said with a grin. “But I’m beginning to see the idea.” She dug into his pocket, extracting the arrowhead. Then, as Carson balanced the snake’s tail on a flat piece of lava, de Vaca quickly drew the sharp arrowhead across the tail, slicing off the rattles. The snake squirmed, furious.

“Get back,” Carson said. “Releasing him is the most dangerous part.”

He bent forward and, with one hand, placed the snake back in the shade of the lava. He picked up one of the forked sticks with the other hand, and pinned it again behind the animal’s neck. Then, readying himself, he let go and jumped backward in a single motion.

The snake immediately coiled, then struck in their direction. It flopped among the rocks and retracted like a spring, coiling and swaying. Its tail was vibrating furiously, but no sound issued.

De Vaca pocketed the rattles. “Okay, cabrón, I’ll admit. I’m impressed as hell. Nye will be, too. But what’s to keep the thing here? It’ll be hours before Nye comes through.”

“Rattlesnakes are exothermic and can’t travel in this kind of heat,” Carson said. “He won’t go anywhere until after sunset.”

De Vaca gave a low chuckle. “I hope it bites Nye on the cajones.”

“Even if it doesn’t bite him, I’m willing to bet it will make him go that much slower.”

De Vaca chuckled again, then leaned over, handing something to Carson. “Nice arrowhead, by the way,” she said mockingly. “Interesting thing for an Anglo to be carrying around in his pocket. Tell me, did you flake it yourself?”

Carson ignored her.

The sun was now directly overhead. They plodded on, the heads of the horses drooping, their eyes half-lidded. Curtains of heat shimmered about them. They passed a cluster of blooming cholla cactus, the glare of the sun turning the purple flowers to stained glass.

Carson glanced over at de Vaca. Like him, she was leading her horse with her head down, face in the shadow of her hat. He reflected on how lucky it had been that he’d gone back for their hats on the way out of the barn. Small things like that were going to make a big difference. If only he’d searched for more canteens to carry water, or quicked one of Muerto’s hooves. Two years earlier, he never would have made such a mistake, even in the panic and uproar of blowing up Mount Dragon.

Water. The thought of water brought Carson’s eyes around yet again to the canteens inside Nye’s saddlebag. He realized he had been glancing surreptitiously at the saddlebag every few minutes. As he watched, de Vaca turned and glanced back at it herself. It was not a good sign.

“What would be the harm in one sip?” she asked at last.

“It’s like giving whiskey to an alcoholic,” Carson said. “One sip leads to another, and soon it’ll be gone. We need the water for the horses.”

“Who gives a shit if the horses survive, if we end up dead?”

“Have you tried sucking on a pebble?” Carson asked.

De Vaca flashed him a dark look and spat something small and glistening from her mouth. “I’ve been sucking all morning. I want a drink. What the hell are these horses good for, anyway? We haven’t ridden them in hours.”

Heat and thirst were making her unreasonable. “They’d go lame if we rode in this stuff,” he said, speaking as calmly as he could. “As soon as we get off the lava—”