Nothing Lasts Forever

...3:49 P.M., CST...

"What I don't understand," the taxi driver shouted over the whacking of the windshield wipers, "is what goes through a person's mind when he mutilates somebody like that."

As he glanced over his shoulder in conversational emphasis, the white station wagon thirty feet in front suddenly braked, skidding in the accumulating slush, its massive back end rising like a sounding whale. The passenger in the taxi, Joseph Leland, who had been wondering about something else entirely, perplexed, threw up his hands; the driver reacted, banging his foot on the brake pedal and twisting the wheel. The taxi pitched forward, rotating slowly on its vertical axis, and slammed sideways into the wagon. The right side of Leland's forehead struck the doorpost, drawing blood. He braced for another collision with the car behind, but none came.

"Shit!" the driver cried, punching the steering wheel. "Shit!"

"Are you all right?" Leland asked.

"Yeah." He saw Leland. "Ah, damn. Damn!"

"Don't worry about it." On Leland's handkerchief was a jagged stain of blood the size of a postage stamp.

The driver was black, young, with high cheekbones and almond eyes. He and Leland had been discussing atrocities in Africa. The falling snow had made the ride from the hotel near the huge, stainless steel Gateway downtown a long one; Leland had learned that the driver had come to St. Louis from Birmingham as a single man in the late fifties, and that his son was now an all-city third baseman for his high school team.

In the bumper-to-bumper traffic near the airport, the conversation turned to violence. As he wheeled the taxi from the Interstate to the airport approach road, the driver brought up the recent sexual maimings in black Africa. Lambert Yield,Leland realized, with the driver talking about severed penises. Not Lindbergh, in spite of the St. Louis connection. Lindbergh, a dangerous airport, was in San Diego. Leland had been in and out of St. Louis a dozen times in the past five years, and this was not the first time he had made the mistake.

Now he was bleeding: for a jot of people, a mature man with a cut on his brow was a falling-down drunk. In spite of that unnerving prospect, Leland was neither upset nor angry. It was not really a bad cut. Because of the accident, he had lost track of something else that had crossed his mind. It began to nag at him. He worked up a new blot on the handkerchief.

"I'm sorry, man. I'm really sorry."

Leland could see it. Now the driver of the wagon opened his door and looked back, unwilling to step out into the mess on the roadway. He was a big, fat man with a moustache, a man-mountain, the kind cops were always careful with. He had a temper to match, too: he scowled at the taxi driver, and jerked his thumb commandingly in the direction of the shoulder of the road. The station wagon rolled forward, spewing slush up against Leland's side of the car.

"My plane is leaving in twenty minutes," Leland said.

"Right. That guy can see me down at the terminal. I'm sorry, man. I really am sorry." He stopped beside the station wagon, reached over and lowered the right front window, allowing the whirling snow to funnel inside.

"Pull over!" the big man bellowed.

"My passenger's bleeding and has to catch a plane..."

"Don't give me that crap! Pull over!"

Leland cranked down the rear window. "Let me get to the terminal."

The big man studied him a moment. "You're not hurt that bad. Do you know what this guy is going to try on me? Pull over!" he shouted to the taxi driver.

"He has to catch a plane!"

"Don't fuck with me, you goddamned nigger! As soon as he's out of the cab, you'll take off!"

The taxi driver stepped on the gas. "Fuck yourself!" he shouted. He nearly lost control of the vehicle again as he struggled to close the window. "I don't have to put up with that shit!"

"He's a psycho," Leland said. "Here's my card. I'll be in California for the next ten days, then I'll be back east. Later, if he makes trouble for you, I'll give you any kind of deposition you want."

"It's not later I'm worried about," the driver said. "I'm worried about now."

"As long as I'm in the cab," Leland said, "we have an ace in the hole."

The driver glanced in the mirror. "He got back in the traffic. You some kind of a cop?"

"More of a consultant, these days." Leland patted his forehead again. "The important thing is that I'm carrying the iron that makes it official."

"Jesus. You never do know, do you? Hey, here's something I always wanted to know: How do you get that thing on the plane?"

"They issue a card. Very special. It can't be copied."

"Sure, right, they would have a card. That's funny, like the commercials. Do you know me?" he mocked. He made a gun of his hand. "This is the realAmerican Express."

Leland grinned. "I'll have to remember that."

The bleeding had lessened, but now his head throbbed. It was going to get worse. The traffic slowed, and the driver glanced up and then over to the mirror on the door.

"Here he comes."

The wagon was on their left. The big man swung it over so that it skidded against the taxicab. Leland moved over and lowered the side window.

"Don't plug him, man, please."

"These guys plug themselves," Leland said, enjoying the old slang. Like so many blacks, the driver had the gift of language — he had wanted to know what went through a person'smind. Leland had wondered about the driver's choice of words in that context — and then had remembered something else, the thing that had begun eluding him with the accident. "I'm a police officer," Leland shouted to the big man. "Let us get to the terminal!"

"I told him not to fuck with me! Now I'm telling you the same!" the big man roared, and turned his steering wheel so that the wagon continued to press against the taxi. Leland was thinking of a guy like this who had held off a dozen policemen in a bowling alley in New Jersey, heaving bowling balls like cantaloupes. There was no telling how wild this one was. Leland drew his Browning 9 millimeter, made sure the safety was on, and pushed it through the open windows toward the big man's nose. The Browning was a professional's handgun, thirteen shots in the magazine and room for one in the clip, which was empty now. The big man saw Leland's seriousness. His eyes rolled back and his tongue protruded, curled like a canape. He thought Leland was going to shoot him in the face... to get on a plane.

"He'll see you at the terminal," Leland said to him.

The big man was motionless, afraid to move. The taxi driver eased forward, the fenders scraping.

"Jesus," the driver said.

Leland was trembling, nearly sick. He could be in deep trouble — at least, have some serious explaining in store. "I made a mistake," he said to the driver quickly. "It's just a fender-bender. If he tries to push you around, we'll both charge him with assault."

"Hey, man, don't worry about it. I saw no gun."

Leland got twenty-five dollars out of his wallet. The curving ramp up to the terminal emerged from the falling snow.

"California, huh?" the driver asked. "I've never had the pleasure."

"I'm going to see my daughter in Los Angeles. Then I'm going to drive up the coast to Eureka to see an old friend."

"Your daughter married?"

"Divorced. She has two children. Her mother's dead, but we were divorced, too, years ago."

"Well, you'll be with your family," the driver said. "That's the important thing. Me, too. I'm going to have a good Christmas in spite of this. I'll tell you, man, I've never had much luck with Christmas. When I was a little boy, my daddy used to get drunk and beat up on me. I guess it's not all clear sailing for anybody..."

A 747 rose up over the roof of the terminal, blackening the fishbelly sky and drowning the driver's last words. The station wagon glided by again, the big man glowering at them warily. Leland got another ten from his wallet, then, almost as an afterthought, the I.D. that would get the Browning, loaded, onto the airplane. While the gun was legal, a badge he was carrying was not. It was a New York City detective's badge, a gift from friends in that department, the back engraved THIS MAN IS A PRICK. Leland pushed the twenty-five over the front seat.

The driver pulled to the curb and flipped the meter flag. "Oh, no, man, this is on me."

"Merry Christmas," Leland said, thrusting the money at him. "Have a nice holiday."

The driver took it. The station wagon pulled in front of the taxi. A skycap opened Leland's door. As he got out, Leland gave him the ten. "Get a cop, pronto. The luggage goes to Los Angeles."

"Yes, sir. I'll get somebody to ticket your bags. You have yourself a Merry Christmas."

Leland felt the beginning of relief. This morning's "Good Morning, America" had reported Los Angeles at seventy-eight degrees. A cop was coming through the terminal crowd toward the automatic doors. Leland raised his hand to hold the cop inside. "Stay in your seat," he called to the driver. "Merry Christmas to you."

"You, too. Thanks for your help. Have a nice flight!'

Leland felt he was abandoning the man. Inside the terminal, he produced for the cop, another black man, the I.D. Woven into the plastic of the card was a coded array of rare metals, and now they sparkled under the terminal lights.

"Oh, yeah, right, I know you." The cop, whose name was JOHNSON, T.E., looked over Leland's shoulder, "What's the problem?"

Leland explained that he had been in the taxi during the accident and that the driver of the wagon had gone berserk.

Patrolman Johnson eyed Leland. "You wave your piece at him?"

"I told him I had it," Leland lied.

He smiled and glanced at the taxi. "Sounds good. The brother with you on this? Don't juice my fruit."

Leland grinned. "Scout's honor. I'd salute, but I'd start bleeding again."

"You better have that looked at. Go ahead. Don't worry about this. Have a nice holiday."

"Same to you." Leland kept the identification in hand for the officer at the metal detector. He blotted his forehead again — now he had four large stains on the handkerchief. He had a look at himself in a mirror in the window of a gift shop. It was a real cut, all right, but not deep and barely half an inch long. Something was still bothering him. The officer at the metal detector was another black man: LOPEZ, R.A. Spanish father and black mother? The combination was more common in Los Angeles, and for a second it made Leland wonder dizzily if he had stepped through the looking glass.

"What flight are you taking?"

"The 905, as far as Los Angeles. I'll be in first class, a Christmas present to myself."

"Well, that'll be a helluva flight for somebody to try to hijack. There's two shore patrol riding in economy through to San Diego, and a federal marshal up front with you. I'll let you figure out who he is."

"More important, you'd better let him know who Iam."

Officer Lopez laughed silently. "I'm going to call ahead. What did you do, slip on the ice?"

"Fender-bender. Nothing serious."

"Well, have a nice flight. See how long it takes you to figure out who the marshal is."

"Thanks, I love puzzles."

The clock in the check-in lounge read 4:04, and passengers were still filing into the umbilical ramp. Leland asked the clerk if he had time for a long-distance call.

"Oh, you'll be sitting here for quite a few minutes, sir. They're backed up half an hour trying to get equipment out of St. Louis. This is a bad one. We'll shut down by eight o'clock."

"There's no chance of us not getting out, is there?"

"No," the clerk said, as if Leland were being foolish.

It took the operator a moment to record Leland's credit card number and put the call through, and another before his daughter's secretary picked up the extension.

"Oh, Mr. Leland, she's still out to lunch. You're going to be on the same flight, aren't you?"

He had forgotten the time differential.

"Yes, but I think it's going to be a little late. There's a blizzard here. That's not what I called about." He didn't know if he should continue. "I was in a little accident outside the airport. I'm not hurt, but I do have a cut on my forehead..."

"Oh, you poor man. How do you feel?"

"Well, I guess a little shaken, but I'm all right. I didn't want Stephanie — Ms. Gennaro — getting upset when she saw me."

"I'll tell her. Don't worry about a thing."

There was a tapping on the telephone booth door: a flight attendant, a woman of thirty-five, her dyed bright yellow hair rolled in a style that dated back to the Kennedy years. KATHI LOGAN, according to her nameplate. Now that she had his attention, she smiled brightly, too youthfully, and did a little curtsying nod. Leland said good-bye to the secretary, being careful not to hang up while she too was wishing him a good flight, and opened the door. Kathi Logan spoke with a professional cheer.

"Mr. Leland? Are you ready now? We've all been waiting for you."

The plane was forty-five minutes getting to the runway. He had to stay in his seat, but Kathi Logan brought him some moistened and dry tissues, her mirror, a Band-Aid, and finally, two aspirin tablets. After she had elicited from him that he was going to visit his daughter, a subtle warmth began to creep into her behavior, indicating she was not a bad detective herself. He was wearing no rings, and a man didn't travel to see his daughter at Christmas without his wife, if he had one. But that was a long way from knowing who he was, or even if he had told the truth about himself. Obviously she was alone, felt she was getting older, and a little frightened. He knew the feeling, and that she still spelled her name cute only made him like her more.

The plane was filled, more like a suburban commuter train than a flight across half a continent. The fellow sitting next to the window had his face in a magazine. Not the federal marshal, he was too small to pass the physical. In her effort to help, Kathi Logan had said that the storm extended to the western edge of Iowa, making the first hour of the flight rocky, so she wouldn't be able to let Leland out of his seat to clean up in the washroom. Leland's seatmate had overheard, and Leland saw him tighten his grip on his Newsweek.From the war on, Leland had flown his own planes for more than twenty years, working his way up to a Cessna 310 before he quit. Now he paid no more attention to aviation than any other constant passenger, but he knew that this latest generation of aircraft was the safest ever built. The real problem these days was human error.

And as for the possibility of air piracy, although none had occurred in the United States in years, there was enough good-guy ordnance aboard to butcher all the people in the no-smoking section. Leland wondered if the marshal on board knew that the other armed passenger in first class had helped design the program that had created his job. At the height of the piracy, Leland had been consulted by the FAA, and now he was caught in the situation the program had been designed to prevent: too many guns. Years had passed since he had had contact with any of it, and because he did not know the latest revisions in procedure, Leland was as good as not trained at all, like the S.P.'s in economy. Too many guns and not enough training. If he was on edge, it was because he knew too much.

The plane was next in line. A porpoise-nosed DC — 10 slipped by in the darkness, followed by the muffled roar of its engines. The 747 started rolling again, and Kathi Logan appeared at his side, steadying herself against the rocking of the aircraft.

"How about a drink before we get in the air? Would you like a double scotch?"

He smiled. "You wouldn't like me any more. Can I have a Coke? I could use the sugar."

"Sure."

The pilot was turning for the takeoff run when Kathi Logan came back with the Coke on a tray. She had another smile for him, then hurried back to her seat next to the spiral staircase to the upper deck. Apparently the notion that he was a drunk trying to stay retired did not frighten her. The pilot pushed the throttles to full power. Halfway down the runway, the nose lifted like the end of a teeterboard. Then the rear wheels floated off the ground and they were airborne.

Leland had been sorting out the Lambert-Lindbergh confusion when the driver had asked his amazing question, turning Leland's thoughts completely around. He had been about to tell the driver that he didn't know what went through a person's mind — when he realized suddenly that in fact he did know.

As a young detective years ago he had been on a case in which the victim's penis had been cut off. Leland had followed the chain of evidence along the line of least resistance, to the victim's roommate, a drifter with a criminal record.

After hours of questioning, the drifter, Tesla, finally broke down and confessed. This was in the days when people went to the electric chair every week. Tesla was sentenced to death and electrocuted within the year.

The case brought Leland to public attention for the third time in his life. A rookie patrolman before the war, he had been in a gunfight in which three men had died, including Leland's partner. As a fighter pilot in Europe, he had shot down over twenty Nazi planes, enough to make a New York publisher ask him to write a book. Leland's presence on the Tesla case, with its elements of forbidden sex and lurid mutilations, made it a media event years before such things had labels. When Leland's personal life shattered not long afterward, he was as confused as anyone.

Six years later, when Leland, then running a private detective agency, was asked by a pregnant young woman to investigate her husband's leap or fall from the roof of a racetrack, the evidence led back through Leland's own life to the Tesla case. Leland had sent an innocent man to his grave.

The real killer had been a closet homosexual, unable to accept himself, ravaged with self-hate. His victim, Tesla's roommate, Teddy Leikman, had been a pick-up in a gay bar. At Leikman's apartment, with the hapless Tesla out for the evening, the situation had become more than the killer could bear.

He beat Teddy Leikman to death with his fists, finally crushing his skull with a piece of pottery — but in the struggle, Leikman gouged the other man's neck, getting bits of skin under his fingernails. The solution the killer hit upon came out of the depths of his soul. He severed Leikman's fingers, and to misdirect the police, he severed his penis, too. It worked because no one thought for a moment that the mutilations were anything butthe act of a man shrieking his hatred of himself.

As an act of self-preservation, the multilations to conceal evidence finally came to nothing. Six years later, the killer did, indeed, kill himself.

But not before leaving irrefutable evidence of the biggest municipal fraud since the days of Boss Tweed.

It was the killer's widow who suffered most of all. A kid who had come up off the streets, she wanted the truth told — she could see the connection between her late husband's secret torments and the profiteering of his business cohorts. She wanted people to see how such stealing added to the burdens of the poor.

None of that happened. Every one of the conspirators was able to weasel out of going to jail. Instead of focusing on the housing fraud, the newspapers turned to the old case, Leland's war record, and on, and on. When a scandal sheet suggested a romance going on between detective and client, Norma moved to San Francisco. Leland didn't see her again for years.

Leland's Lindbergh — Lambert confusion had its real origins in those years, for he had been that uncomfortable with the personality the media had assigned to him. "Lucky Lindy," he had called himself more than once, in despair. Like the killer who had eluded him, he had been living two lives and lying to himself about what it meant. His marriage had been disintegrating — and of course he had not solved his big case at all, although he did not know that until later.

What went on in a person's mind? Nothing at all — at such times, the mind and body were one. But there, Leland thought, there in the blankness, lay the riddle of history.

...5:10 P.M., MST...

The weather report had been wrong. The cloud cover extended all the way to the Rockies, and now that the sun was below the mountains, the endless billowy carpet had turned to the color of slate. The 747 was at 38,000 feet, and the Rockies looked like a snow-covered archipelago anchored in a fantastic, undiscovered sea.

Leland still loved flying — and happily, he spent more time in the air than ever. He wasn't going to live long enough to get into space, but at times he wondered how close he would be able to come before he died. In the back of his mind was the notion to take a trip to Europe simply to fly over on the Concorde.His old wingman Billy Gibbs up in Eureka had not been in an airplane in thirty years. Leland had watched him pull barrel rolls over the English Channel, howling like a savage; but once the war was over, Billy Gibbs put flying out of his mind forever. There was a line in Shakespeare about the fault lying not in our stars, but ourselves. The passage of time had made so much clear. Everything we do, everything that happens to us, rises out of impulses most people can't even feel, much less understand.

After the dinner clamor, he strolled back to the galley to get acquainted with Kathi Logan. After serving a full flight, she looked a little frazzled.

"Thanks for your help."

"Hi. Did the aspirins work?"

"Sure. I'm hoping you do plastic surgery."

She stared at his brow. "No, that isn't elegant."

"How did you spot me back at the airport?"

"You area cop, aren't you? I took the call from the terminal on you. The officer told me you had a cut, but actually I went out there looking for the one who carried a gun. It was a test."

"How did you do?"

"I got an A."

He remembered that a marshal was on the plane. Usually when he was confronted with a problem like that, he had it solved before the plane reached cruise altitude. Under Leland's own rules, Kathi Logan was not supposed to tell him who the guy was.

"Would you like another Coke?"

"Get your work out of the way, first."

"It's no trouble."

"Can I ask what kind of a policeman you are?"

"I'm a consultant on security and police procedures. I just finished a three-day seminar at McDonnell Douglas."

"You make it sound simple. I know how much weight you carry."

He grinned. "My name is Joe."

"I'm Kathi. How long have you been sober?"

He tried to conceal his surprise with her directness. "Oh, a long time. I didn't have a bad case anyway, knocking myself out at night. I quit when I realized I was looking forward to getting loaded at lunch."

"I had to wait until I woke up in Clark County jail. That's Vegas."

"I know."

"Surprised?"

"Not now. In fact, I'm getting to like it."

The plane rocked through another dish-rattling patch of turbulence. She grinned. "You remind meof a boxer I used to know..."

He laughed aloud. "Cut it out."

"No, he was always mannerly and soft-spoken. He never forced himself on people."

"How did he do in the ring?"

"He was welterweight champion of the world."

She kept her eyes on him as he smiled. She was selling hard, but it still felt good. He glanced at the ice in his glass. When he looked up again, she laughed at him silently.

"What I was about to say was that he was shy, too."

Kathi Logan had a condo on the beach north of San Diego, a studio with a sleeping loft, fireplace, and skylights. It sounded beautiful. He lived outside of New York in a garden apartment and spent most of his time in Washington and Virginia motel rooms. When he got out to the Coast, it was more of the same in Palo Alto. He had been to Santa Barbara twice. Fortunately, she flew east almost every other week. As long as she was home within seven days to water her plants, her schedule caused her no problems.

He believed it. She was a native Californian, complete with that fierce optimism. She said she would have loved American Graffitiif it had been made five years earlier. She had grown up on the beach. "I wasn't exactly an early hippy, but I was sort of semiliberated. I went with it for a long time, up to Vegas for Sinatra's openings, being the champ's girl for a while. It was fun." More turbulence, thumping the bottom of the plane. "I would just as soon forget all the years Nixon was in office. I don't know why, but my whole life just went crappo."

"A cab driver in St. Louis told me Christmas is always hell for him. This right after he ran into a station wagon."

She looked at his Band-Aid. When Stephanie had been a child, he remembered he and Karen had called the Band-Aids for her scrapes "battle ribbons." Kathi Logan could see that he had disappeared inside himself for a moment. "I'm going to visit friends this year," she said. "Tonight I'll get the lights up and watch it on television."

"Have a Merry Christmas, Kathi."

"I will. You have one, too."

The other girl needed drinks for passengers upstairs in the lounge, so Leland stepped out of the way and looked down at the snow blowing off the jagged peaks of the mountains. Human beings could not survive down there, yet here they were floating far above with dinner in their bellies and drinks in their hands, and the loudest sound was that of their conversation.

The geography books of Leland's childhood had made him believe that the Rockies were Americans great unconquerable natural wonder. Prices slightly higher west of the Rockies, the ads used to say. Kathi Logan had grown up on the beach. Leland could remember writing to Karen during the war of the world that would come after. In fact, no one could have imagined it. And here he was going with it, as Logan the Californian had just said, playing with the way she expressed herself as much as the cab driver had done back in the snow in St. Louis. In so many ways it was still America the Beautiful, just as it always had been. Robert Frost had explained it in saying we had become the land's — there was a common denominator inside people like the cab driver and Kathi Logan: they were open to themselves, free, and not small, which was the best of the American national identity.

Now you could see the break in the cloud coyer, and the desert disappearing into the accumulating purple of twilight.

When Kathi Logan had another break, they started talking again. He told her of his plans to drive up the Coast. Route One, she said; she told him to have lunch on Saturday in Santa Cruz, but she wouldn't tell him why.

They went on. Her idea of a vacation was a week on Kona — more lying on the beach. She kept promising herself that she was going to do some exploring, but she never got around to it. He saw no point in telling her that his "vacations" consisted of those conferences, conventions, and seminars that took him to parts of the world that he didn't need to be reminded of.

Lake Mead, reflecting the sky, and Hoover Dam, a tiny crescent of lights, appeared below. Las Vegas could be seen blinking and flashing to the north. He could tell Logan things about Vegas, but they could wait.

Leland had her telephone number. He was going to call tomorrow night and ask her to meet him in San Francisco. Maybe he was too tame for her. He assumed she knew San Francisco better than he did, and he thought she was the kind of woman who wanted to stay on an even footing with a man. All that was a bore to a kid looking for action, or a forty-year-old recently sprung from a bad marriage, but it was the way he had always been, and he could not function any other way.

The reduction in the power developed by the engines was so gradual that it was on the edge of perception, but the plane was beginning to descend, and the practiced eye could see the desert floor slowly rising, like an oversized elevator.

"I'd better get back to my seat. You have a nice day tomorrow. I think we're going to be friends. We're going to enjoy each other."

She was watching him. "I'd like that, yes."

He touched her arm, an involuntary, unconscious, gesture of good-bye, and in the moment he was wondering if he had gone too far, she stepped toward him, surprising herself as he had just been surprised. He kissed her. They were alone. Nobody saw. When they moved away, she was flushed with excitement.

"Mariana," he said, and winked.

She laughed. "Ole!"

He was back in his seat before he thought of the marshal again. The man could know him. What did Leland's behavior look like from that point of view? The idea made Leland uneasy. Under the circumstances, he couldn't rubberneck around and try to identify him now. If the accident in St. Louis and its aftermath somehow became a matter of public record, this fellow might be moved to report that he had seen Leland spending more than an hour on the flight warming up one of the stewardesses. There was nothing you could do about the way people saw such things. Leland wanted to think that the screwiness had started in the taxi when they turned onto the approach road, but at last he realized that he had been going since early morning after three hard days' work, and he was tense and tired no matter how lucky he had just been with Kathi Logan, and he needed a night's sleep.

Three months after Leland released what he knew of the old botched murder case, Leland's partner Mike went home early one afternoon and found his wife Joan coupled doggy-style with her other high school boyfriend. Leland and Karen had expected something like that of Joan, but not with such exquisite timing. Joan was one of those connivers who worked hardest against those who were wise to her — like the Lelands, for example. Leland and Karen were still formally separated at the time, but that was having less and less effect on their lives with each other.

Leland did not know it at the time, but the agency was ready to break out nationally. For as long as they had been in business together, Leland had been free to develop new business while Mike handled the books and ran the agency day-to-day. Now Mike was an emotional wreck. It took Leland another year to see that his case was hopeless, and by then Mike was beset on the other side, too, being sued by Joan. Leland wanted Mike out, but it cost two years' earnings, with Joan and her lawyer getting nearly all of it. In eighteen months, Leland negotiated seven different loans, wheeling his assets and factoring accounts receivable, to keep all his creditors, including Mike, satisfied. Inevitably, he and Mike had a personal falling out. Leland hadn't heard anything of the guy in ten years.

Leland knew he would have done better with Mike if he had not had problems of his own. All through that period, he was under tremendous pressure, counting on his health and his skills to keep from going under. There had always been a limit to what Karen could take. The week he paid off the last of the notes, Leland's mother went into the hospital. His father assured him that she was going to recover, and Leland wanted to take his father's word for it. He had never felt all that dose to his mother, but when she died within the month, Leland felt a shock he could not have been able to imagine. That was the year he cleared seventy-three thousand dollars for himself and started reaching for the bottle. He knew what he was doing to himself, but he didn't give a damn.

The pilot reported cloud cover over the L.A. basin, but no rain, and a five o'clock temperature of sixty-five degrees, which caused a gleeful murmur among the passengers. The San Bernadino mountains were on the right, rising above the dirty yellow soup lying heavily in the valleys. Then came the half-dozen truly tall buildings of downtown, all of them ablaze for the holidays. The big sign on the hill was dimly visible, too, newly repaired: HOLLYWOOD. The last time he had seen it, it had read HULLYWOD. He felt himself sinking into the strangeness of Los Angeles. Stephanie had been here more than ten years, and she loved it. She had a pleasant house on a nice street in Santa Monica, but even there at night he felt something eerie in the way the palm trees were silhouetted against the baleful yellow sky.

The streets rolled backward under the wings, the landing gear thumped into place, and the 747 chirped onto the runway of the only airport in the world known by the letters on its baggage tags — LAX. Leland thought it's typical of the city's character. His seatmate sighed, and Leland looked over: the man was smiling as if he had, survived a trial-by-terror. The last time Leland had taken notice of him had been in the cold and darkness of St. Louis, and now Leland felt chilled, as if someone was pursuing him.

...6:02 P.M., PST...

"Mr. Leland."

It was a black man, elderly, with a graying moustache. He was in livery, including billed cap and black tie. "I was sent to pick you up, sir."

"Today — tonight? It wasn't necessary. You should be home with your family."

"Oh, I'm getting paid, sir," the man said with a smile. "Ms. Gennaro wants me to take you to her office."

That was a change. "I have to pick up my luggage."

"I'll take care of that, sir. Just let me have the tickets."

Leland wondered why Steffie had bothered with this. There was no pleasure in it, especially when it led to a seventy-year-old hefting his suitcases. "Come on," he said. "Maybe you'll be home early enough for Christmas Eve."

"That's all right, sir."

It took another twenty minutes to pick up the two bags, and another ten to get the big black Cadillac out of the parking area into the flow of traffic eastward. The driver flooded the car with conditioned air and burbling stereophonic sound. Leland asked him to kill both. The motels on Century Boulevard extended season's greetings — or so the marquees announced. Leland closed his eyes and hoped that Steffie hadn't cooked up anything too strenuous tonight. She had told him more than once that he was becoming cranky, but the simple truth was that he was not completely in accord with the way his daughter lived these days.

She was assistant to the vice president for international sales, Klaxon Oil. It was a jawful of title, but the job was just as big, and paid plenty. Leland estimated that his daughter was making well over forty thousand, plus bonuses. The problem was that she lived all the way up to it, with the big BMW, three vacations a year, and more restaurant accounts, club memberships, and credit cards than he thought it possible to keep track of. It was her life, of course, and he kept his mouth shut, but he was sure she was overdoing it. The kids were well cared for, and given what they had been through, they were doing better than Leland might have reasonably expected. He loved them and sent them gifts all around the year, but he understood that he knew them hardly at all, that their everyday lives were completely beyond him.

The distance had a lot to do with it, and the times in which they lived.

Not to mention times past, and what he and Karen had brought on their own family. Steffie was away for her first year of college when he and Karen went into their final torment. He had never really understood the long-term dynamics between them. Early in their lives Karen had let herself get in serious trouble instead of coming to him. He thought she had been afraid. They had been separated for years during the war; they were never able to grow back together again the way they had been when they had been young together. They had changed and had gone on changing, never acknowledging their separate frustrations and resentments. He had consciously kept them to himself, and she had believed that she had to do the same. Of the thousands of mistakes he had made, the worst had been in not paying attention to the person she really was.

"I can't go on like this," she said one night, glass in her hand, for it was a time she was drinking with him. "I'm sorry, Joe, but I've been over and over this in my mind, but there is absolutely no way I can tolerate another minute of it. You're not the person I thought you'd be when I met you. It's not that I don't know who you are anymore. I know who you are, a businessman out of town half the time whose work is so secret or esoteric that he won't or can't discuss it with me, if I cared. But can I care — about whether unauthorized personnel have access to the computer? Or if the police-force in Prefrontal, Nebraska, is up on the latest in crowd control? Joe, I know it's not shit, but as far as I'm concerned,it isshit, and I'm sick of it. I'm sick of you unable to function at night because of it, and I'm sick of waiting for the future that never comes. I want you out. The sooner, the better. It's not just that I don't approve of you, it's that I don't even like you anymore. There it is. The sex, when it comes, only makes me want to kill you. Get out, Joe. Get out now."

He was drunk before dawn, and he was never sober more than eight hours at a stretch for the next two years. At times, he was genuinely ugly. He called Karen when he was drunk, believing he wanted to plead, but really waiting for the chance to resume old arguments. He had a lot to account for. A marriage as old and bad as theirs was no better than a haunted house, and the two of them found rooms upstairs that had not been visited in twenty years. They fought about them, about who caused what, and when.

Stephanie heard all of it, from one or the other. She flunked out of school, called them from Puerto Rico. It wound up with Karen putting her in therapy and Leland throwing up blood for two weeks in the effort to convince himself that he was doing something that was killing all of them. The next time Karen saw him, he was sober — but in the knowledge that the marriage was over, and that he had to figure out his life anew. He never touched Karen again.

Who could have known she would be dead in less than another eight years?

He had been to the Klaxon building before, a forty-story vertical column on Wilshire Boulevard, and he was familiar enough with the city to know that the old driver was taking the glamour route, north on the San Diego Freeway to Wilshire, then east through Beverly Hills, past the shops and hotels.

As well as the rest: the motionless palms, the glaring billboards. Ninety percent of the buildings in L.A. were low-lying two-story residences and businesses. There was real civic pride in Los Angeles, resulting in some of the most beautiful residential neighborhoods in the world, but there was also another factor contributing to the look of the city, the gaudy, screaming money madness that had hold of Stephanie, and it led to such gross public insults as pizza shacks with signs that leered: "Had a piece lately?" At its worst, you came away with the conclusion that, if the billboards were removed, the power lines buried, and the business signs restricted to a modest size, the city would look like a shaved cat.

The problem was the newness of the place. As recently as the nineteen fifties, most of Los Angeles and its suburbs lay undeveloped. A dozen years ago, when Leland first started coming here, critical stretches of the Freeway remained to be built, and the city was still in fragments. Now Los Angeles was the first postindustrial megalopolis, the giant city of the future, lying in an infant's sleep under a churning, poisoned sky. "Do you live in Los Angeles?" "No, sir, I live in Compton, California." Californians like to say the word. If he had been in New York or Chicago, the answer would not have been "Valley Stream, New York"or "Cicero, Illinois."It was as if people here wanted to assure themselves that everything was where it was supposed to be, as if someone could tear it up overnight.

As a police problem, the place was a nightmare. If the size and sprawl of the city were not enough, Los Angeles was the only city Leland knew that was bisected by a mountain chain, the Santa Monicas, running from east to west and encompassing such communities as Bel Air, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City, as well as the separate, surrounded city of Beverly Hills — among others. In many areas, ground patrol had proved ineffective, and so the police had taken to the air, in helicopters. It worked. You could run from someone hammering above you, but you couldn't hide.

The limo was off the Freeway now, heading east on Wilshire through the fashionable neighborhood of Westwood. Bel Air rose to the left, hidden in its money. For the next five miles, million-dollar homes were not unusual. In this town people who had never had money before were suddenly truly rich, and they didn't care what they paid for the things they wanted. Rolls-Royce did better here than in India in the days of the Raj. And money was pouring in from all over the world, as old regimes collapsed. In a few years Los Angeles was going to be the most expensive — and corrupt and dangerous — city on the face of the earth.

"What are you going to do for Christmas?"

"I think I'm going to watch a whole lot of TV. My boy built me one of those big-screen sets — you know, with the projector."

"Is he in electronics?"

"No. This is my youngest boy, he's just twenty-one. He's an actor, but he's real good with his hands. He got an ordinary TV, a lens, and a screen, and there I am. Four feet across, just like a movie. The Rams will look big in defeat this year. I'll tell you, this old world is turning into something else."

Leland said he agreed and let the conversation die. He had had enough glimpses of strangers' lives today. It was a comfort to know that the younger generation was no more in awe of the new technology than his had been of Model A's or biplanes, but Leland thought he saw important differences. The old technology got people out into the world and into contact with others. This stuff was for consumerslocked in subdivided little warrens, people who lived like cattle being raised for slaughter.

People themselves were different out here, eccentric like the English, exuberant in exploring new permutations of themselves. Hula Hoops came from this part of the world. The skateboard. Drive-ins. There were people here so in love with what they had invented for themselves that they spent Christmas every year sunning themselves on the beach. Never mind that the water was too cold for swimming.

Wilshire was all but deserted. A car crossing here and there. A woman yanking the leash of an ugly, forlorn dog. Christmas decorations. Block after block of lush store displays, through Beverly Hills and back into the darkness of Los Angeles again. He was beginning to feel as if he belonged here. A truck was parked alone at the curb two blocks from the Klaxon building, the only vehicle on the block. The lights changed and the limo came to rest across the street from the front entrance.

"Mr. Leland, you go in the front and I'll take your luggage down to the garage to Ms. Gennaro's car. Tell her the keys will be tucked under the front seat — she knows. And you have yourself a Merry Christmas, all right?"

"Sure. You, too — but don't ruin your eyes."

"Right." He grinned, happy with a loving son. "Right."

Leland noticed something on the far corner, nosed in at the curb. It was a big Jaguar sedan of the kind he had owned, to his regret, in the late sixties. The car had been nothing but trouble for Leland, and as much as he'd wanted to enjoy the car, he'd had to get rid of it. This one was in perfect condition. Someone was sitting inside. CB antenna on the trunk. The limo moved forward, into the light of the entrance of the Klaxon building.

Leland said good-bye to the driver and went up the flight of small steps when he thought of the car again and looked back. The man behind the wheel had the CB microphone up to his face — and as far away as he was, he saw Leland looking back at him and tried to get the microphone down. Leland had seen something he shouldn't have, but the trouble was that the other fellow thought that, too. Leland kept going across the small, raised plaza to the glass doors where an old white guy in a gray uniform sat at a desk reading a paper. Perhaps coincidentally, but certainly interestingly, he was out of the line of sight of the Jaguar. The old man saw Leland coming and got up and unlocked the door.

"My name is Joe Leland. I'm expected. Are you an ex-cop?"

"Yes, sir."

"So am I. I'm going for my wallet."

The old man read Leland's identification carefully. "New one on me, but I've been out of uniform fifteen years. Looks good, though, with a nice, raised seal. I know you're expected. What can I do for you?"

Leland told him about the Jaguar. The old man blinked and looked out toward Wilshire, although there was nothing to see from this position.

"There's a jewelry store across the street, and a kind of mom-and-pop combination liquor store and deli. Everything's closed tonight. I'm going to call it in. You take the elevator at the end, thirty-second floor. I don't know what the hell's the matter with people these days. Remember when Christmas Eve was a night off, and all you got was a stabbing or two?"

"Sure, and when you got there, the murderer was sitting in a chair, still telling the victim how wrong she was."

"An old-fashioned Christmas."

"They're running light tonight, aren't they?" Leland asked.

"If people knew how few cops were actually working some nights of the year, there'd be hell to pay. If you were armed, we could roust him ourselves."

"Lay off," Leland said. "How many kids out there working the holiday, all of them needing a good collar? I think I'll watch it from upstairs. I'll be able to see it, won't I?"

"No, the party's around the other side of the building."

"Party?"

"Something special. They put something over on the Arabs or somebody. The place is full of young cunt, kids, everything. I gotta make that call before that turkey out there goes gobble, gobble, gobble."

The old man did the gobbles in falsetto, and Leland was finally figuring out that he had been doing Gary Cooper in Sergeant Yorkwhen the elevator doors closed and Leland snapped his fingers and said, "Damn!" out loud.

Who had been on the other end of that conversation with the son of a bitch in the Jaguar? Where was he? You don't need a radio to knock over a deli — or a jewelry store, either, for that matter. What were they up to?

...7:14 P.M., PST...

Leland really didn't know how Steffie had gotten this job. She had come out here with Gennaro, her husband, after college, at a time when she was not on speaking terms with her mother and her relationship with her father was only beginning to mend. Gennaro had looked like Leland, trim, with close-cropped, dark hair — this shortly before the hair explosion. Leland's own hair had been almost completely gray then, but there was no mistaking what was going through her mind, however unconsciously. Gennaro was a bit too eager to make an impression, one of those kids determined to look you in the eye when he was talking. Cops took that as a sure sign of a liar, but Leland was in a period of compromise with himself, he thought, and what the hell, a marriage was a step up for Steffie, even one that was so obviously a first marriage.

They were going to California, Gennaro told him. He had an M.B.A. and a couple of remote connections made in college, and he was "working with the draft board," as he put it — what the hell, Leland said to himself, figuring his influence with his daughter was nonexistent anyway.

Now Leland didn't even know if Gennaro was making his child support payments. For a while he was living with an actress in Malibu, going to all the right parties, and then a few years ago Steffie told Leland the guy had a place in Encino, wherever that was, south of the boulevard, which was supposed to mean something, too. At the time, according to Steffie, he was trying to be a better father to Judy and Mark — malarkey, because Leland hadn't heard either one of them mention their father in all the time since.

Leland began to hear something faintly as the elevator approached the thirty-second floor. The doors rumbled open and he was hit by a blast of thumping disco. Strobe lights flashed against the walls. Jesus, Stephanie wanted him to find her in this? Did she have the kids here? A half dozen people had spilled out here into the corridor, holding drinks, passing joints, and writhing to the music. Beyond them, in what looked, in the dark, like the whole southwest quadrant of the building, fifty or sixty adults and teenagers flailed to a sound so loud, so acoustically true, or both, that it made the prestressed concrete floor vibrate like the loft of a barn.

"Hi," a blonde said, "Merry Christmas. You smoke this crap? It's good commercial Colombo."

"The doctors at the sanatorium told me not to. Do you know Ms. Gennaro? She wanted me to meet her here."

"Do you know what she looks like?"

"Always have. I'm her father."

"Jesus. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Wait a minute." She ankled out to the middle of the corridor. "You see that door over there? Mr. Ellis's office. The last time I saw her, she was in there with the other big wheels. Oh, Christ, excuse me. Hey, forget I said that, huh? Please. Tell her Doreen said Merry Christmas — and congratulations."

"What for?"

"This!"

"What's this?"

"You don't know, do you? Mr. Ellis and Ms. Gennaro just put over a one hundred and fifty million dollar deal! Hey, go find out! Let her tell you — then come back and join the party! We'll take care of you!"

"I'm too old for your mother!"

"But not for me, you old fox!"

He winked and blew her a kiss.

"That's Gennaro's father," he heard her say, giggling, when he was supposed to be out of earshot. He didn't look back, because he didn't exactly like the way she had said his daughter's name.

The desks in the big room had been pushed back against the walls to create a dance floor, and Leland had to elbow his way through the onlookers who were three-deep most of the way around. Ellis's door led to his secretary's office, but the furnishings here were a big step up from the brightly colored metal and plastic outside. Thick green carpeting, rosewood walls, and an imitation stained glass ceiling fixture, all for a secretary. Like everybody else, the Klaxon executives took advantage of tax-deductible, business expense provisions in the revenue code to fit themselves out with the kind of accoutrements that would make a pharaoh's jaw drop. The door to the inner office was ajar, but the thumping of the music vibrating beneath his feet did not let Leland hear anyone on the other side. He rapped his knuckles on the doorframe.

"Who is it? Come in."

Three men turned in their chairs. Steffie, beyond them on the sofa, leaped to her feet.

"Daddy! Merry Christmas! You're just in time!" She rushed across the room, hugged him, and kissed his cheek. In his arms, she felt too soft and out-of-condition to suit him. With her arm around his waist, she turned to the others, who were standing now, and introduced him. Ellis, behind the desk, was in his forties; the man Leland's age was a Texan named Rivers, executive vice president for sales; and the boy in his twenties, Martin Fisher, was Stephanie's new assistant.

Rivers was the first to shake his hand. "Welcome, Mr. Leland. A pleasure and an honor. We heard about your accident in St. Louis. Well, it doesn't look like much." Stephanie looked at his forehead. Rivers turned to the boy. "Do you know how many German planes this man shot down?"

"Oh, yes." He was looking at Leland, trying to match what he had been told to the man standing in front of him.

"It's ancient history," Leland said to him. "Your parents don't even remember it."

"Not true," Ellis said, stepping in front of the desk, smiling. "Not true at all. Welcome. Perfect timing. This is the biggest day of our lives." He pumped Leland's hand with an unpleasant energy that put Leland off at once.

"I heard something about one hundred and fifty million dollars."

"That's right," Ellis said. "It's the biggest contract Klaxon has ever done outside of petrochemicals."

"We're in the bridge-building business, Daddy. In Chile."

"Show him that watch," Ellis said to her.

"He'll see it later," she said.

"I've got a model of the bridge upstairs in my office, Mr. Leland," Rivers said.

"Call me Joe. I feel old enough without a graybeard like you treating me like Santa Claus." Or Lucky Lindy, he thought, as images of the past few hours rose in a flurry, stirred like leaves in a wind.

"I was in the South Pacific, myself," Rivers said.

"The whole thing should be put on bubble gum cards, as far as I'm concerned," Leland said. "Stef, I'd like to clean up a little, if I may. It's already been a fourteen-hour day. I'd also like to use the telephone."

"Something wrong?" Rivers asked.

Leland shook his head. He was thinking of the old cop downstairs, but what he had seen on Ellis's desk, a rolled-up dollar bill, made him want to be cautious. "I want to call San Diego." Leland gave Steffie a smile. "Something nice happened on the plane."

"Old goat," she said. "You took the through flight to San Diego, didn't you? She won't be home by now."

"The lady has an answering service or a machine, one or the other. She didn't say so, but I'll bet on it."

"Being a policeman is like having a sixth sense, isn't it?" Rivers asked.

"More like a way of putting things together," Leland said, not looking at Ellis.

"Who isthis?" Stephanie asked, pulling at Leland's jacket.

"The stewardess," Leland told her. "Don't worry, she's older than you — though not by much. What's this about a watch?"

"I bought myself a present. Why do you call her a stewardess?"

"I usually call them flight attendants. In this context, I wanted it to be clear that I was talking about a woman."

The male laughter made her blush.

"We all hear this," Ellis said. "We're all getting re-programmed."

"Deprogrammed," she said with a smile. Leland turned to Rivers.

"I'd enjoy seeing that model later."

"Sure thing."

Who Stephanie slept with was her business — she was old enough to know that office intrigues usually led to trouble — but Leland didn't like the idea of cocaine. Beneath his salesman's gloss, Ellis was as grisly a specimen as Leland had ever seen. Stephanie still seemed incapable of learning the lesson of her life, and Leland could only accept the burden of his failure with her. He gave her another hug. "I'll use your office. I know where it is."

"I'll come with you," she said. "We weren't doing anything but patting ourselves on the back."

"She's the one," Rivers said to Leland. "She put a lot into this. It wouldn't have gone over without her."

"That's just great," Leland said.

In her office, diagonally across the building from the party, Leland went to the window and looked down into the street. The Jaguar was gone. Leland had scared the fellow off, or made him change his plans.

Judy and Mark were here, lost in the crowd and darkness. The party had been Rivers's idea. The call from Santiago had come in this morning, and the place had gone wild. The deal had been very complicated, negotiations with the ruling junta had been delicate, everything was still secret. Klaxon had had to keep her in the background because of the machofactor, which made her angry. Rivers had assured her that her bonus would be "just as good" as the others. She was waiting to see.

Leland thought she looked tired. For years she had been five pounds too heavy, and now it looked like ten. With cocaine in her life, he had to be glad to see that she was still eating. She looked deeply fatigued. Maybe she would be ready to listen to him in a few days. Not now. The first thing he wanted to tell her was how proud of her he was.

"Dial nine to get an outside line," she said. "You'll find everything you need in the bathroom. I'll see you on the other side of the building."

Leland waved. First he found the office directory and dialed the main entrance.

The guard said hello.

"It's Leland, the fellow who just came in. The Jag took off."

"Yeah, well, I put the call in. It can't do any harm. He's probably still right here in the neighborhood, and they'll have an easy one. How's that party up there?"

"Deafening. Have a nice Christmas."

"Hell, I'll be here working."

Leland decided to try Kathi Logan tonight, after all — but not this minute. In the bathroom he saw that Steffie knew how to take her perks, too. The place was what you expected to find in milady's boudoir, including shower and fully equipped medicine cabinet. After he helped himself to two more aspirin, Leland took off his jacket and tie, opened his collar, and rolled up his sleeves. He got out of the harness and put the Browning over his jacket. For years he had been able to get away without having to carry a firearm, but then the word had come down. He was a menace to himself and others without a weapon and the practice that would make him effective with it. He had always been an excellent shot, but now, even at his age, because of the practice, he was better than he had ever been in his life.

Leland didn't want to see too much of the Browning with Ellis so close to his thoughts. The rolled-up dollar bill, evidence of cocaine, made the guy clear. An asshole. The LAPD called them assholes, guys who thought they could keep one step ahead of the system in pursuit of their own desperate satisfactions. Steffie was sleeping with him. Leland knew his daughter. She had something of her own to prove — to her mother, to him, to Gennaro, Ellis, and all the men.

In any event, Leland had to be careful. He had steered the conversation away from police work in Ellis's office because of the dollar bill. Marijuana was seen everywhere, especially in California, but cocaine carried very heavy time, and there was no telling how people reacted if they were faced with years in prison. Better Leland play as dumb as Ellis thought Rivers was. What disappointed Leland was that Steffie underestimated him, too — she had forgotten a lifetime of what Rivers thought was a "sixth sense."

Leland didn't like Rivers any more than Ellis, and not because of the old war buddies crap. Rivers was another hustler, like Ellis, only better. A lot of it was the down-home Texas cornpone. Some easterners never got on to that, and it always worked to the Texans' favor.

Texas was a different attitude, almost a different culture. Cleaning the other guy out wasn't enough: you were supposed to look him in the eye, smile, and squeeze his hand. That was Rivers, a sweet piece of work. One consolation: Ellis thought he was as good as Rivers, and he wasn't.

Leland was a traveler trying to wake up, and he washed accordingly, with cold water, deep into his hairline, careful around the Band-Aid over his brow, around the back of his neck, up to his elbows. Then he dried vigorously, rubbing to draw the blood up to his skin. He felt better, tired inside but not yet ready for sleep, good for hours more.

He took off his shoes and socks. In the sixties, the first time he went to Europe on business, he sat next to a German, an executive in the American branch of an optical firm who had crossed the Atlantic over seventy times, going back to the first quarter of the century. Leland said he was working for Ford, doing a study on the economics of shipping parts by air rather than by sea, to reduce the amount of the float tied up in inventory, and then let the old man talk from Virginia to Hamburg.

The old man had known Hitler, whom he called a peasant incapable of reshaping an opinion. The way to cross an ocean, he said, of all the methods he had been able to try, remained the dirigible. One hundred miles per hour at a height of a thousand feet, almost two days in the company of real ladies and gentlemen. A wonderful man, full of wisdom. Leland would have lied, if he had been asked what he had done in the war.

"Do you want to know a secret, Mr. Businessman? You can be wide awake at the end of the day if you wash your feet. Walk around barefoot for ten minutes. You'll feel terrific."

It was true. Wriggling his toes, his cuffs rolled up to his knees, Leland carried his daughter's telephone over to the windows, braced it on his knee, dialed nine, then one, as you had to do in Los Angeles to call long distance, the San Diego area code next, and finally, Kathi Logan's number, which he had already memorized.

It rang twice, then there was a mechanical pick-up.

"Hi, this is Kathi Logan. I'm not home right now, but if you'll leave your name and number after you hear the beep, I'll send you your dime back. Or maybe I'll call you. Who are you, anyway? Wipe that grin off your face and speak up."

Ah, California. Leland was laughing aloud when the tone sounded. Far below, thirty-two stories down, a truck turned from Wilshire into the side street, then just as quickly into the ramp down to the underground garage under the plaza that surrounded the building. Something turned over in Leland's mind. The truck had been going too fast, but that wasn't it.

"Kathi, this is Joe Leland, your friend from St. Louis today. Thank you. Tomorrow build yourself a perfect day. I'm going to call in the evening and ask to see you. I thought we could meet in San Francisco..."

Disconnect. The tape had run out — no, there was no dial tone. The telephone was dead. He tapped the cradle button. Nothing.

He looked at his watch: eight o'clock. Maybe the switchboard had an automatic cutoff. There was no point in going outside to call again; it would only add to her confusion. For a while he stood at the window, staring at the lights on the Hollywood Hills. Someone had once pointed out Laurel Canyon to him — he couldn't remember who it was, or when that had been.

That old German had left one problem unsolved: putting the socks on again. A change in pitch of the air coming through the ventilator made him look up. No, that wasn't it. The music had stopped. Abruptly. He wondered why he would take notice of it, and then realized what he had wanted to remember about that truck: it was the one he had seen parked on the side street facing Wilshire a half hour ago. No wonder the guy in the Jag had wanted to hide the microphone.

The telephone was dead?

Leland was going for the Browning when he heard the woman scream.

He was on his feet at once. His head was clear. He got into the harness, drew the gun, popped the safety, and snapped the first round into the firing chamber.

Leland extinguished the lights and opened the door slowly, as silently as possible. The corridor was empty, but now he could hear a man's voice, sharp, but too far away to be intelligible.

Leland had to decide what to do — now.His shoes were in the bathroom. If the voice was barking orders to partygoers, then it was only a matter of moments before his teammates made a search of the rooms on this floor. How many of them were there? The staircase was around on the other side of the elevator, bank. For a second Leland would be exposed as he crossed the main corridor, but if people were looking the other way, into the party room, he just might get away with it.

The Browning. If he were caught with it, there would I be shooting. If he left it behind and they found it, they would come looking for the owner. No time to hide it, either — no sense in giving them the chance to get closer to him at all, not when he was carrying an NYPD badge, whatever its gag origins. Barefoot, the Browning raised, Leland stepped onto the shaved surface of the industrial carpet in the corridor.

The voice became louder as Leland neared the elevator bank. He had to get a line on this, if he could, but he had to achieve safety — some measure of it, at least. He stopped five feet before he reached the corner.

An accent. Leland still could not make out the words. The accent was faint; the careful, conscious phrasing showed that the speaker had studied the language in school, or later. Now Leland darted across the elevator area to the staircase door.

Four of them, one of whom he recognized, goddamn it — goddamnit! — all armed with the world's best one-man weapon, the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. Leland shook with rage and self-reproach. He should have done better than this!

He waited, catching his breath. If he had been spotted, someone would have shouted. He had to evaluate what he had seen, which was plenty. He had to think. The first obvious point was that he could not take any kind of effective action with the information he had so far. Now he had to make another decision. He opened the door to the staircase carefully, stepped in, and eased the door closed quietly behind him.

He went up, his bare feet taking the cool, rough concrete steps lightly, two at a time.

...8:19 P.M., PST...

He stepped out on the thirty-fourth floor. Far enough. The main lights were off, and in all directions, through the full-length windows running completely around the building, he could see the city lights twinkling out to the murky horizon, the freeways streaming red away from the city. This floor was different from the thirty-second, wide open, without protection or hiding place. That was all right, for now.

He realized that he was going to have to learn a lot more about the building. It was the building's core that he wanted to understand first. The core was the same on every floor, eight elevators, four on each side, facing each other like square dancers. Right now he could not tell if the elevators were working, and setting one into motion unnecessarily would probably expose him. The four staircases were around behind the elevator banks, facing the four outside corners of the building. The party two floors down was in the southwest. Okay. Going down that staircase would get him closer to the party, but he wanted to do a little more thinking, first.

He walked around the perimeter of the entire floor, looking down into the street. Garage entrances on both side streets, the ramp's cutting down through the steps of the raised plaza. The entry level was two stories high, Leland remembered, sheathed in glass, so that all the elevator banks and the building's supporting pillars were visible. Given the size of the building, the underground garage was at least two levels deep, probably three. At the bottom level, or below it, was the heating plant, the electrical control panel, and the telephone switchboard. You could not defend the building from the ground, but above, far above, with the elevators disabled, it was better than a medieval castle. Not even assault troops could retake the place.

The four men in jeans and Windbreakers, armed with Kalashnikovs, had put on the flourescent lights and herded the crowd into the center of the big room. Leland had not seen Steffie, or Judy or Mark, but he had seen Rivers and Ellis, their hands on top of their heads.

A half dozen people down there would realize that Leland was not in the crowd, if they were calm enough to think clearly. Of them all, Leland probably had the most confidence in Rivers, in spite of what he thought of Rivers's character. Rivers was a survivor: in that, Leland was more certain of Rivers than he was of his own daughter. A longtime ago, she had loved and trusted her father completely. In recent years he had seen her grow annoyed with him, thinking him old-fashioned, out of step, superfluous. But this was not her remodeled kitchen in Santa Monica, and because of her position, she was probably in far more danger than she realized. The man Leland recognized was a killer who liked it — who almost certainly wouldn't be able to resist killing someone tonight, simply to assert his mastery of the situation.

Leland decided to go down the southeast staircase to the thirty-second floor. The door was heavy, fireproof, and almost soundproof. The knob turned smoothly and the bolt slid open in silence. He paused. There was no way of knowing if anyone was looking directly at the other side. He eased the door open.

He had a view of a blank wall. But now he could hear the man who was talking clearly enough to make out some of his words. "You people" something. Then something like "the whole world watching."

Leland stepped into the hall. He wanted to see what they were up to. He wanted to see how many of them there were. The hall narrowed into forty feet of relatively dark corridor, and it would take a good pair of eyes in that brightly lighted room to make him out in the shadows. He kept the Browning in his left hand. Even if he were seen, he would be able to get back to the stairwell, and as long as they didn't think he had a gun, they might believe he was no threat to them.

His view was not what he had been hoping for. He could see only one of the gunmen and a portion of the crowd, their hands still on their heads. The leader, the man Leland had recognized, went on talking, making something else clear: he knew he was secure from below. Leland went back to the stairwell and climbed up one flight.

Suspicion confirmed: the thirty-third floor was different from the other two above and below it that Leland had seen, a series of rabbit warrens leading to fair-sized, plush offices at the windows. Some even had television sets. He had to get organized and keep track of things, make a list of the different floor layouts he was encountering. If he had to run for his life, he might just make it because he had an idea of which direction to take.

The gang. He'd seen four. Even with their radios, they needed two people downstairs, in the lobby and in the control room. The one in the lobby was probably sending the police away at this moment. It would take Leland ten to fifteen minutes to get down on foot to the street level from here. He would have the element of surprise in his favor, and would probably be able to get out to the street. Then what?

Leland knew as well as any man alive. He had participated in the secret seminars and conferences that had developed the contingency plans of many of the nation's municipal police departments. This was the real, only and true reason for the creation of SWAT teams. The Symbionese Liberation Army shootout was a case in point. Ex-LAPD Chief Ed Davis had tipped the strategy completely with his so-called jocular response to the problem of air piracy: "Hang 'em at the airport."

The strategy: kill them all.

The Symbionese hideout had been burned to the ground, and all inside had died.

At Entebbe, a hostage was killed by an Israeli paratrooper when he did not obey orders and looked up to see what was going on.

Hostages were secondary. The nature of this wave of international terrorism was the only primary element in the definition of the problem. The lectures, slide shows, reports, psychological profiles, material made available by a dozen governments and another dozen multinational corporations left no alternatives. There now existed a world-wide network of people in their twenties and thirties, some acting independently but most in combination with other groups, orchestrated from and protected in sanctuaries like Syria, Lebanon, South Yemen, and Libya, who had committed their lives to the destruction of social order in the noncommunist world. After that, they would build a revolutionary society, and naturally enough there was sharp disagreement among them about how they were going to do that.

Think-tanks had developed various scenarios of what would really happen, drawing on the revolutions of 1789 in France, 1917 in Russia, the long Chinese struggle, and now most recently in Cambodia and Vietnam: purges, massacres, genocide, counter-revolution, new schisms. One fat little academic, proud to be among the "tough guys" packing so much heat, dropped this pearl: "We figure a thirty-three to thirty-eight percent chance of world-wide anarchy, instead of the fifteen to twenty percent we're running now."

The psychologists were more help, but the psychiatrist with the profiles of five real human beings was the most useful to Leland. These kids weren't all the middle-class snotnoses the newsmagazines portrayed. An Argentinian who grew up in a seven-foot house made of reworked oil barrels, cardboard, and wine crates; a Palestinian raised in a refugee camp in Beirut, in sight of highrise apartments and first-class hotels, but who had lost all his teeth at twenty-two. People who had no reason to live hoped for redemption in death, or through it. These youngsters knew they were going to die; it made them cling to each other. Before a mission, they partied to the breaking point, passing the girls around. The Japanese kid spraying an air terminal with a Kalashnikov, scared as he was, knew that paradise was at hand. They really were the wretched of the earth.

You had to go to Europe and America for the middle-class snotnoses. Ursula Schmidt, the German poetess who celebrated death, the Italian kids who specialized in killing politicians slowly, or Little Tony the Red, from Germany again, who loved the drama of death, made theater of it, straightening the tie of his victim before shooting him in the lapel of his jacket..."pinning the black boutonniere," he called it.

It was Little Tony — Anton Gruber — whom Leland had recognized downstairs.

The professional advice, and the consensus of Le land's colleagues, was that these people were irredeemably insane on the evidence, that no outrage — using rockets on a commercial airliner, hacking off a penis in Zaire, executing a. pilot after making him get down on his knees to beg for his life — was beyond them.

On Thursday, the next-to-last day of the conference, when Leland and most of the others reported to the amphitheater for what they thought was going to be a day of dividing and subdividing into committees and subcommittees, they found the room being searched — one more time — for listening devices. Sitting in his seat, papers spread before him, was the chief of a department in the Midwest, a white-haired, lantern-jawed man of nearly sixty, one of the most respected policemen in America, his lips drawn so tightly across his teeth that the blood was hardly circulating. Because of what people thought of him, the meeting was convened in the normal manner and the chairman remarked that he thought there would be no objection if he deferred the regular agenda. Without another word, the floor was yielded. The chief stayed at his desk, hardly raising his head, and started slowly.

"I'm sorry about all this, but I had a long, difficult night. For one thing, I wanted us to be able to express ourselves freely. I wanted to be able to express myself freely.

"The longer I thought about this last night, the deeper I had to go inside myself to find out where I really stood. It just kept challenging me, all the way down. Then finally I woke up: not only was it the ugliest damned mess I'd ever had to face as a police officer, it was also the worst problem I'd ever had to face as a human being."

He turned in his seat and looked up to the younger men in the last rows.

"For those of you who don't know me, I rattled doorknobs for eight years and served thirty-three months with the Marines in the South Pacific. I've seen everything — I know how terrible life can be. I've been married for thirty-seven years to the same woman, and I love her more today than I did when I was a boy. We have four daughters, all college-educated, and nine grandchildren. I'm going to get the hell out of here on Saturday because we're having a barbeque for my eighty-seven-year-old aunt. She's my mother's youngest sister, and I think she's decided she's going to die, because she asked for the party. We've shared a lot of life, she and I, and I know she feels pretty satisfied with how far the family has come."

He stood up.

"Well, these kids have got methinking of my family, and what's important to me, because they've made it perfectly clear how they feel about anything that can be manipulated to bring about their grand design. Now I paid very careful attention when the psychiatrist was here, and I can see how those youngsters came to the conclusions they have about the nature of the world. If they're wrong at all about the way things work, it isn't by much. I want everybody to have a fair chance at life just as much as they do, but I not only draw the line at killing for it, I fail to see the connection between the kind of killing they do and the social justice they say they want to bring about.

"They say.I've been around — I've seen things like this before. Once people like these children start killing, they can't stop. When they're in charge — if — they'll organize trials and secret police, but the killings will go on to become a bloodbath, then genocide — you don't have to be an historian to see that once the world is run by fanatics, fanaticism is the order of the day. You don't have to look at the modern period. The Inquisition destroyed Spain.

"This is heartbreak for me. I was raised to believe that we here in the United States are everybody's children, and we have the responsibility of leading the way to exactly the kind of world these kids say they want. When I got older and was able to travel abroad, I saw the other side of the coin: if we're part of the world family, then what we are dealing with in other countries are our grandparents' cousins' great-grandchildren — the difference between us goes back, in most instances, to the smallest stroke of fate.

"We happen to be here today because the world is in an upheaval so violent that our country, which used to be safe, isn't anymore. It's been a time, my aunt and I agree, when families have had to hold on for dear life. And many haven't. In the past fifteen or twenty years, we've seen many, many lives wasted or destroyed."

He took, a step back and hitched up his belt.

"Well, late last night I started asking myself, who the hell did I think I was, bringing my personal life to all this? I'm a professional police officer, in charge of a department responsible for the safety of almost a million and a half human beings. Because I'm determined to be professional, I'm burdened by a great mass of law, regulation, and prior practice. For instance, my department has forty-seven pages of regulations on the proper use of force and restraint. Public information — wonderful, because anyone who wants to go to the trouble, can find out exactly where he stands in any situation beforehand.

"I told you I wanted to speak frankly. A bit later last night when I was trying to understand my options and what they would lead to, I remembered my own regulations governing the use of force. My officers are required to take any and all measures necessary to insure the public safety when firearms are being used in connection with the commission of a felony. In any and all instances.

"What the hell are we talking about here? A lovesick ex-husband holding his ex-wife and kid in their house at gunpoint? Three characters hitting a supermarket? Whether the characters in the supermarket know it or not, the last thing we want in a confrontation like that is loss of life. As for me, I don't even think, over the long haul, that it's good for the morale of the department, if it happens too often."

He arched his back and threw his chest out.

"These kids aren't a bunch of losers looking for the exit. They're a tightly organized, self-reinforcing cluster of young psychos for whom nothing is too vile, too low, too uncivilized, if it advances the common madness. I for one am not going to allow my community to become their battleground. One way or another, if need be, I'm going to serve notice that any incursion into my jurisdiction is going to be met with the most extreme countermeasures. These people say they're fighting for the future. Well, they'll find no future at all in my neck of the woods. And the result will be that there will be no further incidents, no media publicity, no showcase trials. These lunatics will not become heroes. And no hostages are going to be taken later to effect their release.

"As I say, I've given this a lot of thought. I don't like it. I'm going to have to answer to my maker for it. But these kids have made it clear that they're not going to negotiate, except to move closer to their own goal, not to accommodate anyone else, and I don't need my old aunt to tell me that that most definitely includes my four daughters, their children, and everything my family has worked to accomplish for four generations.

"And it's clear, too, that we'll get no help from the media, who are not to blame. The news is what we make it. If we started parading prisoners in front of the press, the newspapers will tell us what they had for breakfast when they were seven years old — and if they can't find it out, they'll make it up. As for television, all it does is take pictures of what we put in front of it.

"I want this clearly understood. A prisoner is a snarling, sullen, cocky little prick. A corpse is garbage. A person using a firearm in my jurisdiction is going to suffer the results of the most extreme measures. I mean death. If these people come to my community, they're going out on stretchers with the sheets off,so that everyone can see exactlywhat will happen the next time. I mean every word I say — God is my judge: I take personal responsibility for this."

He sat down. One by one, police chiefs and their representatives got to their feet and applauded. Leland and the big guy on his right were among the last to stand.

"A lot of innocent people are going to die," the big guy said.

An older man in the row in front turned around.

"Ten years from now, five years, those fuckers are going to get their hands on an atom bomb. Do you think they're going to hesitate to use it?"

None of that mattered now. Little Tony, the man downstairs, was one who had been profiled at that conference: Anton Gruber, a.k.a. Antonino Rojas. Little Tony the Red, who straightened neckties, who liked to "present the gift of death" in the form of the black boutonniere.

There was a hell of a lot more that Leland had to know. It was now 8:52. They had been in the building more than half an hour. No gunfire so far, but that was not necessarily a good sign. What was their plan? There were too many of them for this to be a suicide attack. The language Leland had heard left no doubt that, whatever their objectives, they were going public with it — which meant that they planned to take hostages away with them.

Sure, packing them in, using them like insulation, they could get thirty or forty hostages in the truck with them. If they had Kalashnikovs, they probably had fragmentation grenades.

Now Leland realized that he was listening to an elevator humming in the shaft.

...8:56 P.M., PST...

He was running barefoot on the carpet. It sounded as if the elevator was going up, and at the least, Leland wanted to be sure of that much.

Here on the thirty-third floor the elevator bank was lit as though for business hours. He had no problem hearing the elevator, and he got his ear to the door just in time to hear the door of the car rumble open — high overhead.

Forty stories. Seven flights to the top. Figuring ten feet to each floor, seventy feet. Four hundred feet from the street to the top of the building. He was in good condition, he thought; he did ten minutes of sit-ups every morning, and made sure he walked as much as possible, all the year around. He hadn't smoked since he quit drinking. What he knew for a fact about the fortieth floor was that Rivers's office was up there — and the other top executives' offices, too, presumably.

He was in the northwest stairwell again, figuring he would hear the elevator if it started back down. At every floor, he stopped and made a note of its plan. The more information he could gather, the better. That was the least. What was the most he could do? Free the hostages. He stopped at the thirty-eighth floor, which was another with an open plan, to rest.

He could disrupt them. He could see that they were public before they planned. As the doorman pointed out, there were damned few officers of the LAPD on duty tonight, perhaps as few as two or three hundred over the whole city. SWAT was supposed to be ready on a moment's notice, but the team members had to be called individually. The LAPD would need more than SWAT and a captain for this anyway. Leland knew the procedure: within three hours, a deputy chief would be in charge.

And until that time, assuming that Leland had left the building to notify the police, the hostages would be completely at the mercy of the terrorists. Assuming that his continued presence inside would constitute some kind of pressure.

What couldhe do?

If he waited for the elevator to start downward again, then pressed the call button, the car would stop and the doors would open before the terrorists would know where they were, or that Leland was waiting for them.

Even if there were as few as two of them on board, Leland, with his Browning, would have a less than even chance against their automatic weapons.

Suppose he took them, two of them. And got their weapons. The others would figure out from the wounds that it had been one against two.

They'd know Leland had a pistol, as well.

The less they knew about him, the greater his chances for survival. The longer he'd live.

It occurred to him that his chances were best if he did nothing at all, if he just stepped out of it and let events run their course.

But he coulddisrupt them. He couldget out a signal from inside the building. He couldforce them to direct their attention to him, or whatever they thought he was.

He had that going for him.

And the Browning, with its baker's dozen rounds. They would assume that he was not armed. In fact, the longer he could conceal the existence of the Browning, the bigger it would grow in his arsenal.

At the thirty-ninth floor he stopped to make note of what he had found on the floors below. He had picked the appropriate floor for the storage (and later retrieval) of information. The thirty-ninth contained the Klaxon computer complex, a whole, surgically clean floor of data banks and terminals.

Leland made a little chart, based on observation and deduction.

40 Exec, suite— how lux?

39 Computers

38open— all desks

37N: pvt. offices / S: open— word processing

36cubicles— walls and half walls

35open

34open

33cubicles and offices— TV sets

32hostages

Valuable information, but none of it was worth a damn if he could not get a message out. Leland could see that he was as good as dead if he thought of this as anything less than war. For instance, these people had had someone working on the inside. They had moved on the signal that the last of the arrivals was safely upstairs. Leland was certain that their overall control of the situation reflected nothing but advance information, even if only from a duped secretary, like the one Leland had overheard in the hall.

And that meant the gang knew who was important, and who wasn't. The question was, how muchdid they know? Leland had to assume the worst.

He went up the rest of the way to the top. The stairwell door opened onto a hall that was narrower than those below, paneled with rosewood, and softly, comfortably carpeted. The lights were on. Leland could hear the hiss of the air conditioning, but nothing more. The floor had to be a maze of outer and inner offices, conference, dining, and board rooms, and probably even a small but fully equipped gymnasium.

Leland did not move. What else?

The model of the bridge.

What else connected with the bridge?

Leland had been assuming that all of them were German, or European. What did a Chilean youngster look like? The military junta ruling Chile was the most repressive in the Americas, as committed to torture and murder as Duvalier of Haiti at his most lunatic.

Now Leland heard an elevator again. He was so close to the roof and the elevator machinery up there that he could tell that it was not the elevator that had stopped on this floor, but another, probably coming up. Another question answered: they had not shut down the elevators — yet.

The elevator came all the way up to the top. Leland pushed the door open a little more.

"Wo sind sie?" It was the voice Leland knew.

"Durch diese Turen, ganz da hinten."

Leland's own German was good enough for that: Little Tony wanted to know where "they" were, and he was told to go "all the way to the back." Leland decided to take a chance. He stepped out into the hall and headed in what he thought was the other direction.

The floor was a huge playground of executive privacy and privilege. Leland could see that it was going to be more difficult to find the stairwells on this floor than on those down below.

Leland was on the south side of the building. The president's office, and the chairman's, would be on the north side, out of the direct sun. Given his importance, Rivers's office would be on that side, too. Leland was learning to get his bearings from the lights outside the windows, swimming out from underneath him toward the horizon.

He may have come up a blind alley, Leland realized. He was in a private office, but narrow, small, and windowless, on the inside of the building. The other door was a massive, solid-looking affair. Leland had the Browning out again.

The door was unlocked, the room on the other side unlit. The crack under the door on the far side was as bright as a strip of neon — bright enough to let him see that he was in some kind of reading room, with a table and chairs. The corporate law library. Given what he knew about major corporations, Leland could almost calculate the distance in inches to the president's office.

He could hear something on the other side, at a distance, he thought. The doorknob on this side was fitted with a twist lock. He opened the door slowly, and sure enough, the first things he saw were the raised letters on the other side of the door identifying this room as the library.

He was looking down a long corridor — it ran the length of the building, almost a block, all the way to Wilshire Boulevard. He had come all the way around the elevator bank. He was almost beginning to feel at home in the building.

He had the door open fully when something made him stop and get back inside. At the end of the corridor, a light came on. Leland's heart was pounding again. He must have seen a shadow, he thought. He was going to have to learn to trust himself. Now two men, one of them Anton Gruber, stepped into view and started talking. They were wearing kit bags slung over their shoulders. Leland held his breath so he could hear them. Still, they were so far away that their voices sounded like they were coming over a telephone on a pillow halfway across a room.

"Besteht eine Moglichkeit, dass er uns helfen wird?"

"Ich glaube nicht. Der weiss doch, dass wir ihn umbringen werden, sobald er uns gibt, was wir wollen."

They were talking about Rivers.

"Ich mag das Toten nicht."

"Je schneller wir ihn umlegen, umso leichter wird uns das Toten in der Zukunft fallen, wenn es notwendig wird. Dieser Mann verdient den Tod. Bring ihn jetzt her und wir erledigen das."

Leland waited a moment, then looked out. The feeling was strange beyond all believing. Through the looking glass. Leland had been thinking it all evening, since — when? Gruber had a Walther. He wanted to kill somebody, like a kid — that much the briefings had right. He had Rivers in front of him, and Rivers was it. Gruber dusted imaginary lint off Rivers's shoulders. Rivers didn't believe it — he didn't exactly know what was going on. Gruber put the muzzle of the Walther on Rivers's lapel and pulled the trigger. Rivers had a split-second of incredulous horror as the shot was fired, and then he was dead, sitting down and sprawling back with a little bounce, like a load of wash.

Now Leland was running for his life.

He stopped when he got to the thirty-fourth floor — he wanted a wide-open floor. Through the looking glass, like it or not. The city floated out below him, serene and twinkling on Christmas Eve, with Rivers dead on the fortieth floor, his heart looking like a piece of stew beef. The shock, they said, stunned you senseless before you hit the floor. Hunters said that. A deer hit the ground as if it had been thrown off a truck.

Through the looking glass: he had thought it first in St. Louis, at Lambert Field succumbing to the snow. Officer Lopez, who should have been in Los Angeles. Leland hadn't found the marshal on the airplane, just Kathi Logan. He'd wanted to get back on the plane. You never listened to yourself.

Leland had seen it on Rivers's face. He'd had a fraction of a second to realize what was going to be done to him. After Rivers was Ellis, then Stephanie. What Ellis was worth depended on how long it took him to realize that Rivers was dead. Ellis couldn't help them upstairs anyway: his office — and presumably his authority — was on the thirty-second floor.

It was 9:11.

Gruber and friends had been in the building over an hour.

Taking stock, making a plan: Leland couldn't send a signal without expecting to be detected, which meant that he would be drawing one or more of them toward him. Could he make them underestimate him? Then what? If they made one mistake, could he draw them into making another? If he could, would he be able to capitalize on that, too?

And he would be proceeding without knowing if his original signal had gotten out in the first place.

He was trying to devise a strategy that would give him not just the advantage, but the momentum. He knew what all the floors looked like, and if he forgot, he had them noted on his piece of paper, like a college crib sheet.

And if he got past the first step, he would have another means of communication at his disposal — not to mention destruction. He wanted to get his hands on one of those Kalashnikovs.

Later for that: now he would settle for a knife.

He wasn't going to find a knife, but, probably in the first desk he opened, a pair of scissors. No flashlight — that would be in the basement, or in a supply closet. Every floor had fireaxes. And hoses. He wondered if he could check the pressure. There were other things as well — he sensed his imagination warming to the problem. Oh, yes, the looking glass. He had not taken the step. It had been taken for him, on the fortieth floor, by a gladhanding asshole named Rivers.

A pair of scissors. He wanted to cut some electrical wire.

...9:27 P.M, PST...

He was on the thirty-fourth floor again. He had been to the thirty-fifth, with its similar layout, and had it ready. Now that he had this ready, too, he suffered a loss of self-belief. One good shot and he was dead. Was he ready for that? More ready than Mr. Rivers, ennobled on the deep-pile broadloom upstairs. Leland had seen many corpses, and he had seen men die, but he had never seen a man shot to death in cold blood. Plugged. In all this, Leland had forgotten pointing the Browning at the man-mountain driver of the station wagon in the snow burying St. Louis. He wondered how the cab driver was doing. He was home with his family, so Leland was going to stop worrying about it.

His plan was not going to work. But he had to try. He couldn't let them know hehad a gun. He had discovered he could flash the overhead fluorescent lights in code while watching the elevators. The stairwell doors were rigged with fireaxes to set up a clatter if they were opened. At the first sign of someone approaching the lights would go out. There was nothing subtle or elegant about it. He was waiting to see how many of them he was going to catch.

He was facing the Hollywood Hills. What did they see from up there? This building stood alone, with nothing around it rising as high as ten stories. The word KLAXON, in heavy, drawn-out capital letters, banded the roof: from a distance, the letters blended into a band of fluorescence. Lights were on all over the building. The lights of the thirty-fourth floor; flashing three long, three short, three long, would look as thin as a match-stick, almost indistinguishable from the background. And it was far from certain that the flashing would not be seen inside the building. You could see a faint flicker on the rooftops far below — but even if you were looking at it, you might not realize what you were seeing.

The lights disturbed his eyes — he had to fight to keep his mind from wandering. If you believed the popular magazines, for instance, the people living on those hillsides were about the last you would turn to for help. Leland imagined some whacked-out young actor in a Jacuzzi thinking he had picked up on the lights of a Christmas disco. Hey, dig it.Karen had always thought he sat in judgment on such people. Never.

They reminded him that what he did was not so important after all. There was a certain kind of life that went on in spite of politics and perhaps civilization itself. Karen had never believed that he could see the connections between whacked-out actors and the disconnected people on his own side of the line, like the doorman downstairs who had come alive with the prospect of rousting the guy in the Jag. The people of Los Angeles spent more money on cosmetics and beauty treatments than any other on earth. That was thought especially funny in San Francisco, where they spent more money on clothes...

Elevator: the humming was like an electric shock.

Lights out. Leland was down behind a desk, Browning in hand. He had a perfect view of the elevator bank. With a single, thin chime, the white light over the second set of doors announced the arrival of the ascending car Leland was gleeful. Whether they liked it or not, they even told you what doors they were coming through.

One. Just one; he had a Thompson, for God's sake. Leland had to draw the guy with the antique. The guy was fully out of the elevator now. He was about twenty-five. The doors closed behind him, but the car didn't move. Something else to remember. The kid stepped forward cautiously, his finger on the trigger. Twenty-shot clip. He was still a long shot for a handgun.

"Say, you! You come out with your hands up! We've been watching you flash the lights! Come out, we're not going to hurt you!"

Another German. Leland had to remember not to silhouette himself against the lights outside. He kept low, scuttling around to the west side, making it a long shot even for a submachine gun. What he needed was a paperweight, something twice the size of an ink bottle. The kid was groping for the light switch, still a good twenty feet from it. Now Leland headed toward the stairs.

"Come out! Don't make this difficult for you! We have guns! We are not afraid to use them!"

A flower pot. A little striated philodendron, with nice, white leaves. Leland kept his arm stiff and hurled the pot like a grenade toward the windows of the north wall. Dirt spewed out of the pot across the desks — it didn't sound anything like someone running, but it was enough: the kid was firing five or six shots even before the pot crashed on the floor.

Then something strange happened, a sputtering, popping noise. The windows were splintering. Tempered glass, they were dissolving in a million tiny opaque fragments. Outside air whooshed into the room. The kid moved toward them, springing from desk to desk.

Leland headed toward the stairs — and the light switch.

It was close enough to the end of the wall for Leland to reach it from cover. When the lights came on, the kid whirled, ducked, and fired all at the same time. The recoil knocked him on his backside, and the burst tore up twenty feet of urethane ceiling panels, which jumped out of position and fell down onto the desks. Leland waited until the kid came up again, blinking. The Browning was out of view. Leland was shaking: he had contracted with himself to kill this kid, but now he did not know if he could go through with it, at least on the terms he had planned.

"Hey, shithead, over here!"

Another burst, thudding into the plaster walls. Surely they were hearing this down below. Stephanie and Ellis knew what it was about. Leland ran up the stairs and out across the thirty-fifth floor. He had cut lengths of electrical cord, tied them together, and hoisted a chair draped with computer print-out paper up against the window. It was a lousy effigy, or scarecrow, or whatever it was, and now Leland thought that the kid already had made so many mistakes that he was going to start getting smart. Leland knew his luck could not hold indefinitely. He set his contraption in motion, then ran back for the stairwell.

The thing rotated slowly, catching the light. Leland heard a scrape on the stairs. He was around the corner, not six feet from the door. The kid appeared. He was not fooled. He stepped toward Leland's contraption, the Thompson up, ready to shoot. Leland ran at him, the Browning raised like a blackjack.

The boy almost got around in time. The Browning struck a glancing blow off the side of the boy's head, knocking him backward. He was still conscious, trying to get the Thompson up between them, when Leland hit him again, throwing his weight on him. The kid's head struck the vinyl floor; the submachine gun went flying. The kid got to his hands and knees. He was stunned, trying to crawl away. Leland locked his forearm around the boy's neck. He caught the windpipe. The kid's hands came up. There was no time to waste. Leland got his shoulder against the base of the skull.

They taught this with drawings and diagrams, not demonstrations. "Believe me, it works," the FBI instructor had said, almost a quarter of a century ago, "I hope to hell you never have to use it."

The human spine was as thick as the handle of a baseball bat. Focusing on what he had been taught made Leland lose sight of what he was doing to a fellow human being. There was no choice — not with Rivers lying upstairs. You had to throw your weight out behind you as you dove forward; your shoulder, with all your weight behind it, separated the skull from the neck.

Leland did it, flinging himself out as if from a diving board, and the boy's neck broke with a sound like a sapling being twisted in a strong man's hands.

His head flopped like a chicken's.

Leland felt his bladder open. He thought he was going to be sick. He had to relieve himself. He breathed deeply and held on. He could hear the kid's bladder spilling. The kid's legs were shaking, his hands clenching, as if they did not know they were dead.

Leland retrieved the Thompson and set it on the desk while he went through the kid's shoulder bag. Two more full clips — forty rounds. A small but promisingly heavy hand-held CB radio, civilian America's version of the walkie-talkie. Candy bars — a Milky Way and two Oh Henrys! No grenades.

Leland pulled the bag off the body and put it over his own shoulder. He would be crazy if he thought he had gained an advantage. He had passed from having been undetected to someone they had to hunt down. They would not underestimate him again.

He had to figure he had used up all the luck he was going to get. He had to figure he was a dead man; he had done it during the war, as much as he had wanted to live. It had been the thing about him that Karen had understood least. You forgot you had a personal destiny. Yes, when the mind and body were together, functioning as one, you forgot you had a personal identity. That was the trick of it.

He rolled a secretary's chair next to the body and then wrestled the body into it, struggling to get the weight onto the seat. The head hung face-down on the chest, almost face-inward. Leland scavenged the remaining cartridges from the clip on the Thompson, then fitted a fresh clip. He took paper and a marking pen from a desk.

When he was ready, he wheeled the body around to the elevator bank. It was the second car that had come up to the thirty-fourth floor; if it had not been called back down, it would travel up one flight in only a moment. Leland touched the button and ducked around the corner.

The chime sounded almost at once, and when the doors slid open, the car was empty. Leland braced his foot against the door while he rolled the body in and turned the chair around.

Now he looked up. This was the thing he had wanted to see, if he could climb to the roof and replace the panel before the car reached the thirty-second floor.

Using the muzzle of the Thompson, Leland poked the panel aside. The gun would have to go up first. He could gain six to ten seconds by pressing the buttons for the thirty-fourth and thirty-third floors. The question was, did he have enough strength to pull himself through the hatch? If he didn't, the doors would open and close on the thirty-second — he would have thirteen shots to defend himself for three to five seconds.

He reached up, got a handhold and lifted himself up to his toes with one hand. He pushed the Thompson up, touched all the buttons, and allowed the doors to roll shut.

He was on the roof when the car reached the thirty-third floor, but he was still trying to get the panel back in place when it started down again, and he was just getting to his feet, the Thompson slung over his shoulder, when the doors opened on the thirty-second.

They were waiting. A woman gasped — they had women, as he had suspected. The car shook as people stepped aboard and the doors started to close again before they were blocked. Leland could see only a narrow strip of floor no more than a foot out from the elevator entrance. He was aware of the shafts on both sides, but he saw no reason to get curious and look down.

"Was geht hier vor? Lass mich den Zettel sehen!"

Little Tony again, wanting to know what was happening.

"Now we have a machine gun," he read. "His neck is broken?" he asked. "Speak English."

"Maybe a security guard we overlooked?"

"Why would someone do this if he had a gun? The note says 'we.' That's interesting.. What did you find in that office?"

"A jacket, shoes, and socks."

"One man's clothes. We? A man and a woman, if what you said is true. They went off to make love and were able to slip away. Upstairs? Why is the man without shoes or socks and the woman fully clothed? Lovers who break a man's neck like a Green Beret? Oh, no."

"We have to do something."

Little Tony the Red sighed. "We have to tell Karl his brother is dead. I want Karl down here. The body should be upstairs, out of sight. I want these people kept calm for as long as possible." He moved almost out of earshot. "Call Karl on the radio and tell him to come down here. When he is on the way, you and Franco take Hans up to that place where we put the other fellow. This individual — or these people — now have one of our radios. That is not on the note. This was not braggadocio and the man is no fool. You and Franco come down via the stairs with your weapons cocked. We will keep the way clear for you."

"Karl is coming down," a new voice said. "You had better get going."

The doors rumbled shut, and the car started up. Leland thought of killing them right now, shooting down through the roof of the car, but too many factors argued against it. The shots would be heard. The car might be damaged in a way that could trap and kill him. Or he could not be as effective against these two as he had to be. Perhaps they were doing him a favor, taking him all the way to the top.

Now the car coming down rushed past him so quickly that he had to reach for the cable with his other hand. He spent the rest of the trip holding on tightly.

He waited until they were wheeling Hans out of the car before he took the step up to the catwalk inside the elevator shaft above the fortieth floor. He had to climb over a double railing. He was smeared with heavy, black axle grease. Unless he could clean up, he was going to have to be careful reaching for hand or footholds. When the elevator door closed again, he was left in darkness.

A big of light came through a ventilator. Four elevators on one side, four on the other: what was in the middle? The wall was concrete. He felt his way along until he came to a metal door four feet high. In the center was a sheet-metal sign he couldn't read. Warning enough, he thought. The door swung outward heavily. Leland took one of the .45 cartridges from the canvas bag and held it out through the door opening before dropping it. Thirty-two feet the first second, double that the second, double again the third. After almost four seconds, the cartridge landed with a nonexplosive clatter. All the way down. He'd found the air-conditioning system. He smiled. All he needed was a rope, boots, hammer, and pitons — he could run through the building like a rat. He went on.

There was another metal door at the far wall, this one large enough for a man. It was not locked, but something pulled it closed. The wind. It was howling up here — but by the look of things, blowing the smog out to sea. The city was brilliant. He was looking south to highrises on the horizon twenty or thirty miles away, the traffic still flowing toward them. Long Beach and San Pedro, according to Stephanie. He was two or three stories above the lighted edge of the roof. One thing was obvious: you couldn't land a helicopter up here. You could land assault troops, but you couldn't possibly get the hostages to climb flexible ladders into helicopters hovering forty-five or fifty stories above the street.

Leland went down the ladder to the roof itself. All four stairwells wouldn't come up as far as the roof, but certainly one would lead to a door up here. Leland wondered if anyone else was thinking along the same lines, but there was no reason for anyone to have guessed he had climbed onto the roof of the elevator.

But there was no question about it: in Little Tony, he was up against one smart customer, who had been able to cut right through the nonsense Leland had incorporated into the note. If Leland had any more luck, this individual was going to get to know him a whole lot better, possibly well enough to get even one step ahead of him. Leland asked himself: if he were on the other side, what would he be looking for?

Now he thought he probably had made a mistake, not killing the two in the elevator. They expected him to try to use the radio, and if he allowed them to learn that he had made his way to the roof they would see that much more clearly how cautious they had to be with him.

It would have been better if the elevator car had arrived on the fortieth floor with three corpses in it. In the confusion, he would have had that much more time to get a message out.

Sure, they would have heard the shots, but if he had been thinking, if he had been willing to take the chance, he could have cut deeply into their numbers, drop back into the car, stop it, and get off before it reached the fortieth floor.

He shuddered, and it made him wonder if he was going into shock. He could still feel that boy's neck breaking. He couldn't let himself think about it. If he caved in, it would be only a matter of time before they caught and killed him. He could not be mistaken about that: if they caught him, they would kill him.

He found an open door in the southwest corner. Inside was a large room containing fluorescent lamps for the sign around the roof, and a staircase going down to the fortieth floor. The door below probably opened on the corridor he had followed around the building before he had seen them kill Rivers. If Leland understood the way these people worked, sending Karl downstairs left only one man on the fortieth floor. It was 10:25 now — it had taken him almost ten minutes to find his way down from the elevator tower. How many floors had the other two been able to search? Leland wanted to know what they were doing in the executive suite, but getting a message out was more important. He went back out onto the roof.

The radio had five channels, which someone had helpfully numbered. The selector switch was set on channel twenty-six. Leland flipped the radio on.

"...so you see it is quite pointless to continue. Unless you surrender to us by ten-thirty, we are going to start shooting hostages. Who knows perhaps we will shoot someone you know and love..."

Bullshit. Little Tony Gruber was taking a shot in the dark. He wanted to keep the hostages calm. He wasn't going to do that by shooting them. He didn't even know if Leland was listening. Of course, if Leland acknowledged the transmission, everything would change, and not in Leland's favor. Something bothered him about this. Even given the fact that he was loose with a submachine gun, why would the guy devote so much time and energy to him?

They weren't ready to go public. They needed what Rivers had refused to provide. On the fortieth floor.

At 10:28 P.M., Leland turned the radio on and pressed the "Talk" button.

"You run your mouth so damned much, I can't get a word in. I want to make a deal with you. Are you listening?"

"Yes. Go ahead."

"Let me send the girl down. She's done nothing and she's afraid something's going to happen to her. Let me send her down in the elevator. I want your word on that."

"Yes, of course, you have my word. Summon an elevator and put her aboard..."

Leland wasn't listening. He put the radio down on the table in the law library and stepped quickly into the long corridor leading down to the two bodies and the executive suite. Leland figured he had about a minute — long enough for them to realize that he had distracted them for his own purposes. Who among them was alone? Leland wanted them terrified of him, if that was possible. He was beginning to look terrifying anyway, covered head-to-foot with grease from the elevator cable.

As he reached the end of the corridor, the lights in the suite went out.

Leland froze. He heard a clicking sound, far off around the corner — someone trying to turn a doorknob quietly. Leland took two steps back, then turned and ran. Now he heard them coming. He stopped, turned back, got low, and fired a burst. In the dark he could see nothing, and the roar of the Thompson had him deafened, but he had a sense of the tremendous damage the weapon was doing, tearing through the paneled partition on the far side of the room and the heavy glass plates beyond.

They had figured it out — they had gotten wise to where he was. He backed farther up the corridor toward the library door, and fired another, longer burst. He was shaking now, sure he was going to be shot in the back as he tried to get inside. He ran, stumbling as he reached the door itself, and fell inside.

He was scrambling to his feet, his shoulder going numb from hitting a chair, when the corridor filled with a returning burst of fire. Kalashnikovs — you could recognize their sound anywhere. He had to get his hands on one of those guns. The muzzle flash lit the corridor its entire length, and Leland could hear the damage being done in the rooms on the south side of the building. He was not going to fight it out with them. For all he knew, they were coming around the other way, too. He needed the radio. Given the way the partitions were being torn to pieces, he had to keep low. He scuttled through the far door, the radio slung over his shoulder. He felt like Robinson Crusoe escaping the cannibals.

Across the south side of the building, he tried to keep below the level of the desks, across one small room after another. Three single shots rang out — they were at the library. He kept going, even though he was afraid he was heading right into them again. How had they guessed it? He had done something wrong, but he didn't know what it was. The whole floor was indefensible. If he could get around to the northwest staircase, he could disappear into the floors below.

He held back at the corridor on the west side. Its lights, too, were out. They had been lit before. They were driving him like a deer around the building. This was the bottleneck. They were going to catch him halfway to the northwest stairs, and cut him in half. He wondered if they had learned anything about him from anyone downstairs. There was Ellis, Stephanie's boss. Sure, Stephanie had yet to learn the lesson of her life.

Leland was going to die here, if he didn't get moving.

He took another look into the corridor. The door to the roof was twelve feet away, which was too far, with the radio, shoulder bag, and the Thompson weighing him down. He rapped on the partition separating him from the office opposite the door leading upstairs. Wood, probably three-eighth-inch paneling over a hollow core. If he had the time, he could kick his way through it like a rat chewing through a plasterboard wall.

He looked up: by moving the urethane ceiling panels, he could go over the top.

If he moved fast enough.

On the other side, he had to hang from the metal support and drop the last foot and a half to the floor. He had wanted to replace the ceiling panels, but he had been able to see that they would realize quickly enough what he had done. His shoulder was throbbing now. It would be immobile tomorrow. Firing a Thompson wasn't going to help. He had fired one once before, during an FBI course, and it had felt like trying to tackle Larry Csonka.

The door to the corridor was locked from the outside. He stepped back. He had hoped that he would be able to step from one doorway to the other, but now he couldn't even see the other. When they reached the adjoining room, they would see the hole in the ceiling and understand what he had done to himself.

He had put himself in a box. It was like one of those garden mazes the English loved so much. He was in it and they could blast away until they were sure they'd killed him. Dick Tracy did it all the time.

Unlike the great Chicago detective, Joe Leland had gotten it backwards — and the bad guys had his kid, too, like old Lucky Lindy himself. He wanted to kill them, he thought for the first time. Oh, yes, now he wanted to.

The locking mechanism was covered with that hefty-looking brushed aluminum plate. He had to hope that the ammunition wasn't short-loaded. All he needed was bullets ricocheting around the room, and then the job he would have done on himself would be complete. He moved to the side and squeezed off a long burst. The door swung inward like something out of a ghost story.

Leland decided he wasn't being morbid. Now that he had revealed his position, he had to guess if they were waiting for him at the end of the corridor, or if they had arrived at the next room — or even if they were waiting for him on the staircase to the roof.

Even if he got to the roof, he did not know if he would be able to keep them from coming up after him. In any case, he had no time to think about it. He took a running dive across the corridor, and what sounded like a Browning automatic rifle went off five times, about a foot over Leland's head.

He got up running for the stairs. More shooting. They had enough ordnance to hold off a company of marines, considering the position they held. At the top of the stairs, Leland got low and fired the last of the clip through the open doorway below, trying to buy the time to get out onto the roof. He couldn't hear anything but the roar of the gunfire now. His ears felt like they were crammed with cotton. It would take too long to get another clip on the Thompson. The man with the B.A.R. reached the lower door before Leland got out onto the roof, and for a moment Leland was silhouetted against the pallid sky. Leland dived again, but the man tried to anticipate him, and Leland felt two of the shots pass within inches of his eyes.

...10:40 P.M., PST...

How many? There could have been as few as two on the fortieth floor. In his panic, Leland had been thinking at least three. Now it didn't matter. They had him treed like a cat.

He was back on the cool, metal catwalk inside the elevator tower. He'd hoped that he would be all right once he'd gotten to the roof, but it had been nothing for them to ascend the enclosed stairs and cover their own passage onto the roof. By then he had made it around to the iron ladder outside the elevator tower, and when they finally saw him, he was halfway through the door above. Now they could not climb the ladder without exposing themselves, and he had nowhere to go. The elevator that had been on the fortieth floor was headed down. When Leland had peered into the shaft, he had been able to see that they had opened the roof hatch of the car. They had figured out everything, were so close behind him that he had not escaped, he had been delivered.

Leland turned the radio selector switch past channel nineteen to channel nine. He was drawn up in the corner next to the door to the roof, where he would be able to hear them outside as well as watch what was going on in the elevator shaft, for the little it was worth. All they had to do was move their activities to the other bank of elevators, and they had him neutralized. He pressed the "Talk" button.

"Mayday," he whispered. "Mayday. Tell police foreign terrorists have seized the Klaxon Oil building on Wilshire Boulevard. Many hostages. Repeating. Mayday..." And he went through it again. When he released the "Talk" button, the radio began receiving.

"I doubt that that will be effective. Can you hear me? We know where you are. Will you acknowledge this transmission, please?"

Leland pressed the button. "What do you want?"

"I want to strike a bargain with you, a realbargain. These little radios are not very powerful, by the way, so broadcasting alarms from inside an iron cage is probably futile. Are you listening?"

"Yes."

"Stay where you are. We want no more bloodshed. Stay where you are and keep out of our business. We can come after you if we have to. Ah, and you know it won't be possible for us to deal with you lightly."

Leland thought he heard something. "How did you get on to me?"

"You did it to yourself," Gruber said cockily, "when you said you wanted to send the girl down. You heard me say that at the elevator, and you thought I would be quick to believe there was a girl.

"The conversation I referred to in English about the clothing we found — your clothing, I presume — never took place. Possibly it makes no sense to you, but I have found it useful to act on such obscure little impulses. However, now that I consider it, I judge that you do understand. After all, it was you who thought to climb to the roof of the elevator car. Who are you? You are a bold man..."

Why the stalling? Leland had taken the hesitation before the remark about not dealing with him lightly as an indication that the brother of the dead man was asserting himself in unpleasant ways — not exactly a break in discipline, but perhaps a sign. They seemed to have time to burn. 10:50. In an hour and ten minutes it would be Christmas. 3 A.M. in New York. 10 A.M in Europe. The Pope always had a Christmas message — did he appear in public? The biggest nightmare of the Italian police was an assassination attempt against the Pope. But what did the Pope have to do with an oil company building a bridge in Chile?

Leland rubbed his eyes. He had been awake for the start of "Good Morning, America" in St. Louis, 7 A.M. central standard time. In that time zone it was ten minutes to one, Christmas morning. Eighteen hours. If he'd slept on the plane, he would have missed Kathi Logan, who might be home by now, wondering if her telephone recorder had failed. He couldn't waste time hoping she would make something out of a broken connection. They'd kissed like kids. He wanted to get out of here and kiss her again.

Maybe they were only trying to make him think he was safe. In anticipating him, they'd drawn their perimeter at the fortieth floor. They had been ready for the man who had revealed his presence to them.

Q.: What had he told them about himself?

A.: That he thought he was capable of dealing with them.

Proceeding from that assumption, and the possibility that he was not overestimating himself, they would have to defend what was most important to them. It had taken the leader just seconds to tell the others on the fortieth floor that he was headed toward them. This while he'd been talking to Leland on channel twenty-six. So they had other working channels. Leland was going to have to keep his head up. So far, they didn't know he understood German, however poorly. The radio might become as important as the Thompson.

If he got a chance to use either again.

Another fantasy. Dick Tracy always stitched perfect X's with his tommy gun. It was obvious that Chester Gould had never tried to ride one of these broncos.

Leland did not know if he should try to send another message, or even if it would be worth it.

And he was afraid to open the door and look outside.

Karen would have loved it, he knew. Everything from arriving at the airport in St. Louis to this moment. Pulling a gun in a traffic accident. Kissing Kathi Logan. Letting this happen. And then making one bad decision after another, until he could not make a move, or say a word. Hubris. The All-American Hero. The sin of pride. He'd seen an example of it in an interview with a pretty-boy ballplayer: "My wife was just another coed, but then more and more she became a complement to me."

Leland shuddered. He had hurt many people in his life, but he had hurt Karen more than anyone.

Except, of course, for the people he'd killed. He pressed the "Talk" button.

"Listen, Fritz, I'm getting fed up with this penny serenade. Suppose you tell me what you bums are up to?"

Gruber laughed. "That's very entertaining. Perhaps you would be interested in coming down from there and surrendering yourself."

"You just told me I couldn't be dealt with lightly. Is Karl there? Can he hear me? I want to tell him what it was like to break his brother's neck."

There was a sound, and then the radio went dead. Leland checked his watch: almost eleven o'clock. He looked at the door and asked himself if he could really be sure that he would hear them coming up the iron ladder. He shivered again. The temperature was dropping — L.A. was a desert city. He shook.

For a while he dialed around the radio, trying to find their transmissions to each other, and then he cranked up the volume and listened to the faint transmissions from outside. Citizens band. Kids talking about their midwinter skiing vacations. Utah. One was going back to Arizona. He liked the slower pace of life.

Leland had to fight the cold. His father, who had been a cop, too, had taught him to take ten deep breaths; it got oxygen in the blood, which speeded the generation of heat. His father had outlived his mother, as he had outlived Karen. No, not exactly. His mother had had two strokes, a year apart, and in that year his father had taken care of her. Karen had been married to somebody else at the time of her death, which was not the same thing at all.

She died in her sleep, her heart stopping. Her husband called Leland early that morning, and Leland returned the favor by forgetting his name. Her husband for two years — Leland couldn't remember his name if his own life depended on it. He knew it was a way of not facing what had happened to their marriage. For all their work, they had let it get away from them at the end. Failed. Dick Tracy was entitled to shoot perfect X's: after all, he managed to get the bad guys in the cubicles, and keep himself outside.

Like a kid counting his Christmas money, Leland checked his ordnance again. Two full clips, plus extras — more than forty rounds. If he was able to go one-on-one the next time out, he would have a chance of picking up another weapon.

Getting ahead of himself, he thought.

I'm not going anywhere.After the divorce and before her remarriage, after Leland had quit drinking, and when he had himself in good shape again, Leland wrote to Norma MacIver in San Francisco. They had been drawn to each other years before, but nothing had come of it for many reasons. In the letter he told her what had happened to him. He had been in and out of the San Francisco area on business several times since the divorce, but he had not tried to contact her because he hadn't thought she would like the man he would have had to present to her. Now, he said, he felt better about himself, and wanted to see her.

She called him. They talked for three hours.

Six weeks later, as fast as he could arrange it, he was headed north from San Francisco International Airport in a rented convertible. The weather was brilliant.

Norma had an apartment on Nob Hill two blocks from the Cathedral. The key was in an envelope under the mat at the door. The note told him not to worry about the scruffy toy poodle, and that Joanna, her daughter, was due home from school at twenty-to-four. He was walking into another life.

Norma was an assistant to a San Francisco Supervisor, the dog was a jet-propelled little freak, and Joanna was tall and slim, like her father, but dark, like her mother.

"You shot down all those planes, didn't you? My Dad is at the very end of the book."

"He got into the war late. Now that I'm older, I know how brave all of us were, including your father. Especially."

Fisherman's Wharf. Three days later it would be Jack London Square, in Oakland. Norma looked beautiful. Motherhood and ten years had softened and slimmed her; having created so much for herself made her look wise. Joanna was perfect: intelligent, inquisitive, and brimming with self-belief. She knew her mother and Leland would be sleeping together, Norma told him.

No matter. The first time Leland made love to Norma MacIver was in her kitchen, that first night, with the coffee cups moved quickly from the table. He undressed her, more excited than he had ever been in his life, and they made love with their eyes open, under the fluorescent light, looking at what they were doing to each other. He believed he was with the most honest woman he had ever known. He carried her into the bedroom, and in the morning, when they awakened, they were still in each other's arms.

For the next five days they made love constantly, and for more than a year they were lovers, faithful to each other. But she did not want to return to the East, and his business made it impossible for him to relocate in the West. He was wildly in love with her, hoping they could solve the problem somehow, when she suddenly broke it off. She would have been willing to move at once, she told him, if she could have brought herself to believe that she could ever be more than second in his life not just to his work, but what his work represented.

"Joe, if you had once entertained the idea of chucking everything and starting over with Joanna and me, we wouldn't be at this point. But you never said it, never thought it long enough to discuss it with me. I don't want to be in love with a man who would have to fit us in around his career. I won't settle for it. Not even MacIver did that to me — and I don't think you even know what I'm talking about."

He did know. He loved her, but not enough to fully surrender his imagination. A year later she married a Berkeley radical five years her junior and moved with Joanna and him to St. Thomas, in the Caribbean, where they still lived, for all he knew. She had been right. If he had been willing to give himself a chance, he would have been happy. It took him a long time before he could let himself think of her. He still figured that he had missed the chance to salvage something of his life.

"Merry Christmas," he said aloud. He stood up and stretched, raising the submachine gun over his head. What'd you get for Christmas, Joe?During the Depression, even the cops had been on short hours; you stood on the corner with your buddies a day or two after the holiday, not comparing notes, trying to make your parents look good. "Oh, I did okay. I got what I wanted." He'd been an only child. And he'd had only one, Stephanie. And now Judy and Mark and — for the time being, they were in no danger, he thought.

Hoped.

You didn't tell us, Joe. What did you get for Christmas?Just what I needed,he thought, in the way he'd talked as a child, Igot this really swell gun.Not even his father could understand the things that had happened to him. "Never had to use my gun," he'd said in his old age, as if to atone for the blood on his son's hands. "You don't know how sorry I am that it happened to you."

Hey, Ace, how many kills now?Leland didn't have any idea. He didn't know how to count the mistakes, like the old cop before the war whose bad idea Leland the rookie had followed in spite of himself, or Tesla, who had gone to the electric chair instead of the real killer.

Karen had helped him with Tesla. "You must not blame yourself. He confessed. The confession was wrung out of him, but not by you. There was a district attorney, a judge, and jury. A defense attorney. You are not responsible."

Perhaps. But because he had survived them both, they danced in Leland's dreams. Tesla especially, living the life that had been taken from him.

Leland put his ear against the door to the roof. Nothing. He peered down into the shaft. All of the elevators were far below, motionless.

The cables were out of reach — and covered with grease anyway. The walls of the shaft were smooth cinder block all the way around, all the way down.

He thought about the door again. If one of them was outside and saw the knob turning, he would have Leland cold. Just touching the knob on this side involved an unacceptable risk.

Whether he liked it or not, he had to take another look at the air-conditioning and ventilating system.

A fellow in San Francisco had fallen down one of these vertical shafts twenty-nine or thirty stories; he'd lived, according to the news story, because the air under him had cushioned his fall. Leland didn't think he wanted to try it.

He figured, too, that he would be wise to make as little noise as possible. If someone heard the little iron door clanging, Leland would have the whole bunch after him again.

He could see about three feet down. The idea of going in the shaft made him so sick, he was not sure he could continue to stand where he was, much less try to sustain himself inside. There was no point in dropping another cartridge. Four hundred feet. This was not the same as flying. It was not even the same as crawling into a cave. The large vertical shaft had to branch off into smaller, but still large-enough, horizontal, rectangular tubes. Once in — if he got that far — he would not be able to turn around. He might not be able to get the leverage to break through the register covering the duct opening. He might find himself head down, unable to move.

Did he have to turn himself into a bug in a drainpipe?

He put down the radio and the Thompson, got on his belly on the iron platform, then projected his head and shoulders through the doorway and down into the shaft.

Wider than he had thought. Almost too wide. He could get down about three and a half feet, no more than that. If he couldn't see the first of the horizontal branches, he hoped he would be able to feel it. No dice. He would have to go in without knowing where the first toehold would be. If it was beyond him, and his strength failed, he would fall to his death. Put another way, he would have almost four seconds more of life, enough to make death far from quick. His stomach churned and he had to back out of the shaft.

He looked again at what he had. How was he going to carry all this stuff? He was going to need both hands, and the Thompson had no sling.

The kit bag had a canvas strap. Unhooked, it extended about five feet. Could one of the hooks hold him? If it could, and if he used the Thompson as a T-bar across the small iron door, he could lower himself into the shaft. Figuring on not being able to extend his arms fully because they'd be bearing almost all of his weight, he could get down perhaps as much as ten feet. If one hook could hold him, so could two — if the first hook failed, that would be the end of it, anyway.

The shoulder harness was thick, top-grain cowhide, and presumably stronger than the canvas of the kit bag sling. Another two feet, with the Browning stuffed in his belt. Another two feet. He might lose the Thompson. As well as the kit bag. No. He could leave the kit bag on one end of the sling, drop it into the shaft, and climb his way down around it, then down the shoulder harness. After he found a foothold, if he couldn't shake the Thompson loose, he could still reach up and unhook the shoulder bag. And if he had to give up all that firepower, they would think he was unarmed again — if, of course, he called it to their attention. First, there had to be a toehold.

Don't get ahead of yourself, boy.He thought. He had been able to step from the roof on the elevator to the catwalk here — step up: he had reached above his head for the railing. It took a little figuring. He could be as little as four or five feet above the conduits in the ceiling of the fortieth floor. Then what? Suppose they heard him scratching around overhead, like a rat inside the plaster?

He had to face the fact that he would go no farther down if he found a passageway at a safe level. If he could not have the relative security of the sling and harness, he would not be able to think about getting in there.

The clips were the weakest links. They could be nothing more than some kind of flattened wire. In the light, they'd looked like brass. He was going to see if he could rig a test, wrapping the Thompson around the railing. No noise. If they heard him crapping around, they would be on their way.

It was a good idea to think of other things when he could. It rested the mind. He wondered about the benefit in talking to himself. He'd thought for years that he'd never done it, but his mother had told Karen that he'd done it as a child. Karen had been an orphan, a foster child. She'd talked to herself. She'd remembered more of her childhood than he ever could remember of his. Since he'd never wanted to be anything but a cop, he'd spent his childhood in a dream world, playing, listening to the radio, passing the time, coming awake to make note of something only when someone spoke one of dozens of buzz words, like collar,the verb, or suspect,the noun.

His mother had given him so much support, he'd taken so much for granted, that he'd gotten past the middle of his life, and at the end of hers, before he'd realized how little he understood her. His relationship with Karen had a lot to do with that realization and his father's advancing senility. A lovely woman, his mother, a twentieth-century classic. She'd met her husband right after high school and her only child had been born before her twentieth birthday. She spent the rest of her life creating a home, which an unmarried man knew was making something out of nothing but love, will, effort, and sacrifice.

He stopped to get his bearings again. Even the cartoon Napoleon going out the window of the nut house paused for a check of the knotted bedsheets. Leland was going to know this building — perhaps for only four seconds, but he was going to know it. He made sure the safety was on the Thompson, and then he looped the sling over the railing, which had already taken his weight. The clips still worried him. He was going to be able to put pressure on only the first, there was so little room in here to maneuver. He had to clear his head.

He had to think that this was the same as changing a tire.

What would his mother think of him now? The real question was, what had she thought of him before she'd died? She'd always said she was proud of him, but later, when he was being honest with himself, he thought he could recall something else, too. He'd frightened her. Well, hell, he had frightened everybody. All his life, people had kept their distance, only rarely reaching for him.

A parent was entitled to reservations about his or her child, and he doubted that his mother's generation was the first to realize it. He had his reservations about Steffie downstairs. He used to play Monopoly with her, hoping she'd win. There was a lot of real life on Park Place and the Boardwalk.

Now it was cocaine with Ellis. What Leland really knew about drugs had come from Norma, who had started smoking marijuana while he was seeing her. It was the time when drugs first started flooding into the country. He passed; with his track record on intoxicants, he thought he was doing himself a favor. What you made of drugs, like alcohol, was entirely a matter of your personality — and that was what disturbed him about this situation. He knew enough about Steffie and cocaine to see that the stuff could only re-enforce everything ugly in her. Cocaine was for power-trippers, people looking for an advantage, an edge — like Ellis.

Like Stephanie. He took a breath.

In. He could not think about his fear. Four hundred feet. The cartridge had taken so long to fall that he had wondered what happened to it. The submachine gun was braced against the bottom of the opening. The door itself was swung wide against the wall, and it was too heavy to swing back to trap the Thompson. Leland thought he was going to lose the gun anyway. The shaft was too wide for him to brace himself across it with his back and feet. He did not begin to put weight on the harness until he was hanging from the opening with his hands. Nothing shifted. Now he was fully inside.

As he hung from the harness, he worked his feet around the walls, probing for an opening. The walls seemed to be covered with some kind of fine dust. He was still within reach of the opening. He had to go farther down, but he didn't believe in it anymore. He didn't believe it would work.

He had to stop thinking: he had no choice.

He lowered himself, one hand under the other, until he passed over the kit bag and down to the middle of the sling. It was too dark to see his hands. He swung his feet around, touching all four sides again. No opening. He had to go lower.

Oh, God, please don't let me fall.He had about three feet of canvas strap left. Once more, he swung his feet around. On the right, the wall fell away. He had to go lower still, maybe as much as two feet.

No. His foot touched the floor of the horizontal shaft almost immediately. The shaft was no more than twelve inches high.

At least he had something to put his weight on. It was pitch-black in here. What he had to decide was whether he should take a chance on the horizontal shaft. Once he dislodged the Thompson, there would be no way back up.

If the little shaft branched again, he could be stuck in it for days, maybe for good.

He worked his right leg, then his left, into the shaft until he was on his knees, hanging onto the last fifteen inches of the canvas strap. He had to take the pressure off it for the Thompson to fall away from the bottom of the opening. But he was still using the strap for balance.

Take your time, boy.He dried his left hand on his pants and braced it against the opposite wall. Slowly he released his pull on the strap. From above came a clunk that he felt more than heard. Now the strap would no longer take his weight.

He lowered himself down the main shaft, pushing his legs into the horizontal shaft as far as he could, getting the backs of his thighs against the upper wall. It was as far as he could go without letting go of the strap.

He paused again.

The harness was around the butt of the Thompson, which was supposed to have fallen with the barrel away from the shaft. Now he tugged on the strap. When it gave, he lowered himself more and pushed himself deeper into the little opening. It was twelve by fifteen inches, he guessed: wide enough. He was able to get his hips in so that he was almost horizontal across the large shaft. Even if he could turn his head far enough, there wasn't enough light up above to let him see the position of the Thompson. The safety was on. The whole mess was going to come down on him; he had to get as far into the horizontal shaft as possible when he pulled the strap the last time.

One last pause. He counted backward from five.

He pushed hard with his left hand and wriggled backward furiously; he pulled the strap, something caught and then gave, there was a clang, and as Leland lost his purchase with his left hand and started to pitch headfirst into the shaft, the kit bag hit him on the back of the neck, and the butt of the Thompson bounced off the bag and hit him heavily on the back of the head. He blacked out momentarily; he seemed to know it while it was happening to him. He fell far enough out of the shaft to be able to reach the far wall again. The submachine gun started down, pulling the bag and the strap with it. Leland lunged for the strap as he pushed back into the shaft. His scalp felt like it was bleeding. He had the strap, but he was not safe, and he was still fuzzy from the blow of the gun butt. Using his free hand, he worked his way back until he was flat inside the shaft, his arms out in front of him, his equipment in front of them, the submachine gun still out in the shaft, too long to get into the opening sideways. The top of his head was smearing blood on the metal above, he realized. And he was squeezed in here on all sides. He could feel the rage building inside him as he scrambled forward for the Thompson. He wasn't thinking; he felt his hand on the safety, but he was too angry with himself and his situation to allow the position it was in to register in his mind. His hand went to the trigger, pulled it, and the gun discharged.

...11:24 P.M., PST...

Three shots, sounding like atom bombs in this enclosure, stuffed up his ears tight. He got the gun inside, the barrel pointing away, and reset the safety. He couldn't get the Browning out of his belt. He could turn the radio on, but he couldn't bend his arms enough to get it near his head. He had to leave it between his arms and inch forward to it.

Then work the volume control with his lips.

"Are you all right?" the voice asked. "What was that shooting?"

If he kept quiet, they might believe he was dead, a suicide or the victim of a gun accident. All they had to do was find the nerve to climb the metal ladder outside the elevator tower. Faced with that prospect, they might conclude that it was another trick to get them to expose themselves.

On the other hand, he couldn't be sure of how those on the fortieth floor had heard the shots. For all he knew, they had his position and were on their way. He had to get moving.

He was facing the wrong way. Even if he could see anything at all, he wouldn't be able to see where he was going. He wouldn't be able to see past his own body. He could be backing right into them.

He started pushing his way into the shaft, hauling the equipment after him, moving six inches, nine, sometimes twelve. He had to go fast. He was making noise, but not much; he had to take the chance that there was enough insulation between him and them to mask what they could hear.

There was no way to measure the distance he was traveling. His claustrophobia was almost as bad as his fear of falling, he was beginning to see. Again, he had to keep his head clear. He wondered if there was some way at all to get an accurate count of the members of the gang. He had to forget his fear and concentrate on what was going on here. If they still thought he was up in the elevator tower, it was as good as a new lease on life. He would be able to roam the building at will. He could change his tactics, stop killing, and start counting. As long as they thought that he was out of action, he could send a signal — as many as he pleased.

He came to the end. He couldn't have traveled twenty feet. Something was wrong.

He tried to look around over his shoulder, but it was impossible. No sign of light. The metal grating was cold against his bare feet, and thicker than he would have thought — thicker than such things looked from the other side. He pushed. The thing was really screwed on tightly. The room on the other side would be very close to the north end of the building, which the gang found so important. He pushed again, hard enough for the grating to cut into his skin. He braced himself and pushed harder still, and now he felt one corner part from the wall. He got the soles of his feet in the corner above, and pushed as hard as he could. It was open.

He knew what was wrong as soon as he had his feet down. Tar paper. He had made a mistake. He had figured the distance down the shaft wrong. He was still on the roof.

He drew the equipment out of the shaft quietly. Staying low, he reassembled the kit bag and strap, put on the harness, and put the Browning in the holster. The bleeding from the top of his head had stopped, or slowed, and he was covered with black dust from the inside of the shaft. A few hours ago, he'd been a gentleman in a limousine; now he looked like a circus geek, the guy who bit the heads off live chickens in the sideshow.

He smiled.

He left the submachine gun at the ventilator opening. The roof was covered with pipes and ducts, and he needed his balance getting around to the south side. This time he was going to get a message out, but he couldn't risk it until the roof was cleared. He wanted another one of them, anyway. Going down the shaft had done it, or running for his life earlier, or maybe it was having to control his claustrophobia in that little duct. It had left him feeling humiliated. Degraded.

But he was glad to be alive. And he wanted to do something to make sure he stayed that way.

The weather had changed. The sky was breaking over the hills, a warm breeze was picking up. He could see snowcapped mountains rising above the downtown highrises. The mountains were forty miles away, he knew Stephanie said that the geography of Los Angeles was the most beautiful in the world, and she was probably right.

Admire the scenery later, kiddo.He kept low, moving around the elevator tower to the position he thought someone would take to watch the door above. Up here, in the darkness, dirty as he was, he was hard to see. Wonderful. Terrific.

Now his eyes picked up the guy. He was sitting on some kind of aluminum box. Leland took out the Browning, released the safety, stood up, and started walking toward him. It was a moment before the guy looked up, a skinny little guy with wild, wiry sideburns, and for a split second he had that look on his face that said he didn't know what he was seeing, but by then Leland had the Browning pressed into the lapel of his fatigues, the way Little Tony had done with Rivers. The guy's eyes were wide open. Blue eyes.

"You speak English?"

"Yes."

"What the hell are you sons of bitches up to?"

He hesitated, his eyes brightening. He wanted to be smart. He was going to start arguing, or give a speech.

"No time for that bullshit," Leland said, and pulled the trigger. The little man crashed back on the aluminum box. He let out some air and lay still, staring up. "That's two," Leland said. He got out the radio and sent the message on channel nine, the so-called emergency channel, keeping his eye on the door to the stairs into the building. He put the radio back in the kit bag and picked up the weapon in the kid's lap. He was a kid, too, even younger than the first. The gun was a Czech assault rifle, fully automatic. Leland decided to stay with what he had. Maybe the guy had candy bars, too. He didn't have a bag, and Leland was not going to go through his pockets.

The hell he wasn't.

A Mars bar. Leland had always liked them.

He put the gun out of sight behind the box and grabbed the guy's wrist and pulled him up to a sitting position. He had to grab his collar to keep him from falling over.

"When you see what's coming, Skeezix, you're going to be glad you're dead."

Leland slung him over his shoulder and lugged him around to Wilshire Boulevard. The frame for the lighted Klaxon sign extended outward almost a yard, but it also provided Leland with a place to park the body while he caught his breath. He was not going to do any more lifting. After this, though, he wasn't going to have to do anything to get attention, either. He pushed the body over the side.

"Geronimo, motherfucker."

He had to know where it landed. Jouncing him across the roof had pumped the guy's blood all over Leland's chest and back. He had to be sure people could see the body. Leland got his head beyond the sign just as the body struck the steps and rolled toward the street, distorted and twisted as if all the bones were broken. Leland had thought he was too high to hear anything, but the sound came up, loud, an awful, wet, crackling sound. Leland knew at once he was going to be sick. He was back on the roof when he thought of MacIver and all the others who had done that to themselves. They had heard that sound. Leland was able to bend over before the airline dinner Kathi Logan had served him came flying up again.

He spat and wiped his chin on his sleeve. Now to retrieve the Thompson.

He was going to try it one more time. It was the last thing they were expecting. He was careful working his way down from the roof, then around on the fortieth floor to the corridor beyond the library — but he was not slow, either, going purposefully down the thickly carpeted corridor, stepping over Rivers and Number One. He could hear someone working in the board room. He stopped at the left side of the door and set himself, took his deep breaths, and turned into the doorway.

It was a girl! She was wearing fatigues and a cap, but there was nothing else tough or warriorlike about her. Her eyes dropped from Leland to the automatic weapon on the table. She hesitated, then she lunged for it.

"Don't do it!"

She actually stopped — but then she looked up at him and went on, flinging herself onto the table and getting her hands on the weapon. Leland squeezed off a burst that hit her in the head and chest and blew her off the table and back against the wall.

He straightened up, his heart pounding. He couldn't delay. What was the attraction up here? He hurried around the table and into the next room. A safe — as simple as that. A big, deluxe, copper-colored wall job, now decorated with four small, shiny, perfectly squared holes drilled around the wheel. Four kit bags were arrayed against the wall. He knew what he wanted, and it wasn't candy bars. The first two bags contained plastic explosive. He took three packets. The next bag had the detonating gear, including percussion caps. He threw that over his shoulder.

The elevator was coming. He hurried up the corridor and into the library, trying to keep track of the sound of the approaching car. With the explosive and the detonators, he had picked up another twenty pounds. He had just sworn off lifting. Being sick had taken something out of him. So had killing a girl. She had been twenty-three or four, a baby. How'd you like it, boy? Now you've done it all!He stopped when he reached the corridor on the west side. Voices. He had to hang around. He was near the northwest stairs, having taken the one route he could depend on, and he was near the board room again. He had to gamble. He did not know how the offices were interconnected in this corner of the floor, or if doors were going to lock behind him, if he was not careful with them.

He passed through a luxury suite, working his way down to the typist's tiny quarters. Her door opened onto the broad hall leading down to the board room. With the door ajar, he could hear them plainly, speaking German, but he was too close — it was too dangerous.

He let the door close, and pressed his ear against it.

They were trying to get Karl to calm himself. The dead girl's name was Erika. They knew about Skeezix down on Wilshire Boulevard. Karl wanted to kill Leland himself. He didn't think they were going to accomplish their mission. Then Karl said something just beautiful: there were only nine of them left. Only? What was it that Stepin Fetchit used to say?

"Feets, do yo' stuff," Leland whispered.

First, he hid the detonators. If they caught him with them, they would be back on the track again. Even if they caught him without them, if he had been cute about his hiding place, they might figure it out. So the kit bag was in the wastepaper basket under the big desk in the suite's innermost office. The next step was in trying to get an idea of how they were going to search for him. He could have some influence on that: he could change the rules of the game.

He was on the thirty-sixth floor, going down, when he heard gunfire up above, loud and resonating. Somebody had had the bright idea that Leland would return to his redoubt in the elevator tower. No, it wasn't going to be that simple. He didn't have to be told twice that they were trying to guess his every move.

Hell, they had to, now.

And that was why he was not going down to the thirty-second floor to "surprise" them with another sortie. If Leland knew his man, Little Tony, Anton Gruber, word had already gone down on their secondary channel, and they were in the stairwells waiting for him.

Effectively, there were only seven. Two were downstairs, one in the basement, the other in the main lobby, where he had seen something fall out of Santa's sleigh onto Wilshire Boulevard. Leland wondered if anyone else had seen it. They might have been able to get the body out of view, but they weren't going to be able to hose down the steps.

Now Leland was having trouble holding onto the reasons why he had done it. To get attention. To show them they were dealing with someone who simply hadn't been lucky with Karl's brother. If they wanted to take him for a wild man, so much the better. He was having trouble holding on and he knew it. He had never killed a girl before. Lucky Lindy, the last of the lonesome knights. What had made her think she could beat him? Skeezix's blood, that was it, which was now drying Leland's shirt to his skin. She had thought it Leland's blood, that he was terribly hurt. The next one won't be so easily fooled, Leland thought. It was not something he could count on anyway.

He stopped at the thirty-fourth floor, where the desks ranged in the open from one end of the building to the other. Of all the places he knew, this probably offered him the greatest real protection. The partitions on some of the other floors terrified him. With them, you were only out of sight, not out of danger. If he could use them to his own advantage, he would, but he couldn't figure out how.

More gunfire above. They were working their way down. They were conducting a sweep. Did they know how? Leland went to the elevator banks and pressed the call buttons. Nothing — no familiar whine. The elevators were closed down. Okay. No doubt about it, he was their top priority.

Probably the safest spot was in one of the corners. He selected the northeast, and began pushing desks together, trying to get as many thicknesses of sheet metal between him and them as he could. How many rounds had he left? Twelve in the Browning, a clip and a half for the Thompson, which could jam at any time. He had the plastic. If the packets were embedded with percussion cups, a burst of machine gun fire set them off, and if he molded the packets over the red emergency lights over the stairwell doors, he would have a good chance of hitting them.

He glanced at his watch. 11:51. Nine minutes to Christmas. They were not interested in the Pope or anybody else outside the Klaxon building. Their business was on the fortieth floor. He thought of Steffie again. There was no reason for them to connect him with her. As long as he kept them busy, in fact, she was safe from them. Maybe.

He climbed over the desks to get into his improvised fortress. If he had it figured properly, there were far less than nine that he had to worry about — and another in the lobby. It would take at least two to guard the hostages. Five left. Now that Leland had the detonators, they could do nothing upstairs. So the maximum coming for him was five. If five people were searching for him, he didn't have a chance. Not like this. Not sitting here waiting for them.

But he couldn't see any other choice. They knew that he had gone into the ceiling panels to get over the partition on the fortieth floor. They were looking into anything that could hide a man, and judging by the gunfire, they were shooting at everything that looked questionable.

But with only five, it was impossible for them to watch all the stairwells while they searched the different floors. Still Leland hesitated. He wanted to make sure they met him on his terms. He did not want to get into a shootout in a stairwell with one of them when others could be only thirty or forty feet away.

Now he realized that if they had put five on the search for him, no one was left to even spot-check the stairwells on the thirty-second floor to keep him from escaping to all the floors below. Maybe they figured he wouldn't do that. What kind of connections were they making about him? And why were there so many of them? They wanted to get into the safe. They wanted to keep the hostages calm. They were here for the long haul. They had all the time they needed to find him.

11:56. He had let the girl get to him. The blood on his shirt had made her think he was hurt. Maybe the dirt on his face hadn't let her see his eyes. A nice looking kid. After the burst of .45-caliber bullets had hit her, she had looked as bad as Skeezix down on Wilshire.

He turned on the radio. Channel twenty-six.

"Are you there? Are you listening to me?"

Leland pressed the "Talk" button. He was looking out across Wilshire to the hills — in some places, faintly, he could see Christmas lights winking at random. "What have you got on your mind?"

"We are coming for you. We want our equipment. If you try to resist, we will start shooting hostages..."

"Don't crap me! You want to keep those people quiet!"

"No, no, you don't understand! We will bring them to you, wherever we find you, and shoot them there. Since you don't seem to mind killing women, we were thinking of a child..."

"Hang on, my other line is ringing." Leland turned the radio off. He was watching a small crag in Laurel Canyon, trying to keep his eyes on it. There: one, two, three, four flashes of light. Dark again. He started counting. Nine seconds. One, two, three, four. He would have to climb out of here and go to the light switch hear the stairwell if he wanted to return the signal. Four? What did four flashes mean? He climbed out. Now the interval was ten seconds. One, two, three, four. Okay, but what did it mean? He hurried. When he flicked the switch, the lights dazzled his eyes. Swell. He ran back to the window, trying to keep his eyes on the spot on the hill. Four flashes, a pause, four more, fast; then the light came on permanently and seemed to waver. It was three miles away. Somebody was swinging it in a circle. Four. Four flashes meant four, as in ten-four, because he had sent the signal by radio. Message understood.

He wept.

12:02.

"Merry Christmas," he whispered. He turned on the radio. "You still there? Sorry to keep you waiting. You've got more problems than just me. The other guy tells me that the cops are coming."

"I'm not surprised. We are prepared to be here for many days — weeks, if necessary."

Leland didn't answer. If it were true, why would he say so? Why, indeed. If they were prepared to last for weeks, the only problem they had, the one condition they couldn't control, was Leland himself. They knew exactly what they were doing, even to the talking on the radio. They had to consolidate their position. They wanted the detonators — and him dead — before the police began to understand the situation.