Nothing Lasts Forever

...12:04 A.M., PST...

The whole thing was a lot clearer to him now. He hadn't done that badly. He'd made a pest of himself and weakened their ranks and slowed them down. They'd expected a siege. The hostages were part of it. Something in that safe brought it all together. Some highflying sharpshooters in an oil company had just sold a bridge to the military junta in Chile — that was what he knew.

In itself that might be enough, but the old cop in Leland didn't like it. He felt like a cop again — in fact, wearing a badge wasn't a bad idea. If the place was going to be crawling with the LAPD, it might just save his life. He took the badge out of his wallet, and turned the back into the light. THIS MAN IS A PRICK.

He put it on. At this point he'd rather have the hot coffee and doughnuts that always went with it.

He could use a cup of coffee. All the best police decisions were made over hot, bad coffee served in rough, earthenware mugs. If he slipped past them on the thirty-second floor, they would be permanently stymied, left to improvise the rest of the way. But the price was too high: he would lose his options with Steffie and the kids. The hostages would have to take their chances with whatever went down, as the guys out here liked to say, which he knew meant a SWAT assault — or worse, like the National Guard.

But if he stayed up above the thirty-second floor and they caught him, they would have the detonators and be back in business. Leland knew what they would do with him; he didn't need the questions of a taxi driver in St. Louis to remind him.

There was a third choice, although it involved some risk. The way things were going, he would be more useful a bit further along, when the locals could make their presence felt. The only place to hide was one that had already been searched, and the only one not blocked by members of the gang was the thirty-second floor itself.

It was worth it. He might even be able to keep his eye on Steffie and the others. He had the radio — the only problem would be in locating a channel someone was monitoring.

Now there was more shooting — it sounded directly overhead. To hell with the plastic for now. He would remember where it was, as well as his little fortress in the corner.

On the thirty-third floor, he made his way through the maze of offices to Wilshire Boulevard. Empty. The traffic had been light-to-nonexistent five hours ago. He had been here that long. One puttering motorist would tell him that the area was still open.

Here came a prowl car, number one-four-nine, the numbers on the roof, visible from the air. A black-and-white, they called it out here. Doing fifteen miles an hour. Leland could almost make out the face of the officer driving. He was looking this way. He was looking very carefully, trying to appear unconcerned, a look Leland had seen on policemen around the world. He was looking at the steps. They were onto it — they were here. But it could be hours before they were here in force. It might be daylight before he knew anything more than he did now. When was daylight? Around seven. A solid seven hours away.

The elevators started, and it sounded like all of them at once. He had been told no lie: these people were prepared to deal with the police. This was the time to move, when their attention was directed elsewhere. He felt a frightening wave of exhaustion. If this was going to continue until dawn, he would have to find a place where he could hole up and sleep.

The bulbs in the stairwell lamps on the thirty-second floor had been removed. Leland held his breath — he could hear nothing but the whining of the elevators. They'd had something in mind for him, but it looked as if they had had to abandon it. Still, he went quietly, the kit bag tucked under his arm for silence, the Thompson ready. The stairwell was as black as the ventilator shaft. The elevators stopped — again, seemingly all of them, and here, at the thirty-second floor. If he was going to find a place to hide, he had to do it now.

He knew exactly what was happening to him as soon as he felt the glass under his right foot, but his weight was pitched forward and he had generated too much momentum. His feet were gashed, the left worse than the right. The gang had been ready for him. He was motionless, holding on tightly to the banister, trying to keep from crying out.

The left foot had a big cut, a bad one. He had no one to blame but himself. They had taken the fluorescent tubes stacked in the stairway above the fortieth floor and broken them all over the stairwells. He should have known what they had in mind for him. Coming down from the roof, he had failed to notice that tubes had been moved. When he lifted his left foot back up to the step above his right, he could feel the blood pour off the ends of his toes. His instinct was to be careful, but he knew he had to hurry, even if they would be able to follow the trail he left to anyplace in the building. He had to get upstairs, but he had no idea of how he was going to tend to himself. The only first-aid equipment he knew of was in Stephanie's office. Bits of glass were embedded in his right foot; he could feel them grinding when he lifted his foot and set it down again.

He tried to go fast, but the cut in his left foot seemed to gush blood with every step. He hopped and skipped, trying to keep his weight off it, while the glass ground into the right foot. He went on up to the thirty-fourth floor, where at least he had the protection of his fortress.

Gunfire, just beyond the door. He stopped in the stairwell, his left foot raised above the rough concrete. It was running blood, the pain intensifying. Tomorrow he wouldn't be able to stand on either foot. He could feel the anger filling up in him again.He put both feet on the concrete, took his breaths, and pulled open the door.

The lights were on. The sound of the door opening made the girl in the middle of the room turn around, but she was too slow and startled by Leland's appearance, and a single short burst lifted her over the desk behind her.

Another automatic weapon went off, and the ceiling panels to Leland's left jumped and shattered. Leland had safety in the stairwell only if someone did not come upon him from above or below. He scrambled on his hands and knees across the floor to a position behind a desk. More fire, scattering items inches above his head. Leland knew where it was coming from, near his own fortress in the northeast corner. He moved to the next desk westward, poked his head up, and fired the Thompson as the other guy leaped over Leland's traffic jam of desks.

He was the only other one? Leland's feet were planted in puddles of blood. The lumps of plastic and detonators he had molded around the emergency lights were off to his right, not even in view. He moved over again, fired another burst at his fortress, and got down again. While the guy returned the fire, Leland got the last packet of plastic out of the kit bag and molded it around a detonator into a ball. In another moment, the guy was going to wake up, give his position on the radio, and call for help.

Leland worked his way around a little more. He'd killed four of them now, which wasn't bad, given the odds. This plastic was potent stuff, more than they needed for the safe, probably wrong for it, too. Now the guy was on the radio. Leland poked his head up and fired again, trying to penetrate his own defenses. He moved three or four desks closer to the northwest corner, until he could see the emergency lights to which he had molded the other packets. The other guy shot again, stitching the glass behind Leland. The cops downstairs were loving every minute of this. Cops everywhere liked to be in charge of the gunplay, and when guns were going off and they weren't in on it, it made them more than a little bit crazy.

"Hey, creep! Do you speak English?"

"Yes I do, you human filth!"

"Take a good look at those emergency lights by the elevators!"

He laughed. "I saw that movie, Sergeant York!Gary Cooper made a birdcall!"

Leland hadn't had that in mind; but then he remembered that the old man downstairs had made him think of Sergeant York— now what filled his thoughts was what these people had probably done to that old man.

"Look again, dummy!"

Leland saw his head coming up. "Wait!" he shouted "Don't shoot at it!"

Leland had the Thompson trained on him. The first rounds hit the guy in the neck and high in the chest, driving him back and passing through him to shatter the window beyond. Leland stood up and emptied the clip into him, keeping him upright and driving him back against the glass and then through it, three hundred and forty feet above the ground. Leland glanced again at the plastic on the emergency lights. He'd thought he knew what it was. It had certainly scared hell out of Skeezix's new friend. Later — first, Leland had to tend to his feet. No, first he had to figure out how.

On his way out, he discarded the Thompson and picked up the girl's machine gun — a Kalashnikov at last — and three full clips of ammunition.

He went down to the thirty-third floor, looking for an office similar to his daughter's, hoping to find something besides paper, towels, and toilet tissue. He could walk, but walking made him bleed. He was on the south side of the building, on the assumption that the gang would have its attention turned to Wilshire Boulevard, where the black-and-white had been spotted.

He picked the last of the glass out of his right foot, then studied the left. The gash was in the pad behind the smallest two toes, a good three-eights of an inch deep, jagged, almost an inch and a half long. It had been a long time since he had seen his own meat like this. If it could be treated properly, the cut would give him no problems. But he didn't know if he would even find something to tie around it temporarily. Finally he remembered that the best offices had the corner views.

He found a Turkish hand towel, and he folded it once lengthwise and then tried to tie it, but it wasn't long enough. His temper started to flare again. He wanted to kill them all? Now it crossed his mind that he was glad he still had most of them left.

He caught himself. First he had to bind his foot. He sat up — where the hell was he, anyway? This was a business office. He hopped across the room to the desk and got a handful of rubber bands. Good. In fact, it was pretty slick. The thickness of the towel cushioned the pressure of the rubber bands.

He wanted to see what was playing on the radio. Twenty-six was quiet. He dialed to nine.

"Come in," a voice whispered. It was a young, black voice, deep, with no trace of ghetto. "If the person who radioed for help can hear me, acknowledge this transmission if you can."

Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "You got him. Listen: you've got seven foreign nationals armed with automatic weapons and high explosive, perhaps a lot more, holding approximately seventy-five civilians hostage on the thirty-second floor. They've killed one. He's on the fortieth floor. In addition to the two birds who took the short way down. I've killed three others, including two women..."

There was a pause. "You want to identify yourself, fella?"

"Not possible. If I get the chance, I'll throw my wallet out to you."

"What else can you tell us?"

"The leader of the gang is a German named Anton Gruber, a.k.a. Antonino Rojas, Little Tony the Red, with a call on him in the German Federal Republic. He has enough explosive in here to flatten the place, which may be what he has in mind if he doesn't get what he wants, whatever that is. On the other hand, I've got the detonators, or at least some of them..."

"Throw them out."

"Can't right now, and I don't think it's a good move. As long as he thinks he can get me and make me tell him where the detonators are, he won't play his last card, the hostages."

"You talk like a man who knows something, if you understand me. I want you to throw the detonators out. The first objective is to reduce the chance of disaster."

"I already have, until they catch me. Let me talk. From what I can tell, they have the elevators locked up on the thirty-second floor. You try to shoot your way in, from above or below, and they're going to start killing women and children. Call your boss and ask him if he wants children shot on Christmas in his town."

"I want you to listen to me..."

"No, you listen: I'm wounded and I left a trail of blood to where I am now. They're still after me. I won't be leaving a trail anymore; let me protect myself and I'll get back to you."

Leland turned the radio off. He had been in one place long enough. He had to get himself together and understand how the situation had changed. He wanted to talk some more with the police.

He was limping, but he could move. It was like walking on loaves of bread. His left foot felt as though it had been sliced in half. He would know if he started bleeding badly again. He went upstairs, taking the southeast staircase, hurrying the first flight to get past the thirty-fourth floor, then slowing and feeling the pain the next two. Good enough. He was tired anyway. He wanted to rest.

Of all the aircraft he'd owned after the war, the best had been his Cessna 310. During the war he had flown all sorts of things, of course, from training planes up through the Thunderbolt, a heavy-handling, evil-looking brute, to the Mustang, the best single-engine piston aircraft ever built, bar none. He had been happiest thinking about airplanes and flying. On the day he'd checked out in the 310, he'd dropped the salesman off at the office and taxied back out to the runway again. The kid in the tower had told him to keep the wings on — he'd know how good Leland was feeling that day...

The thirty-sixth floor was like the thirty-third, a gridiron of tiny cubicles surrounded by equally tiny, but color-coordinated offices — in a big corporation, you always knew where you stood in relation to the top.

It had no status now, with bulletholes, splintered panels, and broken glass everywhere. He was on the north side again, sitting on the floor behind a desk, looking down into Wilshire Boulevard. Three blocks away, he could see the flash of a boiling light against a building. A helicopter appeared over the hills, then swung around abruptly and headed north, toward the San Fernando valley.

Leland was eating his Milky Way. He'd finished the Oh Henry!, and he was saving the Mars bar for last. He felt like a kid in the movies, or a young cop eating for energy in a prowl car...

He'd taken the 310 straight out to sea at a height of a thousand feet, across the New Jersey suburban blight where every tacky, upright swimming pool stood revealed, every van, every bolt-together aluminum tool shed — at a thousand feet, at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, the suburbs looked like an enormous junkyard.

But then he'd gone on, out over the ocean. Two miles out, he was at five hundred feet; ten miles, fifty feet. By then he was making better than two hundred knots, faster than he'd flown in almost twenty years. It was a brilliant, blue-sky day, with only a few cirrus clouds far above. The sun was over his shoulder and the water looked very dark, so close the wave's seemed to be nipping at the plane. He passed a sport fishing boat and waggled his wings. The 310 was his second twin, with wingtip fuel tanks, as pretty as any general aviation aircraft ever, loaded, equipped for IFR, one of the first small radars — he had world-wide capability At thirty miles out, he came upon two freighters, five miles apart, making for the Ambrose Light Using their superstructures as pylons, he flew figure eights; and when the crews came out on deck, he waggled his wings, climbed straight up, rolled, stalled, let it fall, and finished with a full loop between the ships where both crews could see. When he headed back to the land, he could see arms waving from the decks.

He pressed the "Talk" button. "You guys still there?"

"Ah, how you doing? What happened to you?"

"I had to get the show on the road. For the last ten, I've been cooping."

"Right. A couple of us heard your earlier transmission, and we agree that you're the real thing. We're going to take a chance on you. Now how do you make the situation?"

"The roof is easier to defend than to take. They're very heavily armed..."

"How about you?"

Leland thought of the Browning, and that Little Tony might be listening. "I'm in business," he said.

"How do we recognize you?"

Leland smiled. "I'm black. I wasn't when I started, but I am now."

"I hear you. We'll talk about that later. What about the radio? How did you come into that?"

No wonder: they hadn't figured out that he had one of the gang's radios.

"I came into this the same way I came into this sweet little Kalashnikov machine gun. It's logical to assume they're tuned in, too. Do you know who Little Tony is?"

"Hey, I usually work out of Hollenbeck. I was on my way home to West L.A."

"Okay," Leland said. "He's third generation Red Army Faction, West Germany. After Andreas Baader died, his people went deep underground Nobody knew where they would turn up, but the stories were always that they would do something big. Here we are." Leland had a sudden thought: what if the marshal on the plane from St. Louis had been responding to some wild, incoherent information? If Leland had been paying attention and identified himself, he might have learned something that could have prevented this.

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"Just say it's a long time since I worked Hollenbeck. Look, I told you: These guys need me, and it's not a good idea to stay on the air too long."

"Well, we're going to give them a taste now."

Leland froze. The police still did not understand the situation. He had become convinced that Little Tony was listening. Leland moved closer to the window — and now, faintly, he heard one of the elevators running. He couldn't be sure that they weren't coming for him. No, such a short trip would have been completed already.

They had been listening! They were headed down to meet the police!

Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "Our conversation was monitored. They're coming to meet you."

"Right on," the black voice said. "Thanks a lot."

With only seven of them left, Leland didn't think they would mount another mission against him. He got up — he needed a cane, or even crutches. He made his way from one doorway to the next. If he was going to continue to be effective, he would have to figure some way to make the gang come to him. There was no point in staying at the window. If there was to be a firefight down in the street, this was the best place to get hurt. He had an idea, anyway. And a thought to bear in mind later: on the basis of the information he had given them, police snipers could assume they could shoot at any target above the thirty-second floor.

He had to give an account of himself, or the gang would know how badly he was hurt. If they sent someone after him while he was exposed and vulnerable, that would be the end, surely. But he knew he would be better off in the long run if he could keep them thinking that with him they still had more than they could handle.

He needed a chair on casters, an electric typewriter, and a fireax. The floor was quiet. His bleeding had stopped, but the pain was intensifying. He remolded his ball of plastic explosive until it was the shape of a football, with the detonator in the middle. He put it on the seat on the chair. Carefully he put the electric typewriter on top of the explosive, tied the typewriter to the chair with its cord, then pushed the chair toward the elevator banks.

Now he heard popping of gunfire out on the street. The position of the elevator banks on the lobby floor and the locations of the garage entrances below that, limited the terrorists' field of fire in all directions on the street level, but from above, three or four stories up, they could keep the police from ever getting near the building.

The gang would be ready for armored cars. There were iron gates across the garage entrances, and an armored car with wounded men in it stalled at the bottom of the ramp would be impassable. This wasn't wartime, when the order would be given to blow it away. Policemen did not kill brother officers in the line of duty. It was more than society had a right to ask.

He could hear gunfire coming up the elevator shaft. What he was waiting for was the sound of a car in motion. He would not have a lot of time, and there was nothing he could do in advance, for it involved using the fireax on the door. As soon as it was heard and understood on the thirty-second floor, they would be after him. He heard automatic rifle fire from outside.

He got out the radio. "How are you guys doing?"

"Well, I guess you were telling us the truth. Some people thought you were a psycho. They're kicking the shit out of us. You say there were twelve?"

"Now seven."

"Well, you're one tough fucking dude, let me tell you."

"Stay tuned." Leland said, and put the radio away. One of the elevators was in motion. He wheeled the chair into position, then turned to the elevator door with the ax. With the first swing, the pain in his left foot was so severe that he nearly dropped the ax on it. The next swing got the blade of the ax into the crack of the door and broke something inside, because the door opened, then was forced shut again. He rotated the handle of the ax so that the door came open again, enough for him to get his hand in and pull it open wide, and block it open with the length of the ax handle.

He looked in — and bullets hit the top of the door. The car, coming up, was still a long way down. Leland had to return the fire — he had to show he was still fit. He poked the Kalashnikov into the shaft and fired a burst down toward the car on the thirty-second floor from which the firing had come. Far below, someone in the ascending car fired at him, the round pinging upward toward the roof. Leland got behind the chair and rolled it like a baby carriage into the shaft. If the guy saw the thing coming down, he might think it was Leland. Even if it didn't go off, his chair-bomb would go through the roof of the car.

Suddenly the shaft filled with brilliant light, and in the fraction of a second before he heard the sound, Leland knew he had accomplished far more than he had intended. The roar was the loudest sound he had ever heard in his life, and the concussion wave flung him through the air across the corridor and against the elevator door on the other side. He never lost consciousness, and he could feel the building continuing to shake as he slid to the bottom of the door. The floor was bouncing like a high school gymnasium during a dance. He could feel the building yawing. It wasn't his imagination — downstairs, people were screaming.

Then the motion was gone, but it had lasted long enough for him to understand what he had done. He had to get moving before he could start broadcasting again. The blast had knocked the wind out of him. Everyone else, too, he hoped.

...1:43 A.M., PST...

He had to go up. The shooting had stopped. What the hell, he'd put the fear of God into everybody, including himself. Climbing stairs was laborious and very painful now; for a while he found it easier to go backwards, but he could feel his muscles knotting. That was exhaustion, too. He went on past the thirty-seventh floor. The only thing that could genuinely surprise them at this point was more effort than they thought he was capable of exerting. He could see that his mood had changed, that he had found another way of keeping himself pumped up. He didn't think anyone was in any immediate danger because of the damage he had done to the building. The weight of the people involved was nothing compared to the weight of the structure itself. He was having trouble remembering what he was doing and what he was doing it for. Killing the second girl had been easier than killing the first. Nagasaki and Hiroshima — nobody remembered Nagasaki. He'd had enough killing. He was sick of it.

He got out on the thirty-ninth floor, the computer installation. The floor was sealed off from even the daylight, great banks of electronic hardware bathed in their own dull gray emergency lighting. Curiously, none of the equipment had been damaged. Either the terrorists were as in awe of it as everybody else, or they planned to use it themselves in their journey into madness they thought was revolution.

Leland had seen the sheet on Anton Gruber a half dozen times. "Little Tony the Red" was supposed to lend him a certain glamor. He was thirty years old, the son of a Stuttgart industrialist, raised by nurses, sent to private schools. On his eighteenth birthday he was given a Mercedes; on his nineteenth, another. Through the late sixties, he ran with a bunch of indolent rich kids who open their summers at Saint-Tropez, winters at Gstaad. Some of those people had been on the arty fringe of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and gradually Anton Gruber was drawn in. He denounced his parents and accused his father of the "crimes" of hypocrisy, complacency, and arrogance.

There was more to it than that: Gruber perehad been an officer in the S.S. during the war, like so many presently successful German businessmen. Automobiles, electronics — the old Nazis were everywhere, silent about the past, smug about the present. A generation of the damned, whose children hated their parents' lies and self-justifications. It was not all that different in America. Steffie had suffered in her life most of all at the hands of her parents, when they had been insisting insanely that their marriage was still alive.

Rivers was probably Gruber's sixth or seventh victim. Dr. Hanns Martin Schleyer, an industrialist like Gruber's father, had been executed the same way, a bullet through the lapel. Leland had heard that the West German police had tapes of Gruber gloating that he made sure his victims were dressed properly when he pinned the black boutonniere. Anton Gruber was fascinated by death, the presence and the look of it.

He was not the only one among them like that, either. Some of it was poetic German horseshit, but Ursula Schmidt, in an essay expressing her "final commitment to violence," wrote of her "womb of death to which men return for eternal rest."

Leland might have just killed her.

He didn't know who he had killed anymore: a generation ago, their fathers, uncles, possibly their mothers. In this building was a man who had just lost his brother because of Leland, unless Leland had just killed him, too.

The offices up here had clear glass half-walls facing the equipment itself, part of the paranoia that surrounded computers. The highest priests had to keep the totems in sight. He could not help grinning at the reaction tomorrow of the computer's attendants to the filth he was dragging in here. He wanted to take a position near the windows on Wilshire, although it would give him no protection. Perhaps that would work for him: given his past performance, they might not think he would be so stupid. He shook his head — that kind of thinking would get him killed.

Even from this height, the results of the terrorists' preparation for battle could be seen. A black-and-white piled up against a lamp pole, the driver lying face down just outside the door. Leland looked up. Two hundred feet above the building, beginning to dissipate, was a great, gray cloud. Sure, the blast had been heard all over the basin: there were ten times as many lights on around the city as there had been a few minutes ago. It made Leland realize something else. He stretched out behind a desk and switched on the radio.

"What do you think a building like this costs?"

"Hey, twelve million. Twenty — who knows? How are you doing?"

"I knocked myself on my can. That was one packet of their explosive. I've got two more. Be careful of what you say, because they're monitoring us."

"I understand that now."

"Don't sweat it. Is the building on fire?"

"Not so we can see. Now we want to know what happened."

Leland told him. "I saw one in the elevator. They have the escape hatches pulled because of a number I did on them earlier. So now we're down to six."

"We had a report from one of our people that he saw two of them back into the elevator. They have some kind of a barricade on the ground floor."

"Well, I saw one. You have to figure six left. I can't count probables here. Now tell me about the building."

"The seventeenth and eighteenth floors are completely blown out, and you have windows smashed all the way up and down the building. They're going to have to tear the sucker down."

"Was anybody hurt?"

"Not by you. We have two men hit. You blew crap all over the neighborhood. That explosive is strong medicine. I saw a desk and chair go sailing clear over Wilshire Boulevard. Hold on. Don't go away."

While he waited, Leland looked for evidence of the damage he had done. A hole the size of a compact car was drilled through a cigarette billboard, and across the street, the front of the squat, little building looked like the victim of a riot.

"Hey, boss, you still there?"

"Merry Christmas," Leland said.

"Merry Christmas to you. I'm going to turn the radio over to my commanding officer, Captain Dwayne T. Robinson, okay?"

He sounded like he was introducing a guest speaker. "Okay," Leland laughed.

"This is Dwayne Robinson. How are you?"

"Fine."

"No, whoare you? I want to know your name."

"I can't tell you that right now."

"Why not?"

"Next question."

"You've given us some information here. How did you come by it? Why are you in that building?"

Leland stayed silent. The guy wanted to control the situation from outside, if he could — if:old Dwayne T. wasn't thinking clearly.

"Are you still there?"

"Yeah. Put the other guy back on."

"No, I'm giving the orders here. We don't need any more of your kind of cooperation. I want you to lay down your weapons and retreat to a safe location. That explosion did a tremendous amount of property damage and threatened the lives of scores of people. Now these are the lawful orders of a policeman, and you are liable to arrest and penalties if you refuse to obey them."

"Put the other guy on," Leland said. "I don't want to talk to you any more."

"Now, listen, fuckhead..."

"No!" Leland screamed. "You listen to me! You've got six psychos holding seventy-five people at gunpoint. They have enough high explosive to flatten this end of the city. What they don't have is the means to detonate it, because of me. They're down to half their strength, because of me. As long as I'm in business, they can't get themselves set up the way they would like. Do you think you can stop them down there? Come on, tell me — you're the fuckhead! If you think I'm going to put up with your shit now and not have your chief kick your ass all the way down to Terminal Island when it's done, you don't know me!Put the other guy on! Now!"Silence.

"Here you go," the black man said. "How're you feeling?"

"Like I should have saved my strength. Who is that turdlet?"

"Don't draw me into that kind of talk. I can understand that you're tired and under strain, but down here it seemed like you were overreacting just a little, if you know what I mean."

There was something comforting about common sense coming from someone decades his junior, Leland decided. "I'm sorry. At this point, this kind of fighting looks easier than that kind of fighting."

"I hear you, partner. Just kick back and relax a while, hear?"

"It's been a long time since I've been called partner. Are you on the street?"

"No, I'm inside."

"All the years I was a cop, I was always on the street."

"How old are you?"

"Old enough to be your father."

He laughed. "Not mine!"

"I said, you oughta get a look at me now. What detail do you have at Hollenbeck?"

"Juvenile. We have a whole big show there."

"You like kids?"

"I love kids. Say, man, is there someone we can reach out for via the land line who can identify you? Once we establish your credibility, we can get going on who these people are."

"It's the long way around, but I see what you mean. You call William Gibbs, in Eureka, California. Tell him what's happening and where, and the first two words out of his mouth will be my name."

"Gotcha. Anybody else?"

"A Ms... got that? Mz?.. Kathi Logan." Leland gave him the area code and her number. "Tell her I was wishing her a Merry Christmas when I was cut off. She'll understand."

"I'll do that exactly right. Don't you worry about it. Why don't you get some rest?"

"No, I'm going to tune in on the opposition a while."

"You do that?"

"Channel twenty-six. Don't let them kid you. They all speak English."

"We heard the German, but none of us can handle it. We're getting it on tape. What have they been telling you?"

"Little Tony likes to think he's a seductive, persuasive guy. You've already heard everything I've been able to figure out. Nothing so complicated: he juices my fruit, and I juice his."

More laughter. "I'm going to tune in."

"What the hell — people are dying left and right, but it's all in fun, right?"

"If you say so."

Leland dialed to channel twenty-six. "Are you there, Tony?"

"Yes, Mr. Leland. It took me a moment to adjust my receiver. Mr. Leland, are you listening?"

Yes."Yes." He almost didn't say it aloud.

"We have here your colleague, Mr. Ellis."

Leland closed his eyes. "How are you, Ellis?"

"All right, Joe." It was a voice on the edge of terror. Leland couldn't remember Ellis's first name. "Listen to me," he said, echoing Leland's words to Dwayne T. Robinson, Lieutenant, LAPD — listen to me:some kind of Mayday into the void: "Listen: they want you to tell them where the detonators are. They know people are listening. They want the detonators, or they're going to kill me, Joe. Joe, I've done you a lot of favors in the recent past. I want you to think of that. I thought you would understand that, Joe. Joe, are you listening?"

Favors?He was telling Leland that he was shielding Steffie, but was favors the word he thought expressed what he was doing? If Leland didn't turn over the detonators, would he tell them who Stephanie was, to keep himself alive? "Yeah, I hear you."

"Tell them where the detonators are. The police are here. It's their problem now."

"I can't tell them. I'd have to show them. Then what? What happens to me?"

"Mr. Leland." It was Little Tony. "What Mr. Ellis has hesitated to tell you is that we are going to kill him straightaway if you do not yield our equipment at once."

"There are people here, Joe," Ellis said. He meant Steffie. He'd already said that he hadn't identified her. What was he threatening?

Leland closed his eyes. Goodbye, Ellis."I don't believe them," Leland said into the radio. God forgive me,he thought.

Through the little radio speaker, the shot sounded like a rush of air, and the screams that followed seemed very far away.

Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "All right. I'll give you what you want."

"We want the detonators," said Little Tony.

"Let me get them and put them where you can find them."

"Excellent. And where will that be?"

"Uh-uh. I'll drop them off first and get clear, then I'll call you."

"You have five minutes."

"I need more time," Leland said. "I've got a long way to go and I'm no longer in the best of shape."

"Ten."

"I can't do it. Not that fast."

A pause; then: "How long will it take you?"

"Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour."

"Twenty minutes, then we will shoot someone else, perhaps this time a woman." There was silence. Leland pressed the "Talk" button.

"You guys get all that?"

"Meet us on channel nine," the black officer said flatly.

"Now I know they can hear me, but I want to find out what the fuck you think you're doing up there." It was Dwayne Robinson. "First you tell us that you don't want to give your name, then that punk calls you Leland — is that your name?"

"Yeah. Billy Gibbs will give you the rest of the information."

"We've got somebody talking to him. Why all the bullshit? I want an explanation — now."

Leland stayed silent. Anything he could say would let Little Tony figure it out.

"Now listen to me, you son of a bitch," Robinson snarled. "Everything that went down between you and that punk is on tape down here. You let that man die. I don't give a fuck who your friends are, if there's a way to jam your ass in jail, I'm going to do it."

"Go fuck yourself," Leland said. He turned the radio off.

This was going to kill him, he knew. He did not know what to do but go out and meet them head-on. He was trying to remember that there was no sense in being stupid about it. He hobbled to the southwest staircase, trying to decide if he should go upstairs and fight it out with whoever was there. If he won, he could hold the position.

What time was it? Almost three o'clock, deep into the black hours before dawn, when people died anyway. He didn't want to die. He wasn't ready to die. He wanted a bath first. They hosed you down at the morgue, but an undertaker would clean his head and hands and bury the rest of him dirty.

He did not want to die while Steffie and the children were in this danger. That was why he was on this rampage. He didn't start the killing. Rivers died first. And how bad a job was he doing? He'd bagged five of them before the cops had even arrived. If he had it to do over, he would do it exactly the same way. Goddamn, he couldn't imagine how he could have done it any otherway.

He knew he was exhausted. "Man, you are beat," he said aloud. He had been awake twenty-two hours, and he knew from experience that the worst was to come — but that with the daylight he would be good for another full day. The body was habituated to sleep, but could easily do without it for one night. He had to manage himself carefully for the next three or four hours, if he lived that long.

He stopped at the elevator banks. If the blast had blown out two floors, the chair must have hit the roof of the car when it was between, or nearly between, them. Leland was wondering what had been done to the east bank. The doors on both floors would have been blown away, but the cars — and more importantly, the cables — had been above the explosion. As long as you stayed above, say, the twentieth floor, just to play it safe, then everything should work perfectly. Naturally, the gang would hear the electric motor humming, unless some other noise masked it.

All right, he knew something. What did he do with it?

It was as if he had been reduced to functioning with only shreds of himself, he felt so drained. He had to make so many new, strange connections to hold himself together.

He switched the radio on. "Tony. Tony, are you there?"

"It is a matter of more than passing curiosity to me, Mr. Leland, how you happen to know my name — and so much about us."

"You just happened to run into exactly the wrong guy." Leland knew it was a mistake as soon as it was out of his mouth: it contained no hint of the capitulation implicit in turning over the detonators. Silence. It was as if Leland could hear the bastard's wheels grinding.

"Tell me, Mr.Leland, why were you so interested in concealing your name from us?"

"I know so much about you that I couldn't be sure that you didn't know something about me."

"What difference would that have made?"

"You would have taken me a lot more seriously than you have."

"Yes, that's true. Very good. You're a wily opponent..."

"Look, I only called to tell you that I'm doing what I said."

"I know," the voice purred. "The reception is of a different quality, and I have to point the antenna in a different direction."

You son of a bitch.Leland was thinking of the kid who was giving his father the big screen television set. How did he know that story? Yes, the chauffeur. Asleep in his bed, bless him. Unless he had been awakened by the explosion. "Why did you kill Ellis?"

"Why did you let him die?"

Leland was moving toward the stairs again, thinking that it was what Gruber wanted: only in the stairwells did they have a chance of hearing Leland's voice — and not on the radio, either. "That won't wash, Tony. I saw you kill Rivers. You had no reason to do that. You wanted him to open the safe, but you were prepared to do it yourself. You killed him because you felt like killing somebody, but you did it on the fortieth floor, where the hostages wouldn't see it. All evening you've been trying to keep them calm, and now suddenly you've changed your act."

"Well, that was your doing, Mr. Leland. Surely you understand that. The explosion set off a panic down here. You seem to be such a warrior, you must know that you left us with no choice but to show them that we have the capacity to realize our aims."

Leland was in the stairwell. "You really know how to lay it on, Tony. The people you had to convince were your own. You're not doing so well, kid. Karl wants action, doesn't he? You made a mistake. You let Karl pressure you. When you have to start showing people how tough you are, you're already finished. You're a walking corpse, Tony. Start getting used to the idea of being dead."

"Like to have a word with you, Mr. Leland." It was Hollenbeck, with his nice, easy way of talking.

"I planned to go off the air."

"Good plan. We're picking up an awful lot of traffic in German on channel thirty..."

Leland switched off and went back up the stairs.

...3:10 A.M., PST...

He continued going up. Karl had prevailed and they were after him in earnest. With Leland dead, they had control. His leg muscles were cramping from the effort of compensating for his feet. He was trying to keep himself pumped up. A cop did it automatically, just trying to remember what he'd been taught, but when the fun was into its eighth hour, the problem became more complicated. Wisecracking didn't work when you had to keep your mouth shut. He'd already thought of the 310. In the twentieth century, when relationships fail, you console yourself with things. It never went anywhere, but he wanted to think about Karen again. He wanted to remember her. One small part of him refused to understand that she would have died anyway, even if they had been able to find a way to live together successfully.

He was going to try to get to the roof — if he could get there before they cut him in half. He wanted to think they were going slowly out of caution, but there was little reason for it. They knew he was hurt. If he could get to the roof, he would tell Hollenbeck. Maybe the police would be able to take advantage of the situation and get into the building.

He heard a door open below him, not too far down, either. He was between the thirty-ninth and fortieth floors, and he still had to get around to the staircase to the roof. Wait a minute!Hollenbeck on the radio? Maybe Robinson was somewhere else because the police were planning another assault. They had picked up the German transmissions and somehow understood their meanings. Maybe he was going to get a break! Hey! Hey!He wanted to shout it out loud.

He could hear footsteps, shoes on the gritty concrete. He couldn't be sure if he could be heard in return. He was even trying to breathe quietly. If the guy got much closer, Leland was going to shoot down the stairs and try to get him on the ricochet. They had almost gotten him that way when he'd dropped the chair-bomb into the elevator shaft.

He was beginning to lose track of what he'd done. Skeezix making a hit on Wilshire Boulevard. The girl at the safe. The one he'd mailed back to them, sitting in the elevator. That was the first. And the guy at the window, who didn't fall for the gobble-gobble trick, but fell for it anyway, and told Leland something about the explosive. A long night. And nobody to bill for overtime.

Leland remembered that he had an arms cache on the roof — Skeezix's automatic rifle and his kit bag of ammunition. Sure, altogether, almost one hundred and thirty rounds. In the right position, it was enough to hold them off indefinitely.

He hurried out onto the fortieth floor, using the wall for support. The latch clicked audibly when he released the knob. He had to hurry. He couldn't be sure that the other person would understand the sound or accept it for what it was, instead of a trap. He had another advantage: he knew the route around to the roof staircase. They had shot up this area, too. He had to be ready. He had come this far. He wanted to go the rest of the way. He had made a hell of a contribution already. When the sun came up, the world would see that they weren't as clever, or invincible, as they were trying to tell themselves and anyone who would listen. One human being had stood up to them. That's all it took. That's what they always said. He was one human being, and everything was different because of him.

The staircase door slammed behind him. He had to run — he started skipping, lost his balance, and fell against a desk. Somebody squeezed off single shots, and he could hear glass breaking. Returning the fire would only give away his position. How many more offices did he have to go through before he reached the hall to the staircase? Two, three? Now two.

From very far below came the sound of more gunfire, the heavy automatic weapons of the gang. Good! The lights of the hall were on, but he had to take the chance. As he headed down the hall, he heard a girl giggling behind him. He stopped.

"Drop the gun, please."

He did.

"Now turn around."

It was a little blonde girl in fatigues too big for her, holding an automatic with both hands. Her eyes widened when she saw the badge. "You are a policeman? Where are the detonators? Quick, tell me."

"On the roof."

"Ah, yes, I see. With two fingers only, please, remove the pistol."

He held it out for her. She dropped it in her kit bag. "Now tell me where on the roof."

"You have to go around to the right. There's a staircase up to the elevator tower and an aluminum box opposite..."

She waggled the pistol. "Show me."

He opened the door. She stayed behind him as they went up the stairs. All but a few of the fluorescent bulbs were gone. Mistake number one. He didn't know what the hell he was going to do when they got to Skeezix's gun. She was being too careful. He wasn't going to get anywhere near it.

"This is really too bad," she said. "You seemed to enjoy killing so much. But you are really only a trained dog. You destroy the building in order to save it."

"Honey, I don't give a flying fuck about the building." He was at the top of the stairs. "I have to open the door."

"Just a moment." He heard the click of her radio switch. She spoke at some length in German. Little Tony answered and then she said, "Nein, nein," like a woman telling a man she didn't need his help. Leland was beginning to think of something else. "Now open the door," she said.

The wind was stronger than ever, a warm, roiling gale out of the hills. The sky was clear in all directions.

"You didn't ask me why I didn't care about the building."

"Are you trying to tell me something, old man? Go on, keep moving."

"You people aren't thinking. Why didn't I just work my way down and out of the building?"

"I want to hear this. I want you to tell me everything. Now, with nothing remaining, you want to justify yourself."

"The detonators are on the other side of that box, Ursula."

"What? That's not my name..." He threw himself at her, and she shot him, once, in the left thigh. But then he was falling on her, and when the gun discharged the second time, the muzzle blast scalded his arm. She was falling, with nothing to absorb the shock. He was afraid that the gun would go off again, and he rolled to the left, away. He punched her in the face, but she tried to get the gun around, and he punched her again. She got his thumb in her mouth and bit down hard. She was trying to knee him in the groin. He grabbed her hair with his other hand and slammed her head down on the roof. She opened her mouth. He punched her again. His leg wasn't broken, thank God. He punched her three more times, and when the fight was out of her, he twisted the gun from her hand and got to his feet and shot her in the right eye. He was shaking with rage and relief and the exultation of victory. He pulled the trigger again. When the gun was empty he pulled the trigger three more times, and the last thing to pass through his mind was the notion of throwing her body off the roof, too, just to let Tony know he still had his store open. And then Leland fainted.

He didn't know how long he had been out, and the time on his watch, 3:38, wasn't much help. The bullet wound was in the flesh on the outside of his thigh, two small holes five inches apart, the exit wound almost as neat as the entry. A patch of blood the size of a pie plate glistened in the reflective light. He crawled behind the aluminum box and set up Skeezix's gun. He had the strap of his kit bag for a tourniquet, but he didn't think he would need it. More gunfire from the street.

Maybe he had been out less than a minute. This time he wasn't going to announce his continued presence. He had another thought: these people weren't getting tired. In addition to their own amphetamines, maybe they had found Ellis's cocaine, too. Assholes — they deserved each other. He had a clear view of the staircase door as well as the door leading into the elevator tower. He watched both. No surprises.

"Hannah?" someone called.

The man was coming up the stairs. He could have been close enough to hear the shots. This one would be number eight. The door was hinged to swing Leland's way.

"Hannah?"

The door started to open. Leland got down low.

"Hannah?"

The door was wide open, but no one appeared. The door started to close again, and Leland fired, slamming the door shut. He waited.

"We're going to leave you up here for now," Little Tony called. "But don't worry, we'll be back in the daylight, and then we will kill you. I will kill you myself — believe me, it will be better that way."

There was another long burst of automatic rifle fire from the street.

"Hey, Hollenbeck."

"Hey, my man! How are ya?"

"I'm on the roof. I think they've locked the door. I took one in the leg, but it's no big thing. Oh, yeah, scratch one more."

"You're kidding me!"

"She's lying right here beside me. Name of Hannah."

"Ah, shit."

"This is the third woman. I'm almost getting used to it. What's going on down there?"

"Our German ace showed up and he's been giving us their play-by-play. We've got so many radios going down here that I didn't hear anything about women. That's really disgusting."

"Stop being old-fashioned."

"He told us that they were after you, and Robinson tried to get a diversion going. Two things: are you sure about the total number? We are very definitely on hold down here."

"It's what I heard them say. What made Robinson see the light?"

"Well, now we know who you are, man! He's still cursing you out; but at least he knows — we all do — that he's dealing with somebody who knows what he's doing. That's the second question. The German ace picked up something about you wearing a badge. What's that about?"

"It's just something I had. I put it on so you'll know me when I walk put of here."

"Well, that's what they're for. You go on wearing it. Now we got a deputy chief on the site, fully briefed and in charge. Billy Gibbs says he wishes he was covering you, by the way. Hang on." He had the "Talk" button still depressed, for Leland heard him say, "He got another one. That's seven."

"Son of a bitch." The radio went dead a moment. "Joe? Vince Crane here. We met two years ago in New Orleans."

"How are ya?" He'd been in New Orleans two years ago, but he couldn't place Crane in the huge Los Angeles delegation at that conference.

"I'm okay. I think we're going to be okay with this, thanks to you. I wouldn't want to face twelve of them. Now listen, for now, we think it a good idea to let them speak their piece. We want you to hold tight, if you can. We understand the problem, and we're taking all due care, believe me. Are you going to be all right?"

"When you send out for food, put me down for coffee and a jelly doughnut."

He laughed. "Well, you take it easy for a while. I'll give you back to Sergeant Powell."

"Hey, partner," Leland said.

"That's right, and I'm honored. You have the scam now don't you? More news for you. I was talking with Kathi Logan. She doesn't remember you at all!"

"I'll get you for that, fella."

"No, she said a whole lot of nice things about you, man. All she knows is that you're stuck in a building with some bad people. Now something else: the media are showing up and that's in a big way. They want to patch the two of you in, when they can. You lose your privacy, but it's something."

"I don't want a circus."

"It's a little late for that, kimosabe."

"I'll catch you later, Hollenbeck."

"Call me Al."

"Joe. Later."

"You bet. Take care now."

...4:53 A.M., PST...

Pain awakened him. He knew where he was before he opened his eyes, but it took another moment before he remembered it all, or his memory caught up with the rest of him. He wasn't even sure he could move, he was hurting so badly in so many places. Even his thumb was cut, where Hannah had bitten him. The temperature had dropped or, more likely under the circumstances, his resistance had lowered just that much. Before he had fallen asleep, he had figured he had lost about a pint of blood, or the amount you gave at the blood bank, which was a hell of a lot of blood to lose. The sky was still black. At this time of year, there would be another hour and a half of total darkness.

He wanted to try standing up again. He had walked here, to the spot on the Wilshire Boulevard side where he had squeezed out of the ventilator. His left foot was so bad that he wanted to cry out. His thigh burned. He had been grazed by a bullet in his youth, and it had felt the same. He could walk, but he could see it was going to take five minutes to get around to the other side of the roof where Hannah's body lay. He stopped — why the hell did he want to go there? He was going to have to calculate every step. He got out the radio, but he waited a moment before he turned it on.

Something was bothering him. Al — Hollenbeck — had asked him about the number in the gang. Why? Leland had heard the same gunfire. These kids had studied this stuff in guerilla camps throughout the Middle East. They could set up a field of fire as well as the U.S. Marines. Al might not know that; his work kept him occupied around the clock.

Leland had decided that he was only going to listen. Twenty-six was quiet. On nineteen, a woman was speaking German, reciting words and numbers. Nothing on nine. The police had their own frequencies, but that did not mean that the gang could not listen to them, too, with the right equipment.

He was going to have to get ready for them. It would be more than an hour before they came for him. They would want to wait until the sun was up over the mountains. The worst of it for him was not knowing about Stephanie. He did not want to outlive her. He hadn't wanted to outlive Karen, either. He did not want to go through that grief again. He didn't think he could.

He shook his head. People were coming to kill him in an hour, and he was worrying about living too long. He made his way to the edge of the roof, but his leg made it impossible for him to get up on the sign to look down onto Wilshire Boulevard. He was wondering again about the wisdom of not getting on the air. The police could have something to tell him.

It seemed that there were many, many more lights on all around the city. He'd bought the 310 after the divorce. He'd known it was going to be his last plane, and toward the end he didn't even use it much. There was a time in your life to quit certain things. For the past six or seven years he'd devoted himself almost completely to his work. Good, interesting work, too.

He had been on the team that had devised the first antiterrorist, antikidnapping driving course. He'd designed the security system in the first of the new ball parks, and it had been copied, or adhered to, ever since. And something he had learned not to tell people, that he'd been the one to advise the national retailers to force manufacturers of small items like ballpoint pens to mount them on cards too big for people to slip into their pockets. People hated having to gouge their way through the cardboard and plastic so much that it did no good to tell them that it had to be done because shoplifting the world over was so bad that it threatened the retailing business.

What was going out of the world was the understanding that it was worthwhile to care about other people. Few people lived in a neighborhood any more. Life was being organized to keep people distant from one another. Human beings were beginning to feel like guests on their own planet. The designers of this building were more interested in glorifying a bunch of oil pirates with an impressive raised plaza than in providing a few trees and benches where people could sit and talk to each other. He turned the radio on again.

"Al?"

"Hold on. He's awake."

"Joe? Are you all right?"

"What is this, 'He's awake,' crap? I've been up here writing letters and rinsing out a few things."

"Fella was spelling me on the monitoring, that's all. Try to stay loose."

"I'm loose, you're the one who sounds tired. Listen, they're going to come up for me..."

"We've been working on that. You're going to get air support."

Leland was silent. If the police could control the roof, they could lower men onto it. They needed Leland to get that close. Support, hell: they wanted him to cover their landing. As far as they were concerned, he was expendable. They had even managed to get a public-relations face on it, calling it "air support." Now the gang had another reason to want him dead. So much time had passed since they had locked him up here that it was possible they had stopped monitoring channel eleven.

"Look, I'm not sure that will work. This roof is covered with structures that will give them damned good cover. They came to stay. It's odds-on that they have rockets."

"Only one way to find out, right, brother?"

Now they were brothers, Leland thought. Hell, he could hear the con in Al's voice! "Look, kid, we can talk about his honestly, but don't bullshit me, please."

"Something I should have told you, Joe. The networks are here, and they're picking up and sending out everything we're saying."

Leland sighed. "Am I getting paid?"

"I don't think so."

"They'll have to take their fucking chances with the rest of us."

He voice was controlled. "It's Christmas morning back east, Joe. Little kids are watching."

"They should be in church. Sure — if anybody out there wants to do something for me, he can go to church."

"There you go. Everybody knows you've been through hell — now you've got me doing it. Merry Christmas, everybody! Joe, we're not kidding you. With first light, we'll have helicopters overhead constantly. They're going to cover you."

"Listen to me. Listen carefully and think!The only reason I'm still alive is because they know they have the situation under control. They wantto shoot down a helicopter."

"No, Joe, they want air time. They want to patch into the networks. They want to hook up to the satellite and talk to the whole world."

"And?"

"The people we've been able to talk to so far say that it's difficult, if not impossible, to give them what they want. We're trying to talk to them about it."

And at first light, the helicopters would attempt to get what remained of the SWAT team down. If they succeeded, the men would fight their way down to the hostages, many of whom would be killed. Among the dead, Steffie, Judy, and Mark.

But the police were going to fail. The job would be surrendered to the army, which would blow its way in from above and below. The army would succeed, and then all would die. Leland decided not to argue any more.

"Joe, are you awake enough to talk to a friend?"

"You soundlike you're on television."

"Go easy on me, man. I want to go home and see what Santa left under my tree."

"People keep giving me machine guns." He was moving again, trying not to let the pain show in his voice. "Got six of them so far."

"I thought you said seven."

"Oh, I got seven of them.The last was Hannah over there."

"How do you know her name?"

The police had to get a picture of what had happened in here. "I wanted to talk to her about poetry. What's this about a friend?" He saw that he had an interesting dilemma: if he had enough light to see what he was doing, he would not be able to do it for long.

"Well, you have a choice of two, Billy Gibbs or Kathi Logan."

"Tell Billy Gibbs that I'm still flying point. He'll know what I mean."

"Then you want to talk to Miss Logan?"

"Ms."

"Hey, I had to do that in front of the whole country. Billy Gibbs heard you on television and he says to come out of the sun, whatever that means."

"It means that Billy knows who the Captain, is, that's what it means." It wasn't bad advice, actually. Leland struggled to the east side of the building.

"Was that your rank during the war?"

"Are you going to let me talk to Kathi or aren't you?"

"I'd better, or I'm going to get bad fan mail."

"I keep forgetting we have an audience. They missed half the show."

"You keep saying that. Are you sure you killed seven?"

"So far."

"And that there were originally twelve?"

"I heard them say that — and not for my benefit, either."

"What do you mean by that?"

"We've been playing cat-and-mouse up here since nine o'clock last night. If any of them live through this, we're going to have a reunion next year. Pizza and bowling. Put Kathi Logan on before your switchboard lights up, hambone."

"Boy, I'm glad I don't ride a black-and-white with you."

"Joe? It's Kathi. Can you hear me?"

"As if I were in the candy store around the corner. Want to go to the movies? How are you?"

"I'd love to go to the movies. I'm fine — how are you? I have the television on and it looks like a war up there."

"Nah, just one dumb cop trying to quiet down the neighborhood."

"They're saying what you've done so far."

"You can say it."

"No, I can't."

"I understand. Listen, kid, this is what I was trained for. There's a young lady lying over there who called me a trained dog. These people have a habit of trying to deny your humanity. Do you care who's listening?"

"Besides me, no. I'm interested in who's talking."

"Trained I am; a dog I'm not, or any other animal. I'm a human being, just one, and they can't see that my presence here ought to teach them something."

"I agree with you, Joe, but I don't know if I'm as brave as you are."

He was looking for a way in through the roof. If the five survivors were monitoring him, let them think that he was having a chat with his girl. He could smell her perfume. He could feel her lips on his lips again. Thank God — it was what fate had left him to believe in. "Okay, this is a personal call. Did you listen to your tape?"

"Yes."

"I was cut off by these people. They didn't know that I had stepped away from the party to call you. I got upstairs. I saw them kill a guy named Rivers. Anton Gruber shot him through the heart. I'm an eyewitness. I tried to flash an SOS, but they sent a guy after me. I sent him back with his neck broken. You might as well know who I am, kid. I've been operating on this corner for almost thirty-five years. The police want a record of this. Do you understand what I'm doing?"

"Yes."

"Can I really make this a personal call?" There was no way in through the roof. "I've been thinking of that place on the beach. It's going to be a while before I can walk, but that's all right."

"Why can't you walk?"

"I'll tell you that, too." The only way in that he knew was through the ventilator shaft, but then he would have no way of going up or down. Even if he could really move.

He was beginning to see that it was in his favor if he could convince Little Tony that he was totally disabled. He had to provide covering fire for the helicopters, if for no other reason than to make the gang think that he could still defend himself. What the hell time was it? Almost 5:30. They would start to see light in another fifty minutes.

He kept talking, almost as if reciting in class, counting the bodies out loud. He had decided to take stock of all his assets, including Hannah's empty automatic. He had a pair of kit bags. Skeezix's Czech assault rifle and almost three clips of ammunition. He had bath towels wrapped around his feet, if he needed them. What else? What was left of him?

It was still a long time until dawn, and at odd moments, because of his exhaustion he would sense the black globe, in which the darkness seemed to press up against his eyes. Pilots, sailors, and truckers knew about the globe.

He told Kathi that he didn't know who had signaled him that the police were on their way, but he wanted to think it was some actor in a Jacuzzi with a beautiful woman. She actually did the work, at his instruction. Kathi understood what he was doing. She said she knew the guy, and that he would be glad to lend them his tub. Leland was studying the crap he had.

"I appreciate this, Kathi. I really do."

"I want to see you when this is over. I want you to live."

He thought again of Billy Gibbs's advice. He wondered how much being four hundred feet above the pavement was going to bother him now, in his condition, "I want to live, too. Al, you on the line?"

"I was trying to maintain a discreet distance. What can I do for you besides get the champagne and caviar? Just don't ask me to wear a butler's uniform."

"Too bad, it was just getting interesting. Listen, I'm trying to set myself up for your suicide charge, and I want to get the sun behind me."

"It'll rise about ten degrees left of the highrises downtown. I love you, man. Do you understand? I'm with you."

"Thank you, Al. Billy Gibbs will tell you what kind of a partner I am. Kathi, are you still there?"

"Yes, Joe."

"Well, as a regular viewer, you know that the LAPD will be coming over the hill at sunrise, if not before." He was trying to figure out how much he could carry. No, he had to figure out what he needed. He had to make a plan. He had to assume that Tony was listening, looking for the way Leland was trying to set him up. Well, to hell with that shit; Billy Gibbs's advice remained the best. With the sun behind him, Leland stood a chance.

Billy knew that Leland meant to go on the offensive. That was right. That was goddamned right. He had become the climax of a horror flick only because of these animals. If God was good, he was going to be able to kill them all. This was not the first time he'd had that thought; now he wanted it more than ever.

"Anyway," he said to Kathi Logan, and, he thought, to anyone who happened to be listening, "What I'm going to do is get my back to the sun so these people will have to look into it to find me. We did it in World War II. From that position, I'll be able to cover both the door to the roof and the door out of the elevator tower. Since I saw you last, Kathi, I moved into Klaxon Towers here. I know it more intimately than I've known most people."

"Joe, I want you to live."

"You said that."

He had all the kit bag straps assembled. This time he was going to attach it to his shoulder harness at his end, while he was still wearing it. His legs were worthless. He had to go with what he had. A rat in a trap would chew his foot off if it would set him free.

He threw the harness onto the roof. It wasn't going to work. If he did not face that fact, he would die. He would die if he tried to stay on the roof. But he could not trust his weight to those clips again, especially if they had to take it suddenly, which was going to be the case. He had less than half an hour left.

"Al, are you still there?"

"Right here, Joe."

"Kathi, stay on the line. Al, I want to talk to Vince Crane."

"I'm sorry, you can't."

"Why the hell not?"

"He's not available, Joe. Stay loose, will you?"

It took Leland a moment to realize: "Crane was dead. Dwayne Robinson was in charge again, however briefly. He had devised the roof landing — and if Leland happened to get killed in the process, it would be no skin off Robinson's ass. Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "Al, who is the officer presently commanding this operation? I want it on the record."

"Joe, you don't have to help us. You've done enough."

"Let's get the man's name on the record, Al."

"Captain Dwayne T. Robinson. Now, Joe, you've been under tremendous strain."

"Don't kid me. All this time you've been keeping it light, and Vince Crane is dead. Now tell me what the situation is down on the street."

He was moving toward the elevator tower again. His left leg was completely numb — it was his back that was racked with pain now. If there were fire hoses up here, they might be in the same relative positions as the hoses down below.

"Are you going to tell me about the situation or aren't you?"

"Mr. Leland?" It was a new voice, very loud and clear.

"Who's talking?"

"Never mind. I have this little base station up in the hills with enough power to blanket Canada. They had it on television. The garage is rigged with explosives."

Leland had an idea. "You want to get in on this?"

"My pleasure."

"Can you hear me well enough?"

"Hell, I'm getting you in stereo. If the FCC saw my equipment, why, they'd just about make me eat it."

Leland smiled. "They have their limits."

"Joe, this is Dwayne Robinson. I want you to back off, and I mean now! You've been at this all night, and you've had enough."

"I'm going to do my duty," Leland said.

"Joe, find yourself a place to hole up." It was Al Powell again. "You've done more than your share. Put yourself in our position down here."

"That's exactly what I have in mind."

He had found the hose in a metal chest like the glass cases downstairs, but it was too heavy to carry. He had to unravel it anyway, to get at the coupling that secured the hose to the water outlet. How long was it? Forty feet?

He wasn't going to be able to cut it. In fact, he didn't want to cut it. "Kathi?"

"Yes, Joe."

"If this is too much for you, say so."

"They've already told me they're coming down here with cameras. They're on their way."

The hose was stretched across the roof. "Hey, you with the oversized transmitter: what do I call you?"

"Taco Bill. I'd tell you why, but there are kids listening."

Another voice: "Joe, this is Scott Bryan from KXAC On-the-Spot News. We thought you'd like to know that the churches back East are filled..."

The coupling was frozen. He had to hit it with the butt of Skeezix's gun. Now he picked up the radio again. "Uh, Bryan, I'd appreciate it if you stayed the hell off this channel."

"Sorry. We're rooting for you."

"Stay the fuck off!"

It took two more trips to get the whole length of the hose to the edge of the roof. A quarter to six. He wasn't going to make it easy for Little Tony. Leland would still be able to cover both doors if he took another five or ten degrees of arc to the north. It might be enough to pull them out in the open a little more — although Leland really doubted it. They had been too quiet. They had everything figured out.

Leland himself had to figure something else, and for that he had to get up on the metal frame supporting the sign around the building. For the last half hour he had been keeping his thoughts away from this, and now that he had to think about it, he could feel his rage rising. He didn't even know if he could get up on the sign at all, and what he had in mind required at least two ascents. Maybe more.

He pulled himself up with his arms, like a child. Four hundred feet. Smoke was still rising from the street. The officer's body had been removed, but the look was that of a war. The street wasn't what he was interested in, however.

He had to hang his head and shoulders out over the side. The last time he had tried to estimate the distance down, he had been off by six or eight feet. The conditions had been different, but hardly worse. He had to estimate the distance down, the arc he would travel, where that arc would take him, and then translate it all into the length of the hose. If he secured the hose properly, there would be no danger of falling. He might wind up hanging by the waist three hundred and seventy feet above the street, like something in a shooting gallery.

The first moments were critical. Given his condition, he was going to have to roll off the roof. He was going to be spinning. He could only hope that the momentum was going to take him back in toward the building again. And he had to calculate his position on the fortieth floor. Once the action started again, he would be safe there, unless someone figured out what had happened to him. Then he would have to scramble for his life again. Crawl.

He was so frightened he could hardly focus his eyes. He didn't know if he should take that into consideration or not. He got the hose up onto the KLAXON sign, measured it off, then doubted his calculations. He didn't want to do it, but he was going to die if he didn't. Now he realized that he was going to have to keep the hose taut while he was lying on the sign, or rolling off would yield the same effect as being dropped through a trapdoor. He would break his back.

He was going to use the massive brass connector to lock the end of the hose looped around one of the sign supports. Around his waist, he had planned to wrap the other end, secured the same way by the hose nozzle, but he was having second thoughts about that. The force of the fall could drive the nozzle right into his rib cage. And if he actually did get inside the building, he might not be able to get the thing undone before he was pulled out over the street again.

He put on the harness and secured the Browning. He connected the kit bag straps so that they became a webbing of three thicknesses. That still did not solve the problem of quick release. He took off his own belt.

By 6:05, he was in position — hisposition. He had been out to the edge of the sign again to fix the target window clearly in his mind. At this point there was no way to tell how much time he would have once the shooting started. It could be as little as a few seconds, not enough to allow him to get the window open — not an easy shot, from this angle. Presumably there would be more light, but he couldn't even be sure that the police weren't planning to jump the gun and attempt to land before dawn. The noise of the helicopters precluded the element of surprise. For that matter, Leland had to figure that the gang right now was on the other side of the door to the roof, waiting for the first sound of the helicopters.

Which put him in no-man's-land. Beyond the law. Now he neededpeople like Taco Bill. He had been driven here in a limousine, wearing a suit and tie. People would recoil in horror if they saw who they were rooting for. The difference between heroes and villains was only a matter of time anyway.

University kids in Germany had been cheering for these bums for more than a decade. Not that they were completely wrong. The police had tried to sucker Leland into a little thing like laying down his life for a mission he knew to be futile. The police were only quiet now because more talk would point to how little control they had over the situation. They weren't telling Taco Bill to stay off the air. Sovereignty had its limitations, and thank God.

Of course, the best thing that could possibly happen to Dwayne T. Robinson in the next hour was the death of Joseph Leland, eliminating a source of embarrassing questions later. Civilization was full of Dwayne Robinsons, seeing everything that happened to them as opportunities for their own advancement and aggrandizement. They were the spoilers of society as much as all the Little Tonys who had ever lived, with Richard Nixon at the top of the list. Assholes. Because of them, civilization ceased to be even a sometime thing and sank into ambiguity. You didn't know what to believe in any more, or whether there was anything left.

No, Robinson was really playing hardball. As a cop he knew what was going to happen to every one of the people who had died in this thing. When the forensic lab was finished cutting into you, you looked like a boat burned down to the waterline. That's what they called them, canoes. They peeled the skin off your skull, too — it ripped off like the skin of a tangerine. If Leland died, they'd have him all done and sewn back up again by nightfall.

Now he became aware of automobile horns near and far off. People were coming to see. He wanted to think it was typical Los Angeles, but he knew that that attitude was everywhere now. Leland was in no-man's-land: he hardly understood what he was fighting for. There was still no sign of dawn.

...6:41 A.M., PST...

They appeared on the periphery of his vision, three winking red lights rising over the hills. A finger-three. Leland wondered what the terrorists knew about the tactics of helicopter support and landing. He had one of the two reserve clips on the sign in front of him, and the radio, volume dialed low, beyond the clip. The second spare clip was in his back pocket. Streaks of mackerel had begun to appear over the skyscrapers. The mountains were in clear view, ready for the next ten thousand years. Leland pulled the radio closer.

"Taco Bill."

"You got him."

"Tell me what you see on television."

"Well, you're a pretty good draw. Thousands of people out there in the streets, back at a distance."

"Nothing else?"

"Everything else is secret. We see the building, which looks like you really smoked it, but nothing has changed there, either, not even a light on or off. I know that because that's all the TV has had to talk about. That, and people going to church back east."

"Joe, we can be of help..."

"Hold on, Al. Bill, you be ready for me."

"Right."

"Joe, we don't want you to do anything. You can stop right now and save yourself."

"If I believed it could be done, I'd take you up on it." The helicopters were still hovering. "I don't think I have any choice. I told you what's going to happen. If I were down there, you'd believe me. You'd take my word for it."

He pushed himself backward until the kit bag straps pulled against his ribs. He had to retain the freedom to move. The helicopters started climbing. Maybe they were going to show some caution — but not without creating another problem. If they were going to dive down upon the building in this light, their chances of shooting him were excellent. He realized why the gang had not moved onto the roof: Little Tony and the others had the same field of vision from the floors below, and they could see the helicopters, which were climbing higher still.

He had to watch the doors. It would be fifteen or twenty minutes before he had the sun behind him, and the helicopters were no more than five minutes away — less, if that was the plan.

"Al, they can only come out of the west tower."

"We have you patched to the pilots."

"How are you, Kathi?"

"Looking at myself on television. How are you?"

"Never better."

"Is there any way you can do what the police say?"

"And live? No."

"They've cut away from me now. Look up, to the north."

"I can see. So can everybody else." From the street rose the rumble of an expectant crowd, such as one at a championship fight. Leland thought of Kathi's friend, the welterweight. He wanted to ask her if the guy had gone one fight too long, one round too long.

Leland moved to the edge of the sign. He could see people behind barricades only three blocks away, too close. People were going to be hurt. The police couldn't help that — they had limits. Searchlights were coming on, what he would have done if he had been the officer commanding, trying to get a view of what was going on.

The lights, crowd, cameras all fit together as the way the new world understood anything. People had to see what was going on. It had started with the first Kennedy assassination. If people thought, they would see that they had come to expect television specials like this. It was part of the belief most people had about the unimportance, or insignificance, of the individual. They were used to police like Dwayne Robinson, who expected obedience in the face of his own common sense.

The helicopters were swinging around to the west, the light in the sky strong enough to allow him to see their shapes. Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "Kathi, I don't want you to worry."

"I understand."

He thought she did, that he might have to go off the air for a while. The helicopters were now so high in the west that they were picking up the pink light of the sun, still behind the mountains. The air looked crisp and frosty cool up there at this hour, and Leland almost wished he were with them. Almost. He turned the channel selector to thirty, then back again.

"Bill, count backward from ten and then start jamming channel thirty."

"Channel thirty. Counting now."

Leland turned to channel thirty, cranked up the volume, and threw the radio as far as he could toward the south wall. The first of the helicopters streaked to the south. Now the radio began blaring organ music — Taco Bill had patched channel thirty to the broadcast of a Christmas service. The second and third helicopters followed the first, all three blue and white in the sunshine, what looked like Bell Jet Rangers, with large, articulated searchlights mounted under their snouts.

The radio was twenty feet beyond, from a line drawn from the door to the roof and Leland's position. He wanted that extra moment of distraction, if that was possible. The helicopters were still too far away to be heard, strung out almost a half mile apart.

Briefly, Leland looked over the edge of the roof again, making sure of his calculations. The hose was made of heavy canvas, and he had looped the hose around the brass fittings so that nothing could slip or come loose; but he still could not think about what he was going to do, the act of it, swinging out over the street secured by a rig he had made himself.

He had no choice any more. The police had seen to that, and now a lot of them were going to die. While he swung out four hundred feet above the street. He wanted to think of anything else. The first helicopter began to come around, sinking, dropping its nose. Sunshine flared along the top of the elevator tower, far too high to light the roof itself. Leland hoped his own timing would be more precise.

The second helicopter began its descent, the first still three or four miles from target. Leland could hear the whomping of their engines. He squirmed closer to the edge, where he could hear the crowd in the street starting to yell. He was still hidden from below by the lights of the KLAXON sign. When he rolled over, he would have to hold on to the machine gun and the hose together — if he let go of the hose, the shock of his weight might cause the web of kit straps to slip over his shoulders. He would go straight down. Less than four seconds.

It wasn't going to work!

The sunlight was racing down the elevator tower. Leland dared not look the other way, lest the sun itself momentarily blind him. The door from the stairwell moved. If the gang had been listening to him, they expected him to start shooting at once — unless they figured that everything he had been saying had been some kind of trick. He hoped that they continued to have that much respect for him. He had taken that extra five degrees of arc, with the sun above the mountains behind him, shining into the eyes of his adversaries.

The first helicopter was less than a mile away, and the stairwell door, full of the holes Leland had put in it last night, moved again, as if the people on the other side wanted to test its weight. They were watching the approach of the helicopter through the holes, and from more than an eighth of a mile, those holes were invisible. Leland trained the Czech assault rifle on the door, waist high. He was going to wait until the last possible moment. The organ on the radio stopped and a male voice in a great hall somewhere invited everybody to rise for the Apostles' Creed.

The door came open six inches and a gun barrel protruded, firing in Leland's direction, over his head. Leland fired two short bursts — he had to save his ammunition, in case he couldn't load the other clip. The next burst hit the wall below him, five feet away from his toes.

The elevator tower spewed dust as the first rounds from the helicopter struck it. The helicopter was coming in quickly now, and Leland could see the men inside. He squeezed off another short burst at the door before the helicopter roared overhead; then, as it went by, he leaned over the edge of the roof and took careful aim with the assault rifle toward the window he had marked out in his mind. In the shadow that remained, he could not see what he had done.

The second helicopter was making its run, and this time the door opened wider momentarily as the terrorists returned its fire. As Leland got his own gun around to provide cover, he could see the tube of a missile launcher. More automatic fire was directed at him, but they could not take the time to fix exactly where he was. As long as he was on the roof, they could not set up for a clear shot at the helicopters. But he was going to run out of ammunition or have to change clips or get nailed, and that would be the end of his support.

Rounds from the second helicopter tore aluminum ductwork up from the roof and blasted it out over Wilshire Boulevard. The third helicopter was right behind, lower, shooting out the sign on the south side of the building. The first was just turning into its second pass, flying a much tighter arc, and much more slowly. Leland fired again at the open door.

He counted two of them inside. If the police were coming from below, too, then only one of the gang would be guarding the hostages. That was getting too far ahead. He got off another short burst as the helicopter began its run. The terrorists turned from him, and he leaned over the edge of the roof to empty the clip at the window. It was beginning to turn white, the cracks spreading almost the way foam hisses up a beach.

The terrorist shot at him again, the rounds whanging off the frame of the sign. Leland had to wait until the second helicopter came in before he tried to change clips. More rounds whined over his head. The second helicopter started firing, and Leland lunged for the new clip, throwing the old over the side — a mistake, for he saw it grow small, then disappear into the darkness far below. He wanted to vomit.

There was shooting in the street. Leland fired at the elevator tower. He had to save ammunition. He could not stop thinking about the fall. The hose had no tension at all. In the fighting, he had squirmed the wrong way. Now the door was flung open wide, automatic fire poured up at the helicopter, followed by a great, roaring whoosh and a column of white smoke as thin and stiff as a flagpole. The helicopter exploded in a ball of flame that turned the roof cherry red. One of the terrorists scrambled out onto the roof. Leland fired at him. It was too late; if he could save himself, this was the only way, and he had to do it now.

Wrapping his arms around the rifle, his fingers clawing into the hose, Leland rolled off the roof.

He screamed. He did not want to open his eyes. The slack was taken up almost at once, and he was swinging and spinning downward and then up again. As he opened his eyes there was another explosion, worse than the first, and flames shot out in all directions that seemed like only a few score feet above him.

The spinning carried him away from the building, then back toward it again. He could see the street spinning beneath his feet. The window glass was beginning to break away. He grabbed at the frame with his left hand, bits of glass cutting to his palm, but his own motion wrenched him loose again. If he didn't gain a purchase now, he would swing back and forth in an ever-decreasing arc, until he was level with the thirty-ninth floor, five feet out from the building.

He let go of the hose and the assault rifle and lunged backward with his right hand, then his left, so that he was hanging by his hands, facing the street. The rifle teetered on the edge of the floor, directly beneath his feet. To free himself of the hose, he had to pull himself up with one hand and unravel his belt with the other. Even if he could do that cleanly, which he doubted, and was able to drop straight down, if he landed on the assault rifle the wrong way, the result would be the same as stepping on a banana peel.

The weight of the hose was pulling him out into the street, and he wasn't sure he had the strength in either arm to resist it while he worked on the belt. It was as if he were being drawn to his death. He cried — he wailed, out of control, his eyes shut tight again. His left arm shook as he clawed at the belt. He could feel it coming loose, but not fast enough.

His fingernails ripped at the buckle. Paratroopers clawed through their clothing when their chutes didn't open. The hose began to fall away. Leland pushed at it, trying to twist against the thin air to get deeper into the room. He was screaming again, his fear and rage filling him completely, with the heat of an orgasm. His wrist felt like it was breaking, and then he lost his grip.

He landed on his spine on the assault rifle, his hands and forearms pushing back against the window frame as his legs and hips fell out of the window. The breath was knocked out of him; the only consciousness he knew was his terror. He was shrieking at the top of his lungs. His hand landed on the rifle and he almost pushed it out from under him. He rolled onto his belly and crawled into the room, sobbing.

There was somebody on the floor! On his back!

Leland was staring directly into Rivers's dead eyes. Leland's shriek scalded his throat, and his heart stopped. He could feel it, and feel it start again with a massive thump. He fell back, whining, gasping, grabbed the machine gun, and fired into Rivers until the gun was empty.

He looked down into the street, where the SWAT team was running from burning debris still raining down, and bared his teeth. He was alive — he had been saved again. He wasn't a cop, no matter what he thought. He was a victim. A victim. Little Tony and his gang kept trying to kill him, his heart had even stopped, but he was alive. He still had the Browning and the last spare clip for the assault rifle.

He looked around: the gang was still trying to get into the safe. Furniture had been piled in the hall to absorb an explosion. Dizzy, the pain glued onto his back like a shell. Limping and stumbling, Leland made his way into the building one more time.

...7:04 A.M., PST...

He headed downstairs. Each step felt like a knife in his back. He didn't know if his numbness meant he was going to lose his left leg or not, but at this point he wasn't sure he even cared. He would worry about his leg later.

Now he had an advantage, and he wondered how he could exploit it. Unless Little Tony could take the time in all this confusion to read the evidence on the fortieth floor in the shattered window and the mutilated corpses, the gang had no reason to believe Leland was alive.

Leland was thinking he was going to let the police, too, believe he was dead. Of course, there might be an advantage in having the gang take a close look at the corpses. Let them think they were dealing with someone who had gone insane. Leland understood what he had done — why he had done it. Never explain, never complain. THIS MAN IS A PRICK. Now it was keeping him alive.

He had been trained for this? Policemen had a view of the world that few others understood. It was the way humanity wanted things arranged. No one wanted to know what life — and death — really looked like. Every day this country slaughtered seventy-five thousand head of cattle, a quarter of a million hogs, and a million chickens, but not one person in a hundred actually knew someone with a portion of that blood on his hands. People expected the Lelands of the world to dispatch the Little Tonys as simply as the butchers turned lesser beings into cutlets. But you'd better not demonstrate just how thin the veneer of civilization actually was. If you covered yourself with blood, had the look of death in your eyes, you, too, had to be scourged. He was wise to that. He was still alone. He would be alone until he got out of this building. Leland wanted to live. Like everyone else, he had a right to life, and nothing else mattered.

He heard the elevators humming before the shooting started to fade. With only five left at this point, he could plan his killing so that the opposition was left defenseless at every step along the way. It was the only chance to save the hostages, starting with Stephanie, Mark, and Judy. Ellis had wanted Leland to see that he was doing people favors. Dwayne Robinson was incapable of understanding a really serious situation. The guidance systems that had directed the terrorists' rockets into two helicopters would not have been all that complicated to the kid who had built his father's Christmas television set. How many people had been able to see that highrise office buildings were beyond law enforcement, even after it had been shown that they were beyond fire protection?

Leland kept on going down, trying to remember where he would find equipment to replace what he had lost. If the gang thought he was dead, he might have the chance to kill them all. His head was spinning with it now. More than anything, he wanted to kill every last one of them.

In the northeast corner of the thirty-sixth floor, where he had built the fortress he had never used and where he had caught number five with his head up looking at the plastic explosive, he found a radio, and from the emergency lights near the staircases, he retrieved the explosive itself. The sun had risen clear of the downtown brightness, and the office, or what was left of it, was flooded with warm, pink light. Leland went around to the west side of the building to see what he could take from number four, the girl he had surprised when he had come out of the stairwell. Her kit bag was glued to the puddle of blood in which she lay. She had given him the Kalashnikov; now she surrendered a second radio.

She had some candy, but he didn't think he could stand any more. He was hungry, he thought, as he stood looking down at her shattered body, but he wanted a real breakfast, eggs over easy and bacon or sausage.

Elevators were humming again. More helicopters were in the sky than ever but all of them were quite high and far away. Leland stepped back from the window. If the police thought he was dead, they could have their snipers primed to shoot at anything moving above the thirty-second floor. He turned to channel nineteen: a man reciting prayers. Twenty-six had some kid yelling at the top of his lungs. Nine sounded with a steady, high-pitched note. On thirty Leland heard the man reciting the prayers.

God only knew what was going out over the channels he couldn't receive.

Leland took a piece of memo paper from one of the desks, wrote a note, folded the note into his wallet, and took the wallet to the window. A fire on one of the rooftops across the street was getting worse. He had to attract attention to himself. A quarter of a mile out, a small helicopter tightened its swing back toward the building. Leland waved the wallet, then tossed it out into the street. The helicopter rose and pounded swiftly overhead. Leland turned for the stairs. A noise erupted from the street, the crowd again, people yelling. Cheers. He understood who they were for, and he was chilled, as if he had made a mistake, and tested his luck.

He went down again, to the thirty-third floor, and worked his way out to an office on the northeast corner. It had a television set. From the hills chugged two large, red and white helicopters, great tanks slung to their bellies. They dropped down, swung to Leland's right, and passed over the fire across the street far below him, dumping a reddish cloud over the entire block. Leland turned on the television set and set the volume low.

The screen showed the fire department helicopters going away — from the angle, the picture was being taken from one of the helicopters far above. The air jangled with microwave transmissions. A reporter appeared, microphone riveted to his chin. He was in the street; behind him were four or five black-and-whites, and occasionally an officer in a bulletproof jacket sprinted past him. The director cut to the helicopter shot of the smoldering rooftop, while the reporter indicated that the fire wasn't serious. Leland changed the channel.

A night scene, with the words "recorded earlier" in yellow at the bottom of the screen. A black-and-white came into the picture from the right, seemed to shake as it crossed the center of the screen, then wheeled off crazily and into the light pole. Leland remembered something and turned the volume off. A shot of the muzzle flash of one of the terrorists' automatic weapons. Police running. Now the picture went out of control, spun around, and focused on the building with a cloud of smoke obscuring the upper floors. Daylight again... "Live" — showing the ring of destruction around the middle of the building. Leland had done the job; he had aced the whole building. He turned up the volume.

"...And then, with the sunrise, police helicopters came over the hills to try to protect the desperate, former policeman who, he says, has killed seven of the gang. Although three are known dead, the man observed early last night on the steps to the front entrance, the man shot and then who fell from, the guess is, the thirty-sixth floor, and the woman still visible on the roof — although, I say, although these three are accounted for, the information is that the police discount Leland's estimate of the size of the gang and his body count, as it were, because of the incredible show of strength by the terrorists at dawn, just a few minutes ago."

"I should have taken scalps," Leland said sourly.

"It ought to be said here that this is not a pretty piece of tape, so viewer discretion is advised..."

Tape of the street now: with slightly more light, it was possible to see bullets striking the walls and sidewalks. A long, long shot of empty sky, with a bit of the Klaxon roof coming into view. The helicopters appeared as spots growing larger. It took Leland a moment to get his bearings. He was out of the picture, to the left, and from this distance, his contribution, such as it was, would not even register. One after the other, the police helicopters exploded. None of the cameras was even trained in his direction.

"Now comes word from the police asking all those persons here in the Los Angeles area to stop, repeat, stop, jamming the forty Citizens Band channels. You will recall that Leland asked the mysterious Taco Bill to jam one of the channels on which the German language transmission had been heard. While no one knows exactly what did happen to Leland, there is no evidence of his death. He is not in view on the roof. Repeating: the police want the persons jamming..."

Leland changed the channel. A blonde woman in a blue housecoat watching herself on a television screen. Kathi Logan — with her hair down to her shoulders, Leland almost did not recognize her. A microphone appeared at her shoulder.

"Did you see anything?"

She leaned toward the microphone to speak. "No."

"What do you think?"

"He told me not to worry. I think he's alive. I've only known him a short period of time, but he's a very special man."

"He said he was going to do his duty," the reporter said with apparent amusement. Kathi Logan kept watching herself on television.

"Well, he's under tremendous pressure. Normally he doesn't talk like that, but people who know him are aware that he has his own set of rules and he lives by them even when it's very difficult to do so."

"He says he's killed seven people. What are your feelings about that?"

Now she turned. "My feelings are that I hope that God has mercy on their souls, because they'll need it. The man in that building isn't young, and he's alone!"

"If there are television sets in the Klaxon building, he could be watching right now. Anything you'd like to say to him?"

She glared at him. "We just didtalk!"

"I mean now, on television, when he can see you. If he can."

"Just that I know that he's right and those hoodlums in there are wrong, and most of the people in this country agree with me. We don't want killing — we don't want to be threatened with machine guns or bombs, ever. We have the right to live our lives in peace, all of us, and we ought to say so. I think most people are like me. What you see is all I have in the world."

The reporter put his hand to his ear, "Uh, thank you. Back to the Klaxon building in Los Angeles."

Another reporter was standing next to a young black man with a badge on his jacket. Al Powell: he looked like a twenty-year-old. Leland smiled. Behind them was a battery of television sets, and Powell was holding a two-way radio. "Thanks, Jim. This is Sergeant Al Powell, pressed into service late last night. You've been actually talking to the man inside, Joseph Leland, haven't you?"

"Yes, but not in the last few minutes." Leland watched Powell's eyes, although it did not seem that Powell was thinking that Leland could be watching him. "We're asking people to stop jamming the CB. The telephones in there are shut down, and CB is his only means of contact with us. This man has been tremendously valuable so far, and we know that if he can continue to help us, he's going to try."

"Now, something came out of one of the windows a little while ago. What was that, a message?"

"No, the wind up there is pretty strong, and with all those broken windows, things are going to come flying out."

"What was the object?"

Al Powell smiled. "Hey, finders, keepers, right? Look at all the terrific television sets I've picked up. Maybe we can work out a deal. Let's see that watch you're wearing."

Leland laughed. The flustered reporter took Powell's cue. "This is your communication center, isn't it?"

"Well, actually it's yours,but we've borrowed it, and the studio has been feeding tapes back to us."

"And?"

"We're using them to gather information."

"You've been to the city engineer's office, too, haven't you?"

"Hey, my wife thinks I've been here all night."

The reporter smiled haplessly. "Sorry. What's the next step?"

"You know as much as I do. The people in control of the building said we would hear from them again at ten o'clock. We'll all learn something then."

Leland was sitting up.

"And that was the only communication from the terrorists?"

"That's it. The one line just a few minutes ago. 'You will hear from us at ten o'clock.'"

"There have been no negotiations, then?"

"With the situation as it is, we're going to have to wait."

The reporter announced a commercial break, and Leland turned down the sound. After the station's holiday greetings, there was a shot of an oil-drilling platform belonging to one of Klaxon's competitors. Leland wanted to go to the window to have a look at what was happening, but now he was afraid that one of the helicopters would spot him and let one and all know he was alive. Powell knew. The note Leland had enclosed in his wallet had asked for the jamming to stop, adding, "Let me make first radio contact with you. The helicopter attack was ineffective — no casualties on the other side."

It looked like the police were beginning to respond to him, but Leland wasn't completely sure. Cause and effect weren't always what they seemed. He wanted the CB transmissions stopped, and the police seemed to be going along — but Leland was following another line of thought now, independent of what he had been putting into events. It had to do with the safe, the hostages, and the building. What if Leland had never gotten here? What if he had called Steffie and taken the plane on down to San Diego?

The television screen was zooming in on an actor portraying a gas station attendant holding a can of motor oil next to his cheek in a way people never held anything in real life. With the fade-to-black, Leland turned the sound up again, while he followed his line of thought. The terrorists would have seized the hostages, secured the building, and gone after the safe, exactly as they had done. Given the power of the plastic explosive and the number of detonators he had hidden, they could have wired the entire building. Suppose they got into the safe? Then? It stood to reason that once they had opened the safe, they were finished with the main business of the operation.

The reporter on the street below was reading from notes he had developed earlier when Leland had identified the people who had taken over the building. Unconfirmed.Leland thought he would lower the next one down in a basket.

These people thought of themselves as commandos, freedom fighters. Having accomplished their mission, they would withdraw. Leland drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. The television screen showed the building again, blackened and smoking.

You don't blow up a building while you're still in it.

But you canblow it up from a distance with the right kind of transmitter. And if you can threaten to blow it up from a distance, you might be allowed to go on your way.

The gang had enough explosive not just to pulverize Klaxon Oil and the seventy-five people inside it, but everything and everyone for a half mile around. If they left via the roof, up into a helicopter, they would be able to see that their bomb wasn't defused until they were on a jet leaving the airport. Everything was in view here. For all Leland knew, that was the only reason why they had chosen Los Angeles. The police weren't going to be able to get into the building from below, even if they came through the sewers, and the gang knew it.

The police still didn't believe Leland. According to Powell, they wanted him to serve them again. While they waited for ten o'clock, they were looking at engineers' maps and video tapes, and still not ready to accept seven when he said seven, or five when he said five, not six or four or twelve. Kathi Logan understood it. He was alone. He had to solve the problem by himself.

He watched television for another twenty minutes, dialing from one channel to another when the reporters started repeating themselves. One of the networks had footage taken in Germany of some of the gang, including Hannah and Skeezix, whose real name was Werner something. And Karl, the brother of the boy Leland had rolled into the elevator, number one. Karl was a big guy with shoulder-length blonde hair: he looked like a drummer in a rock and roll band. Leland didn't see Kathi: maybe the director thought she was too upset to put on the air again. His mind wandered groggily. He felt himself falling asleep and had to jar himself awake. Old man, he thought. That had been his first mistake, thinking he had the internal resources for this. Heroes grow old, not just obsolete.

At last, another realization: there was food everywhere in the building. All his life people had been telling him how smart he was, when he had always seen that his best ideas came to him when he was being shown just how stupid he was. He had gotten away with mistake after mistake all through the night. Taking advantage of Skeezix and Hannah because they were young, an old man keeping himself alive on his experience — it made him feel ugly. The food was in the desks of the secretaries and typists; every twenty-year-old girl in the country would have listed it among her assets from the start. Diet crunchies. Crackers, cookies, envelopes of soup, jars of instant coffee. And hot plates for the water to brew it. He grinned — once again, he had come through. If he could balance on one leg, he would kick himself.

...8:42 A.M., PST...

Long enough. Let them all think he had crawled off into a corner and died. He was feeling pain again, more than ever. The radio had been silent for almost an hour. No attempt to reach him. All right. Good.

He went up, one step at a time. He had been able to make a cup of coffee that had tasted awful, and then after that he had ducked into a ladies' room to relieve himself and wash his face. All in the dark. He had not wanted to see himself. Afraid. He had seen the mirror before he had found the light switch.

He went up, using the banister as a crutch. He was so dirty, he could feel the crust on his eyelids when he blinked, in his crotch when he moved his legs. If he lived through this, he was going to feel the pain for the rest of his life. No sound from the elevator shafts. He figured he would be better off in the middle, between the fortieth and thirty-second floors. Because they had not found him there yet, he thought the thirty-seventh was the safest of all. His chart said that the north side was offices, the south, some kind of typing pool.

He was trying to stay alert. He kept dialing the radio between nine, which was silent, and nineteen, which occasionally hissed with the static of distant transmissions. He was looking for meaning in the crackle of Marconi's ether. That dated him. Predated him. Steady.He could feel blood in the towel on his left foot. It made no difference now. In front of the television set he had tried to think of Kathi Logan, waiting for her to appear on the screen again, but when she had turned to him in his thoughts, she had been Karen. He was that tired. There was going to come a time in human history when people wouldn't have to pay six or a dozen times for the right to stay alive.

He stationed himself at the elevator bank on the thirty-seventh floor. He didn't give a damn how long it took. He could get two, even three of them if he had any luck at all. They had written him off. He loved it. Little Tony, Karl, and the woman Leland had heard reciting the letters and numbers on the radio. That would be the end of it. He wanted to hear that electric whine. When you were in an elevator, you never knew where it was going to stop. Thirty-eighth floor, women's lingerie, kitchenware, and toys; thirty-seventh floor, death.

He wondered if he could find a way of getting down below the normal line of fire, but he couldn't bend his left knee. The only thing he had going for him was the fact that the people in the car wouldn't know it was going to stop. Maybe he would catch them talking about how well they were doing, now that they were rid of him.

He had to wait another twenty minutes before one of the electric motors kicked over. A car was coming up from below. He had to hobble from door to door to decide which of the four on the right side it was. As soon as the doors started opening, he was going to shove the assault rifle in and start firing. He pressed the call button and wiped a gritty hand on his shirt, or what was left of it. He had that going for him, his appearance.

The rifle fired three rounds before it jammed. Leland had the Browning out when the doors fully opened — the car was empty. The doors started closing again. He hit the rubber bumper on the edge of the door with the barrel of the Browning. As the doors rolled open a second time, Leland peered inside.

A small trunk on the floor, and in the middle corner next to the control panel, on an aluminum tripod, a television camera. The doors began rolling again. Leland grabbed the camera by the top of the tripod and pulled it out of the elevator onto the thirty-seventh floor. If he had to give himself away and jam his machine gun for a television camera, he might as well have it. And get moving, too, because the gang would be after him again.

He lugged the thing toward the stairs.

He had to pull the desks out of the way to get to the open window. He stood in the shadow and turned on channel nine.

"Powell, are you there?"

"Hey, Joe, where've you been keeping yourself?"

"I've been around. Look, I want to let you have another souvenir, but I don't want to step out where I can be seen until I know some young genius isn't going to put one in my rib cage."

"Okay. Hold on." The radio went dead. "You're clear. What have you got for us?"

Leland told him. "You said they wanted to go on the air? They had the equipment for television."

"Black and white or color? I'm going into the business."

It made no sense to tell Powell he had seen him on television. "Well, I spoiled their fun. It wasn't what I had in mind, but it'll have to do."

He tossed the television camera out into the bright morning air. As he watched it plunge like an arrow toward the street, Leland asked himself if Little Tony was really so uncontrolled an egomaniac as to put himself on television for no good reason. The answer was no, he had a reason. While he stood in the window, Leland raised the jammed assault rifle over his head. If Tony was watching a television set, he could believe that Leland was still a player in the game. The pilot of the police helicopter pressed his hand against the plastic bubble in a salute. It was time to get out of sight.

He was thinking of Tony... and the safe. Given the freedom-fighter pose in the window, Little Tony expected Leland to take the initiative again. In reality, Leland had only the Browning — but enough explosive to turn the Klaxon building into Wilshire Canyon. Tony had to think of the explosive, too. Perhaps he was convinced at last that Leland was liable to do anything. The trick was to keep him off balance. The situation had not changed. In spite of the daylight and the electronic penetration, Leland remained independent. It was to his advantage to let Little Tony think otherwise — that he was the "trained dog" that had beaten and shot Hannah to death. As things now stood, Tony thought Leland was still trying to break down their defenses against the police. Leland set out for the thirty-third floor, where Tony would not be looking for him. It was time to free the hostages, before the ring around them was drawn too tight.

The assault rifle was hopelessly jammed. He needed tools to get into it, and even then there could be a broken part, like a spring. He put it in a desk drawer. He had no need for deadweight, and leaving it where it could be seen was just foolish.

He turned the television set on, the sound very low. One of the elevators was running, and Leland assumed it was a trick to draw him out. He was curious about what they could have arranged. Enough of that — they wanted him curious. At least they didn't believe he could be frightened.

The radio was still silent. On the television screen, the reporter jabbered animatedly, looking up. The director cut to a shot of the building, labeled "live." The camera zoomed up to the window in which Leland had just been standing. What the hell was the use of that? The reporter again. The picture broke up and the building reappeared, labeled "recorded earlier."

It was the same shot, but now Leland could see a blackened ragged figure holding up the useless gun. On the screen he was not so much nightmarish as pathetic. Like something from a concentration camp. Now the director cut to a helicopter shot, tracking the police helicopter floating in front of it, the building swinging into view beyond. There he was again, recorded earlier, gun aloft. Leland turned the sound off. He wanted to think. Television was another tool, if he could figure out how to make it work. If he could communicate what he wanted without giving the game away.

More than that: without even having heard the announcer's words, Leland knew that he had been telling the world what it had just seen, and was about to see again. Tony had a television set. The people in charge of what went out over the air had revealed his position in a situation that was still life and death.

He wrote another note, strapped it to a staple gun with rubber bands, and put it in his kit bag. The police were able to retrieve notes thrown from the northeast corner. On the way he took a fireax from the wall, to break the window.

What he wanted was complicated, and he hoped that he was being clear. If he saw a television helicopter on station a quarter mile to the east, he would go to the windows of the thirty-fourth floor, where he would put on a show of pushing desks around. The television people would put him on tape, which they would broadcast for the first time at exactly 9:28, calling it "live." He and Powell could add the dialogue then, over the radio. Leland guessed that Little Tony would know within a minute it was another of Leland's tricks, but that was all Leland thought he needed to sweep the glass on the stairs out of the way with the towel on his foot, and get down onto the thirty-second floor.

The window was harder to break with the ax than he had thought, and then it shattered with a noise like an explosion. People half a block away on Wilshire Boulevard started running for cover. He could see broken windows and blackened walls everywhere from blocks around. He chucked out the staple gun and started away, hefting the ax like a woodsman. It was a good idea — it would work. The hostages would be headed down the stairs by 9:45. All Leland had to do was hide out another nine minutes.

The elevator again — more than one. The doors rolled open and someone shouted in German. Leland went down before the firing began, the sounds tearing through the glass partitions. They had seen him on television getting rid of the staple gun! He let go of the ax and crawled across the office floor. More shouting, high and low. They wanted him so badly they didn't care what was seen and heard on the street below. The next office led nowhere but back to the elevators. He drew the Browning and got behind a desk, his back to Wilshire Boulevard. The sound of the firing grew closer. The next burst crossed the top of the desk and brought the ceiling and walls down on top of him. Leland huddled down, trying to protect his head.

The next burst went in another direction. Someone shouted and there was another burst that sounded even farther away. More window glass shattered. A police helicopter made a run past the building, its engine pounding. He had to get moving, but he was buried by his own weight in debris. He had to crawl out from under it — he had been crawling all night and now again, in the daylight. He picked up the ax. Even with almost all of the glass partitioning down in here, there was nothing to see. The helicopter was gone, and the two terrorists either had retreated to the stairs, or were hidden by the debris still upright. The Browning drawn, Leland made for the stairs. He had to get up one flight for his rendezvous. He still had almost six minutes.

Now he saw in the glass at the other end of the building the reflection of one of the terrorists behind the elevator bank. He was crouching against the wall, waiting for the helicopter to return and he didn't see Leland. Leland moved faster, trying to get to cover.

The terrorist's radio suddenly erupted with Little Tony's voice, in German. He was speaking much too quickly and excitedly for Leland to understand him. Leland reached the door of the northwest staircase, and the sound disappeared.

He hesitated. Tony had been smart enough to send two of the gang after Leland when the television coverage had given him away. What had been all that on the radio? 9:24 — four minutes to go. He wanted to stay concealed until the last moment. The gang still did not know he was without a machine gun — or had Tony figured that out, too.

At 9:26 he opened the door and looked around. Clear. Daylight was no longer his natural habitat. He was beginning to descend the stairs when the door directly below opened.

He couldn't help smiling. He backed out onto the thirty-fourth floor and eased the door closed carefully. If Bozo came out on this floor, Leland would be waiting for him, and if he kept going up, turning his back to the door, that wasn't bad, either.

More than four hours had passed since he'd tagged one of them. For a moment Leland was afraid he was going to find he had lost his taste for killing. He brought the ax over his head. The guy was on the other side of the door, his shoes grinding on the concrete. If Leland had had any sense, he would have fitted himself with somebody's shoes at the start of the evening. You weren't supposed to wear a dead man's shoes. He had been too civilized. The doorknob turned slowly, making Leland doubly wary. Tony had figured something out — suddenly Leland was sure of it.

The door eased open into the stairwell. First the muzzle of Bozo's Kalashnikov — it was the guy Leland had just seen on the thirty-third floor, one of the two who had been trying to kill him. Leland brought the blade of the ax down on his forearm, knocking the gun down and pulling the guy out of the doorway. The ax had gaffed him — he was too stunned to scream. He rolled over on the floor, holding his arm, and Leland hit him again. It was easier than a cleaver going through a chicken. Now the guy couldn't scream. He was still alive, just barely, looking at Leland, helpless, when Leland buried the ax in his head.

"I'm back in business."

He remembered 9:28. He had about a minute, time enough to conceal Bozo, or at least drag him behind a desk and hope that Tony would begin to worry about desertions.

Bozo had a clip and a half left for his weapon. There was nothing else Leland wanted. He headed toward the east side of the building, trying to remember to stay careful. Now he knew what the others didn't: the gang was down to four. This time, Leland wanted to keep the information to himself.

When he turned the corner, the sky to the east was empty. He moved forward to get a better view: there was nothing in that part of the sky all the way to the mountains.

He looked behind him, to the west. Two helicopters, so far off he couldn't tell whose they were. He thought of getting closer to the window, but changed his mind. He turned for the stairs and switched his radio on.

"Powell, where are you?"

"Right here, Joe."

"Not exactly. I'mright here."

"We can't go that way, Joe."

"What was wrong with the idea?"

"Put yourself in our position, Joe. We can't yield sworn responsibilities to you, no matter how good a job you've done for us so far. Joe, we want you to withdraw from the battle. You've had enough."

Leland was on the stairs, going down; he was thinking of something else. He pressed the "Talk" button. "Can I talk to Kathi Logan?"

Silence.

"Are you kidding me?" Leland. "I told you how bad the situation was! You wouldn't believe me! Your people are dead because you wouldn't listen to me! You guys are really beautiful — what are you trying to do by this, patch up your image?"

"Now, Joe..."

He was buried by another transmission, clear and booming. "From here it looks like they're really fucking you over, cowboy." It was Taco Bill. "They had it on television. We saw you throw a note down. Boy, you really are some kind of a mess. After all the work you did for them, they don't want to work with you? Well, they sure can kiss my ass. You want to talk to your girl? I'm looking at her right here on television, and I can patch you to her myself, if they have a CB."

"You think you can reach San Diego?" He knew the answer; he was out on the thirty-third floor, moving toward the office with the television set, keeping low.

"Well, that's a kick in the head," said Taco Bill. "She's right here on this screen, and some slicker just handed her a portable CB. Can you hear me, honey? You talk into this microphone, and I'll pick it up off my TV and relay it to your friend."

"Thank you very much." It was Kathi, almost as if she were in the room with Taco Bill.

The whole floor was destroyed, but the television set was still playing, and there was Kathi. He boosted the volume, but not too much.

"Hi, Kathi," Here we go."Bill, boost me up if you can, she looks like she's having trouble hearing me." He was moving away from the set, toward the east side of the building. With all the glass gone, the winter sun flooded the floor with white light. "Can you hear me? You look great."

"Just a minute, Joe." He was watching her from the next office through the broken glass of the partition. She turned off the two-way radio, then reached forward and turned up the volume of the television set. "The network is picking up and relaying your signal," she said. "I can hear you perfectly."

So can I.He almost giggled as he kept moving away. Tony would be wise to this, but it wasn't Tony, Leland was after. Bozo had taken the unlucky staircase. Leland figured Tony had simply turned around the two who had just stopped by the police helicopters — Tony had sensed something. He was that smart. He was like an animal. Maybe he already knew that Bozo was dead.

Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "Kathi, let me know that you understand what happened here."

"I do." He could hear her in both ears, from the television set and his radio. He dialed down the volume of the radio; it wouldn't affect the level of his transmission.

"You see," he said, still backing up, "there's a lot on my mind, and I want to get it said before I don't have any more chances. I don't know what you saw of the last few minutes, but it looks like I've run out of luck."

"Don't talk like that," she said.

He was almost to the east side of the building. Except for the kiss, there had never been anything but the most casual, even plastic interaction between them. Maybe even the kiss. Four or five panes of unbroken glass stood between the television set and him. This was going to take a lot of dead reckoning. He felt another failure of nerve. He pressed the "Talk" button. "Listen — can you hear me? Say so."

"Yes." Now he was beyond the range of the sound of the television set. At least Taco Bill was still patching the signal into the Citizens Band channel. Leland saw that he would be giving himself away if he told Bill to stay with it.

"Pretend we're alone," he said into the radio. "I want to pretend there's nobody listening but you and me. The worst thing in the world is one human being using another." He lowered his voice. "It's an awful way to start a relationship. Do you understand what I mean?"

"Yes."

"Don't just listen, talk. I want to hear your voice." It would give him the chance to move around. He thought he had heard something, a cracking sound like somebody stepping on broken glass.

"I understand what you're doing, Joe," she said. He lowered the volume on the radio a little more, then switched to channel nineteen. It was silent. He wished he could hear the television set. He went back to nine. "It's very important for you to remember that the rest of us out here know and believe that what you're doing, as unhappy as it is, is for us all."

He was supposed to say something. "It weighs on you. They're hardly more than kids." Now talk— keep talking.He turned back to nineteen and strained to hear what was happening in the room. Another crunch of glass. Leland was almost on the floor, like a turtle, trying to get closer.

"Nein! Nein!"

Leland could hear it near and far, Little Tony's voice, on two radios; but then, in the next second, as if the act had been too far along to be stopped, a machine gun went off. Leland pulled himself up and poured the full clip through the windows in that direction. As the glass fell like snow off a roof he could see the guy's shadow briefly, spastically dancing in the impact of the rounds hitting him. Before Leland moved forward, he inserted the remaining half clip. He picked up the radio and pushed the "Talk" button, "I'm doing you a favor, Tony. I'm letting you know I'm alive."

"You stupid braggart..."

"Tony, I'm looking forward to killing you."

"That remains to be seen."

"Ah, well, I have other calls to make. It's Christmas, remember?" He turned to channel nine. "Kathi, can you hear me? You'll have to talk into the radio now."

"Yes, yes, I can."

"How about you, Bill?"

"I'm all ears. I'll show you sometime. How are you?"

"Okay. Kathi, I'm sorry, truly sorry. I meant what I said about using people, but I had no choice."

"I knew what you were doing. Now I'm beginning to feel it."

Leland shuddered: he had stretched his luck again. "Credit yourself with a third of an assist, Bill. The other third goes to Billy Gibbs..." He was looking at his ninth victim. He had killed nine young men and women since nine o'clock last night. This one had three in the chest and one in the cheek below the right eye. The face was twisted out of shape, but the blood was still spreading. The guy was alive — Leland felt sick. He took out the Browning and administered the coup de grace.Again he had tested his luck — he had a bad feeling about himself, an awful feeling.

"Billy always knew how to keep a guy alive," Leland said into the radio, but absently, as if to himself.

"He says to return to base, Joe." It was Powell. "Why don't you listen to him?"

"You're the one who's talking."

"Do you want to talk to him?"

Maybe Billy didn't know that Steffie was in here. He could say something that would let Tony know who she was. "No, I don't want to talk with him. I'm all right."

"The mayor is here, and the president of the company."

"Tell the mayor I'm not a constituent, but I appreciate his interest. As for the other guy, tell him that my liability insurance doesn't cover acts of insurrection or war."

"Joe, please..."

"Not yet."

"That's right, Mr. Leland," Little Tony said. "Your daughter wishes to speak to you."

"Daddy!" Steffie urged. "Listen to him!"

...10:00 A.M., PST...

"I'm listening," he said, heading downstairs again, kicking his left leg out in front of him, almost hopping. With three left, whether they knew it or not, they were like a monster with its arms at the top and bottom of the building, and its head on the thirty-second floor. He had to go for the head. This was the last chance for the hostages to get away.

He was so frightened for Steffie that he wanted to cry. She had identified herself. She must have, trying to save her own children. He had only needed two more minutes, less than he would have had if the police had been willing to go along with him on the television scheme earlier. He was at the door to the thirty-second floor. "Come on, you wanted to talk. Let's hear what you have to say."

"Don't bully me, Mr. Leland. I have every intention of talking with you." The transmission was very clear, and it made Leland cautious. "Ah, silent now? I know you're nearby. Does it surprise you that I know that?"

Leland moved back from the door.

"Please, Mr. Leland, you're not going to admit that you're afraid of us at this time. I know you've been through an ordeal, but surely you don't believe you've proved your point. Hannah was more right about you than she realized. You're more than a trained dog. You live in a world of appearances and illusions designed to give your life the semblance of meaning. What do you think you've accomplished with all this?"

Leland stayed silent. He had his hand on the knob of the door.

"You're determined to make a fool of yourself," Little Tony said. "You don'tknow what you've done, do you? You've been guarding millions of dollars stolen from the destitute people of Chile, protecting the property of the biggest thieves the world has ever known, and trying to keep secret the most disgusting marriage of power and greed. Your daughter? Your daughter knows all about it. You are going to be hard-pressed to prove that you did not know it yourself."

Leland had the door open. The corridor was empty. To his left was Steffie's office; around to his right, the big room in which he had seen the gang herd the hostages. He had to try something.

"You haven't said anything real so far."

"A little more patience."

A strange thing to say, but at least Leland knew that Tony was not within the range of ordinary hearing — which meant, too, that he could be as close as the elevator banks.

Now, from upstairs, a sharp, loud report; the building shook slightly, and from around on the right, he heard people gasp and begin to cry. The gang had not given up; with only three left, they had finally managed to blow the safe. But at the same time, they had confirmed their deployment. Leland grinned and moved around to the right.

The crowd of people looked not nearly as fresh as last night. The men were in their shirt-sleeves, and the women had gotten out of their uncomfortable shoes. They were sitting or lying on the floor, most of them facing the far door. One of the women looked up at him and put her hand to her mouth. He pointed to his badge and then put his finger to his lips.

"Tap your friend on the shoulder," he mouthed, going through the motions. She did, and he beckoned them to stand. The message spread quickly through the room, but not before one woman screamed.

"Get down! Get down!"

Leland pushed his way through the people falling to his left and right. He heard something on the radio. A shadow moved on the wall outside, and Leland fired at it. The Kalashnikov had no more than six rounds left. Tony's shadow withdrew — it had to be Tony, with Stephanie. If he drove Tony back for a moment, the rest of the hostages could get to the stairs the other way.

"Go back!" he yelled. "Go back and go downthe stairs! Go slowly, there's no one after you!"

Tony poked the muzzle of his machine pistol around the corner and fired a burst, hitting a woman in the stomach. Leland returned the fire, then moved forward. People were running now, screaming.

"Grandpa!"

"Get your brother out of here, Judy!" He couldn't turn around to look at her.

"What about Mommy? He said he was going to kill us all. That's when she stood up."

Tony had threatened everyone because of Leland. "You go ahead. I'll take care of your mother."

"We thought you were one of them at first."

He turned around: now that her face was changing, Judy was beginning to resemble her dead grandmother.

"Go on! Go on!"

Tony stuck the muzzle around again. Leland fired. Tony's burst tore into the ceiling panels. Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "The hostages are free and coming down the stairs. Now you can take the bottom of the building. Do you copy?"

"We copy. How many are left?"

"No more than one downstairs. See you later." Outside, people began cheering. The Kalashnikov had two rounds left. A man was trying to pull the wounded woman out of the line of fire.

"Help me, she's my wife."

"He has my daughter!"

"Look at yourself! You're covered with blood!"

Leland showed his teeth. "Damn little of it is mine."

The man turned away, saying something to himself. Leland looked behind him. Not everyone had got out. There was a man's body in the corner, and near the exit, a second woman was on the floor, holding her leg and writhing. The cheers outside were louder, almost loud enough to obscure the sound of the elevator. Leland spoke into the radio again. "We have wounded on the thirty-second floor."

"How many?"

"Three, maybe more, maybe one dead."

"What's happening in there now? What was that explosion?"

"Tony can tell you as well as I can. Talk to him yourself."

"No, Mr. Leland, it's you to whom I will talk." You could hear the crackle of the elevator motor in his transmission. "What have you done here tonight but perpetrate the most bloody, unspeakable crimes?"

"You killed Rivers first. I saw you shoot him in cold blood."

"History will be the judge of that," Tony said.

Leland was moving as he listened, crossing the building to Steffie's office. "Mr. Leland, how many people have you killed tonight?"

"For a little while longer, Tony, that will stay classified."

"You're not ashamed of yourself, are you?"

"Nah." Steffie's office had been ransacked. It took him a while to recognize his jacket, but not because of the mess surrounding it. His pants were no longer the same color. He went into the bathroom.

"The world should know what a savage you are," Tony shouted. "You broke a boy's neck. You threw a man off the roof."

"Listen, you jive-ass son of a bitch!" Taco Bill roared. "Let go of that man's daughter!"

"Stay out of it, Bill," Leland said.

"The man's daughter, as you call her, is an adult largely responsible for seeing that one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world remains armed and in control of millions of helpless peasants. Are you listening, Mr. Leland? What are you doing, Mr. Leland?"

"Taking a couple of aspirins. I have a headache."

He had already done that. He had decided not to try to wash his face again, for he was liable to get something in his eyes. He was coated with grease, soot, and brown, dried blood from the top of his head down to the blackened, encrusted towels on his feet. He could scrape grease and dried blood out of his hair like cream cheese from a slice of bread. He opened the medicine cabinet again, trying to think ahead. Something was nagging him, something added. He took off the harness.

"Mr. Leland, for whom do you work?"

"I'm self-employed." He was hefting the Browning. The dirtier he was, the better. He had eleven shots. "Look, Tony, you've turned this around on me. Let's do a deal, you and I. A straight trade. You need a hostage. Take me instead of my daughter."

"Of course. You read my mind."

Leland practiced the move for the first time. Terrific — it was going to work. "Now, how do you want to do this?"

He heard gunfire below. That was right: one below, number two was Tony, three was defending the roof. Three left, including a woman. It took Leland a moment to remember how he knew that: the voice on the radio reading the words and numbers. He practiced the move again. Adhesive tape wasn't going to bother him.

"You know where I am," Tony said. "I want you to take the elevator here, unarmed. When you present yourself, your daughter can enter the elevator, free to do as she wishes."

"Sounds swell."

"Don't go for it, Joe."

"Bill, this has been what I've been working for all night."

"Joe, we're entering the bottom of the building," Al Powell said. "We want you to use your head."

"You tell me when you're inside. In the meantime, I've got to play ball with this guy. What choice do I have?"

"Joe," Bill said, "according to the TV, the cops aren't in the building yet. In fact, somebody's really pouring it on."

"Let me tell him," Al Powell said. "They have fortified positions on the third floor that give them fields of fire to the north and south, which is all they need."

Leland was quiet. Was Tony upstairs with Steffie alone?Leland didn't think whoever just blew the safe could get downstairs that quickly. Either way was all right. Tony and Leland were wise to each other. Tony wanted him thinking he was on the fortieth floor. What Leland did not like was the idea that Tony was trying to pull on Leland a stunt Leland had tried — unsuccessfully — on the gang. You get in an elevator, you don't know where it's going to stop next. It was too simple. He picked up the radio.

"Al, you've got seventy-five people coming down the stairs. You've got to occupy the bottom of the building now."

A helicopter swung in on the building, which rung with the sound of returning heavy automatic fire. There was still one upstairs. He wondered how long it was going to take the police to get wise to the situation down below, one guy running back and forth between two positions.

"I want it known that we still have the weapons to knock the helicopters out of the sky!" Tony screamed. "The people on the staircases will be permitted to descend to street level. We want no further bloodshed. Mr. Leland, are you ready?"

Leland was already climbing the stairs. "What do you want me to do?" One down, one up, and Tony — he couldn't have been able to fire at the helicopter and maintain a hold on Steffie at the same time.

"Get in the elevator."

"I'm starting from my daughter's office, and my feet are cut."

"I understand."

"It's a bad deal, Joe," Bill said.

"I want him to talk. Let him have his say."

"What we were going to do, Mr. Leland, if you had not interfered and caused all this bloodshed, was demonstrate to the world that your daughter and her partners, Rivers and Ellis, were doing what your own government now expressly forbids, that is, selling arms to Chile. One of the mistakes made by the capitalist press is the perpetuation of the idea that we are stupid people. We are not stupid people."

Leland was on the thirty-fourth floor. He thought he could go one more before he had to call an elevator. He didn't give a shit about Rivers or Ellis or their guns. Smart guys. Assholes. Stephanie hadn't even been sure of her bonus. They'd kept her tied in knots. How smart were they now, on their way to the autopsy room? He thought of what he had done to Rivers's body — more bad luck. If you could not wear a dead man's shoes, you could not mutilate his body, either. He thought of his daughter again and had to wonder what kind of a human being she had become. He wondered if all this would even make a difference to her, a difference in the way she thought of life.

Tony was on the air again, talking to the world.

"We have been aware for a long time of the secret elements of the contract just concluded between Klaxon Oil and the murderous regime in Chile. Under the terms of the contract made public, for one hundred fifty million dollars, almost all of it borrowed from the United States and its puppet international lending agencies, Klaxon Oil is to build a bridge in Chile. One hundred and fifty million for a single, unimportant bridge in a country where millions live in unimaginable squalor. That itself would be bad enough, but there's more. For the next seven years, Klaxon has promised to supply the Chilean fascist, military regime with millions upon millions in arms. Arms with which to hold their illegal power, power that they seized through well-documented American intervention."

Leland was on the thirty-fifth floor, hailing an elevator. Tony was not so in love with the sound of his own voice that he would not recognize the starts and stops of the elevator for what they were — evidence that Leland was coming after him. What Leland had in his favor was the fact that Tony was on the air. If he tried to punish Stephanie for what Leland was doing, Tony would lose whatever audience sympathy he was trying to develop. He knew it. Leland had no doubt that everything Tony was saying was true. Tony's tragedy was that he didn't see that he was as much a factor — a result — of the problem as the woman he was threatening with a gun.

The elevator arrived; Leland banged the "40" button and shuffled toward the stairs. He would be able to hear what happened. More gunfire from below. Good. Anything to make Tony think the situation was changing. Leland was at the stairs when the elevator stopped again and the shooting began almost at once — and stopped. Leland got on the radio.

"Tony, you're feeling the strain. I tried that trick an hour ago, and it didn't work for me. I'm disappointed with you."

Tony sighed. "Mr. Leland, how do you know that your daughter is not already dead?"

Taco Bill boomed. "You touch that woman, I'll kill you myself, you son of a bitch!"

"That's how I know," Leland said. "Let her go if you want to fight me." He kept climbing: the length of time the elevator had been in motion made him think Tony was on the thirty-eighth floor. It was an open floor plan up there, with the outside windows in view on all sides. You'd better figure out what you're going to do, kiddo.

"Mr. Leland, your problem is that you don't know what battle you're fighting, or even what century you're in. Your chivalric notions have no relevance here. You are not Robin Hood and that fool with his radio is not Little John. Your daughter is one of the principals in this illegal transfer of weapons. You seem to know something of the real strength and status of multinational corporations. There are arms stockpiles here in the United States and in warehouses all over the world, where the most lethal weapons are traded on commodities exchanges, as if they were pork bellies or grain futures. We can document the transfers of funds, the money laundering, the attempts to conceal, obscure, and confuse the record. Even as I speak, on your precious, stupid holiday, ships are in international waters, bound for Chile, supposedly carrying farm equipment and machine tools, but in fact laden with automatic weapons, rockets, and other assorted arms. They set sail yesterday morning because the first payment was delivered to this building promptly at nine o'clock, and the signal was given. Six million dollars — six million of the people's money. It has been in the safe here all this time, Mr. Leland. It is our intention to return it to the people. This six million is evidence of Klaxon's disregard for life and human rights in its pursuit of wealth and power. In our redistribution we are going to demonstrate the power of the grip corporations like Klaxon have on all of you. We are going to show how you all dance to their tune."

"Blow it out your ass," Taco Bill said.

"I think he was saying he was going to throw it out the window," Leland said.

"Yes, indeed," Tony said. "At noon. Do you have any objections, Mr. Policeman?"

Leland was thinking of something else, the remark Judy had made about him looking like one of them. Leland was above the thirty-seventh floor, going slowly. He was going to be two weeks in the hospital. All he had to do was live. "Tony, you have an odd sense of social justice. I don't think you'd be as thrilled with the idea of redistributing the wealth if you weren't involved. You'd probably be looking for a secret motive, wondering if somebody was getting a bigger cut than you. That's the way you are — most people listening to you know that already. You made a point before of telling us that you weren't stupid. The most stupid thing people like you do is believe you understand the rest of us. You're not selling revolution, you're just trying to grab a piece of the action for yourself, on your own terms. No sale."

Leland was still thinking of Judy's remark. Tony rarely had been off the thirty-second floor. In the glimpse of him Leland had had moments ago, he had looked reasonably clean, even groomed. Leland looked like one of them? None that he had killed, not Tony, and not the girl who was still alive.

Karl. Karl was the one downstairs. Maybe he had lived through the elevator explosion. He was some tough son of a bitch.

Leland opened the stairwell door slowly. He was on the east side, still believing in Billy Gibbs's advice. He wanted to tell Tony that he hadn't known about Klaxon's — and his daughter's — involvement in the clandestine arms trade. But he knew about the arms trade itself, and everything Tony had said about it was true. Anything that was possible, some human beings were willing to try, apparently including Stephanie. He would be able to explain her behavior when someone was able to explain humanity to him.

Leland got down on his hands and right knee, and pulled himself toward the windows of the east side of the building. The Browning, as big as it was, taped up high between his shoulder blades, gave no sign of coming loose.

Leland and his daughter lived on opposite ends of the continent and saw each other once a year or so. They talked on the telephone every month, when they remembered, or when he was in a hotel room somewhere alone. In Atlanta or Boston, with the day already over in the East, he could call Santa Monica where it was still early evening, and say hello to everybody. He knew Steffie loved him, and knew, too, that sometimes she grew tired of him. Whether he wanted to believe it or not, the passage of time had made him old-fashioned. She had not had an easy life, and in some measure he was responsible — but how much responsibility did he bear for an Ellis in her life, or the compromises she had made with herself to get so involved in this?

Leland wasn't thinking about guilt, he was thinking about distance, the distance between people. In spite of his success, money, and privilege, Leland could be in Atlanta or Boston at the end of a day as lonely as a bum sleeping in the park. When people knew who he was, what he had done, and where he had been in the world, they enviedhim — without ever bothering to inquire about his interior life. What was true for him was true for millions of others. Face-to-face, Taco Bill, whoever he really was, probably couldn't sustain a conversation for more than five minutes, unless it was about radios — or drugs, sex, or rock and roll. Over the air, though, why, this was living!

"Mr. Leland," Tony cooed, "I thought you were going to meet with me."

Leland had the volume low. "I'm still on the stairs."

"I know, I know. You're not so talkative."

"I've talked to killers before. You have nothing to teach me."

"There you go again. Rivers was an international criminal. A crime is being committed here, Mr. Policeman — don't I have the obligation of a citizen to try to stop it? Do you claim that what you have done is morally different from, or superior to, trying to alert the world that another of your great multinationals is up to its elbows with human blood? And as for your daughter, what can a trained dog sire but a blood-thirsty bitch?"

Tony meant to kill her, too. Leland was moving along the east side of the building, still even with the elevator banks. He had been sure that Tony would be between them, but if that had been true, by now Leland would have picked up his voice in the room. Leland pressed the "Talk" button.

"You're getting scared, Tony. You were all right when you were in control, but now you're losing your grip." Leland was still moving. "What makes that, do you think? You ought to have more confidence, figuring how right you are. Or maybe it's because I'm so close to you now. You told me to come up here unarmed and then you blast the elevator you thought I was riding in. You're hiding behind my daughter with a machine pistol and you're shaking in your boots. Where's the Walther you shot Rivers with? That's all anybody needs to know about this. You're the one who brought the machine guns into the building. We were unarmed."

"Are you unarmed?"

"That's what you wanted."

"Well, then, stand up, please. I can hear you without the radio. Turn it off."

Leland turned it off before Taco Bill — or anyone else — could protest. He still didn't know Tony's location. It didn't matter — not yet, anyway: Leland wanted to be sure Stephanie was well clear before he went for the Browning.

"I'm standing up!"

"Hands in the air!"

As Leland raised his arms, slowly, making a show of the pain he really felt, Little Tony emerged from behind the desks on the Wilshire Boulevard side. Leland took a step; he wanted Tony to see him dragging his leg. Tony motioned Stephanie to her feet. She reacted when she saw her father, and Tony grabbed her arm.

"I'm all right, honey," Leland called.

"Very noble, Mr. Leland," Tony said. "Over here, please. You look like a corpse already. Come on. What is the matter with your leg?"

Leland didn't answer. He was making a show of it, listing heavily to the right, which tilted his hand a bit closer to his head. Tony and Steffie were eight to ten feet from the windows, with Leland still too far away to be any kind of shot with the thing Tony carried, still too far to be an easy shot with Leland's Browning. He had always been an excellent marksman; there was some psychological theory about it, having to do with one's sense of self. Stephanie was watching him, but not because she expected him to do something. She started to break down. The last time she had seen him, he had looked human.

"I'm sorry I did this to you, Daddy!"

"The avenger," Little Tony snorted. "Implacable. Your father is a man of infinite illusions. He has a pistol in his collar. The policeman tried to make believe he was unarmed, and now he thinks he is going to be able to save you. He's such a fool. Why should he want to?"

"Out of the way, Steffie!"

"It will give me pleasure to kill both of you," Tony said.

Steffie did not pull away; she threw herself against Tony. It gave Leland the chance to hop forward a few feet more. He wanted her to get clear. This was his job. "Out of the way!"He still had the sun behind him. The pistol came out of position just as he'd planned, tape swirling around it. Tony had his eyes on him as he struggled against Steffie. Leland was close enough. He turned and offered his profile, shooting the way he had been taught decades ago, the old-fashioned way, bringing his arm down smoothly, aligned, a piece of machinery. The first shot was the one most pure, unaffected by recoil, and Leland wanted to hit Tony amidships, where the impact would do the most good.

"Kill him, Daddy! Kill him!"She swung at Tony, hitting him in the face. He was turning the machine pistol toward her when Leland fired, hitting him in the right nipple. He looked at Leland incredulously as Leland's second shot hit him in the shoulder, wrenching him back. Stephanie swung at him again.

"Get clear, baby! I got him and he knows it! "Tony shot her once in the lower abdomen, not letting go of her wrist. She turned to Leland as Tony tried to aim the machine pistol at him.

"Shoot him! He told me he was going to do this!"She pushed against Tony again. Leland shot a third time and missed. Eight left. Tony backed up, holding Stephanie. Leland reset himself and started shooting again. The first hit Tony in the stomach, three inches above the navel. Leland squeezed another, driving Tony back against the glass. The third shot was between the other two, and went clean through him, turning the window white. Tony was still clinging to Stephanie, falling backward. Leland fired three more times, not missing, almost cutting him in half.

Tony fell against the window, pushing it out with his back, holding onto Stephanie by her wrist, then hooking her wristwatch with a ringer, falling out, pulling her out with him. He was already dead; Leland heard Stephanie scream all the way down.

Outside, people shouted and cheered. Leland screamed, too, holding Stephanie's cry long after it would have disappeared from the earth forever.

...10:38 A.M., PST...

And he kept screaming, staring at the open window, at the brilliant sky beyond. He turned the gun around and looked into the barrel, screaming — if she had done what he had told her to do, she would be alive, unharmed.

She should have trusted him.

She hadn't even listened to him. "Shoot him, Daddy," she had yelled.

"Steffie!"What did he do now? What was expected of him, the trained dog? The crowd was still shouting, yelling. What did they have on their minds? Did they want more blood — or money?

Were they angry because they thought they weren't going to get the money? He did not want to go to the window. He did not want to see what had happened down below — but just as much, he did not see the necessity for letting anyone know he had survived.

He did not know that he had. He did not know if he cared. He did not know if caring mattered.

He had not moved. He recognized what he was feeling. He had felt it when his mother had died, when his marriage had broken up, and again when Karen had died, the feeling that it was time to quit, that he would be better off dead. It was on him all over again, as if it had never gone really far away after all. Something in us always wanted to die. No forgiveness — never any forgiveness in life. What did it say of a man, if he outlived all the women who had ever loved him? A man like him, with a gun in his hand? What did a gun mean, except death?

He shuffled back to the east side of the building and picked up the radio.

"...inside. Joe, if you can hear me, repeating, we are inside and some of the hostages are beginning to reach us."

He decided to leave the radio on. From the street came a voice calling for the money. What did they used to call those guys at the ballpark? Leather lungs. Six million dollars. For arms. Guns. Shoot him, Daddy.Millions for a bridge. Millions upon millions as if there were some use at all to the money madness and the hoarding up of treasure. As if it could add a day to your life. As if you could eat more than two eggs in the morning, Steinbeck once said, which was all you needed to know about the limits of life. What had Stephanie been looking for? What lessons in life had made her believe in it? What had made Little Tony believe in revolution?

Six million dollars. The president of Klaxon was down in the street, looking at the ruin of his corporate headquarters and wondering if his insurer was going to bug out on him. Leland had worked for an insurance company, so he knew it was damned well going to try. Insurrection? Act of war? No, the arms deal itself, which, because it was outside the law, voided Klaxon's coverage. It made Leland smile. How much pain can you inflict on an oil company? How much could it absorb, before the stockholders insisted on people going to jail? He had two rounds left in the Browning, all he needed. Merry Christmas, everybody.He started up the stairs again, crying like a child.

In her childhood, he and Steffie played checkers and Monopoly. She'd been born at the start of the war, and he had seen little of her the first four years of her life, one separation lasting almost two years. When he came home, he and Karen tried to make it up to her, sensing that she had been damaged by the war as much as them, but in ways no one could see. They tried to make it up to her... What you don't know in all your worry and concern is that later in your life the memories that matter most are of ordinary life. Checkers and Monopoly. Their relationship had fallen apart again while he'd been drinking, but when she had come to recognize that he'd stopped for good, it had grown better. He hadn't liked her husband, Gennaro.

She would be alive now if he'd surrendered and functioned as an observer or made his way out of the building to call the police. No, he couldn't be sure. He couldn't remember why he had done so many things through the night. In all, it would have been better for him if he had missed the plane in St. Louis. The accident outside the airport could have stopped him. It would have, if he had surrendered to fate. No, he had pulled a gun to keep to his schedule. He should have paid attention to what something had been trying to tell him. It was as if he had been rushing to see his daughter die.

Any cop would tell you, sooner or later you were aware of every mistake you had ever made. He made mistakes under pressure all his life. The mistakes were as much a part of human nature as the situations that created them. Maybe Little Tony had had the time to realize what he had done wrong. Tony had known about the gun behind Leland's neck, but had died anyway. It was Steffie who had made it possible for Leland to put one bullet after another into him. She had been sorry for what had happened to her father. She had held herself responsible. No one had thought of that.

Leland didn't know what would have happened if he had gone for a head shot. He might have hit her. If she had gotten clear, Leland would have tried to empty the Browning into Tony. It might have worked. It might have killed Leland in the process, but that would have been better than this.

He pushed oat onto the fortieth floor with the Browning still in hand. No need to be cautious. He shuffled past the board room, where the table was piled high with cash, around toward the staircase to the roof. He was thinking now that he had to do this quickly; if the police were in the building, they were coming upstairs — slowly, maybe, carefully, but they were coming. His autonomy in here was almost at an end.

He moved more quietly when he reached the corridor to the staircase. He could hear her in there, thinking she was safe from attack from below. He was reminding himself again that he was a victim, that his daughter would be alive if not for these people, including this person:she would have died hours ago, if Leland had caught up with her. He had understood the risk at the start; maybe Steffie had understood it, too, but he did not see how that changed anything.

He had to keep himself going just a bit longer. Maybe they would figure out who had done what in these last few minutes, the real order in which things had happened, but there weren't going to be any witnesses to dispute Leland's version of events. You spend all your life behind one badge or other not knowing if you're a good cop or just lucky, but one thing finally does become clear to you: better than anybody else, you know how to commit a crime. The Forah said that you weren't responsible for what you did while you were a victim of a crime. The argument hadn't worked for Patty Hearst, but it would for him.

Rule one: no witnesses.

He was not going to jail because of some corporate thief's six million. Under the circumstances, what had been good for Little Tony and nine others of his gang — and Stephanie — was going to be good for Klaxon. As much as he could, he was going to inflict pain on these people.

He swung the Browning around into the staircase. "Freeze!"

"Kamarad!"

"Speak English! Hands over your head!"

She was a little girl, plump, with rosy cheeks and green eyes. She looked hardly older than Judy. Judy was even taller. At the top of the stairs with her were more rockets in launching tubes and enough other ordnance to hold the building for a week. If they had had the personnel earlier this morning, the gang could have come out of the building to drive the police back, inflicting heavy casualties and damage along the way.

"Do you have an assault rifle or machine gun up there?"

She looked confused for a moment, then she nodded yes. She looked like somebody's baby-sitter. How old could she be, twenty? Twenty-two?

"I can see you very well," Leland said. "Do you understand me?" His nerves were crawling with self-disgust. "I want you to pick up a weapon by the barrel, and two clips of ammunition with the other. Don't move too quickly."

She did it, looking relieved, he thought. He saw her less well than he had said: the daylight filled the open door behind her. She had that dark red hair, a full, to-the-shoulders head of it, beautiful.

"Come down, one step at a time."

He was trembling. He wanted her to get close enough for him to kill her with a single shot before she realized what he was going to do. He wanted to stop sentimentalizing her; he didn't know who she was, what she had done, or the people she had killed. If she had been up here at dawn, she had killed the men in the helicopters.

And trying to kill him. Another mistake. This was the price of failure. She was at the foot of the stairs, holding a Kalashnikov, looking into his eyes, frightened, trying to smile. She had perfect teeth. He had the pistol low, so she would not believe he was aiming it at her. He shook — quaked: his bladder opened. As he raised the pistol she realized that he had allowed her to live these extra seconds only to carry the gun to him. She started to scream. Leland could see that she had never lived, that she knew she was dying without ever having experienced most of the natural course of life. Leland thought of his dead daughter Steffie and shot this bitch in the forehead above the bridge of her nose.

Nothing on the radio. No shooting down below. There was more than just the six million on the table: documents, correspondence, internal memoranda, some of it bearing Steffie's initials, an "S.G." that looked like a flower. He wasn't going to worry about police problems. He wasn't going to worry about anything. It would be interesting to see if somebody tried to shoot him when the money started flying out over the city. Would the cops automatically assume that he was one of the gang? Or would that just be the story they gave out? The question of who was right and who was wrong was more a matter of point of view than anything else. If you were in a helicopter, you just might pull the trigger because the money was out of reach. You wouldn't even know why you had done it.

He had to get a chair on casters, and even then he would have to make two trips to the open window — past the mutilated Rivers and the kid with the broken neck. Up here, Leland was the only one left alive. Tens, twenties, and fifties as well as hundreds, all banded and initialed by unknown Santiago tellers. After a job like this, if you had any brains, you shot them, too.

Leland was going to have to tear the bands off scores of packets of bills. Rivers and the kid were in rigor mortis now, complete with bright postmortem lividity, like a couple of starched shirts. Smart guys. Stiffs.

Leland's leg was beginning to hurt again. He didn't know if that was a good sign or bad. The first packets seemed to disappear into the haze, so Leland opened five at once before releasing them. From the street came a shout, then cheers and screams. Leland could hear a helicopter approaching. He pulled the chair back out of sight while he opened all of the remaining packets of bills. At the window, the air caught them, carried them upward in a spangled cloud. More screams from below, and horns blowing, as he scurried after the second chairload. Six million — six million more,figuring the building.

The helicopter swinging back and forth outside held a guy with a television camera. Leland made sure to stay back out of view. Maybe they would figure out who had thrown the money from the window, but they weren't going to be able to prove it. He opened all of the packets before he wheeled the chair past the bodies, and the money lifted up like the last fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Leland could hear automobile horns from all over the city. He gathered his equipment for the trek downstairs.

On the thirty-ninth floor he loaded the Kalashnikov and stepped out among the computers. He stopped, seeing what he had planned wasn't going to work. He had been about to empty both clips into the equipment. It wouldn't matter. That was part of the new magic that the young understood so well — it wouldn't make any difference. Whatever he destroyed here could be replaced quickly, or the workload distributed elsewhere. The people in the field probably would welcome the challenge.

He threw the gun down. Let the police find his fingerprints. In fact, he'd see if they were good enough to find them. One thing that was notgoing to happen: the police and Klaxon were not going to make him the fall guy. Not even for his goddamned trick badge. Six million and the building, that was enough damage. Maybe as much as twenty-five million, enough to trigger panic selling on Wall Street. The president of Klaxon Oil, whoever he was, could not yet imagine the trouble Leland was going to bring down upon him. Somehow. None of it was going to bring Stephanie back. He wanted to know when — how long ago — her life had slipped beyond his reach.

He turned the radio volume up. "This is Leland. I'm coming down."

"Hi, Joe." It was Al Powell. "Where are you?"

He did not want to be caught in a lie. "The thirty-ninth floor, on my way down from the fortieth. I just got the last of them up here. Did you get the one down there?"

"We haven't seen anybody. Now what do you mean, you got the last of them up there?"

"I told you I heard them say there were twelve. I kept very careful count. Since I went off the air after nine o'clock, I killed four more, including Little Tony..."

Taco Bill let out a rebel yell.

"We saw two," Al said. "They landed on a black-and-white."

"No. One of those was Little Tony. The other, whom he killed, is my daughter, Stephanie Leland Gennaro."

"Take it easy, Joe."

"No, I want to get this straight. I killed three others besides him, two men and a woman. The woman is the last — she's on the fortieth. I told you I kept count. I killed eleven..."

"Come on, Joe..."

He was on the thirty-eighth floor. "No, listen to me, damn it! There was one downstairs. If you're not sure you have him, make sure. His name is Karl. I killed his brother and he knows it. He's a tough bastard, covered with dirt and blood. Like me. Find my granddaughter. She'll tell you that one of them was covered with soot and maybe blood. That's the one I didn't kill. Do you understand? I didn't get anyone like that."

"Joe, why don't you sit down and wait until we get to you? If the roof is clear as you say, then we'll be able to put men on it..."

"I have one shot left. The guy has been listening to us right along. How far up into the building are you?"

"There are people coming out of all four staircases. We have only your word that you have as many as you say — or that there were twelve to start. I'm not asking, Joe, I'm telling you: appreciate our position. Let us do our job."

"There's one more," Leland said.

The pain was increasing, but he had fallen into an easy, slow cadence that allowed his arms and shoulders to take his weight on the banisters. He was finished — he was going to get out. He needed medical attention. At the rate they were going, the police wouldn't get to him for hours, even if they came down from the roof. If they tried to lift him to a helicopter, they might just drop him down to the street. Accidents happened. All concerned would be better off if this thing remained a mystery.

He marveled at himself: he was still afraid of falling, even after Steffie had already done it. It made him sick to his stomach. He had one shot left with Karl on the loose and the police afraid to come up into the building. It was as if people wanted him to die. Certainly the president of Klaxon Oil. After this night, the list was longer than ever.

On the way down he tried to figure out everything that had happened and where all the bodies were, but he was too tired, so tired he wasn't sure he was going to be able to remember even after he'd had the rest he needed. He would let other people worry about it. He was going to get to sleep. He wasn't going to think. He would answer questions later. The first person he would talk to was his lawyer.

At the thirty-second floor, he thought of looking again at Steffie's office. If he wanted to live, he would have to forget things like that. After the medical attention, he needed a bath, one given to him, a meal, and a night's rest, in that order. He wanted to see his grandchildren. He wanted to talk to Kathi Logan. The kids had a father, but Leland wasn't sure they wanted to be with him. They weren't that young and Leland wasn't that old. It was a thought and a reason to live.

At the twenty-eighth floor he had to stop to rest. He sat down heavily, stretching his left leg stiffly across the stairs. Both legs ached, his back, his chest, and his arms. Coming down, when he tried to ease the strain from one part of his body, another would begin to give way to pain, and then spasms. He knew he could make it. He would be all right once people could see him, once cameras could pick him up. That was what he wanted. He wanted to get better. He wanted to get healthy, eat a steak and baked potato. He wanted a meal that started with a shrimp cocktail, about eight fresh jumbos.

He got up.

He had to stop again at the twenty-second floor and this time he threw himself back on the stairs to ease the cramps in the muscles all around his rib cage. Terra incognita:he kept thinking of the offices and labyrinths outside the staircases, the self-important little bastions of clerical territoriality — what if he opened the doors and found more computers, more value, more magic beyond his grasp? He kept going, thinking that an old man believes in himself in spite of the changing evidence, in spite of everything.

On the nineteenth floor they started to hail him on the radio again, and he turned them off until he passed what he thought could be a danger zone. He was thinking of where his chair-bomb had hit the elevator. The wreckage he had seen on television opened the possibility that one, more, or all of the staircases were unsafe, exposed, or both. If hostages were hiding in the middle part of the building, he had not seen them. He did not want to see them. He had one bullet left, and he did not want to scramble the wrong person's brains by accident.

The staircase was intact. The blast must have gone straight out the windows. Maybe the building wasn't that badly damaged. He gave up as an unnecessary risk the opportunity to look out on the two floors. Karl had not established that he had an imagination, but how much imagination did it take to stake out the floors about which Leland would be most curious?

At fifteen he rested again. This time he went out onto the floor. Some ceiling panels were down, windows broken, but otherwise it looked like every other office waiting for Monday morning. He sat on a desk, pushed his weight back so that his thighs were supported, then lay back. He had to wipe the grime off the face of his watch in order to read it. Almost noon, if it was accurate.

He thought of staying where he was.

He had to get down to the ground floor. His daughter was dead. Her children were alone. He couldn't stop. You don't stop, ever, no matter what.

He was barely able to get up. His muscles shook so much he felt as if he were being raised by a bumper jack. The sun was so high now that the light pouring through the windows was pearl-colored. Who was going to clean out his daughter's room? He had taken care of both his parents, and perhaps God had spared him Karen, but he did not want to do it for Stephanie. He did not want to intrude on her privacy. Karen would not have wanted it. He was on his feet, moving.

"Bill? Can you let me talk to Kathi?"

"Sure, man. Anything you want."

"Joe? Are you all right?"

"Do you know what happened?"

"Yes. I'm sorry. If I can help you in any way, please let me."

"I got all of them but one. There's one still running around in here."

"The television picked that up. The police say they have no way of being sure, one way or the other. Can you stay where you are? Can you tell the police your location and wait for them to come for you?"

"This fellow's listening to every word we say. He's in here somewhere."

"Joe, he's not your responsibility..."

"She's telling you the truth, Joe," Al Powell said, "Look, I believe you. I don't want anything to happen to you!"

"I'm not looking for him! I'm trying to get out of here!"

"Please, Joe..."

It was like living your life for nothing. What was left? Everything he and Karen had worked for, everything they had planned, and all that had survived the disaster they had made together, was gone. It was just history and the passage of time. He pressed the "Talk" button. "What else is happening? What are they showing on television?"

"The streets of Los Angeles are jammed with cars," Kathi said. "People are trying to follow the money, which is blowing east. The building is between Beverly Hills and the direction the money is taking, and people in their Rolls-Royces can't get around the jam. If you caused all that after what you've been through, if you were the one throwing the money out the window, I'll love you forever."

"I don't know anything about any money. I never saw any money."

"Do you want me to come up there?"

"I'm going to get into the right hospital. Try to get some rest. I want everything to slow down."

"I'll be watching for you," she said.

He had forgotten that television would be downstairs, too. Something made him feel a start of fear — he didn't know what it was. Now Al Powell broke in.

"Joe, let me have a word with you. We have people coming down in twos and threes, reporting that there are people up there too exhausted or frightened to move. We have about forty down here now, but no sign of your grandchildren. On the basis of what you've been saying, Captain Robinson had devised a plan. We're sending teams of officers up all the staircases. These men are heavily armed. As they get to each floor, they're going to say so — radio that information to me. I'll relay it to you. You don't have to give us your location. When the officers are near you, sit down on the stairs and put your hands on your head. We'll get you down, I promise. I promise you, partner."

It took another forty minutes; they were being very cautious. He was on the sixth floor when he heard their voices and the scraping of their shoes. He sat down, put his hands on his head, and announced his presence.

It was as if he had been away — out of contact with people — for years. After they disarmed him and Al told them on the radio they had the right man, two of the officers picked him up and carried him down the stairs. There were six of them altogether, all trying to talk at once. Just as well, for he had nothing to say. He dreaded the talking he was going to have to do. He had lost weight; he could feel it in the ease with which they carried him, then passed him to their fellows.

"How are you doing?"

"Okay. I'm okay."

"You tell us if we bounce you around too much."

"No, you're doing fine."

He could hear the roar of voices from above the second floor, even through the steel door to the lobby. He muttered something, and the officer bearing him on the right said that he might as well get used to it.

"Here he is! Here he is! Get back!"

The door opened on a wall of people, police, cameramen, and reporters, all shouting at him, pushing each other. The light was so bright that he was temporarily blinded. A doctor started cutting at the left leg of his pants. He could see a stretcher at his feet.

"I want to stand a while."

"How do you feel?" a female reporter asked.

"Did you really kill them all?"

"Where's Al Powell?"

"Right here." He was standing back six feet, his hand on the butt of his .38, his eyes searching above the heads of the crowd.

Leland smiled. "You look better on television."

"I'll remember that." He stepped away, not looking at the short, dark-haired white man on his left. "This is Captain Dwayne Robinson."

"We're going to have to ask you a few questions, Leland. We're studying the video tapes now, and we're very interested in who got rid of that money, and why."

Leland saw Powell shake his head: the tapes showed nothing.

"I'm not answering questions without the advice of a lawyer," Leland said. "I think his first advice would be that I get medical attention."

"Let us talk to him," a dark-haired, moustached reporter said.

Leland recognized what was happening with the first sound, to his left, at the door to the northeast staircase. He wanted to get to the floor, but Robinson was blocking him, pushing him back against the wall. Karl shouted and opened fire on the reporters, whose screams and shrieks as they fell almost obscured the sound of the Kalashnikov. It was like looking in the mirror. Karl was covered with dirt and blood. He wanted to kill them all. It was another kind of madness, like the greed that had brought this down on them. Karl was not going to be satisfied until somebody stopped him. Not even Stephanie had been able to stop Leland. Not even Stephanie's death.

Now Karl found Leland. It was exactly like looking in the mirror. Karl could see no one but Leland; Leland knew it. Robinson had his gun out, but he never got off a round. Karl shot first, as Al Powell grabbed Robinson's shoulder and pulled him into Karl's line of fire. There was a ferocity to Powell's expression that Leland would not have imagined from what he had just seen upstairs on television. Robinson backed and fell against Leland, who felt himself being hit again, in the thigh, high up. Before the shock and the weight of Robinson's body knocked him down, Leland saw Powell take careful aim and, with two clean shots, tear off the top of Karl's head in a sheet of brains and blood.

Leland tried to pull himself out from under Robinson. With two hands, Powell rolled Robinson's body away. He tore at the leg of Leland's trousers. The blood felt as if someone had poured a bowl of soup in his lap.

"Medic! Medic!"

The doctor was lying dead beside Leland and Robinson. People were just stirring from where they had thrown themselves around the lobby. People started shouting.

"Give me that fucking belt," Powell said, pulling it loose. "You're not going to die on me, not now." He lashed the belt tightly around Leland's thigh. "I liked the way you ducked behind Robinson."

Leland stared.

"He died a hero," Powell said. "Don't you forget it."

"I wish you hadn't done anything."

Powell looked at him. "I know. But nobody should think that about himself — especially not the guy I'm counting on as my partner."

"Robinson made a mistake," Leland said aloud, but to himself.

"He gave his life for you," Powell said. "That's the only way to look at it. You're not bleeding anymore. You're going to live."

"You're a hell of a good cop," Leland said.

"Next to you, I'm no kind of a cop at all." Now he was crying. Cops crowded over him, craning for a look. A bottle of plasma was being set up. A new face appeared.

"Don't let go of that belt, kid."

"Sergeant," Powell said.

"Sergeant, I'm sorry. That's exactly right. Don't let go"

"You take it easy," Powell said to Leland. "You have years of living ahead of you." .

Leland had no answer. He wanted to say something, but found himself suddenly unwilling to think. He realized he could let everything go — he could let himself drift. He felt the whole long life he had already lived recede deeper into his memory. He was being picked up, rolled quickly toward the door. Somebody was holding the plasma, running alongside him with Powell. Powell smiled, the same man who had just looked so ferocious.

Leland closed his eyes. Now, and for a little while longer, he was going to think of flying.