Soft Targets

For my parents

SOFT TARGETS

Copyright © 1979 by Dean Ing.

". . . I found fear a mean, overrated motive; no deterrent and, though a stimulant, a poisonous stimulant whose every injection served to con­sume more of the system ..."

—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

FRIDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER, 1980:

Still naked and sleep-fogged after his morning coffee, the wire-muscled little man retrieved his attaché case from his pillowslip and placed it with reverence on the apartment's sleazy table. He touched the case in a necessary spot, then traded regal glances with Elizabeth II of England, whose likeness faced him from predom­inantly brown engravings. As an eye-opener, he reflected, caffeine was no match for cash.

The twenty-five thousand was in hundreds, all Canadian money. There would be more soon, if his sources were sufficiently pleased with his Buffalo broadcast of the previous night. Next to the money was his Hewlett-Packard hand cal­culator; American, modified in France. His German passport, tucked into a flap, had been faked in Italy. The Spanish automatic with its armpit holster took up most of the remaining space; he had obtained the piece in Quebec while killing time—among other things. He flicked his great dark eyes to the note pad flank­ing his passport, deciphering his personal shorthand which was by Arabic out of Gregg. Altogether, he thought contentedly, a cosmo­politan survival kit.

He grasped the little HP calculator and queried it. 9:37 A FRI, the alphanumeric display read. He could easily have programmed it to add, 19 SEP 80 TORONTO; or perhaps 6 DAYS TO BORDER. Even among HP units, it was a very special gadget. He winked—a signal Americans usually misread as harmless duplicity—at the stacks of Elizabeths, closed the case, and stood. There would be time for calisthenics before mak­ing the buy.

He began with simple hand and foot exercises, progressed to ritual defensive maneuvers, then dervished through a repertoire of offensive moves, breathing easily in marvelous silence as he negotiated the furniture. No surplus flesh masked the tendons that slid just beneath the skin. The knee was solid again, so he covertly eyed the pencil mark he had made chin-high on the door moulding. He took one bare-footed step as if to flee but rebounded, the other leg sweep­ing up flexed, then extended in a vicious slant­ing blur.

The ball of the foot gently swept within cen­timeters of his target, then thrust away. He landed quietly and rolled, to freeze into a crouch, mouth open to quiet his breathing. His weaknesses in martial arts were philosophical ones. He knew few peers in the prime requisites for unarmed combat: speed, silence, ferocity.

Not once had he made enough noise to excite comment from the next apartment. He was pleased with himself but he was not smiling. In his apparatus of deceit, the smile was a favored tool. He essayed two more flying side kicks, test­ing his eyes, his precision, his right shin's peroneus longus muscle that really made the move so murderous, and stopped only because of a creaky board in the floor. Satisfied, he ta­pered off with mild arm and leg flexures before his shower. The cold water sent blades of pain twisting up his limbs. Now he smiled, and turned the water on full force.

His scrub disturbed the flexible cobbler's ce­ment on his fingertips and he applied a fresh coating. When dry, its sheen was unseen as it filled the tiny whorls of flesh. Now his touch was anonymous, matching the prosthetic tip of his left small finger.

He dressed quickly, choosing the ice-blue silk dress shirt and the deeper blue conservative jacket above dove-gray trousers. He shrugged into the harness, placed his piece carefully in the holster against spring pressure, and decided he would have time to find chemicals at supply houses enroute to the big buy. He flipped through the thick yellow-page Toronto direc­tory, made several notations, and checked the window telltales. Then, taking the attache case, he paused to emplace a telltale on the bottom door hinge before sliding out to the hall.

The garage attendant wheeled his rented Toyota to him, proof that no unfriendly hands had dallied under the car. Then he drove down Bathurst on his shopping foray. At the paint store, paying for the aluminum powder, he asked to use a telephone.

A young woman's voice tinned through the earpiece, "Salon du Nord," making it sound like a beauty parlor.

"Monsieur Pelletier, s'il vous plait," he replied. His accent gave away less in French than in English. There were advantages to operating in a bilingual country.

Pelletier was in, Pelletier was oozing charm. Pelletier had the stuff. "But of course," he said, "packaged as you requested, Mr. Trnka."

^"Quality assurance tests?^"

"Of course. I believe your appointment was this morning."

"Precisely," said the little man, pronouncing his favorite English word. Though fluent in En­glish, he had chosen the name 'Trnka' because so few people could say whether his accent was truly Czech. Once he had preferred the Turkish 'Jemil,' but no longer. Turkish was too close. He reaffirmed the appointment and minutes later drove into an area of new light industry.

Salon du Nord occupied half of a two-story building. Its logo phrase, "Electronique—Recherche et Perfectionnement" had its English equivalent below: "Electronic R & D." He had dealt with the firm only through an intermediary, but Pelletier was known as a useful source.

He was immediately shown to Pelletier's of­fice. Pelletier was short, scarcely taller than his visitor but heavier by a good twenty kilos, all smiles and reeking of bonhomie. 'Trnka' smiled, detesting him on sight. "I trust you're enjoying your stay in Toronto, Mr. Trnka," Pelletier be­gan.

"Very much; but I am pressed for time," the little man replied, placing the attache case in his lap.

Pelletier sighed. "Of course." His soft hands reached into his desk, reappeared with a plastic belt. Aligned like cartridges along the belt were twenty black oblongs, somewhat more slender than dominoes. "Unusual packaging," Pelletier said, offering the belt. "But, ah, very practical." Again the smile like an oil slick, bright and wide. And thin.

The visitor nodded and detached one of the black oblongs. The tiny microprocessor boasted eighteen gold-plated prongs down its length on each side, giving it the look of a centipede by Mondrian. "Certified for all functions, you say," he prompted.

"Yes indeed. But there's an exceedingly smart little computer in each one, Mr. Trnka. We can't test every one for every function although I per­sonally supervised random sampling of the entire lot."

"Random? You are telling me that most of the microprocessors are untested," the visitor replied softly.

"On such short notice, and for such a price . . ." Pelletier displayed his palms.

"Fortunately," said 'Trnka,' "I can test them myself." He took the HP unit from his case, withdrew a tiny circuit board with a flimsy cable and IC socket. Pelletier gaped in silence as the HP, the test circuit board, and the microproces­sor were assembled. Lastly, `Trnka' energized the HP and fed it a slender tongue of ferrite tape. They watched the alphanumeric display flicker for perhaps twenty seconds.

Pelletier smiled engagingly. "Forgive my curiosity," he wheedled. "It occurred to me that your circuitry could have—unusual applica­tions.^"

"Games," was the reply. "We hope to give the Atari people a rude shock."

"I see," said Pelletier, unconvinced. "Something like war games." He flinched at the re­sponding glance. It softened in a flash, but for one harrowing instant Pelletier felt that he gazed into the eyes of a Comanche warrior.

At length the HP display stabilized on CONFORME. Silently, `Trnka' substituted another microprocessor. "Sixty-three seconds," he said to the restive Pelletier. "It would have taken you just twenty-one minutes to run exhaustive func­tion checks on this group." He was not pleased.

"Mr. Trnka, it will take you seven hours to check them all. May I suggest you simply return any you find faulty?"

"Like this one?" The HP display read OP AMP X.

"It is not easy or conventional to include that operational amplifier in a unit of that size," Pel­letier reminded.

He was answered by a grunt. The faulty cen­tipede was pocketed while another took its place. Pelletier fidgeted as two more microprocessors were tucked away. At last the belt was reassembled with its seventeen conforming units. `Trnka' snorted softly. "It will be neces­sary to use your telephone."

Pelletier indicated his desk phone and wad­dled out to give the illusion of privacy. `Trnka' was certain his call would be recorded. He had no other reason for the call.

He reached McEvoy with the phone's third buzz. Mr. Trnka was unavoidably detained. No, nothing serious. Yes, he was still interested but must delay his trip a few days. Still, they might meet today as planned. Two o'clock? Fine; Slip Three.

Pelletier, in his photoreduction lab, listened to the call while querying his own system at his lab computer terminal. The detectors built into his entryway insisted that Mr. Trnka carried roughly a kilogram of some dense metallic arti­cle near his left armpit. Pelletier was not sur­prised, but he was perspiring lightly now. How could he have known the salaud would have such a test rig? He considered the alarm button, then the money, which Trnka had promised would be in cash. If Trnka paid fifty cents on the dollar for such faulty units, Pelletier and his partner would lose little. If Pelletier got more, he could still claim it was fifty, and then Pelletier alone would profit very well indeed.

And the damned Czech expected to be in To­ronto a few more days. Pelletier wondered why, and then heard the conversation end. He allowed the little foreigner, still grafted to his attaché case, to find him slurping coffee from a foam cup in the hall. Then—insultingly—he was ushered back into his own office.

"I am prepared to discount the entire lot of four hundred microprocessors, Mr. Trnka, by fifteen per cent," Pelletier said blandly.

"I need four hundred units, twenty of the belts. And I shall take delivery of four hundred," the smaller man lied. "With such a high failure rate we must test them all. Do you agree?" A glum nod from the fat man. "It is my intention to pay you in cash for half of them now, discounted as you suggest, and to test them. You, meanwhile, will test the rest—all of them—and man­ufacture a sufficient number that I will have," he paused, closed his eyes and said as though to a child, "four hundred microprocessors."

Pelletier's mental circuits flickered. Eighty-five hundred dollars in the raw, today, and an equal amount to come later. He debated the ways in which he could profit from this frightening little Czech. "I could have them in a week," he offered.

"Tuesday," the man said. Pelletier did not like even a little piece of the smile that accompanied the ultimatum.

"I will do what I can." To see the last of you, he added to himself.

The attache case opened and the visitor counted out eighty-five brown Elizabeths. He pushed them across the desk. "You will want to count them."

"I trust you," said Pelletier, his voice quaver­ing as he stroked the cash. He watched the swar­thy little man walk to a small sedan, the attache case burdened with nearly two hundred micro-processors. Then Pelletier counted the money. Next he replayed the telephone call. The number was that of a fly-for-hire outfit located at Island Airport just south of Toronto. McEvoy did not seem to know Trnka well, and Slip Threesuggested a boat rather than an aircraft. Pelletier knew little of such things and did not much care. It was enough to know that Trnka would be good for another eighty-five hundred, after which Pel­letier could pay his respects to the police in return for a certain latitude they allowed him in business. Trnka was a fool, thought Pelletier, to deal directly in cash. Even though his micro-processors were very, very smart.

`Trnka' did not assume that Pelletier was a fool. He drove directly to the new bridge over the Western Gap and onto the seaplane slips on To­ronto Island. At one o'clock he found the de­crepit old Republic Seabee wallowing in its slip, its high wing seesawing gently. The amiable curmudgeon pumping water from the fuselage bilge turned out to be Ian McEvoy, and soon they were sharing lunch at a counter with a view. The little man could spot anyone approaching the aircraft, the better to learn if Pelletier really wanted his anonymous cash more than he wanted to inform. He had seen Pelletier tremble like a pointer while raking the money in; but he had not come this far by trusting nuances.

McEvoy accepted the stranger at face value: a sinewy little Czech given to expensive clothes, on the long side of thirty and able to pay for eccentric notions. Between bites of his sandwich, McEvoy said, "Sure she'll get you and the lady to Lake Chautauqua, Mr. Trnka. It's maybe an hour's flight time, but there isn't much to do when you get there." He brightened. "For a little more I could take you to the Finger Lakes. They're in New York State too. A little more action."

A pause, as though genuinely pondering the idea; as though there really was a woman. Then, "She humors me, Mr. McEvoy, and I shall humor her. She tells me that Lake Chautauqua is a good location for the film and I need to take some footage along the shoreline for study. You are famil­iar with cine cameras?"

"Just home movie stuff." McEvoy held a hunk of bread to his face. "Clickety-click, and off to be developed. Nothin' like an honest-to-God movie. You mean you aren't interested in land­ing at all?"

"We hadn't considered it. Why?"

A shrug of the narrow shoulders. "Just makes it simpler. If we land, I hafta notify Customs when I file my flight plan. They say it's recip­rocal clearance, I say it's a hassle." A twinkle in the moist blue eyes as McEvoy studied his client's tailoring. "But you don't look like a shit-runner to me." He took another mouthful of his monte cristo.

'Trnka' assembled a smile for the pilot. "I am merely combining business with pleasure, Mr. McEvoy." He watched two people stroll toward the seaplane in the distance, spied the cameras, noted that the woman was stout, the man clum­sy. He continued talking with McEvoy, discussing fees and weather, increasingly sure that the pair at the slip were only tourists. The couple continued their stroll and presently passed beyond the slips. Pressed for a time estimate by McEvoy, he said, "Wednesday or Thursday. We may pay you a visit before that." He left the buried implication that he would be somewhere in Toronto.

"Speaking of pay," McEvoy put in slyly. The little man's blue jacket yielded a slender envelope which McEvoy inspected. He withdrew the three hundred dollars, then absently stuffed the bank notes into his oil-stained leather jacket. "Half of that would've done it, Mr. Tee," he grinned. "This retainer just bought me a fathometer."

"And your silence," said the smaller man. "Film companies have their little secrets. There is one more thing ..."

"I thought there might be," McEvoy mumbled. He seemed ready to give back the retainer.

"You can stow some equipment for me un­til then. Just a piece of luggage; camera, film, clothing. But my car is very small and the suitcase is both a bother and a temptation to thieves." He saw strain lines disappearing from McEvoy's face and continued, "A pilot of your years must be a careful man. I think the cine camera equipment may be safer in your care than in mine. I have a tendency to forget things." He delivered this last phrase sadly, tentatively, the confession of one ill-equipped to deal with details.

McEvoy sealed his agreement by paying for lunch, then walked with his client to the Toyota. If he had any lingering worry, it evaporated when `Trnka' opened the suitcase, poked among the clothing and equipment. These were not the actions of a guy running heavy shit, McEvoy thought; the thing wasn't even locked. He hefted the suitcase and shook the small man's hand. "What you need is a bigger car," he joked.

"And struggle to fuel and steer and park it? How I loathe the American product," said `Trnka,' frowning, pleased to wedge more mis­direction in as he climbed into the Toyota.

Ian McEvoy trudged back to his Seabee, pleased with an honest negotiation, cudgeling his memory to recall where he had seen Trnka before. Movies? He had heard that voice somewhere, for sure. Maybe on the TV ...

The telltales in the apartment were undis­turbed, the weather report optimistic. He left the clothes on their hangers but applied more ce­ment to his fingertips, scrubbing glassware and fingers meticulously as he had the Toyota's in­terior. Then he turned his attention to the telephones. First there was the microprocessor, which passed an on-the-spot function check before he installed it on a circuit board and patched the tiny rig into the automatic answering device. He disconnected the smoke alarm in his kitchen, then placed the answering device, connected to both telephones, in the sink. He dumped his small potted plant on the floor, cleared the hole in the pot's bottom only to cover the hole with tape, and twisted coat hangers into a sling that suspended the empty clay pot over the circuit board.

Next he mixed a cupful of magnetite and aluminum powder, pouring the potent stuff into the clay pot. He used squibs and an igniter com­mon to model rocketry though he always, always employed them in threes, wired in parallel for reliability. Finally, though its crudeness irri­tated him, he deployed the twenty-meter exten­sion cord and connected its bared wires directly to the squib circuit. He knotted the free end of the extension cord around a chair leg near a wall socket and spent several minutes taping the mousetrap firmly to the chair. Adhesive tape was so damnably adhesive it could take a faint impression of a fingerprint even through the protective cement. He had plenty of time, and he knew how to use it.

After he wired one leg of the extension cord to the trap, arranging it to complete the circuit when triggered, he deformed another coat hanger and taped it, centered vertically, to the inside door knob. He measured a length of cord with great care, tying a loop in its exact center and securing the loop over the mousetrap's trig­ger. Each end of the cord was then loop-knotted to an extremity of the coat hanger. The cord was very slightly slack. He turned the door knob sev­eral times. Either way the knob turned, the lengthened arm of the coat hanger would assure triggering, completed circuit, squib ignition—and a few more gray hairs for the apartment manager.

At last he was ready, going through his prep­arations again, checking every connection. It was rush hour by now on a Friday afternoon, and he would be all the more anonymous. He took up the attaché case, studied the entry rig again, and then plugged the extension cord into the wall. That moment always set him on edge: you never knew.

Then he slid one loop knot loose and opened the door, peering casually into the empty hall before he swiftly secured the loop again and tightened it. He set the lock on the inside, picked up the attaché case, and stepped into the hall, pulling the door closed. He did not test the knob. If the lock was faulty the knob would turn, and if the knob turned much he would get the gray hairs. He strode from the building and down the street to another parking complex where an at­tendant brought all six meters of his dun-brown Pontiac Parisienne, the Canadian version of a Catalina. Moments later he turned north on Route Eleven toward Lake Simcoe, chafing at the need to drive around Lake Huron en route to Winnipeg. But, "To regain the initiative we must ignore the main body of the enemy and concen­trate far off," he quoted silently. El Aurans had known.

He held the big Pontiac at the legal maximum, unmoved by the occasional view of sunset over inlets from Georgian Bay. At Parry Sound he fed seventeen imperial gallons to his brute, nagged himself into checking the equipment in its trunk, and made a toll call to one of his two Toronto numbers. His own voice said, "Mr. Trnka regrets that he is unable to take your call at the moment. At the tone, please leave your name and number.^" The response tape was blank. More important, his communication center was still functioning, which meant that no one had traced him to the apartment. Yet.

He drove nearly to Marathon before he entered a rest stop, evacuated himself, and fluffed out the slender goosedown mummy bag. It was not op­timal, but neither was confrontation in a motel by some red-suited lackey of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He slept.

On Saturday he passed Winnipeg ahead of schedule, crossed Manitoba, stopped well into

Saskatchewan. Hunger, as he knew, kept a healthy animal poised for the hunt—whichever end of the hunt it was on. He nibbled at fruit, then, in the mornings and feasted at the end of each day's travel.

Sunday he was immersed in listening to a mysterious noise in the Parisienne's luxurious vee-eight and nearly failed to hear a news item on the radio. Government sources had disarmed two charges of high explosive hidden in the structure of the Cap Rouge Bridge north of Quebec City. The massive charges would have rendered the bridge useless for weeks. On un­disclosed evidence, both metropolitan police and the RCMP sought one Jean Bonin, known as a violent Quebecois separatist.

He snorted to himself, certain that the evi­dence was as simple as fingerprint impressions in the plastique. Bonin was an excellent pro­vider, but an idiot with explosives. He would wind up in Archambault Penitentiary yet. The Cap Rouge fiasco, at least, explained why Bonin had refused him even a kilo of plastique. And now it belonged to the government! C'est la guerre; another toll call assured him that in To­ronto, Mr. Trnka still regretted .. .

The terrain was a distinct drawback as the Parisienne labored into the Canadian Rockies, its malaise now more pronounced. He skirted Banff, stopped near Lake Louise, and nestled into the mummy bag at midnight. The cold was one thing he had never mastered, and anger at this failure in himself kept him awake too long.

Monday he flogged the car through Kamloops and past Ashcroft, unwilling to admit that the

Parisienne was no vehicle for mountain driving. He found a turnoff with a downhill slope leading to the highway, nearly backing the big machine over a precipice. He was grimy, he was hungry, he was in no mood to appreciate the cataclysmic rush of the Thompson River that boiled southward below him in the moonlight.

He was in the same mood at dawn on Tuesday and feared for long minutes that, even after glid­ing down onto the highway and building up to cruising speed, the Parisienne might not start. It guzzled fuel at an infuriating rate but, once past Chilliwack, he knew he would make it to the ferry south of Vancouver.

Thirty-three hundred kilometers to the east in the offices of Salon du Nord, Pelletier gnawed a cuticle and waited for a call which, he was in­creasingly sure, would not come. If Trnka was buying the remaining microprocessors, he was infernally slow about it. If Trnka was buying time, Pelletier himself was dilatory. He thought about the anonymous cash again. He would wait one more day.

TUESDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER, 1980:

During the long ferry ride across the Strait of Georgia to Sidney on Vancouver Island, the little man poked at the vast pig-iron innards of the Parisienne as long as light permitted. Unknow­ingly he moved two frayed plug leads apart and, at Sidney, was intensely relieved to hear the engine splutter to something like a willingness to move the two thousand-kilo machine. He drove to Victoria, found the upper harbor, and left the car near the small boat flotilla off Wharf Street. It might never start again, but this possi­bility did not disturb him.

Wednesday morning he contacted Bonin's man, Charles Graham, identifying himself as Domingo Baztan. The Basques, too, had a separatist movement and unusual accents.

He stood some distance from the boathouse at first, pleased that the long individual boathouse was in good repair. The man who unlocked the door was a tall windburned specimen dressed in ducking to his shoes. The beret said he was Graham. The accent suggested he was a New Jersey transplant. They met inside the boathouse and traded ritual handclasps, Graham standing so near he seemed to loom.

"Hope you didn't want me to pick up your man today, Baztan," the larger man said. "I've got to put her in tune first." He indicated a powerboat that lurked beyond.

Forgetting himself, 'Baztan' cursed in Arabic. The boat was fifteen meters long, eel-slender, its lines promising great speed and minimal radar echo. Though no sailor he knew instantly that some rational alternative must be found. "It looks very fast," he said.

"Runs like a striped-assed ape," Graham chuckled, motioning `Baztan' alongside the craft. "Twin turbocharged chevy four-fifty-­fours, sixteen hundred shaft horses between 'em. A Cigarette will cross Juan De Fuca Strait in fifteen minutes with weather like this."

"Cigarette?"

"That's what they call this breed. Designed for ocean racing; the only thing that'll catch it is a bullet. They're sots for fuel, though. That's part of the three thousand you're paying."

The little man studied the boat, realizing that it would have to reach one hundred forty kilometers per hour to cross the treacherous ocean strait as Graham boasted. Anyone lying under its hull would be pounded to marmalade at that speed. No, the Cigarette would not do. Well enough for Bonin's uses, perhaps. He cleared his throat, choosing to sound vulnerable." Is it a smooth crossing? The man is very old, very frail."

Graham thought about it. "Maybe I could strap him in foam cushions, when we clear Port Angeles on the way back." He jerked a thumb at the sleek craft. "This thing is the Can-Am car of powerboats, Baztan, at eighty knots she'll rearrange his guts. There's nothing I can do about that," he smiled.

"His heart is very bad," was the response.

"Then he'd need a transplant in ten seconds. Do you care?"

The little man brightened. Graham had given him another idea in his cover story. "After I cross over tonight and bring him to meet you at Port Angeles tomorrow, my responsibility is dis­charged. If he arrives with you here in Victoria, well and good. If he should happen to fall overboard and you arrive back here alone—again, well and good." A brief smile for Graham. "But he is not a fool, and I think he would refuse to accept your trick Cigarette. And then I would not be paid."

"I'm not the dumbest jack-off in the world either. If you can't drive him across the border he must be pretty hot."

A shrug. "What we need is a craft that is docile and looks it."

Graham led him along creaking planks until they stood at the mouth of the boathouse, blink­ing in the strong light. He pointed toward the nearest of the sloops that nodded at moorings. "The Bitch is the only other boat I have, a refitted Islander Thirty-Four. She'll do all of six knots with the big jib, friend; she wouldn't outrun a pissant with waterwings." He eyed the little man with shrewd good humor: "But I won't have to be fast on the south crossing, and maybe not on the return trip. If you really don't care whether the old geezer makes it all the way," he added.

'Baztan's' smile was bland. "I believe the sailboat will do. How long will you need for the crossing?"

"Four hours, maybe five; I have to run close-hauled a lot with the fuckin' winds in the strait. What do you care, so long as I make Port Angeles tomorrow?"

"My client asks such things. When should we rendezvous?"

"High noon, with a brass band?" Graham laughed. "I'll start from here about noon tomorrow. That way we'll have your guy on deck without too much light. I want it dark before I'm back in the strait if I'm gonna, like, dump some ballast."

There was no need to ask about that ballast. The smaller man produced an envelope from his wrinkled but very expensive jacket. Moving back into the shadow he allowed Graham to watch him peel fifteen bills from the stack and tuck them into a pocket. The other fifteen he handed to the Canadian, who counted them without apology. "You will have the rest in Port Angeles."

"Why not right now," asked Graham, stepping closer, and a trifle too quickly.

"Because that is as it must be," he heard, see­ing for the first time how a spring-loaded armpit holster works. The little man's right hand did not actually disappear into the jacket butonly seemed to flicker at its lapel, and then Graham was dividing his time between staring into the barrel of a Llama automatic and into the still darker barrels of the little man's eyes. Given the choice, he found he honestly preferred star­ing at the pistol. The death it suggested would at least be swift and clean. Taking two backward paces, 'Baztan' moved against the boathouse wall. "You will understand if I ask you to precede me."

Graham was still protesting as he stepped through the doorway. "I never meant to spook you, fella," he said, turning to see 'Baztan' who now stood relaxed with empty hands. They were small hands, carefully groomed, and he noticed that they were not shaking as his were. He thrust his hands into his pockets, feeling the money again. He had thought it would be interesting, though no contest, to take the entire three thousand just to see what would happen. Now, stand­ing a head taller than the innocently smiling 'Baztan,' he felt like a tame bullock beside a wolverine. "No hard feelings, Baztan. I should've moved slower." He thrust out his hand, feeling the limp dry fingers in his own. "See you in the States tomorrow about five," he said. "I'll have to go to diesel and switch main­s'ls, so look for a dark red sail on the Bitch." He strolled toward the sloop. The back of his neck itched. He let it itch.

'Baztan' walked back to the business district, choosing a hotel at random. In the telephone booth he extracted the HP from a pocket, punch­ing a simple program into it before dialing his second Toronto number. After a moment he placed the HP to the mouthpiece and punched the Memory Return key. A series of tones came to him faintly. It would be lunchtime in Toronto, he mused; perhaps McEvoy was consuming another sandwich.

Then the relay connection fulfilled its task as he heard McEvoy answer. The filters masked the background which might otherwise suggest a long-distance call. "This is Jan Trnka, Mr. McEvoy," he said. "I seem to have overlooked another detail."

"Anything I can help with?"

"No, regrettably. Business compels me to delay our flight. And yet I need the film. You don't suppose," he began quickly, then laughed. "No, I don't suppose you could fly your aircraft and use a camera simultaneously." He spoke as if asking for some rare feat of valor.

McEvoy could, of course. Changing film might be a chore but he was, after all, his own mechanic. "But jeez, Mr. Tee, how do I know what you want to shoot?"

An excellent reply crossed his mind but was throttled. "As much shoreline as you can on the lake," he said, "a cross-section of everything that is—the word?—photogenic? I myself could do no more. And," he lowered his voice, "I shall be very grateful."

McEvoy squirmed between rocks and hard places. "You think you could pay me the balance before I take off, Mr. Tee? I could drive over and pick it up now."

A pause to simulate weighing the idea. "That may not be necessary, Mr. McEvoy. Where is my suitcase?"

"Stowed in the Seabee."

"Would you mind bringing it to the tele­phone? You can call me here when you have it." He gave a number. What could be more inno­cent? It was obviously a Toronto prefix.

He heard McEvoy hang up, waited seven min­utes, then heard the connection come to life again. "Mr. Tee? Ian McEvoy. I got it here.^" He was puffing from exertion.

"Open it, please, and check the coat pockets. My damnable memory may have done us a favor for once."

There ensued a long pause, then a faint rau­cous chuckle. Clearly, then: "Jesus Christ, man, there's twelve hundred dollars here!"

"Two hundred more than we bargained for. It is yours, Mr. McEvoy, if you will allow me to pick up cartridges of exposed film on Friday. Will you be going today?"

"Don't see how. It'd be dark before I could get over to Lake Chautauqua. Would tomorrow be good enough?"

It was perfect. He let McEvoy twit him about leaving hard cash lying around in unlocked luggage, then mentioned being late for an appoint­ment.

He stepped from the booth, checked the time, and walked to the bus depot where he took his attaché case from a storage locker. He found a restaurant with two entrances, expecting no sur­veillance but taking the usual precautions, and ordered filet of sole. Awaiting his early lunch, he pondered the likelihood that Ian McEvoy was working with Canadian authorities by now. Yet it took time to check the location of a telephone; still more time to secure a large apartment build­ing. It was unlikely that police would cut power to the apartment, or to the telephone. But it was possible.

At the moment when the little man started toward the pay telephone in the restaurant, Pelletier was scanning a collection of photographs maintained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Pelletier drew a blank with the Que­becois, another with known elements of Meyer Cohane's people in the Jewish Defense League. He had basked in virtue when complimented on his ability to remember a telephone number; Pel­letier would have been unwise to admit indis­criminate bugging of a client's calls because police saw such criminal activity as their own particular vice.

RCMP plainclothesmen had already checked on Ian_. McEvoy. He had no previous record and eked out a precarious presence by flying sportsmen into wilderness lakes. To a business-suited gentleman of endless curiosity he said yes, the Seabee was for hire but he was already booked for the following day. Yep, he had plenty of hull storage, even for a moose head. Tomorrow? Oh, just a photorecon job for some movie people. Nope, he would be carrying no passengers.

The RCMP left a staff sergeant in plain clothes with field glasses in an unmarked car, unwilling to confide in McEvoy. Their job might have been simpler had they simply asked him about his client. But McEvoy was under suspicion.

While Pelletier's eyes grew red-rimmed in his search for a make on Mr. Trnka, the little man in Victoria reached his Toronto number. With a casual glance around him, he brought the HP from his pocket, punched an instruction into it, then let his machines confer. A poignant three-second tone from the HP was identified in the sink of the Toronto apartment and its instruction executed. The little man fidgeted for another fifteen seconds before the line went dead. He nodded to himself, replaced the receiver, and ambled back to his table.

In the Toronto apartment, beads of light had grown in the clay pot over the sink as the squibs energized pyrotechnic igniters. The beads began to sink from sight into the silvery mixture before, reluctantly, the thermite caught fire and pros­pered.

Thermite is a simple composition of great util­ity when it becomes necessary to weld, say, the frames of locomotives. Because one of its com­bustion products is pure liquid iron. The other product is aluminum oxide, also common in solid rocket exhaust.

A tiny ravening sun radiated from the top of the clay pot as its temperature rose to approxi­mately twenty-five hundred degrees celsius. Since thermite is hot enough to melt concrete there was a considerable quantity of smoke, which boiled above the starlike glare and crawled across the ceiling.

An observer with protective goggles might have seen the thin trickle of brilliant yellow-white molten iron that began to drip through the hole in the pot. It instantly destroyed the microprocessor, consumed the circuit board, and proceeded to fry the answering device into bubbling junk while smoke thickened in the two-room apartment. Tiny particles of aluminum oxide began to fall as snow on the carpet while the sink enamel pinged and spat under incandescent metal soup. The stream of iron dwindled, slag already congealing as the clay pot disintegrated to add its thermal content to the mass in the sink. The cast-iron sink began to char the wooden counter at its lip, then slowly cooled. At that point, tendrils of smoke found their way through ceiling moldings into the apartment above.

In Victoria, the little man dallied at his lunch, which was evidently filet of shoe sole, but aban­doned it after a few minutes. He walked to his own hotel, tossed a pillow on the floor of his room, and lay with his bare feet touching the locked door. He would need sleep now, to assure alertness that night.

While the sleeper husbanded his strength, an apartment dweller in Toronto arrived to find her smoke alarm whining in panic. Fire marshals traced the problem, took one look through the door they forced in the apartment below, and radioed the Toronto Metropolitan Police. Within an hour they had conferred with the RCMP which, unlike the generally similar Federal Bureau of Investigation to the south, has more sweeping powers in domestic matters.

A thorough description of the apartment's contents reached Ottawa early in the evening, and shortly afterward Ottawa sent five new photographs by wire to Toronto. None of the new pictures were from passports or mug shots; all were of a special category of people whose expertise in communication devices fitted the Toronto pattern. Neither the three men nor the two women were thought to be in Canada—until now. Pelletier took the group of new photofaxes, spread them irritably—and howled with delight.

Pelletier brandished a `known photograph,' distinguished neither by clarity nor recency, and handed it to the RCMP sergeant, who flinched. It was `Trnka,' beyond any shred of doubt. At that moment, there were five men on the case. A few minutes later, after RCMP/Ottawa contacted FBI/Washington, there were over thirty.

The HP tintinnabulated in the sleeper's ear at ten o'clock, Pacific Standard Time. Presently the little man strolled from the hotel to a dust-covered Pontiac off Wharf Street, and then moved on to the Inner Harbour. He watched a tall figure move across the lights from the cabin of an Islander Thirty-Four, continued his walk, and stopped again as the lights went out. He cursed softly, realizing that Graham intended to sleep aboard the damned boat. He found a coffee shop, wasted an hour, then returned to the Pontiac.

He dressed inside the car, beginning with the wetsuit, struggling into the zippered black turtleneck and charcoal denims more by feel than by sight. The deck shoes were new, stiff, and uncomfortable. He stuck the Llama auto­matic into his waistband and locked the car, taking one of his three B-four bags with him from the trunk. He sank the bag in shallows, two moorages from the Islander, and brought the other bags.

The water was cold only on his hands and feet, but he had trouble with the microbubbler in the darkness. Exhalations from SCUBA gear had been a clear signature of manfish since the early Cousteau aqualungs, and a trained ear could identify this signature through a fiberglass hull. The microbubbler changed both pitch and rhythm of exhalations. It was an absolute neces­sity for the job.

He adjusted flotation on a B-four bag, tugged on his flippers, carefully made his way under two hulls by touch and emerged silently at the third hull. A quick surveillance assured him that he had the right boat; then he submerged again in the friendly blackness. His flashlight played across the great weighted keel and, seeing rings set into the keel, he let fate smile for him. It would be necessary to bond only one ring to have a triangulated lashing. The work went quickly. To be on the safe side he emplaced a second ring with the thermoset adhesive. He did not risk testing the rings too much, but lashed the sodden bag in place and took his bearing again before dousing the flashlight. Then he returned for the second bag.

It was two in the morning before he eased aching muscles from layers of cloth and rubber. He wiped the Pontiac's interior with a cloth wherever some stray print might have clung, scrubbed his skin with the blue jacket to warm himself. What had he forgotten? Nothing.

Fool! The HP and the Llama both. The cold had made him stupid. He shoved the pistol into a rubber bag, leaving the zipper open for instant recovery, and set the HP alarm for a three-hour delay.

First light proved the Parisienne abandoned, strewn with expensive clothing and an empty attaché case under a mummy bag. Charles Graham spent most of the morning belowdecks with his spare mains'l, applying spurious United States Registration. He was tempted to abandon this business; it was one thing to snuff someone you actively disliked or who—you suspected—might be setting you up. But it was something else to kill some poor old helpless stranger. It would be a pleasure to put little Baz­tan over the side into Juan De Fuca—but Baztan, he thought, might not be the one who went over. Baztan might also become downright unpleas­ant if Graham did not show up at Port Angeles in the State of Washington. Sighing, Graham scanned the wharf for loiterers while he brewed tea in the galley. He did not think about the Pontiac, or about nearby boathouses.

At half-past eleven Graham cast off, easing the hull back on her inboard diesel. He was too busy to notice the splop and swirl from a neighboring boathouse, and got underway without the sails. He could crowd on plenty of sail once away from the Inner Harbour and into Victoria Harbour proper, but proceeded slowly until he could get some leeway. The diesel made a scant wake, but enough to hide the myriad of tiny bubbles that closed the gap toward his rudder, then disap­peared torpedolike beneath his portside rail as he lounged at the tiller.

The Islander's sleek hull was designed to slip easily through the water and Graham assumed that some vagrant current was responsible for her sluggish performance. He would have reconsidered if he had seen the excrescences that rode her keel. A fathom below her waterline, rock-climber's carabiners snapped into place one by one as the manfish struggled to place himself in such a way that he felt minimal force from the water. He was fairly warm in his wetsuit under cotton clothing, but he had not yet felt the currents of Juan De Fuca, cold and treacherous as a spider's bride.

He felt more vulnerable as the sloop forged ahead. It might have been better to risk a border crossing afoot into Montana or Washington, he thought, but increased border patrols and sens­ing devices had made that chancy, even for Quebecois, who had provoked those precau­tions. He fumbled for a spare tank in the nearest B-four bag, letting the sling straps bite under his shoulders. It might not be such a bad trip, this way—unless his suit heater batteries failed.

The sloop coursed out from the city, under sail now, on a sou'easterly heading. Near the corner of St. Lawrence and Dallas streets a man watched her progress as he spoke into a telephone. "Yes-sir, no mistake, it's Graham's Bitch. Well, that's her name, Inspector, can I help it? Nossir, she could be on a tack toward Port Townsend or just on a pleasure cruise. Right, sir; not very likely for Charles Graham. All right, I have twenty-power glasses; I'll let you know if he heads for Dunge­ness or Port Angeles." He replaced the receiver, took up the glasses again. For an hour he watched the sloop. Then he made another call.

Near Buffalo, New York, a tiny craft plunged upward from the concrete airstrip, its pusher engine shrilling eagerly. Small by normal stan­dards, the single-place Bede Five was also ridiculously fast. Its thin airfoils carried the additional burden of a long-range tank cupped flat against its belly. The Bede arrowed westward over Lake Erie, soon overtaking the ancient Republic Seabee amphibian that galumphed along on VFR at one thousand meters altitude. The Bede's pilot throttled back, lazing several ki­lometers in arrears, radioing his position as he passed the New York State shoreline and Route Ninety. He turned back only after learning that the big float-equipped Cessna from Erie, Penn­sylvania was closing from the West and had the Seabee on radar.

Moments after the Bede had curved away on its homeward leg, the Cessna surged ahead. Its quarry was sinking toward the northern end of Lake Chautauqua, making no effort to pretend otherwise. The Cessna swept over the lake high enough for maneuvering advantage, yet low enough to land quickly. All three men in the Cessna were equipped with chutes and government-issue automatic weapons befitting agents of the FBI. The attaché in Ottawa had forwarded an RCMP sergeant's opinion that only a pilot was aboard the Seabee, but it was a capacious craft and might hide a stowaway for days. The pilot had filed a flight plan but had not contacted Customs. The Cessna hung back, wait­ing for the amphib to flare out for its controlled bellyflop.

And hung back. And hung back. The old Seabee droned down the narrow lake, swooping near the shore at picturesque spots and banking out again from time to time. At the southeast end of the lake, the Seabee began its sluggish return, and eventually passed northward back toward Lake Erie. In the Cessna, the three agents traded shrugs; for all its suspicious behavior, the Seabee had broken no law.

In Juan De Fuca Strait, Charles Graham waited until he was fifteen kilometers from the Cana­dian shore, then started the diesel again and changed mains'ls. Directly below, the manfish fought to free a spare tank from its lashings. Switching tanks under such conditions was a peril he had not fully appreciated and, his hands numb even with the heating elements, he was clumsy. The empty tank, moved by vagaries of the current, bumped hard against the keel and was gone, bobbing in the wake of the Bitch, a perfectly obvious sign to anyone who saw it. Graham was grunting over his halyards and saw nothing else; the huge dacron sail lay flaccid along the mains'l boom and required all his con­centration. The manfish nearly lost his fresh tank as well but finally lashed it to his chest and hung in his straps, hands tucked under his armpits for warmth.

The crossing took nearly five hours. At one point the manfish saw, with a terror he denied, a great gray mass that levitated toward him from below. He fingered the Sharkill. No fish, he hoped, could possibly be so vast—and then he saw that it was a sandbar, the Bitch gliding so near it she could have run aground. He debated cutting loose to swim for shore which, he felt, must be very near. He waited for surer signs; a wise decision. He was two kilometers from land.

Port Angeles, huddled in the protecting arm of Angeles Point, sprawls along the Washington State side of Juan De Fuca Strait with its back to the rain-sodden Olympic Mountains. Charles Graham rounded the point in a subtle riptide to see the town, coming about expertly despite the odd sluggishness of the Bitch. He scanned the wharves for `Baztan,' who was much nearer than he knew, and offered a line to a friendly idler who caught it and made it fast. When he had secured the Bitch fore and aft, Graham stepped up to resecure the idler's clumsy work, then strolled away alert for a frail old man with a tough little man.

The friendly idler waited for a few moments, then shifted the toothpick in his mouth and dallied behind Graham. The FBI was better at tails than at knot-tying.

Fifty meters from the Bitch, a burly man under a long-billed cap nodded to another man, who adjusted his face plate, clamped his mouthpiece, and slid from his boat into the water. Once they bonded their transmitter just under the water-line near the stern of the Bitch, they could fix her location whenever they liked for as long as the battery lasted. The transmitter was disguised as marine growth. If Graham noticed it he would, at worst, only remove it. Customs and Immigration fretted about Graham on both sides of the border. The burgundy mains'l had almost fooled the watchers in Port Angeles but hull lettering and Graham's features had not changed. His mains'l could be explained as borrowed; a minor viola­tion. Better to give him a long leash and, while they were at it, to check his hull. It would not be the first time a man had run contraband in his keel.

The manfish had lashed one of the B-four bags to a distant piling and was wrestling with the second bag when he saw, impending above him in the sunlit murk, the second manfish. He quickly released the bag which tumbled slowly out of sight below, fumbled for carabiners on the third bag, saw that he would be too late. He unzipped the third bag, heedless of the masses that cascaded lazily downward, and armed the Sharkill.

The stubby Sharkill, no larger than a baseball bat with handles, had been an afterthought purchased chiefly for study. It was also said to be effective on even the largest carcharadon, firing a single salvo of small concussion warheads rocket-propelled in a conic pattern. It was a di­rectional pattern, designed to implode flesh, a great hammerwave of water to surround and pulverize a shark's gristle without releasing blood in the water. The Sharkill was an almost-perfect weapon, but its warheads were stupid: they had to be set for the quarry's distance or they would streak away, quicker than bar­racudas, to explode at maximum range. For once, the little man had skipped a detail.

He kicked backward, shielded by the keel, and aimed the weapon as the new arrival spotted him. It did not matter who the intruder was; better a mysterious underwater explosion now, than an excited SCUBA enthusiast on the wharf in moments. If all but known friends are enemies, then all strangers are enemies. He triggered the Sharkill.

The young agent saw a silver-gray gleam in the other swimmer's hands. It did not look like a weapon until it fired. Six petals unfurled into streamers that sizzled past him, one passing be­tween his knees, but before he could wheel to escape he felt the distant shocks.

The warheads continued for thirty meters in the water, two exploding far below, the others slanting outward. Two more broke the surface and, unencumbered by water, detonated in air bursts well beyond the boat that contained the agent in the baseball cap. The last two warheads flanked the FBI boat before triphammering its shallow-draft hull.

The fleeing FBI agent in SCUBA gear found his own boat settling as he boarded it, nearby tourists too stunned by the air bursts to find his predicament funny. The burly agent in the cap, clambering to the wharf, shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears. In moments he realized the situation, and the wetsuited agent found canisters in his boat before it was completely awash. He tossed the canisters to the wharf. The third agent raced to the Bitch and, arming the canisters, hurled them into the water on both sides of the sloop.

The manfish saw the canisters fall, saw silent puffs as each discharged several liters of chemi­cal. He knew the chemical was intended for him and did not wait to discover its function. As the material spread, it thickened into a colloidal gel that turned many cubic meters of sea water into salt treacle. It would have immobilized him had he not fled. He swam to the pilings, found his one secured bag, and used churning flipper-strokes to put him as far down the wharf as possible before he turned to proceed along the shoreline a few meters below the surface.

He continued until his breathing supply was exhausted, the light beginning to fail as shallows forced him near the surface. He lay still then, the bag his anchor in the shallows, gasping the salt air and awaiting his ally, darkness.

Charles Graham went through predictable stages for the federal agents: anger, innocence, astonishment. He did not believe he had car­ried a human parasite across Juan De Fuca ("He'd freeze his balls off!") until a wetsuited agent recovered damning evidence from below the Bitch.

They let him reconsider his innocence overnight and began afresh the next morning with a rough-smooth treatment. Chilton, the husky agent, was rough. Polsky, the tier of inferior knots, was smooth. In the cell with Graham, Polsky leaned against the wall. Chilton stood with one foot on Graham's bunk, furry forearms crossed over his knee. "The very least that's going to happen is impoundment of your boat," Chilton finally said with poisonous relish.

Polsky withdrew the toothpick from his mouth. "Unless you can show good faith," he murmured.

"At worst," Chilton continued, "you'll end up playing rock hockey with a sixteen-pound hammer in British Columbia Penitentiary.^"

Graham looked from one to the other. "I'm clean! Take the Bitch apart, you won't find a thing." He glared at Chilton. "I think it's a frame; you bunch of pussies planned this whole thing!"

"Somebody sure did," Polsky agreed. He let Graham chew on that for a moment while he chewed the wooden splinter. "It wasn't us, Graham. Chilton thinks it was you." He seemed about to go on, then gave a quick headshake. "Doesn't matter what I think."

Suddenly it mattered very much to Graham. "What, what? Your guess is as good as mine..."

"My guess? Somebody knew you were com­ing. Somebody used you. Somebody wanted to make you look like an asshole."

Graham was silent long enough to fumigate a few details for inspection. The deal with Baztan was dead, now. The Basque could have set him up for somebody, all right. Not Baztan himself, he was already in Port Angeles. Or was he? A glaze washed over Graham's face. "There was one guy I mentioned it to," he hazarded, and soon found himself checking photographs in a room without bars. Graham had met a few men whose photographs graced the stack, but nobody looked like his client.

With Graham's help, the agents forwarded a report that included 'Baztan's' habits of packing heat and heavy cash. Graham was released with orders to drop in for a chat with the RCMP in Victoria. As Graham was casting off, young Polsky sprinted down the wharf with a sheaf of fresh photographs from Washington. The wirephotos covered a cross-category of diminu­tive men who had used Basque cover, met the other criteria, and were hoped to be almost anywhere but in the United States. Graham iden­tified the same man Pelletier had, instantly, without doubt. It was an eight-year-old alien registry photo.

"Arif?" Graham studied the data with the photo. "Who's Hakim Arif?"

Polsky sat down heavily on the Bitch's transom. After a moment he looked up. "Well, there was Abd-El Kadr; his boys used to stuff testicles into empty eye-sockets after a raid," said Polsky, very matter-of-fact. "Then there was General Qassem, who liked to have his enemies tossed to his troops a piece at a time. All's fair in a jehad—holy war.

"Dr. George Habash was a pediatrician who bazookaed a schoolbus," he continued, staring evenly at Graham, "all in the name of freedom and equality, naturally. And Carlos Ilich Ramirez-Sanchez. Carlos is your up-to-date ter­rorist, Graham; he can work with electronics or old gelignite, and he can make the explosive himself if he has to. Carlos planned the Entebbe hijacking back in seventy-six, but he's not above tossing antipersonnel hand-grenades into a crowded movie theatre. They say he's dickering with the Libyans for plutonium now. Or his heirs are."

Graham watched gooseflesh crawl on his arms. "Sanchez I heard about. On TV, I guess."

"No doubt. And every time he gets TV coverage, some sheikh sends him a care package to pay for another spectacular."

"Arif's one of that bunch?"

Polsky stood up, straightened the photo-graphs in a neat stack and stepped to the wharf. "From it. Not of it. Hakim Arif is a fanatic Carlos expelled from his group because he was out of control," he said softly. "He likes a free press because it publicizes his atrocities. He only re­cruits fanatics. You want a summary, Graham? He is a one-man jehad. He is also the guy you were going to meet right here," he said, pointing toward his feet.

"And you think he was in the wetsuit?"

"I hope not. He'd feed on our media like botulism on tuna salad. You'd better hope he was, because now maybe he won't be looking for you again."

"Who's he looking for now?"

The agent sighed, snapped the photographs against his thigh. "Soft targets," he said.

"You mean he's not particular."

"Oh, yes. Yes, he's very particular, Graham. Sleep well," Polsky said, and hurried away.

FRIDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER, 1980:

The identification of Hakim Arif came twelve hours too late for Mary Kellam, who had given a lift on Thursday night to the damp little fellow with the canvas bag so she would not have to fight sleep while driving to Bremerton. The sleep that overtook her was endless. Hakim mutilated the pathetic old corpse before dump­ing it because the knife lent authenticity to the appearance of a bizarre sex crime.

By dawn he had abandoned the Kellam car. While awaiting a connection at the Tacoma bus terminal, he idly watched television. He consid­ered calling Talith, but chose to wait until he was better equipped. He must not erode his lead­ership of Fat'ah with signs of vulnerability.

The hour was equally early in Anaheim, fif­teen hundred kilometers to the south, where television's regulators, the Federal Communica­tions Commission, had convened—fittingly, one newspaper quipped, adjoining Disneyland. Maurice Everett stared out his window in the hotel to the small bogus Matterhorn that stood several hundred meters from his suite in the Marine Tower. If he squinted enough he could almost imagine it was a massif in the Rockies. Born a hundred and fifty years too late to be a mountain man, Maury Everett had moved from Iowa to Colorado as soon as he had a choice of terrain. His executive career with Oracle Mi­croelectronics in Colorado Springs was all but inevitable, once his college and military re­quirements were behind him. The endless com­pacting of communication devices made it clear that Oracle would either get into television or make way for some company that could. By 1980, Everett had years of liaison with ENG newsmen who used Oracle's Electronic News Gathering equipment, and good connections with conservative democrats. How this qualified him to be appointed a Commissioner, one of the FCC's famed seven dwarfs, was a mystery solved only in Washington. But mavericks had settled the west, and someone evidently felt that they might settle the electromagnetic spectrum. Maury Everett was not disposed to argue. At the moment, he was strongly disposed to chuck the damned agenda in favor of Frontierland. He squashed his whimsy with a faint sigh, shrugged the big sloping shoulders, and ordered enough breakfast for two smaller men.

Everett noted that the recent appointees tended to arrive promptly; the older hands took their time. He filled the conference room doorway punctually at nine to find Barbara Costigan hiding her plain features under counterculture beads and poncho, sharing coffee with Dave Engels. Everett slid into a seat across from Engels, nodded into the merry hyperthyroid eyes of the `retired' FBI man. Engels was a terror on the handball court but that nervous energy did not meld easily with sedentary work. At the mo­ment, he was swirling his coffee to see how close he could come to spilling it.

Costigan tore her eyes from the Engels coffee and smiled her relief at Everett. "We were won­dering where everybody's going to stand on the religious broadcast thing," she said.

"I thought it was pretty clear yesterday," Everett rumbled softly, tugging at his tie. He frowned at the ceiling, trying to recall the quote: "Stance of neutrality, acting neither to promote nor inhibit—same old wording, Barb. I think it'll carry."

Engels's head jerked up to glance beyond Everett. The new arrival was John Rooker; tiny, bald, tweedy, the professor of political philos­ophy. Rooker sat down with Leon Cole, a snappy dresser who understood political cam­paigns better than any other member because he had managed so many, so well.

Last to arrive was the attorney and Chairman, Thomas Wills. Powell, they all knew, would not be coming. Thick and slow moving, Wills eased down into his seat and bestowed a Santa Claus smile at the assembly. "With apologies for the time," said the reedy old voice, "I can tell you we have those videotapes now."

Everett cursed to himself. Most videotapes at these conferences were dull affairs. The religi­ous broadcast controversy went as Everett had guessed, and more quickly than usual.

Moving to the next items, Wills studied his notes. "We have tapes of the Texas courtroom ENG problem, the Conklin kidnapping in Phoenix, and that outrageous thing in Buffalo. Do I hear a motion?"

"I move we see the last one," said David En-gels quickly. "For one thing, I've always won­dered what this guy Arif looks like in person."

A faint smile from Wills. "I take it you've dealt with him professionally, Mr. Engels. Well, he's managed to disappoint you again. He wore a hood, you know."

"But it's a landmark in political campaign stupidity," said Cole. "I second David's motion."

The videotape rolled, the bay-window-sized screen lit in full color. The Federal Communica­tions Commission stored a bushel of mail from the event they watched now, a five-minute polit­ical broadcast aired the previous week over an NBN affiliate in Buffalo, New York. Cromwell Cawthorn was a local candidate of the anti-Semite Purification Party, which had somehow gained a toehold in Buffalo. Cawthorn de­manded and got air time from a reluctant WGRT-TV, citing the FCC's Section 315, paying the regular fee for his right. The tape began with a closeup of Cawthorn, well-fed and unctuous in his male Anglo-Saxon Protestant self-assurance. He was an abominable speaker.

"Some of my friends and neighbors," Cawthorn brayed, "say the Purification Party is not forward-seeking. I tell you, the Purification Party is the wave of the future. It has friends beyond the borders of our fair country, and today I want to prove it."

The camera pulled back to show that Caw-thorn was not alone. A small figure sat near Cawthorn, one leg crossed over the other in casual elegance, a black hood completely hiding his head in contrast with the dazzling white double-breasted suit. "Folks, I want you to meet my friend and fellow freedom fighter, Hakim Arif." Twenty-two seconds of air time had elapsed.

In the tower in Anaheim, chuckles met Cawthorn's inept performance and Leon Cole vented a low whistle, perhaps envious of the clothing worn by Hakim Arif. But there was nothing risible in the hooded man's voice. They fell silent at its soft sibilance, the gently rolled r, the cautious effort to correctly render the th.

"Greetings from Fat'ah," the hood nodded slightly, "to all of the victims of Jewish oppression wherever they may be." Everett, glaring at the screen, found himself clenching and spread­ing his big hands, surprised at his own first reac­tion. It was the same cold sick breathlessness he felt whenever he saw a small animal beneath the wheels of a truck. Then the blood began to sing in Everett's veins as Hakim Arif, gesturing with languid ease, proceeded to promise aid to the foes of the Israeli conspiracy. "All over the world, victims of Zionism are rising to dem­onstrate a single will. The will to live in a free Quebec, a free South Molucca, a free Ireland," he paused expertly, then lowered his chin and voice, "—a free Palestine." The hood jerked up. "The Jew is the very symbol of oppression. He wants only his own land—and all of the land adjoining it. Ah, and the Coming of his Messiah, always the Coming."

Arif's was an astonishing presence that sur­vived faulty reasoning and transition through videotape. It invested the conference room with the ambience of a cobra pit. The calm precise voice spat and crooned, stroked, stung, the slen­der hands moving in concert. To a few lunatics the message would be gospel swathed in flame. To most viewers in Buffalo, it had been icy hor­ror.

"To those who ask whether the military opera­tions of Fat'ah are truly necessary, Fat'ah replies: they are precisely that. To those who have known some Jew who showed a spark of human decency, Fat'ah reminds you that in war, there is nothing personal. Each operation is a military operation, and must be supported by those who love freedom.

"The friends of world Jewry are the enemies of peace and freedom. The friends of Fat'ah—like Mr. Cawthorn—are the friends of final peace. The Jew wants the Coming of his Messiah?" A two-beat pause before, "Fat'ah will see that he goes to meet it."

Everett did not remember the fatuous mouth­ings Cawthorn had made afterward. Cawthorn did not matter: he was only the envelope in which this reeking turd had been handed to the voters of Buffalo, and in their own homes.

As the lights brightened in the conference room, Everett met the stunned gaze of Barb Cos­tigan. She had been an investigative reporter herself and could usually be expected to stand fast against government interference with a free press, but: "Utterly unconscionable," she said into the silence.

Professor Rooker nodded gravely. "Of course, Ms. Costigan. But it is different from a few other incidents only in its degree."

"Not true," Leon Cole said. "For one thing, it wasn't even to the point of Cawthorn's candi­dacy. It was a global message, a—a hymn to hatred," he finished, hoping he had found a use­ful phrase.

"Why the hell did Cawthorn do it," asked Engels. "It must've queered his chances at the polls."

"Cawthorn never had a chance anyway," said Cole, cynical with his campaign experience. "I suspect Cawthorn did it for more money than the cost of his entire campaign. He made a profit on the Purification Party; it's that simple. What I'd like to know is, where that interview was done."

"I can tell you that much," David Engels said, stretching his long legs restively. "Consider it restricted data. The tape was made in Quebec two weeks ago with private equipment and a CBC man, moonlighting the job. The Mounties just pieced that together in the past couple of days. They had assumed Arif was already in the States when that videotape was shown on a Buf­falo station. Arif made a smart move choosing Buffalo. He got coverage in Toronto, too, with the new cable channels."

"They must be turning the whole province upside down for him," Everett said.

"They would've, but they got a strong fresh lead in Toronto yesterday," Engels grimaced. "Turned out to be a very cute diversion, appar­ently a solo effort using telephone links, a blind lead with a rented aircraft, and so help me God, a thermite bomb to delay tracing him."

"So he's in Toronto?" Rooker^'s face was hope­ful.

"No such luck. Hakim Arif got clear across to Victoria, while the RCMP had its thumb in its ass, pardon me Barb."

"Either he's several people," Everett mused, "or he's mighty spry."

"Spry enough," from Engels. "He made it into Washington State under a little sloop, we think, and the Canadians are damned glad he isn't loose up there anymore. I leave it to your imagi­nation how the Bureau feels. They almost stum­bled over him. Well—they'll nail him." Engels's tone suggested an inaudible, maybe.

Thomas Wills coughed politely for attention. "If we can return to the present," he said drily, "I suggest we separately consider drafting state­ments at your earliest conveniences, to further elaborate existing policy on political messages."

The members scribbled notes, Costigan doo­dled nervously with her pen. "Could you help with a legal opinion, Mr. Wills?"

The gray brows elevated into a vee in the stolid face. "Not really; it isn't an attorney's problem at this stage. A philosopher's, perhaps. Dr. Rooker?"

A courtly smile from the educator. "You do me honor, Mr. Wills. I think the problem resolves itself, if Mr. Cawthorn fails to achieve public office and uses his terrorist money to buy something besides bullets."

Engels: "But it's inflammatory material! This little Arab isn't just threatening violence, he's promising."

"Just as the Jewish Defense League does, whenever the American Nazi Party schedules a parade. Our system is designed to withstand ex­tremism of many stripes, Mr. Engels,^" said Rooker, with patient scholastic phrasing.

"Are you forgetting that we are part of that system? If we do nothing, are we delinquent?"

"Over-response is repression, Mr. Engels. Sometimes the best thing to do is—nothing. I think our system can absorb extremist rhetoric."

"So long as it stays purely rhetorical," Everett growled, louder than he intended. He flushed uneasily.

David Engels, the only other member who knew Everett well, snapped his fingers. Costigan jumped. "That's right, you're Jewish, Maury. I'd forgotten."

Everett ran a hand through his bush of graying brown hair. "So do I generally," he said. "It's my mother who's really Jewish, my dad was a goy; she claims I am too." He grinned suddenly, a boyish cast on the ruddy fortyish features: "But don't you say it to her."

"Drown me in chicken soup, most likely," Engels muttered, getting his small laugh.

"It'd put you out of your misery," Everett snarled good-naturedly; "you're already dying in Charlie's old jokes." The riposte was not quite fair: NBN's star comedian, Charlie George, had used the idea in a TV sketch only days before. Charlie was a favorite among the Commission­ers, most of whom had met him at some media fete. Carefully awkward in his slapstick, but with overtones of Sahi and Cavett, Charlie George brought to television a sense of the ab­surd that was layered like veal parmesan, with peppercorns of logic and political truths to sting the unwary palate. Engels was not the first gov­ernment figure to steal Charlie's material.

Wills coughed again. "The agenda, gentlemen? The other videotapes may constitute new business."

"I'd like to view the Phoenix kidnapping," Barb Costigan said. "I know some of the people involved, and that injunction was granted on what seems like awfully shaky grounds. But again, isn^'t that a legal matter?"

Wills leaned back, nodding, patting his paunch reflectively. He took his good time with an answer. The Commission had already taken complaints from all three of Phoenix's major network stations on an injunction which, within hours of a banner news event, had prevented television newsmen from using parts of their on-the-spot ENG coverage. The event was unprecedented in media terms, and in a highly public place. Yet the kidnapping of CBS correspondent Wally Conklin had begun in a room of the Phoenix Convention Center, and that room had been rented for a private gathering of news­papermen. The private element was at issue: was it reasonable to prohibit results of electronic news gathering after ENG equipment had been allowed in the room?

"The ENG reporters claimed implied consent," Wills said slowly, "when they carried their ENG equipment in. But not one of them bothered to ask for a release beforehand. They were newsmen covering an event of other newsmen—a family affair, as it were. But the family doesn't always pull together. I tend to stand with the private group—really only one member of it, and a member from another medium, at that. It gets a little complex," he admitted. "Hadn't we better show the tape and then discuss it?"

No one disagreed, partly due to curiosity over footage that had been forbidden to the public.

The videotape began as ranking members of the Investigative Reporters and Editors sat with Wally Conklin, the famed CBS anchorman, in a half-acre room of the Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. The correspondent had been perspiring in the August heat despite air condi­tioning, and minced no words in his assess­ments. "Frankly, some network people are afraid to use your findings," he was saying to the IRE members, "because they feel your work has too much emotional carryover from the Don Bolles bombing. We realize it was the Bolles incident that caused the IRE to be formed—but perhaps with too much zeal in your efforts to do what is really police work."

"You just don't put out hard contracts on reporters, Mr. Conklin," one newsman rapped out. "Every thug in the world knows that."

"They forgot it with Bolles," Conklin replied, as two young men shoved in front of the cameras. One was dark and bearded, the other clean-shaven.

The men marched quickly toward Conklin. A seated reporter, reacting more quickly than the rest, stood to face them, only to back away as he saw what the cameras did not reveal at first: a heavy .45 automatic leveled at Conklin. The bearded intruder produced a museum piece, a long-barrelled naval Luger with a small drum clip. Over angry shouts could be heard the man with the Colt automatic: "They did not forget, you reactionary scum! Nor did they forget in Turin when La Stampa's editor was executed." The accent was German, the features fiercely handsome above a strongly built frame. The camera zoomed in for an extreme closeup, the ENG man holding his camera steady despite frantic efforts by the assembled men to flee. The German turned a wolfish smile on Conklin who was slowly rising, face leaden with apprehen­sion. "And we have not forgotten this man's ef­forts to seduce Egyptians into a fool's paradise with the dammt Israelis," the German contin­ued, obviously intending to be heard by microphones over the turmoil. He wrenched Conklin's collar, twisted hard. The correspondent's mouth trembled but he did not respond. There was no point in crying, `why me'; a media man who dabbled in Middle-East diplomacy assumed new risks. Conklin knew why him.

"This man must be re-educated," cried the bearded man, waving the Luger to clear a path through the ranks of journalists. Some IRE mem­bers were shouting, some lying prone, one actu­ally taking notes as he stared at the unfolding drama. A lithe young woman with long honey-red hair, her ENG equipment shoulder bag emblazoned with the letters of an independent station, backed away, stumbling toward the door at the rear of the room. Her face registered terror.

A second camera angle showed why the room had not emptied quickly: a dozen reporters faced a swarthy young man who guarded the doorway. He held a Schmeisser machine pistol, his lips stretched away from bad teeth in a rictus that could be pleasure or wild hatred.

"Weitergehn, Chaim," the German barked, and the youth at the door whirled, moving into the rotunda beyond the room. A man across the rotunda glanced around, saw the Schmeisser and screamed like a woman. He ran for the glass doors toward the outside. He never made it, as a burst of gunfire from the Schmeisser cut his legs almost in two. At this point the camera angle plummeted; the cameraman had dived for cover.

Another ENG man was of sterner stuff, record­ing the scene as he followed the two men who herded Conklin. They hustled the correspon­dent toward exit doors, the German pressing his Colt against Conklin. The honey blonde stum­bled again, fell to her knees near the youth withthe Schmeisser as his companions urged Con­klin through the exit and into bright sunlight. There the cameraman had stopped, his view momentarily obscured by others.

The blonde woman seemed dazed, reeling up without her equipment bag as the youth waved his gun barrel in obvious warning against any newsman foolish enough to try following the German outside.

Then the woman pivoted, her right elbow ramming deep into the youth's midriff as she forced the weapon muzzle down with her left hand. The Schmeisser loosed a brief hail of slugs, some smashing into a meter-thick bronze cuboid sculpture nearby. The blonde continued her move, the youth holding onto his weapon, providing her with a lever as she spun him crashing against the metal cube. Her own mass added to the impact as the youth faltered face-forward into sharp-edged bronze.

The woman was a flailing, snarling puma, clutching the Schmeisser as she kicked the youth repeatedly in the groin, her free hand a hatchet against his face and neck. She hammered him until he slumped, leaving a sticky splotch crimson against the golden sheen of bronze.

She leaped away with the weapon, kicked her shoes off, fumbled with her prize before scudding it across the floor. "Take him," she cried, snatched up her bag, and sprinted down the rotunda away from the exit.

The screen went blank in the FCC chamber. Wills cut through the excited murmur of his colleagues with, "Those were the segments pro­hibited by the injunction."

"Je-zus, who's the Amazon," breathed David Engels. "I know some people who could use her."

"So does she, Mr. Engels," was Wills's amused reply.

Then Engels fingers popped again, and this time everyone jumped. "Vercours? That was Vercours?" He was grinning incredulously at the chairman.

A single stately nod.

"Now that Mr. Engels has identified our mys­tery challenger," said John Rooker with malici­ous humor, "perhaps he can inform the audi­ence."

"The tapes that were made public are on this reel, if I may go on," Wills put in.

Engels nodded to Rooker. "Then you'll see." "Roll the tape, roll the tape," Everett demanded, irked.

Wills complied. The new scene was from near ground level, just outside the rotunda in the open air. A half-dozen men had taken up posi­tions behind outcroppings of the adobe brown walls of the Convention Center. All were peering down the broad walk. Fifty meters away a uni­formed policeman sprawled unmoving, his serv­ice revolver glinting just beyond him. The bearded man writhed some distance further, his Luger forgotten. He knelt on the paving, tearing at his belly, then rolled onto his back and tried to stand erect again. The policeman's fragmenting Glaser slug had gut-shot the man. Effectively, he was dead when the slug burst in his peritoneum; but this death was merciless. "Fri-i-itz," the man screamed, thrusting bloody hands aloft.

A second policeman risked a shot: dust spanged from the concrete lip of a shallow pool beyond the dying man. The German, protected by his hostage, reached the pool and tumbled with Conklin into the water. Even at maximum zoom the details were fuzzy, but it seemed that the German hoped for protection in the pool. The water was too near the lip, but slowly whirring near one end of the pool were elements of a monumental sculpture in steel and aluminum.

Jerome Kirk's "Tiered Orbits" was already a noted piece of mobile sculpture, its concentric metal circles glittering red on stainless steel axes as they turned. The piece would have fresh celebrity now. The German wrestled his hostage to the two-story mobile, seemed to be arguing. A faint, "Schnell! Schnell!" sounded among the shouts that punctuated the scene.

The Colt now in his stomach, Wallace Conklin reached up to grasp the outermost of the great metal circles. The German, head twisting furi­ously around to check the terrain, followed. At the edge of the screen, then, a honey-gold flash heralded the young woman from the rotunda, who had doubled back through the building in a flanking maneuver.

She dived crabwise and rolled twice, cradling her shoulder bag, coming to rest behind a con­crete tube that surrounded a small tree near the pool. The earth-filled concrete tube was easily a meter high and two broad; the woman, evidently shaken from impact against the concrete, lay for a moment on her back. Then she pulled the bag onto her abdomen and peered inside it.

The policeman began to curse the crazy reporter, waving helplessly until he saw the German aim in his direction. The .45 is not one of your quicker slugs, but it hits like Reggie Jackson. The cop sought cover.

The bearded man lay flopping and twitching, a fleshy sackful of aimless synapses. Conklin, at gestured orders from the German, managed to climb astride the great metal arc, then hugged it and lay horizontal. The German, too, straddled the metal, the Colt again only centimeters from Conklin's expensive head. For moments the scene appeared frozen, the kidnapper vulnera­ble to a sniper yet with a peculiar advantage: the slowly rotating sculpture constantly changed his position and his cover while he scanned the area, working out some new strategy. He seemed intent on the busy street beyond.

The blonde kept down, rummaging in her equipment. A pocket mirror gleamed in the sun before she slid it upward, a makeshift periscope trained on tiered orbits. The German shouted threats, intent on the men who had taken cover in his wake. At that instant the mobile began to shift, its metal circles now moving at varying speeds in accord with some preprogrammed sequence. Very soon, now, it would scissor its occupants in a blind embrace.

The blonde began to search her equipment bag, working quickly as she lay on her side. Presently she slid the bag out to provide a rest for the mirror, then eased up into a squat, her feet a full unladylike pace apart. She held several loops of power cord in her left hand, and some-thing that bulked larger than a microphone in her right. The German craned his neck to study the street again, and apparently caught sight of the woman. But as he swung the .45 to this new menace, he could not see that his perch was closing the gap on the next concentric circle.

The metal scissors closed inexorably, nudging nearer, pressing the German's shoulder so that his shot went wide. Conklin, his hair in the Ger­man's grip, slid lower as he saw the scissors closing. Then the thick metal circles swung into the same ecliptic. The German, his thigh pinioned, screamed and swept his gun arm back toward Conklin who stared helplessly upward.

The blonde was five meters from the pool, ten from the German, and one second from an assas­sination.

She spurted up from her cover, vaulted to the pool lip, and sprang toward the German, hurling the battery pack she had tied to the power cord. The heavy battery pack sailed overhead but she passed beneath to splash barefooted into the pool, yanking the cord like a lariat. The cord passed across the German's extended arm, taut from the battery pack's mass, snapping the arm hard enough to wrest the heavy automatic from any normal man.

The German was not a normal man. Fighting free of the cord, he swung the Colt again toward Conklin, now single-minded on killing. The blonde shouted and flung the cord at his face, so that the German missed Conklin's head at one-meter range.

A heavy Conklin fist swung upward then in a roundhouse right to match any monument. The German's head flicked up and back, rebounding from the metal sculpture. His arms went limp, Conklin tumbling into the knee-deep water as the German slumped half conscious. Now both Conklin and the blonde were beyond arm's reach. A fusillade from the building wrenched and shook the German's torso, and a ragged cheer spread across the plaza.

Faintly, above the cheering, there came a shriek of tires on pavement from somewhere beyond the camera's view. Wally Conklin was not cheering. He was embracing the blonde.

The screen went blank in Anaheim. "Now," David Engels breathed in awe, "you^'ve met Gina Vercours."

It took the Commission a few moments to recover from the videotape; a thousand Hollywood scenarios and ten thousand stage killings were poor preparation for the shuddering, flopping reality of violent death.

Everett saw that John Rooker cradled his face behind hands that shook. Costigan was pale, rubbing her arms to banish gooseflesh. "Pretty strong stuff, Thomas," Everett said to Wills. "You might have warned us."

"My apologies. The Phoenix stations, I'm told, showed only brief clips. For obvious reasons."

Leon Cole waved his hands, mystified. "But why no injunction on this? The footage outside in the plaza was much more horrifying. Why prohibit only the inside footage?"

Wills let one eyebrow rise. "Because, Mr. Cole, the inside footage included closeups."

Everett: "But that wasn't the stated reason."

Wills: "No. But it was Ms. Vercours's real reason. I have this orally from Conklin."

"Ah; so the Vercours woman got the injunc­tion," Cole said. "But that doesn't make sense. I'd think that, as an ENG reporter herself, she'd enjoy all that coverage. It could have made her reputation overnight—and she's, um, a strik­ingly handsome lady."

"Her status changed appreciably between her sack lunch that day, and her dinner in the Hyatt House with Wally Conklin," said Thomas Wills. "Conklin had her on a retainer within ten min­utes. The next time you see Wally in a place where it's tough to maintain tight security, take a close look around. You'll probably find Vercours among the ENG people roaming around him."

"She was my tennis instructor, you know," Costigan chirped.

"In Chicago?"

"No, a vacation in Phoenix. Gina had ideas of making it on the Phoenix Racquets, but she wasn't quite that good. I got her interested in ENG. God, I'm glad I did."

"We're moving off the point, I'm afraid," Wills murmured.

"I see the woman's angle," said David Engels. "Vercours realized she'd be compromised if everybody in the country saw her in closeups. With a new job as bodyguard, she wouldn't want those tapes aired. But how'd the little indepen­dent station that hired her get so much clout with a judge, so fast?"

"It didn't, Mr. Engels. Wally Conklin did."

Everett laughed, "Wheels within wheels. Conklin asked for the injunction on her behalf then? Conklin is CBS, but Ms. Vercours is strictly a private individual."

"You can say that again," Barb Costigan gig­gled.

Rooker, more composed now, put in: "I take it that CBS knows of Wallace Conklin's part in this."

"To be sure," Wills replied, "but they felt it politic to make their protest along with NBN and ABC. What if the Vercours injunction becomes a common ploy by many people who find themselves in the news in some quasi-private capac­ity?"

The Commission took up this sobering thought, wrangling through a coffee break toward a solution; perhaps a test case. As always, such gritty questions would take time to resolve and as always, media men would tiptoe over rotten eggs until the FCC, in good time, set out fresh guidelines. The meeting broke up in time for Everett to grab a quick lunch with David Engels before taking the copter shuttle to catch his Denver flight.

Engels studied his colleague as their order arrived. "Why so subdued, Maury? Still thinking about Phoenix?"

A brief nod. "Not just the violence, Dave. I saw worse in 'Nam." He paused as Engels forked a bite of his entree, then continued slowly. "Do you realize we've spent the better part of the morning, and much of the conference, grappling with a wave of problems brought on by a bunch of shit-gargling terrorists?"

Engels stopped chewing, met Everett's glance. He tried twice before he could swallow. "Did you have to say that while I have a mouthful of chicken a la king?"

"Mea maxima culpa," Everett said in mock contrition.

"Your mother'll love hearing you've turned Catholic."

"What I've turned is chicken. This link be­tween terrorism and the media, especially TV, has me worried, Dave." Everett gestured with his spoon, searching for a simile. "It's like—not a link at all. More like an intertwining," he mut­tered.

Engels tore into a buttered roll. "Emigrate to China," he cracked. "Either China. They don't fuck around with terrorists in police states, of buddy."

"I hear you," said Everett, picking through his Crab Louis. "A free press means freedom to sell time to some murderous little nit with his head in a sack. At least we bagged that bunch down in Phoenix," he finished.

"Not all of 'em. Jeez," at Everett's startled glance, "you must spend a lot of time noodling around in the Rockies, Danl. The German with the gee-eye forty-five was Fritz Valken; one of the Baader-Meinhoff gang—and I wish we'd taken him alive. The beard was some guy named Hashem, an Algerian national who was sup-posed to be in class at M.I.T. A grad student in nuclear engineering." He saw Everett blink at the significance of terrorists being trained in nuclear technology. "Yeah," he answered the unspoken comment; "but now he's building bombs in hell. It was the kid with the Schmeisser machine pistol who got away."

"Christ, after getting smeared by that hysteri­cal miz?"

"Fanatics take a lot of killing," Engels shrugged. "He apparently ran out while a gaggle of reporters were trying to learn how to pull a trigger, and he had some woman waiting in a getaway car. By the way, the Vercours woman was anything but hysterical. Maybe you haven't seen a tai kwando offense used in anger, but I have. Vercours is foxy."

"Damn' right," Everett grinned, remembering the way those long legs moved, the strawberry sheen in the honey-blonde hair. "But she's just a trifle butch for my taste."

"Not foxy looking; foxy smart," Engels said, corraling a speck of chicken. "A pretty hard target. And she'd better be, leaving that Chaim character loose somewhere with his nuts in a splint."

"I thought that's what I heard." Everett frowned. "Chaim isn't Arabic, it's about as He­braic as you can get. I mean, what the hell?"

"Some Jew you turned out to be,^" Engels chuckled, glancing at his watch. "Immigration photo and prints on the weapon checked per­fectly. The young guy was one Chaim Mardor. He's Israeli, all right, from some religious order so strict it doesn't even believe there is an Israel. Even though he was born there. Don't ask me to justify it, pal; I can't."

Everett watched Engels signal the waitress, reviewing old tales his mother had spun with friends from Tel Aviv. Natural? Something to do with nature? "Neturay Karta," he blurted; "right?"

"Something like that," Engels agreed, then switched to his frail imitation of Yiddischer speech: "God forbid I should have to keep all those momzers straight."

"One of these days you're gonna give offense," Everett beamed at his departing friend. "But not this time."

"Because I let you beat me at handball," Engels guessed.

"Let me's rickety ass. No, because you bought lunch." They exchanged grins, like most middle-aged American males unable to say what they felt: our competition is trivial; our affection is not. Everett watched Engels filch mints near the cash register, then let his smile slowly fade as Engels walked out.

He lingered at his table, reflecting on the irony of an orthodox Jewish sect so conservative it could find common cause with Third-World radicals. ^`Neturay Karta,' his sabra mother had said, meant 'guardians of the city.' In the or­thodox quarters of some Israeli cities lay houses and attitudes musty with a hundred generations of tradition. Old Testament Hebrew scriptures insisted that ha-messiach, the Messiah, would come one day—but at a time when He was most needed; a time when there was no Israel.

The strict fundamentalist Neturay Karta sect argued that, since the scriptures were scrupulously exact, the Messiah would not come so long as Israel existed. Therefore, they reasoned, they must abet the Coming of ha-messiach by destroying the State of Israel. If young kibbutz women strayed into Neturay Karta haunts in short sleeves or worse, shorts, they risked being stoned by fundamentalists who would rather have a dog carcass putrefying in the street than have it removed by a girl in such scandalous garb. Everett had heard of retaliatory raids by kibbutzim to break a few heads in the old quar­ter. Until now it had seemed a joke to Everett, albeit a bad one. But Chaim Mardor was no joke; he had shot down a passerby as if eradicating vermin. To Mardor it had to be a sort of holy war; an Arab's jehad. And there could be no greater glory for some than to die in a jehad.

To a true believer it all made sense. Everett finished his coffee and headed for the heliport, wondering.

He wondered just how retired David Engels was.

He wondered how much money Gina Ver­cours made—assuming that money was her motive.

He wondered if he would ever have time to visit Frontierland.

Deplaning at Denver, Everett went im­mediately to the Hertz people. His own Mini-Cooper 'S,' a tiny British racing sedan with the look of an unsanforized golf cart, was undergo­ing an operation. In his enthusiasm Everett had permitted a specialist to shave the head too far. Now it was being replaced for reliability. The Mini was a rolling joke, but the laugh was on the other fellow. Despite their boxy shapes the Minis had thrashed Porsches in Alpine road-racing. Like Everett, his Mini was getting older; and like him it had attained scruffiness without losing much stamina.

Hertz had the compact Zephyrs; nothing smaller. While he waited, Everett idly took note of the little man in the dark jeans and zippered turtleneck who stood nearby. The man's identification did not suit the Hertz girl too well, but she would let him take a big Mercury if he could provide cash plus deposit in advance. The little man paid in Canadian currency and made a notation in his Hewlett-Packard calculator. Everett took the Zephyr's key and his credit card, nodded to the man, and walked away wondering.

He wondered where he had met the little man's combination of accent and gesture before; the face was wholly unfamiliar.

MONDAY, 6 OCTOBER, 1980:

Late on a Monday afternoon, Talith swooped past her mail slot en route from the experimental psych lab to a seminar. Graduate students did not rate locked boxes, but at least they did not have to sort through a stack. She glanced at the cubbyhole above her name, passed on, then abruptly checked her progress and fished out the small perfumed envelope. From a woman?' Probably the letter had been placed in the wrong slot. It was addressed to Leah Talith, Department of Psychology, California State University, San Jose, CA 95101. The letter bore a Denver post-mark.

Her slender calves aching from several flights of stairs, Talith hurried to the seminar, pausing only at the coffee machine. The class was popu­lar and eighteen students were too many for a seminar, but after Talith slit the envelope with a razor-edged fingernail, she was glad to be one among many. The letter purported to be a partiallisting of towns containing Friends of the Kib­butz members. It was a long list.

Talith knew her fingers trembled on the coffee cup, knew young Jamie Hilborn was watching her. He did that a lot. She folded the letter away, inched her left hand downward, began to stroke the flesh of her thigh just above the knee as though unconscious that Hilborn's gaze had fol­lowed her hand. Presently she stretched her legs, exercising the calf muscles. Jamie Hilborn would not be taking many notes this day, or thinking about her letter.

Talith did not return to the seminar after its intermission, but hurried to her apartment near the park on South Sixteenth. It was typical of Fat'ah to disguise even the envelope, and as she locked her doors she was giddy with anticipa­tion. She drew the massive zip-code book from a shelf and started to scribble numbers next to the towns listed.

Grand Rapids, North Dakota did not matter except that it provided its five-digit number: 58446. Virgin, Utah and Maryville, Missouri were equally insignificant. The numbers were all that counted.

Leah Talith felt hunger pangs before she had all two hundred and thirty numbers. It was a long message, the longest she had ever received. Her instructions in July, before the Phoenix attempt, had been much more succinct. She ig­nored the growl in her belly and, from her tam­pon cassette, took the one-time pad.

The one-time pad is not the only unbreakable code system, but it is easily the simplest to use. Talith's pad was written in washable ink on the backs of postage stamps in a stamp roll, and had to be kept absolutely dry. Each stamp carried twenty of the five-digit numbers, and somewhere one of Hakim Arif's Fat'ah men had an identical grouping of numbers. The groupings they coded and sent were not precisely the same; indeed, the difference between a given zip-code and the next number on Talith's one-time pad varied between one and twenty-six. The twenty-six variations made letters in English, the language used because it employed many terms that ill-suited Arabic. Despite the bril­liance of cryptanalysis techniques, they fail before the one-time pad. In the message to Talith, the vowel e occurred seventeen times. It oc­curred as seventeen different five-digit numbers, so that a frequency count was not possible—or, at any event, nonproductive. The one-time pad was not as sophisticated as indeterminate qua­dratics. It did not have to be. Talith licked twelve stamps that evening, erasing the sequences after their one-time use. Then, for the first time, she read the message for its content.

The message left her little room for improvisa­tion; it even specified the model numbers of the necessary equipment to be purchased. But that would be Rashid's problem, since he controlled the funds. She could improvise in site selection, at least, before signaling readiness of their Fat'ah cell for its distinguished visitor. She felt certain that the Pueblo telephone number was that of a public telephone booth. She would either call at the proper time or not at all.

Trained by Fat'ah lieutenants after her re­cruitment from Neturay Karta, she had never seen Hakim Arif, had seen only half of his other followers. But Talith knew that the demands of Fat'ah in communication skills were refractory, as Hakim was refractory. If Hakim was sending an aide to prepare for his coming, the contact number would be no private one.

Hakim Arif's man would arrive on Saturday, 25 October, expecting videotapes of the day's news as well as a cell meeting. Rashid would be glad to abandon his studies in California State University at Northridge, several hundred ki­lometers away. She could only guess at the willingness of the motorcycle mechanic, Bernal Guerrero; but while he occasionally questioned an order, he was a complete professional. She was not so sure about Chaim.

Talith frowned as she sought the address near the village of Felton where Chaim Mardor might, or might not, be found. He had always been mercurial, a temperamental link in Fat'ah's be­havioral chain-mail. After she had driven him bleeding and frenzied from the center of Pheonix on that disastrous day in August, he had become more reclusive. Talith told herself she would cover for any cell member with emotional lapses, and knew that she lied. Chaim would have been eliminated by now, were it not for her. Chaim was a problem that must be faced; but Chaim was also, with Talith, Neturay Karta. She would give him time to recover, to realize his full potential.

As a weaver among counterculture people in California's Santa Cruz mountain communes, Chaim was accepted. His gentle fingers teased lovely portraits from yarn, driftwood and feathers; and occasionally they squeezed a trigger. He lived with a brace of young women who found in his quiet intensity a strangeness enough for two. Chaim found himself a capable respondent because, apart from their camouflage value, their combined significance was zero. Talith had begun to suspect that he was impotent with her because she was significant. This, she felt, was a great pity: one of the pleasant articles of her new Fat'ah faith was its demands on her body.

Talith put the apartment in order before driv­ing her small van into the southern mountains toward Felton. Chaim might not be roused by the visit of a Fat'ah lieutenant, but the message had suggested something that would. Chaim could always be galvanized by the verbal trigger, Hakim Arif. Though the fact had not emerged clearly enough for her to deny it, the same was true of Leah Talith.

SATURDAY, 25 OCTOBER, 1980:

At the first buzz of his phone, Everett decided to ignore it. He had planned his selfish Saturday since the Anaheim trip, determined that official business would positively not deflect him from one last October day in the high country. Everett lived his fantasy whenever he could—briefly by necessity, alone by choice. It was not until the third buzz, as he struggled into a forest green pullover, that he recognized the buzzer tone of his unlisted number. Only his informants, and probably a few old colleagues of David Engels, had access to that number, a tenuous link be­tween newsmen and the federal government.

Everett spoke briefly, listened long, and promptly forgot the Rockies that stretched in sere majesty across his horizon near Colorado Springs. "You're already there, are you," he said, thrusting the earpiece between head and shoulder as he tugged on heavy socks. "But why the Shoshone-Beardsley intersection? Doesn't the parade go through the center of Pueblo?" A pause. "Sure; handy for you and me, and for the tactical squads too. Those mothers must be aw­fully confident. You have any idea at all what kind of trouble's brewing?" A final pause. "So we'll have to wing it. I'll make it in maybe fifty minutes if I take the superskate, but I haven't a CB rig in it. My problem anyhow. And thanks, Leo—really."

Once before he hit U.S. Route Eighty-seven and twice after, Everett was noticed by Colorado Highway Patrol cruisers. The Mini was in racing tune again, though he rarely had time for his infatuation with the little freeway raptor. The big cruisers invariably saw his honorary highway patrol decals, fell back to check his plates, then let him continue fleeing south at nearly three kilometers a minute. A Commissioner was supposed to be circumspect, but Everett used this special privilege only in the line of duty.

He took the second off-ramp at Pueblo as if the curve were a personal affront, then eased off as he entered boulevard traffic. According to the newsman's tip, he would have time to find the intersection before the terrorist demonstration. Briefly, Everett was reminded of Charlie George, who had sat near him at—what was it, the As­sociated Press convention? The comedian had opined in his laconic drawl, "TV will still play whore to any pimp with a machine pistol. We're the tush of terrorism." Everett had laughed at the remedy Charlie had proposed. But then, you were supposed to laugh at Charlie.

He spotted vehicles of two different networks as he neared the target area, and forgot about comedy. The van, he overtook; the big Honda bike overtook them both, more by maneuverabil­ity than speed. The van gets you status, the bike gets you there first, he mused. Newspeople could do ENG with two-wheeled vehicles though the Honda did not carry powerful transmission equipment. Everett kept the van in his rearview and when it stopped, he found a niche for the Mini. From that point on, he was in enemy country.

One of the most disturbing things was that the enemy, while promising a news event to media people, had not identified itself. That could mean a hoax by some amateurish crank—or it could mean the precise opposite.

Everett hesitated a moment in choosing decoy emblems. His was a camouflage problem: he wanted to avoid a make by newsmen, and a few knew Maury Everett on sight. But he also wanted to avoid getting himself killed. He donned wraparound dark glasses for the first criterion, and an armband over his rough leather jacket to meet the second. Terrorists generally knew who their friends were: the armband said simply, PRESS.

Following a National Broadcasting Network cameraman on foot, Everett wished he too had a lightweight videotape rig—even a dummy Ora­cle Micam would do. It was rare for a terrorist to deliberately down a media man and when it happened, it was usually a revenge killing. But Everett's informant could not predict details. Everett remembered the videotapes he had seen in Anaheim; it was prudent to suspect gunfire.

The boulevard was lined with spectators enjoying that foolish marvel of autumn anachronism, a homecoming parade. Everett could not pause to enjoy the brassy polychrome of as­sembled high school bands that high-stepped, a bit wearily by now, between wheeled floats. He focused instead on the ENG people. One, a bulky Portacam slung over his back, clambered atop a marquee for a better view. Two others from com­peting stations took up positions nearer the in­tersection, almost a block from Everett. The com­forting mass of a stone pillar drew Maury Everett into its shadow. He could see a thousand carefree people laughing, pointing, children darting after stray float decorations, cheering at discor­dances in the music of these devoted amateurs. Was the tip a false alarm? If not, Everett thought, this happy setting might be shattered within minutes. And he was powerless. He smiled without mirth: Bureaucracy giveth, and bu­reaucracy taketh away. Blessed be the name . . .

Watching nubile majorettes cavort despite a chill breeze on their naked arms and legs, Maury Everett faced his personal dilemma for the hun­dredth time since his appointment. Newsmen dubbed their solution `disinvolvement.' You have a job and you assume its risks. If you are government, you stay in your own bailiwick and off the toes of other bureaucrats. If you are busi­ness, and most explicitly media business, you rise or fall chiefly on informal contacts—and in newsgathering, you do not interfere with the news event. You do not divulge sources for two reasons. The legal reason is backed by the Su­preme Court, and the selfish reason is that fin­gering a contact is professional suicide.

If Everett somehow interrupted the impend­ing show after its careful leakage to ENG people by some unknown malcontent, his sources would evaporate instantly, permanently. Free­dom of reportage, even when irresponsible, was a fundamental function of American media. John Rooker called it surveillance. Everett called it hellish.

The Portacam man had shifted position to a second-landing fire escape next to the synagogue. A thorough pro, he was taking footage of the parade so that, whatever happened, he would be able to salvage some sort of story. Everett saw that all of the floats featured the same general theme: athletics. Lumbering beyond him was a float honoring the 1980 Olympics winners, a crudely animated statue labeled `Uri' waving three gold medals. That would be Yossuf Uri, Israel's surprise middle-distance runner. The hulking mannikin beside it represented the Soviet weights man, whose heart had later failed under the demands placed upon it by too many kilos of steroid-induced muscle tissue.

The casual connection of death with the float display goaded Everett's mind toward a casual inference, but he froze for too many seconds while the details linked in his head. A synagogue on the corner, an Israeli hero ap­proaching it, and a vague tipoff by a terrorist naming the intersection. No matter how little the ENG people knew, Maurice Everett clawed his way to a terrible conclusion.

Later, he could regain an uneasy sleep whenever he awoke streaming with the perspira­tion of guilt—for he had vaulted the horns of his dilemma. "Stop," he bawled, and knew that his voice was hopelessly lost in the general clamor. Everett sprinted between bystanders, knocked a beldame sprawling, caromed into the side of another float. He was still on his feet, still shout­ing for attention, when the great torso of Yossuf Uri came abreast of the synagogue and disap­peared in a blinding flash. A wall of air tossed Everett halfway across the street.

* * *

How Jewish can you get? The stable manager fingered the crisp twenty-dollar bill, smiling down at the signature. "I've saddled up a perty spirited mare, Mr. Rabbinowitz," he said, taking in the wistful smile, the olive skin, the dark hypnotic eyes. "Sure that^'s what you want?^"

"Precisely," the little man said, and paced out to the corral. He mounted the mare quickly, gracefully, and cantered her out along the rim of the arroyo. The stableman watched him, puz­zled. He was certain he had seen Rabbinowitz before. As the figure dipped below his horizon in the afternoon sun, the stableman laughed. Meticulous silken dress and manner had made the illusion even better, a youthful cosmetic ver­sion of a man more character than actor. "George Raft," he murmured, satisfied.

The mare was no filly, but she had Arabian lines. The rider held her at a gallop, imagining that he was in Iraq and not California. He savored the earthy scents of this, a small pleasure he could justify in terms of security. No one, he felt certain, would bug a bridle trail. Presently he came in view of San Jose rooftops and at that moment—precisely—knew that he was being watched.

He made an elaborate show of patting the mare's neck, leaning first to one side and then the other, scanning—without seeming to—every mass of shrub cover within reasonable pistol shot. Nothing. His heels pressured the mare. She was already plunging ahead when he heard the girl cry out behind him. He had passed her without sensing her? Most disturbing.

He wheeled the mare and returned, erasing his frownlines for the girl. She was clapping now, a jet-haired comely thing, slender-boned, with the lustrous eyes of a drugged fawn. "Ayyy, que guapo," she laughed aloud, showing a pink tongue between dazzling teeth. The gold cross at her throat, the peasant blouse: a latina.

He misjudged her in two ways: "You like the mare?"

"The combination," she answered, growing more serious. Her hands were clearly in sight and he did not see how she could hide a deadly weapon while showing so much youthful flesh. But still—Now she stroked the mare's nose, looking up at him. He liked that. "Like music," she said, and waited.

The formula should not have surprised him so. "Music by Sedaka?"

"Imsh'allah," she said. How convenient that a popular composer's name should also, in several related tongues, mean 'gift.' Well, this one would give. Her stealth and cover identity had been, if anything, better than his own. He did not admit to irritation in his response.

He complimented Talith in her deception, dismounting, walking with her to a tree-shaded declivity. The mare tethered, they sat, and now her slight advantage in height disappeared.

"Curious," he began, "how my appetites are whetted by a job well-done." They spoke English and then Arabic, softly, warmly, and when he remounted it was not on the mare. He forced into her immediately, a pain she ignored in her joy to serve. He coupled like a ferret, grinning fiercely, his need unsullied by affection, and Talith knew that she would not be required to simulate orgasm. She extended her tonguetip between her teeth, her own grin lewd in his face, and reached down to find him. She began to contrive for him that redoubled rapture, a Florentine. His restraint was no match for this and, in moments, he was spent.

Presently they drew apart. The girl combed her hair with impatient fingers. "You have seen the media coverage of the Pueblo operation this morning?^"

"There was no time for that," he yawned. "I nearly missed my flight to San Jose. But I did hear a bulletin. Did Fat'ah obtain suitable coverage?^"

She nodded gravely. "Hakim will be pleased."

"Of that, I am certain." Their great bituminous eyes locked for a moment before, toying with her, he persisted. "But Hakim must have a media center. You are prepared?"

"Prepared? When I hailed you," she riposted, "did you or did you not think I was a local chicana?"

Echoes of repugnance clashed like scimitars behind his quiet words. "You are clever, you are willing. I speak of greater things than—" and paused after using a grossly sexist Bedouin term for his recent use of her. He saw her pupils ex­pand. Pleasure or pain? "I must know whether you have the site, the men, and the equipment Fat'ah requires."

"I cannot say. My instructions are to provide only for the leader himself. He may not arrive, as you know. Or he may." She shrugged.

"You are clever. But you are prepared for Hakim Arif?"

"We are Fat'ah."

"And who am I?" He removed his left small finger at the last joint, replaced the prosthetic tip while she regained her composure. "In our telephone arrangements I spoke to you as 'Rab­binowitz'."

"But I thought you would first send—sire, you are Hakim Arif," she murmured, seeming to grow smaller.

"So I am. And angry at continued small talk, and impatient for my media. We have another demonstration to plan, depending on the results we see from this morning's work. You have pro­vided for me, you say? Then show me, Talith."

She quickly explained the route to the site she had prepared, naming each landmark three times. He did not remind her of his old familiar­ity with travel in the United States, but listened with critical approval. It was best to arrive after sunset, she said, which also gave her time to alert the others.

"Chaim and Rashid know you," she added. The third, Bernal Guerrero, had been recruited in Damascus, as Talith herself had been, after Hakim Arif's last sojourn there. Hakim had read impressive reports on his new followers, and chose not to say so.

"They will serve," he said, rising to collect the somnolent mare some distance away. He flung over his shoulder: "Better perhaps than a woman who deflects my questions." She could not read the satisfaction in his face. He wheeled the mare and trotted her back to the girl. Again he stared down from a commanding height, stern, refrac­tory: the visage of Fat'ah. "Soon, then," he said, eyeing the sun.

"Sire," she stammered. Her body was controlled; only her voice betrayed her. "I was led to expect a lieutenant. Your face is known to few in Fat'ah."

"Or out of it, as Allah is merciful," he rejoined. "Perhaps I shall be merciful, too."

"If God wills," she said in Arabic.

"Or perhaps—" he waited until she met his eyes again, "I shall beat you."

"Perhaps you will," she said, not flinching.

Hakim Arif whipped the mare mercilessly up the trail with the reins, enjoying the experience, the control, especially enjoying the memory of the girl's eyes. They had dilated again at his threat. Under a westering sun he sped back to the stable. He was thinking: spawn of pain. We Fat'ah are the children of El Aurans after all...

Over an hour later he found the Fat'ah site, temporary as it must be but better situated than he had expected. The bungalow commanded a clear view of the San Jose skyline in the dusk and, on three sides, open pastures beyond car­bine range. On the fourth side a swath of scrub oak followed a brook so near the house he could almost leap from its porch into thick cover. He accepted congratulations for his work in Pueblo as though spurning praise, yet Hakim was pleased. He let his distant smiles and nods say so. Let those idiots in the PLO show all the ersatz egalitarianism they liked: Fat'ah, born of Al Fat'h, born of injustice, was effective because he, Hakim Arif, was so. It was essential to strike a balance between fellowship and personal supremacy—yet a little fellowship became a heavy weight.

Only after his site inspection did Hakim con­jure a show of warmth, with a ritual embrace for gaunt, silent Rashid and then for Chaim. He traced the new scar tissue across the forehead of Chaim Mardor with a finger. "An honorable wound," he said, thinking otherwise. He caught the gaze of Bernal Guerrero, who stood slightly apart from the others, stalwart in khaki work clothes. "And now, Guerrero: welcome." He of­fered the handclasp then the embrace.

"My regrets that we could not meet in Damas­cus," the Panamanian said, his bow formally correct.

Hakim felt the aura of strength, like a physical shield of energy surrounding the strongly-built latino. Independent, ingenious, cold; he would need firmer leadership than the PLO had pro­vided. "I share your regret," said Hakim. "Talith, bring us bread."

They sat cross-legged on the living room floor, Hakim tearing chunks from the uncut loaf. He placed a piece in each mouth, then chewed a piece himself. With this ritual he invoked the ancient Arab law of hospitality; no matter that he thought it a hollow gesture. Rashid, and perhaps Guerrero, would luxuriate in the rite that placed them under Hakim's protection. The site was, for the time, the home of Fat'ah; and Hakim Aril was Fat'ah.

Then: "They say you are clever with electronic devices, Guerrero."

"I can fix a toaster," Guerrero smiled. Then, sensing that he had been too flippant on such short acquaintance, he went on. "Or a trans­ceiver, or a squib time-delay. From what I have seen of the Pueblo blast, perhaps not as well as you.”

Hakim grunted with pleasure. If Guerrero was hinting for an explanation he was doing it ex-pertly. Besides, a recapitulation of the recent events might impress them afresh. "Talith, bring us sweet coffee, and my briefcase. I have some new devices of French design, manufactured in Canada. They will be of use." He darted a glance at Guerrero. "You are prepared to emplace communication devices tonight?"

"A sus ordenes, at your orders," Guerrero said. "But the roads across the coast range are few and well-patrolled. In my van is a vehicle that avoids the highways."

Hakim hesitated. Even an expert cyclist would have little chance to make good time through those low precipitous mountains. He said as much.

"It is not a scrambler bike," Guerrero said eas­ily. "While repairing a small rotary engine last year I learned that it powered a shrouded impel­ler. The unit is slung beneath a parafoil, senor. What I have in the van is my gift to Fat'ah."

He seemed willing to continue, which would effectively wrest the moment from Hakim. Worse, it would consume minutes which Hakim needed to familiarize the Panamanian with the new microprocessors. "I assume you are profi­cient," he said curtly, then took the briefcase from Talith. Moments later he was again the undivided center of attention. And of control.

Guerrero was quicker than quick, more im­pressed with the microprocessors than his fellows because he understood their multiple func­tions without delay. "With the battery packs and ordinary communication devices patched to these units," he mused, "Fat'ah can be everywhere at once."

"Indeed," Hakim smirked. "Perhaps I shall tell you how I used them in Canada. But another time," he said, seeing Talith check her wristwatch. "Tonight I shall require remote voice relays at two telephone locations. Show me, Guerrero, how you would use my components."

Guerrero made mistakes only twice, then cor­rectly assembled the devices three times without error. At length Hakim was satisfied and called for a light meal. Talith, in her wisdom, had managed to obtain honey-rich, multilayered baklava as their dessert. Hakim found himself salivating for it and so, perforce, refused it. He had seen the jumble of communication equipment arranged by Talith and Rashid but this, too, he ignored for the moment. Then it was time for Guerrero's departure, and he sent Talith and Rashid out on picket duty.

Guerrero's van combined a short wheelbase with all-terrain tires under a long cargo com­partment. At Hakim's acid comment on the garish paint, Guerrero pointed out that, by California standards, it was subdued. The van culture, springing from the recreational vehicles of the seventies, was invading the west coast to such an extent that one could purchase, direct from Detroit, vans covered with tinted plastic bubbles and fantastic painted panoramas. While he enthused over the uses of a van, Guerrero was proving his point.

With Chaim's help, dark green dacron and black-painted aluminum tubing from the van soon became a spidery frame topped by fabric. In places the fabric was taut over the slender tub­ing; across most of its span it draped limp. The vehicle had no tail surfaces but featured two swept wings, the lower wing staggered behind. Guerrero boasted that the dual wing gave his craft such a low stall speed that, unlike earlier parafoils, it could fly at the pace of a trotting man. Despite the darkness, Hakim could see that Guerrero's perch was a padded bike seat, mounted above the enclosed driveshaft. Ahead of the rider was the little rotary engine; behind him, the shrouded impeller. It started quickly with the rasping whirr of a big lawnmower.

A loaded pack frame leaning against his knee, Hakim cupped one hand to his cheek and leaned forward. "If your landing is not gentle, Guerrero, your cargo will dig your grave."

"I can land in any clearing," Guerrero joked, "with the landing gear I was born with." He flexed his knees and gestured for the pack.

Guerrero settled the pack straps over his shoulders, adjusting the twenty-kilo mass, test­ing the freedom of his arms. Hakim realized that, as Guerrero straddled the machine and lifted it clear of the ground, he was momentarily supporting over fifty kilos of dead weight. His takeoff seemed ludicrous for only a moment, a bow-legged trot down the smooth slope of clear­ing. Then the whirr of the rotary engine was lost in the rush of high-pressure air as Guerrero opened the valve of his air bottle. The great advantage of the air rocket, Hakim saw, lay in the fact that it had no visible exhaust. If it was a relatively low-impulse power unit, it was cer­tainly more than enough for the parafoil.

In twenty meters Guerrero was running in space, then bending forward to lie semi-prone as the parafoil wafted upward. A sprinter could have outrun him. The cold-gas rocket abruptly ceased its hiss and Hakim saw the parafoil gently accelerate, now climbing at a shallower angle. Guerrero claimed that the thing could exceed legal highway speeds but only now did Hakim believe him. Guerrero might see by the glow of the city, but his own craft was invisible to Hakim, even its exhaust glow hidden from below.

A whistle from Chaim brought the pickets back, Chaim taking Talith's carbine with a swift check of its safety. "You will kill one of us yet, Leah," he said as the mechanism clicked. They followed Hakim into the bungalow.

Hakim forced his thoughts away from Guer­rero, who was gliding above the starlit ravines somewhere to the west. The parafoil was a technology he deeply mistrusted, but once he had felt the same way about microprocessors. He strode to the living room, determined to hide his delight with the new media center, genuinely concerned that it might not be adequate.

Despite himself: "Ah," he breathed, jubilant as he surveyed the media center Talith had as­sembled at his orders, with the help of Rashid. Four small TV sets half-encircled a desk which also faced an expanse of window. Four mul­tiband radios were ranged to one side. All sets had earplugs. Three telephones were within reach. Note pads, blank card files, colored pens, typewriter, videotape recorder and two audio tape cassette machines filled much of the work­ing space. The squat table underfoot was almost hidden beneath stacks of directories; Bay Area numbers, Los Angeles numbers, Washington numbers, precisely as he had specified. Hakim knew the dangers of heavy dependence on help supplied by the various telephone companies. There were ways to trace one from his patterns of inquiry. Unless, of course, one mastered the sys­tem.

Talith stood near, gnawing a full underlip, watching him assess the media center. "Rashid; Chaim," he rapped suddenly. "Are you prepared to spend the night as pickets?"

Both straightened. "We are Fat'ah," said Chaim. Rashid only nodded.

"Rashid, could you fly that thing?" Hakim was staring out the window toward the mountains again.

"With practice, sire," was the whispery reply. "My experience is all in fixed-wing craft."

"Learn," Hakim ordered, and knew it would be done. He dismissed them both.

Behind him, Leah Talith coughed. He turned, waiting. "Shall I take picket duty?"

"Stay," he said, toying with the HP from his new briefcase. After a moment he continued, "How long have you known Guerrero?"

"Since El-Hamma," naming a Syrian training base. El-Hamma was near enough to Damascus to suit Hakim's purposes—and the purposes of the Syrian army as well. Syrian regular army units, Al-Sa'iqa, the PLO, and the alphabet-soup of irregular terrorist armies all over the world boasted graduates of this ghastly seminary. But Talith seemed to think something more was re­quired and added, "I was with him on a border raid last year. His night vision is supernatural; he always sees things the rest of us miss."

"Or would like us to think so," Hakim coun­tered.

Talith did not speak again for a moment. "He is in awe of you," she said then, sensing a guarded stance in Hakim's attitude. The lie might set the Fat'ah leader at ease. "For one thing, the man is not of our blood. He does not understand all of our customs even yet. For example, he does not know how to address you." Her hesitancy suggested that Talith shared Guerrero's concern.

Hakim had not risen this far by allowing cyni­cism to show in his voice. "Do we fight for democracy? Is my name Hakim? Then Hakim it is!" His face softened, faint lines around his jaw the only sign that Hakim was entertaining a pri­vate amusement. "If you can conceive of a Chris­tian Trinity, you can hold the dual concept that I am Fat'ah—but also Hakim."

Talith, deeply ingrained with religious im­ponderables, accepted this self-assessment by Hakim as a god, yet an equal of his followers. She knew how this attitude would be identified by her psychology professors: mad as a March hare. It had not occurred to her that Hakim was simply cynical. Her professors had psychology as their religion, and Talith had Fat'ah as hers.

Hakim began to play with his new equipment, not waiting for Guerrero's call, half-expecting to see a brief new starbloom on the silhouetted peaks to the west. It was nearly an hour before the news programs, but the girl flicked a finger toward the videotape. He fumbled it into opera­tion and saw that she had edited earlier newscasts into a television festival of the Pueblo hor­ror. Hakim settled back into a chair, note pad ready, and watched his favorite show.

TUESDAY, 28 OCTOBER, 1980:

Like a dry bearing in his head, a thin pure tone pierced Everett's awareness. "When will I quit hearing that whistle," he demanded.

The white smock shrugged. "It goes with the injury," the physician replied. "With luck, another day or so. No, don^'t try to sit up, you'll disturb the tubes. Follow orders and you'll be up in a few days, Mr. Everett. You're a big healthy animal; give your system a chance.^"

Everett glanced out the window of the Denver hospital. The fine cloudless day was lost to him, and he to the Rockies. "Hell of a day to be down."

"But a very good day to be alive," the doctor insisted. "You were blown ten meters, mister. Some others weren't so lucky, including a whole handful of TV people. You have no idea how much outcry the networks are making over those five particular fatalities."

Thanks to the drugs, Everett did not feel his bruised kidney, the hairline fracture, and other modest rearrangements of his middle-aged anatomy. The Denver people had done very well by him. But there were things they could not do.

Curbing impatience, he said, "Let's assume I stay put, don't hassle my nurse, and take lunch in approved fashion," with a glance at the in­travenous feeding apparatus.

The surgeon folded his arms. "If," he promp­ted.

"If I can trade the nurse for a staff member in here to—"

"Contraindicated. We're trying to excite regrowth around that flap torn in your tympanum, Mr. Everett. At your age, a blown eardrum is tough to repair. The nurse stays, the FCC goes."

"My left ear's okay, though. And even a felon gets one telephone call."

After a judicious pause: "You've got it." He spoke to the nurse for a moment, stopped with his hands on the door. "We're starting you on solid foods, provided you make that one call and no more. We can haggle, too. Agreed?"

"Agreed." More or less, his tone implied.

"By the way, which note do you hear?"

"I haven't the foggiest," Everett admitted. "Why?"

Deadpan: "If it's 'A' natural, you might take up composing. Robert Schumann heard that note for years; nearly drove him up the chimney."

"Have you ever considered a bedside man­ner?"

The doctor grinned. "If you needed it, you'd get it. You're on the mend," he said, and walked out.

Maury Everett watched the door swing shut, thinking of channels. FCC staff to network hon­chos? Dave Engels? Both too slow, and always loss of fidelity when the message was indirect.

The hell with it. "Nurse, I want you to call NBN Hollywood and get just one man on the line. I want nobody else, I want him with all possible speed, and it might help if you tell him Commissioner Everett is itching to lay the tush of terrorism."

She waited starchily, receiver in hand. "You're to avoid all excitement. Is this an obscene call?"

"Everybody's a comedian," he grunted. "But the only one I want is Charlie George."

* * *

Everett never knew exactly when the whistle died in his cranium. It was gone when he donned street clothes six days later, and that was enough. He was shaky, and he wore an earplug in his right ear, but he was functioning again. A staff member packed his bag because there was no wife to do it, and brought the taxi because he wasn't going home first. The office would sim­ply have to improvise until he had recuperated in Palm Springs—a tender negotiation with militant medics, based on his promise to relax with friends at the California resort city. He did not tell them it would be his first visit, nor that he had met only one of those close friends in casual encounters. He did mail a note to one other Commissioner, outlining his decision. He signed it, 'Zebulon Pike^'; Engels would enjoy that.

Everett did not feel the Boeing clear the runway, so deep was he into a sheaf of clippings collated by his staff. A dozen dissident groups had claimed so-called credit for the Pueblo blast, each carefully outlining its reasons, each hope­ful that its motive would be touted. As usual, Everett noted with a shake of the massive head, our media system had accommodated them all.

Yet only one group was armed with guilty knowledge: Fat'ah, led by the wraithlike Iraqi, Hakim Arif. Shortly after the blast, a United Press International office took a singular call from Pueblo, Colorado. It spoke in softly ac­cented English of a microwave transmitter hidden in a tennis ball on a synagogue roof. It spoke of galvanized nails embedded in explosives. It correctly stated the exact moment of the blast, to the second.

These details were quickly checked by the UPI. Each detail was chillingly authentic. The caller went on to demand that Fat'ah, the only true believer in Palestinian justice, be given a base of operations for its glorious fight against Jewish tyranny. Ousted by Jordan, then ostensi­bly from Syria, Fat'ah was simply too militant even for its friends. It had nowhere to go. It chose, therefore, to go to the American people. Its channel of choice was a hideous explosion that left nearly a dozen dead and three dozen injured, half a world away from its avowed enemy.

When the caller began to repeat his spiel, police were already tracing the call. The message was on its fourth re-run when a breathless assault team stormed a Pueblo motel room. Not quite abandoned, the room contained a modified telephone answering device which, upon re­ceiving a coded signal, had made its own prear­ranged call with a tape cartridge. The device was altogether too cunning: when an officer disgus­tedly jerked the telephone receiver away, it blew his arm off. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, To­bacco, and Firearms was still theorizing about the devices used, but was quite positive about the sophistication of the user.

According to a Newsweek bio, the leader of Fat'ah was a meticulous planner. When Hakim Arif was twelve years old, U.S. and Israeli agen­cies were still aiding Iran in the design of its secret police organ, SAVAK. Thus SAVAK was still naive and Hakim already subtle when the boy visited Iran with his father on a routine brib­ery expedition. During the night, security ele­ments of SAVAK paid a lethal call on the elder Arif. The boy evaporated at the first hint of trou­ble, taking across rooftops with him most of the emeralds his father had earmarked for Iranian friends. SAVAK knew a good joke when it was played on them, and praised the lad's foresight. They would have preferred their praise to be posthumous; in the Middle East, drollery tends to be obscure.

Hakim took his secondary schooling in English-speaking private schools under the benevolent—and venal—gaze of relatives in Syria, who never did discover where the jewels were. Hakim also came under sporadic crossfires between Arab guerrillas and their Israeli coun­terparts, and he knew where his sympathies lay. Newsweek hinted that young Hakim might have taken additional coursework in an academy of socialist persuasion near Leningrad. How he got into an Ivy-league American school was anybody's guess, but a thumbnail-sized emerald was one of the better suppositions.

Trained in finance, media, and pragmatism, Hakim Arif again disappeared into the east after his American training—but not before leaving indelible memories with a few acquaintances. He quoted the Koran and T.E. Lawrence. He was not exactly averse to carrying large amounts of cash, and protection for it, on his person. He won a ridiculously small wager by chopping off the end of a finger. And he was preternaturally shy of cameras.

Hakim and Fat'ah were mutually magnetized by desire and bitterness, but not even Interpol knew how Hakim Arif came to lead a guerrilla band that rarely saw its leader. One thing seemed clear about his emergence: anyone too devious for Carlos Sanchez developed a certain mystique among the terrorist cadre. Even luna­tics have a lunatic fringe; the Fat'ah group devel­oped a positive genius for wearing its welcomes threadbare among groups that were only half crazy.

Thwarted by security forces in Turkey, England, Syria, and Jordan, Fat'ah was evidently fingering the tassels at the end of its tether. Perhaps Hakim had peddled his last emerald; the fact seemed to be that the goals of Fat'ah, reachable by sufficient injections of cash into the proper places, were elusive.

This was not to say that cash could not be raised. According to magazine sources, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi had shelled out two million dollars to Carlos Sanchez for his Vienna raid on ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in December of 1975. Analysts of the Third World eventually shifted from their initial opinion that Qaddafi had acted out of personal pique. The final con­sensus was that Qaddafi and OPEC had simply sustained a corporate disagreement, just as other businesses sometimes have disagreements. Nothing personal; the bullets and the blood had been merely business. The biggest. As usual.

An even larger investment--some said as large as five million dollars from Swiss accounts controlled by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli—had been made toward the massacre at the Olympic Village in Munich, in 1972. Hakim Arif had later contrived a brief and uneasy alliance with the Black September movement precisely because of its success; not with the Israelis so much as with the money they had squeezed from Feltrinelli.

Hakim himself was rumored to have a dark angel in the person of a sheikh living in and around an English country estate. The anglo­phile sheikh could afford a castle, and walled grounds envied by many a British peer, more easily than the English could afford the sheikh. The nabob had been gently dissuaded only in 1977 from driving his special-bodied ten-meter Rolls across his rolling meadows in search of the once-tame deer that infested his estate. It was not the speeding that his neighbors minded; the Rolls was on very, very private property. The complaints stemmed from the submachine gun bullets that sprayed beyond the sheikh's property whenever he sought the deer. There may have been no close connection between the sheikh's forced moratorium on the deer hunts and his decision, a month later, to put Hakim Arif on salary.

No act of terrorism, of course, would be paid very well by its well-wishers unless it achieved that crucial phenomenon, media coverage. The sheikhs, Qaddafis, and Feltrinellis would pay more for one well-covered disemboweling than for a thousand committed in secret. Media coverage, especially on television, gave the criminal a chance to publicize his motives and his potency. The news magazines implied that the emergence of Hakim Arif in the United States was an omen of spilled guts.

They also gave coverage to Hakim's motives, and his potency.

Everett paused in his reading to gaze wistfully out at California's mighty Sierra range that stretched below the Boeing. Somewhere below, near Lake Tahoe, was a cabin he knew well; hoped to visit again. With the dusting of early snow on sawtooth massifs, the Sierra looked as cold and hard as the heart of Hakim Arif. What sort of egoist did it take to shorten his pinkie on an absurd wager, yet shun photographers? A very special one, at the least. Everett resumed reading.

The conservative Los Angeles Times, the pre­vious Monday, had devoted too much space to a strained parallel between law enforcement agencies and Keystone Kops. The smash hit of the new TV season was a Saturday night talk show in which a battery of clever NBN hosts deigned to talk, live, only with callers who were already in the news. Soon after midnight after the Pueblo disaster, a caller had identified himself as Hakim Arif. A reigning cinema queen was discussing oral sex at 12:17:26, and found herself staring into a dead phone at 12:17:30. Hakim was speaking.

Incredibly, the Iraqi responded to questions; pre-recording was out of the question. While Hakim launched into the plight of Palestinian Arabs and the need for funding to continue his heroic- struggle, network officials feverishly col­laborated with police, the FBI, and several tele­phone companies. Hakim was obviously watch­ing the show, to judge from his critique of one host's silent mugging.

Hakim used no terms objectionable enough to require bleeping. He merely promised to repeat his Pueblo entertainment in larger and more vulnerable gatherings until, in its vast wisdom and power, the United States of America found a haven for Fat'ah. And oh, yes, there was one condition: the country of the haven must adjoin Israel.

While voiceprint experts established the iden­tical patterns of the Pueblo and NBN show voices, a co-host asked if Hakim realized that he was asking for World War Three. Hakim, chuckling, replied that he trusted the superpowers to avoid exaggerated responses to Fat'ah responses to Israeli banditry.

As Hakim chuckled, a Lockheed vehicle lifted vertically from Moffett Field in central Califor­nia for nearby Santa Cruz. Its hushed rotors car­ried four case-hardened gentlemen over the coast range in minutes to a parking lot two hundred yards from the Santa Cruz telephone booth which composed one link in Hakim's tele­phone conversation. Police cordoned the area and awaited the fight.

There was no fight. There was only another clever device in the booth, relaying the conver­sation by radio. Its sensors noted the approach of the bomb squad to the booth with the `out of order' sign, and suddenly there was no tele­phone, no device, and no booth; there was only concussion. The Times surmised that Hakim could have been within thirty miles of the booth. No one, including Hakim, knew that the Lockheed assault vertol had passed directly over his bungalow in San Jose. Nor that a sweep-winged parafoil had narrowly missed a redwood tree while banking upward from a school playground near Soquel, California.

Hakim's next call passed through another booth in Capitola, near Soquel and Santa Cruz, to CBS. Hakim was in excellent spirits. Govern­ment agencies were in overdrive, steering madly with many corrections. No one was in position to corral even one arm of Fat'ah and when Hakim was good and ready, he closed down his media operation.

By the time his bungalow had been discov­ered, Hakim had a two-day start. That is, said the private report compiled for Everett by friends of David Engels, if it had been Hakim. Fingerprint gambits, falsely planted prints, were com­mon in disinformation games. The Iraqi's M.O. varied, but he always knew how to use available channels, including the illegal importation of some of his materiel from Quebecois sources. There was more, and Everett forced himself to read it. Beyond his old-fashioned reading glasses, his eyes ached. Presently he closed them and tried to ignore the faintly resurgent whistle in his head.

MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER, 1980:

Two flights and a limousine later, Maurice Everett declined help with his suitcase and carried its reassuring bulk in Palm Springs heat toward a featureless sloping lawn. At least, it seemed to have no features until he strode through a slot in the grassy berm and realized that this comedian knew how to use money.

The berm surrounded a sunken terrace open to the sun. Around the terrace and below ground level lay the translucent walls of Charlie George's hideaway. It reminded Everett of a buried doughnut, its hole a glass-faced atrium yawning into the sky, slanted solar panels more attraction than excrescence. It was thoroughly unlike the monuments erected to Mammon on the nearby acreages: it was logical, insulated, understated. Already, Everett liked Charlie George better for making sense even when he was not compelled to.

Everett was nonplussed for an instant by theman who met him at the door like a sodbuster's valet. Denims tucked into beflapped, rundown boots; suspenders over an ancient cotton work shirt; a stubble of beard. Yet there was no mistak­ing the loose-jointed frame or the shock of corntassel hair over bushy brows, familiar to anyone who watched prime time television. Be­neath a strong nose was a mouth legendary for its mobility, from slack-jawed idiocy to prudish scorn. Everett realized with a start that it was speaking.

"You wanted it informal," said Charlie George, and ushered Everett to a guest room.

Everett removed his coat. "I thought you'd taken me too literally, Charlie. For a minute I thought you'd set this up in a vacant lot."

"Just doing my bit for the Palm Springs image as the world's most elegant unfenced asylum. Complete with crazy proposals."

"Not in my book," Everett replied. They dis­cussed their strategy while he changed into his scruffies. "I haven't sounded out all the members of the Commission," he admitted, wincing as he adjusted his pullover. "Wills is a reasonable sort, though, and I'll lay it out for him so he'll know how you propose to separate tele­vision from terrorism. These panel talks with the AP and UPI sure haven't excited him—or me. I like your scenario much better."

The comedian kept his eyes sociably averted as Everett donned soft leather trousers. "We've been batting out details for an hour," he said.

"Who's `we'?"

Charlie leaned his head toward the window facing the atrium. "No net veepees, just a couple of pivotal people I told you about." He led Everett through a kitchen saturated with fra­grances of tortilla and taco sauce, into sunlight toward a buzz of male voices in a hidden corner of the atrium.

They found two men seated, dividing their attention between sketch pads and bottles of Mexican beer. The smaller man made a point of rising; the taller, a point of not rising. "This is our friend in the feds," Charlie placed a gentle hand on Everett's shoulder. "Maury Everett: Rhone Althouse here, and Dahl D'Este over there."

Althouse, the compact younger man, wore faded jeans and Gucci loafers. Only the footgear and a stunning Hopi necklace belied his undergraduate appearance. He was tanned, well-built, and his handshake had the solidity of a park statue. It was hard for Everett to believe that this pup was a media theorist who deserted academia for a meteoric rise in gag writing.

"I hope you FCC guys move quicker separately than you do together," he said to Everett, with the barest suggestion of a wink.

Everett smiled at the threadbare gibe. FCC de­cisions never came quickly enough for the in­dustry they regulated. "Don't bet on it," he replied. "I'm still pretty rickety today."

D'Este, doodling furiously on a mammoth sketch pad, stopped to gaze at Everett with real interest. "I forgot," he said in a caramel baritone, “you were the star of the Pueblo thing. Perhaps you'll tell me about it.” His tone implied, some other time, just we two.

Everett accepted a Moctezuma from Charlie George and eased his broad back into a lawn chair. "All I know, literally, is what I've read since I woke up with tubes running into my arms. I expect to learn a lot more from you three, in hopes it won't happen again."

"Ah," said D'Este, beaming. His elegant slen­der height was covered by a one-piece mauve velour jumpsuit which, Everett hazarded, might have been tailored expressly for this event. Dahl D'Este affected tight dark curls; his tan was by Max Factor. He hugged the sketch pad to his breast and stood to claim his audience. "Well then, the story thus far—" He paused as though for his host's permission and seemed gratified by some signal. "Charlie has this—wild idea that he can ring in a new era of comedy. Instead of avoiding the issue of terrorism in his shtick, and believe me, luv, we all do, he wants to create a truly fabulous character."

"A whole raft of 'em," the comedian put in. Everett nodded; he knew the general idea but would not rob D'Este of his moment.

"Charlie has seduced the best talents he could find to plan graphics, that's me, and situations, that's Rhone—according to Rhone. Of course it's ironic because Charlie is NBN, Rhone is an ABC captive, and for the nonce I'm doing CBS sets. I don't know how Charlie beguiled his old enfant terrible," he smirked at Althouse, "to cross tradi­tional lines in this madness." Everett, who knew it had been the other way around, kept silent. "As for me, I couldn't resist the challenge."

"Or the retainer," Althouse drawled in a murmur designed to carry.

The splendid D'Este ignored him. "While Charlie and Rhone brainstormed their little skits, I've been inventing Charlie's logo for the new character. A cartoon of the sort of loser who—how did you put it, Rhone?"

"Rates no respect," the younger man supplied. "If he tried dial-a-prayer he'd get three minutes of raucous laughter.

"Well, my logo will peer out at the world from Charlie's backdrop like a malediction. I really ought to sign it. Behold, a very proper Charlie!" With this fanfare, Dahl D'Este spun the sketch pad around and awaited reactions.

Everett was thankful that he did not need to surrogate approval. The sketch was, somehow, the face of Charlie George as an enraged Goya might have seen him. Yet the surface similarity was unimportant. Splashed across the paper in hard sunlight was a stylized symbol of repel­lence. The head and shoulders of a vicious imbe­cile faced them as it would glare out at untold millions of viewers. The face was vacuously grinning, and gripped a fuzed stick of dynamite in its teeth. The fuze was short, and it was lit. In redundant arrogance, just exactly enough out of scale as though reaching toward the viewer, was a time-dishonored gesture: the stink-finger sa­lute.

Laughter welled up from the group and gey­sered. Althouse raised his beer in obeisance.

"Ah,—about the monodigital scorn, Dahl," Charlie wavered, darting a look at Everett.

Althouse held his hands open, cradling an invisible medicine ball. "C'mon, Charlie, it's perfect." He too risked a sidelong glance at the FCC Commissioner. "And for its public use, our precedent was a recent vice-president."

D'Este: "Of which net?"

"Of the United bloody States," cried Althouse in mock exasperation. "And Rockefellers built Radio City. Yes it's naughty, and yes it's safe!^"

"I'm inclined to agree," said Everett, "if it's done by a questionable character for a crucial effect. Chevy Chase, ah, had a finger in that deci­sion."

D'Este leaned the sketch against the solar panels. "A proper Charlie," he repeated, then looked up quickly. "Did you know that British slang for a total loser is a veddy propah Chahlie?"

"Poor Dahl," sighed Althouse. "Did you know that we picked the name `Charlie George' in 1975 because semantic differential surveys told me they were the outstanding loser names in the English-speaking world? Bertie is good, 0llie is better; but Charlie George is the people's choice."

"Thanks for nothing," Everett chortled. "I always wondered why citizens band jargon for the FCC was `Uncle Charlie'." Althouse affected surprise, but not chagrin.

Charlie looked back into the middle-distance of his past. "I wasn't too keen to change my name from Byron Krause to Charlie George," he re­flected, "until I thought about that poem."

Althouse saw curiosity in Everett's face and broke in. "I tacked up my doggerel on a sound-stage bulletin board, and Charlie saw people react, and bingo: Charlie George." He squinted into the sun as though studying some sky-written stanza, then recited.

"Heroes all have lovely names,

Like Vance, or Mantz, or Lance—or James;

But authors elevate my gorge

By naming losers Charles—or George.

There's no suspense on the late, late show:

Big deal the bad guy's Chas., or Geo.

Goof-offs, goons, schliemiels and schmucks:

Georgies every one, or Chucks.

Since the days of big Jim Farley,

Fiction's fiends have been George and Charlie.

No wonder heroes all seem crass

To any guy named Geo. or Chas.

I think I'll change my name, by golly!

My last name's George. The nickname's Cholly."

Everett grinned around his swig of beer, but: "Obviously some of your earliest work," D'Este purred.

"Point is, Dahl, it fitted the image I was after," the comedian insisted. "And it's been good to me. Your logo is great, by the way; it is a proper charlie." He paused. "I want you to release it to the public domain."

The ensuing moment held a silence so deep, Everett's ear hurt. D'Este broke it with a stran­gled, "Just—give it away? Like some—amateur? No—" and there was horror in his hushed, "—residuals?"

"Oh, I'll pay, Dahl; don't I always? But I want the thing available with no restrictions, for any medium anywhere, anytime. PBS. Mad Mag­azine. The National Enquirer maybe."

"Madness. Madness," D'Este said again, aghast, his normal hyperbole unequal to this task. He reached for a beer.

When Rhone Althouse spoke again it was in almost fatherly tones. "I'm afraid you haven't been listening very closely, Dahl. It's no accident that Charlie and I are planning to spring this idea in different networks. Charlie's the rudder of several steering committees where the power is in some veepee. I have a little leverage in ABC and with any positive audience response we can slowly escalate the trend. IF there's no problem in, uh, certain quarters." He raised an eyebrow toward Everett.

Everett traced a pattern on the label of his beer bottle, thinking aloud. "There shouldn't be any serious objection from us," he began. "It's in the public interest to pit media against terrorism—and if you find yourselves in jeopardy it won't be from the Commission." He could not keep an edge out of his voice. "Personally I think you've waited too goddam long already."

"They nearly bagged an FCC man, you mean," Charlie prodded.

"No. Yes! That too. I can't deny personal feel­ings; but I was thinking of ENG people from three networks, casually hashed like ants under a heel. That's why network execs care. That's why your iron is hot. But so far I don't hear evidence of any broad scope in your plans."

The comedian bit off an angry reply and Everett realized, too late, that he teetered on the brink of a lecture that none of them needed. Charlie and Althouse had broached the idea months earlier, looking for outside support that he represented. This group comprised, not prob­lem, but solution.

Althouse rubbed his jaw to hide a twitch in it. "You came in late," he said softly. "You didn't hear us planning to expand this thing into news and commentary. If you've ever tried to apply a little torque to a network commentator, you know it's like trying to evict a moray by hand. I think morning news and editorializing are a good place to start; more folksy."

"Start what? Boil it down to essentials."

"It boils down to two points: we turn every act of terrorism into a joke at the terrorist's expense; and we absolutely must refuse, ever again, to do a straight report on their motives in connection with an act of terrorism."

Everett sat rigidly upright at the last phrases, ignoring the pain in his side. "Good God, Althouse, that really is censorship!"

"De facto, yes; I won't duck that one. But legally it's a case of each network freely choosing to go along with a policy in the public interest. Wartime restrictions beyond what the gov­ernment demands are a precedent, if we need one. When countries go to war, their media gen­erally follow that model. Why can't a medium go to war on its own?

"American television has already seen its Pearl Harbor in Pueblo, Mr. Everett. It just hasn^'t declared war yet. And the National Association of Broadcasters could publish guidelines for independent stations. The NAB is an ideal go-between."

The issue lay open between them now like a doubly discovered chess game. Everett saw in Althouse a formidable player who had studied his moves and his opponent. "It's unworkable," Everett said. "What'll you do when some Quebec separatist gang tortures a prime minister? Sit on the news?"

"Of course not, if it's a legitimate story. The medium can give coverage to the event, sympathetic to the victims—but we must deride the gang as a bunch of charlies, and refuse to adver­tise their motives in connection with an atroc­ity.”

"While you let newspapers scoop you on those details?"

"Probably—until they get an attack of conscience."

Everett's snort implied the extravagance of that notion. "A couple of Southern Cal people did in-depth surveys that suggest there's no 'probably' to it, Althouse. Editors will print assassination attempts as front-page stuff even if they know it brings out more assassinations. They admit it."

"Hey; the Allen-Piland study," Althouse breathed, new respect in his face. "You get around."

"I've been known to read hard research," Everett replied.

"And newsmen have been known to modify their ethics," Charlie George responded. "If this amounts to censorship, Maury, it'll be entirely self-imposed. Nothing very new in that."

"I'm sure this sounds like an odd stance for me to take," Everett smiled sadly, "but I tend to balk at social control. Hell, Rhone, you've studied Schramm and his apostles."

"Funny you should mention that; I remember something you don^'t, apparently. Most media philosophers claim that, between simple-minded total liberty to slander and hard-nosed total control over the message, there's something we always move toward when we confront a common enemy. It's called Social Responsibility Theory. We used it to advantage in 1917 and 1942. It's time we used it again."

That the issue would arise in the Commission seemed certain. It was equally certain that Everett must select a principle to override others sooner or later. He had a vivid flash of recollec­tion: a willowy girl with gooseflesh and a baton, bravely smiling after an hour of parading, ten seconds before her obliteration. "I don't like it," he said slowly, measuring his words, "but I don't like wars on children either. You make God-damned sure this social responsibility doesn't go beyond the terrorism thing." His promise of support, and of its limitation, were implicit.

"I don't like it either," D'Este spat. "I seem to be part of a media conspiracy I never asked for. Charlie, you didn't ask me here just for graphics. What, then?"

"Commitment," Charlie said evenly.

"I'm working CBS specials! How I'm ex­pected to collar newsmen, writers, producers, who knows who else, is beyond me; regular programming is out of my line."

"Nothing in television is out of your line," Rhone Althouse began, laying stress on each word. As he proceeded, Everett noted the up-swing in tempo, the appeal to D'Este's vanity, the loaded phrases, and he was glad Althouse did not write speeches for politicians. "You're independent, Dahl; you work for all the nets, you know everybody in key committees all over the Industry, and when you lift an idea you pick a winner.

"Charlie can sweet-talk NBN news into using your logo when there's a place for it—we think—while he develops his satire. You know the old dictum in showbiz; if it succeeds, beat it to death. I'll start working the same shtick in ABC comedy Christ, I'm doing three shows!—and I can drop the hint that this lovely logo is public domain. With any luck, the idea can sweep NBN and ABC both. News, commen­tary, comedy.^"

Althouse watched D'Este gnawing a thumbnail, fixed him with a hard stare. "And you, Dahl? Will CBS keep out of the fun for some asinine inscrutable reason? Or will one of its most active—" he paused, the word homosexu­als hanging inaudibly in the air like an echo without an antecedent, "—free spirits, cham­pion the idea from the inside? That's really the only question, Dahl. Not whether you can do it, but whether you will."

Intending support, Everett put in, "It'll take guts, in a milieu that hasn't shown many," and immediately wished he hadn't.

"No one corporation owns me, Mr. E," D'Este flung the words like ice cubes. "I don't have to stroke your armor."

"That's not what I meant. None of you have considered asking the next question," Everett replied.

Charlie George misunderstood, too. "Ask yourself if it's worth some trouble to keep the Industry from being a flack for maniacs, Dahl. If we don't start soon, ask yourself if you'd like to see the FCC license networks themselves when Congress considers tighter government con­trol."

An even longer silence. "Madness," D'Este said at last, "but in this crazy business—I have misgivings, but I'll go along." He folded his arms in challenge and stared back at Everett. "Licens­ing? Is that the sword you were brandishing over us, the next question you meant?"

Everett took a long pull at his beer, then set it down. His smile was bleak. "That never crossed my mind, I think Charlie overstated. Here's what I meant: if this idea takes hold, the idea men could be spotlighted, and that means to people like Hakim Arif. I had a brush with their rhetoric, and they weren't even after me. See what it bought me." He peeled his shirt up to reveal the tape that bound the bandage to his right side. Angry stripes, the paths of debris in human flesh, marked his belly and pectorals beyond the tape.

He hauled the fabric down, regarded the so­bered media men. "We have a lot of questions to thrash out, but none of you can afford to ignore the next one: if you take them all on—Palestinians, IRA, Chileans, Japanese extremists —what are the chances they'll come after you personally?"

For once, he noted with satisfaction, Rhone Althouse sat unprepared, openmouthed. Preparation would not be simple. Everett made a mental note to talk again with Dave Engels. Surely Engels could recommend someone as a bodyguard. Not a woman; certainly not anyone like Gina Vercours...

MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER, 1980:

Hakim's feet were light on the steps as he hurried from the bank. The sheer weight of bank notes in his briefcase tugged at his left arm but failed to slow his stride. Fourteen minutes to rendezvous; plenty of time unless he were fol­lowed. His quick pace was perfectly normal in metropolitan New York City. He checked his timing again before entering the cafeteria. No one followed or seemed to loiter outside the place. He bought a chocolate bar to tempt, but not to entertain, his empty stomach. Slipping the candy into a pocket of his silk shirt away from the newly extended armpit holster, he thought of the pleasures of self-denial. He salivated for the chocolate. Later he would watch Talith eat it. He surveyed the cafeteria's glass front through re­flective sunglasses. Twelve minutes; time to burn. He left by a different exit, moving unobtru­sively down the street.

It was sheerest luck that the antique store was placed just so, and boasted a mirror angled just so. Hakim spotted the glance from a stroller to the unmarked green Camaro, both moving behind him and in his direction. The stroller drifted into another shop. A tall sandy-haired man emerged from the Camaro, and in a hurry. Hakim's body braced for action.

He continued his brisk pace. Instead of converging on him they had exchanged tails, which meant he was expected to lead them—whoever they were. They did not move like divinity stu­dents. Federals, probably, judging from the cut of their suits. He tested the notion of the Jewish Defense League, a distinct danger in Manhattan, and felt perspiration leap at his scalp. But their methods were usually more direct, and the tail he had picked up must have mooched around the bank for days. And that meant inefficiency, which implied government. He cursed the over-coat that impeded his legs in November cold, then saw the third-rate hotel.

The sandy-haired man entered the lobby as Hakim was leaving the stair onto the filthy mez­zanine and wasted seconds on two other pas-sages; seconds that saved him. Hakim found the fire exit, burst the door seal, and slithered past the metal grating to drop into the alley. He sprinted for the street, adjusted his breathing again as he slowed to a walk, then turned another corner and risked a peek over his shoul­der. The Camaro was following with its lone driver.

Hakim had nine minutes and needed seven. He wanted that rendezvous, not relishing the alternative risks of public transportation to Long Island. Nearing the next corner he noted the lack of pedestrians and made his decision. He broke into a run, turned sharply, ran a few steps, then turned back and melted into a doorway. He did not want the driver to pursue him on foot and knew this would be the next option.

A small girl sat on the stair in his doorway at Hakim's eye level, licking fingers sticky with candy, watching silent and serious as he fum­bled in his coat. The silencer slowed his draw. He flashed the little girl a smile and a wink. The Camaro squalled around the corner. Hakim gauged his move to coincide with commitment to the turn, made five leaping paces, and fired as many times. The parabellum rounds pierced glass, cloth, flesh, bone, upholstery, and body panels in that order, each round making no more noise than a great book suddenly closed.

The Camaro's inertia carried it into a forlornly stripped foreign sedan. Hakim held the sidearm in his coat and retraced his steps, winking again at the little girl just before he shot her. Then he reseated the pistol, careful to keep the hot si­lencer muzzle away from the expensive shirt.

Seven minutes later Hakim hurried up another alley, squirmed into a delivery van, and nodded at the sturdy Guerrero who lazed behind the wheel in coveralls as the engine idled.

The van's engine was mounted between front seats with an upholstered cover. Bernal Guerrero had built an extension toward the rear just long enough to accommodate a small Iraqi; the makeshift upholstery would pass casual inspec­tion. Kneeling with the extension cover up, re­luctant to relinquish control to the latino, Hakim urged caution. "Drive south first; I was fol­lowed." He did not elaborate.

For a time, Guerrero attended strictly to driv­ing as Hakim directed him to the bridge approach. Once over the East River, in heavy traf­fic, Hakim began to relax but did not stir from his position. Guerrero adjusted an inside rearview. "The funds were on hand, then."

Hakim met his eyes in the mirror. "Was that a question?"

"Deduction, Hakim. The briefcase seems heavy—and you are smiling."

"A wise man smiles in adversity," Hakim quoted, reloading six rounds into the clip.

"I trust Rashid was smiling at the last," Guer­rero said obliquely. "We shall miss him."

"Rashid was a fool. You cannot load down an underpowered aircraft and maneuver it, too."

"A fool, then," Guerrero shrugged. "I agree that a satchel charge would have been simpler."

Hakim's irritation was balanced by the utility of the sinewy Guerrero. The Panamanian^'s suggestions were good, and he did not press them. Yet his conversation always provoked broader answers than Hakim cared to give. "You agree with whom? Have you toured the Statue of Liberty, Guerrero? A satchel charge might disfi­gure the torch; nothing more. The thing is full of steel girders inside. I planned to destroy it ut­terly. Think of the coverage," he breathed, and chuckled.

They were past Queens, halfway to the site of Farmingdale on Long Island, before Hakim spoke again. "The new funds," he said as if to himself, "will pour into accounts for Fat'ah exactly as long as our coverage is adequate. But our supporters may not enjoy last night's media sport at Fat'ah expense.^"

Guerrero nodded, remembering. But to prattle is to reveal, and this time Guerrero said nothing. Amateur films had caught the hapless Rashid, his handmade bomb shackles hopelessly jammed, as he veered away after his first pass over the great green statue, the previous day. The canister weighed nearly three hundred kilos and as it dangled swaying from the little Piper, Rashid must have seen and accepted his immi­nent death; must have known he could neither land, nor long maintain control. To his credit, he had fought the craft into a shallow turn and straightened again, many kilometers from his target but prepared for another and more suici­dal assault. With any luck he might have com­pleted his run, barely off the surface of the har­bor, to crash directly into the Statue of Liberty. But the new fireboat hovercraft were very quick, faster under these circumstances than the Piper that careened along at all of ninety kilometers per hour.

Hakim sighed. What ignominy, to be downed by a stream of dirty salt water! Still, "The network commentator made Rashid a martyr," he asserted.

"To what? Idiot liberation, he said. And," Guerrero reminded him, "NBN news did not carry the story well. `A terrorist quenched with a water pistol,' indeed. It is la palabra, the word? Provocative."

"As you are," Hakim said shortly. "Let me worry about media, and let the Americans worry about our next demonstration."

"Our next demonstration," Guerrero echoed. It was not quite a question.

"Soon, Guerrero, soon! Be silent.^" Again Hakim felt moisture at his temples, forcing him to acknowledge a sensation of pressure. Harass­ment was the guerrilla's tool; when he himself felt harassed, it was better to cancel the opera­tion. Yet he dared not. Something in Guerrero's attitude, indeed in Hakim's own response to the smug mockery of television, said that Hakim must choke that dark laughter under a pall of smoke.

He shifted his cramped legs to sit atop the briefcase as they skirted Mineola. Soon they would roll into the garage at Farmingdale, soon he would bear the briefcase inside with a show of indifference, reviewing the site again to assure its readiness for—for whatever; he did not know what.

Fat'ah must be ready with only four members now, and he could not easily muster more on short notice. The Syrian site would again be secure for a time, now that Hakim could furnish bribes; but Damascus is not Farmingdale, New York and Hakim knew that he was improvising. Fat'ah could not afford always to improvise. Nor could it afford to delay vengeance for the Rashid defeat.

The double-bind was adversity. Hakim forced himself to smile, thinking of smoke. Of black smoke and of media, and of Leah Talith who would be warm against him in the chill Long Island night. He vowed to deny himself the third, which facilitated the smile, and knew that he could now concentrate on the first two.

* * *

Forty kilometers away in an office of The Tombs, Manhattan, Assistant Chief Inspector Dolby was slavering into his telephone. "Because it doesn't make any goddam sense, that's why," he snarled. "If you were gonna heist a Zee Twenty-Eight Camaro, why pick one that'd just tried to hump a stripped Volkswagen? And when you figure that one out, tell me why you'd take the Volks too. I mean, where's he gonna fence fresh junkers, Damico?"

He listened for long moments, nodding, tapping his teeth with a pencil. "Okay, I'll tell you what I think, I think the officer on duty is also on dago red." Listening again, he began to tap on his cheek. "I don't give a rat's ass how many eyewitnesses he claims, total strangers don't just rush up three minutes after a crash and bodily, BOD-i-ly, pick up two tons of crunched Camaro coupe and cram it into a truck."

Shorter pause. Then a yelp. "Twenty? You can't get twenty men around a Camaro. Well, belay that, maybe you could. But why would you want to?"

He began to experiment, tapping his cheek and moving his lantern jaw. Pause. "Oh, hell, poor little kid. She DOA? Well, at least there's definitely a crime, up 'til now I had serious doubts . . . For one thing, your alleged wreck and your alleged truck and your alleged twenty bad dudes are gone, right? And nobody's reported a theft of any green Camaro today."

Pause. "Look, I can roll when I get a report on the little girl, but you haven't convinced me there was any grand theft auto, much less two. Just some glass in the street, and what else is new? Whaddaya want from me, Damico?"

Listening again, he found the trick and hap­pily tapped his cheek to a simple rhythm. Then sighing: "Okay, right. I will. Hey, my other phone's lit. Yeah—what? Uh, Mary Had A Little Lamb. Talent, huh? S'long."

He punched into the other line in time to take the call. "Dolby here . . . Can you rush it, Canfield? I'm about to go off shift." He started tapping again until his eyes glazed. "Hold it. Let me tell you: it's a green Zee Twenty-Eight, and the Volks ain't got any wheels at all." Pause "I'm psychic is how. Go on."

Dolby started scribbling. Now and then he grunted into the mouthpiece. At last he blew out a mighty breath. "What I think, Canfield, is we don't have enough forms in the Pee Dee. We only got an Unusual Occurrence Report, when we also need a Can You Top This report. Hey, are you sure it ain't some fucking movie crew that staged a wreck in that alley?" His jaw throbbed as he heard the next response. "No, I guess not—for sure they wouldn't leave it with a stiff in it. You sure it's a real live corpse?"

Dolby closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. "No, Canfield, it's just been a very long Monday for a very short temper. And before you file a report, would you kindly tell me how the Camaro driver could've been dead as long as you say, when he was in another wreck half an hour ago with the same Volkswagen. . . . Never mind, I just know. But you got no lab experience, how come—" He closed his eyes again, very gently. "I see. Not just stiff, you mean cold stiff. How cold? Well shit, take his temperature, I guess . . . For all I care you can shove it up his—wait a minute. You said there was some ID on him?"

Dolby scribbled again. "Ahboudi; courier? Hold it. If the deader had Algerian diplomatic courier status it changes a few things; like, I can dump this in the lap of a Special Services officer, thank God."

Dolby took down more details, then laid down the receiver. After a few minutes he said to Someone beyond his ceiling light fixture: "Let me make You a little bet. I bet You my gold badge if there's a deep-frozen ayrab courier up front, Meyer Cohane's JDL boys are in back of it."

It was a wager even God could not have won.

The New York Police Department found its decision above Dolby, below the Mayor. In return for certain immediate information, the PD elected not to press charges against members of the Jewish Defense League who, all in fun, had removed two vehicles after the collision only to place them elsewhere. The driver of the Camaro, they insisted, had been dead when they arrived at the scene.

This was a luminous understatement inas­much as Moh'med Ahboudi, an Algerian na­tional with loose consular connections, had been missing from his duties for several weeks. He had been in a freezer for most of that time, after expiring in a brief contest for his freedom. Ahboudi's wounds were frontal skull frac­ture, broken knuckles, and a ruptured spleen, all of which might possibly be consistent with a very unusual automobile accident. But it also explained why Meyer Cohane, though a full-fledged Rabbi, was persona non grata in Israel. Police records of his enemies tended to be short and untidy.

In the spirit of good fellowship, the JDL fingered the man who had perforated the Camaro—oddly enough, with no bullet holes in the driver—because they had been tailing the gunman. They were virtually certain of his iden­tity: the Iraqi, Hakim Arif.

The JDL was terribly sorry that it could offer no reason why Arif should also be followed by Moh'med Ahboudi, but there it was: Ahboudi was a sloppy tail and had paid the price. Finally, the JDL was sorry they could not lay hands on Arif.

This latter sorrow was genuine enough; after tailing Hakim from the bank in hopes of follow­ing him home, JDL men were contrite at their failure. They were even sorrier for young Sammy Greenspan, the original driver of the Camaro. Sammy had died instantly in Arif's ambush. The one bright spot was in the speed with which they managed, in one gruesome practical joke, to get Sammy's body away and to replace it with the cold remains of Moh'med Ahboudi. Now, if the NYPD was willing to take its simplest course, Algerian terrorists and the Iraqi terrorist would find a reason to loathe each other. It was richly Cohanesque. Sammy Greenspan would have loved it.

* * *

Chaim and Talith failed to hide their relief at the sight of the money, stacks of twenties and fifties, which Hakim revealed in due time. Dur­ing supper their eyes kept wandering to the cash until Hakim wordlessly arose and dumped it all back into the briefcase. "Now we will have sweet coffee," he sighed, Talith rising to obey, "and contemplate sweeter revenges. Even today I struck a small blow; the late news may bear fruit." He was gratified to see curiosity in their silent responses.

Hakim did not expect to occupy the ABC lead story, but grew restive as national, then local news passed. Had his escape gone unnoticed, then? It had not, for, "There was an evident postscript, today, to the blundering attempt on the Statue of Liberty," said the anchorlady. "If anyone can make sense of it, perhaps Richard can. Richard?"

Her co-anchor gazed out at millions, his backdrop logo a leering idiot that was becoming familiar on several channels. The newsman dropped a piece of typescript as if it were defiled and related little more, factually, than the locale and the killing of Hakim's pursuer. He went on: "What places this below the usual level of crime in the Big Apple, according to one source, is that the gunman's description matches that of a Fat'ah charlie; and his victim was an Algerian Daoudist, from another terrorist group."

Mugging a faint blend of confusion and in­souciance into the camera, he continued: "The best current guess is that the victim was trying to make friendly contact, and the gunman mistook him for someone who knew too much." A frosty smile. "Or perhaps that's a charlie's way of hail­ing a taxi."

Injected by his co-anchor lady: "About the little girl he grazed at point-blank range?"

"Maybe he thought she knew too much, too. And compared to these charlies, maybe she does. She's almost five years old."

Hakim employed vast restraint and continued his televiewing. At his side, Talith said, "But you told us—" until Hakim's hand sliced the air for silence.

The weather news endorsed the frigid gusts that scrabbled at the windows, and Hakim's mood was like the wind. He could not have missed the urchin—and his daring coup was against domestic security forces, he was certain.

Well, almost certain. Was it even remotely possible that the coxcomb Daoudists had intended—? On the other hand, government sources could have deliberately lied to the newsmen, with a release designed to confuse Fat'ah.

Talith ghosted to the kitchenette to prepare fresh sweet coffee which Hakim craved, and subsequently ignored, as he lounged before blank television screens. The art of disinformation was but recently borrowed by the Ameri­cans from the Middle East, but the west was learning. But if they know I know that Daoudists could not know where I am, his thought began, and balked with, where am I ?

He released a high-pitched giggle and the girl dropped her cup. Hakim angrily erased the ric­tus from his face and pursued another notion. Daoudists could be behind this, seeking to share the media coverage in its bungling fashion. He, Fat'ah, would need to arrange more talks with his television friends.

Not exactly friends, he amended, so much as co-opportunists who could always be relied upon to give accurate and detailed coverage if it were available. Except in wartime, whispered a wisp from a forgotten text. It was unthinkable that American television networks could perceive themselves to be at war with Fat'ah.

Unthinkable, therefore Hakim thought about it.

The same grinning salacious fool was becom­ing the prominent image behind every news item on terrorism. On competing networks! He thought about it some more. While Fat'ah planned the attack that was to cost Rashid his life, Ukranian dissenters had made news by murdering three enemies in the Soviet Secre­tariat. A scrap of dialogoue haunted Hakim from a subsequent skit on the Charlie George Show.

INT. SQUALID BASEMENT NIGHT

CHARLIE wears a Rasputin cloak and villainous mustache, leaning over a rickety table lit by a bent candle.

He scowls at CRETINOV, who cleans a blunderbuss with a sagging barrel.

TWO-SHOT CHARLIE AND CRETINOV

CHARLIE Comrade leader, I say we must kidnap everyone who calls us fools!

CRETINOV (bored) Nyet; where would we keep five billion people?

This established the general tenor of a five-minute lampoon, redolent of fools and of impo­tence, on terrorism against the Kremlin. The Ukrainians had enjoyed the sympathy of the United States Government. Perhaps they still did, but obviously American television moguls thought along different lines.

When had Hakim last heard a sympathetic rendering of the justice, the demands, the motivations, of a terrorist group? For that matter, he persisted, any factual rendering at all? A harrowing suspicion fostered a pattern that coalesced in Hakim's mind as he absently reached for his coffee. Every datum he applied seemed to fit the undeclared war that he should have expected from this medium, sooner or later. A medium upon which Fat'ah was all too dependent: newspapers brought details, but TV brought showers of cash from Fat'ah well-wishers. Had the Americans at last conspired to rob him of his forum, his voice, his cash?

Hakim retrieved his mental images of smoke and media, this time imagining a greasy black roil erupting from a picture tube. It should be simple enough to test this suspicion. If the sus­picion proved to be accurate, Hakim vowed, he would bring war to this monster medium.

He sipped the tepid coffee, then realized that he had forbidden it to himself. Rage flung the cup for him, shattering it against a television set that squatted unharmed. The girl's gasp paced Guerrero's reaction, a sidelong roll from his chair from which the latino emerged crouching, his Browning sidearm drawn. Guerrero was not particularly quick, but his hand was steady. In the soundless staring match with the latino, Hakim told himself, he dropped his own eyes first to atone for his rashness.

Hakim stood erect and exhaled deeply from his nose. "We need rest," he said.

"Yes, you do," Guerrero agreed, tucking the automatic away.

Hakim did not pause in his march to the far bedroom. Talith knew that he would not ask her to follow, knew with equal certainty that he ex­pected her to do so within minutes. She col­lected the debris that lay before the television set, unaware of its symbolic content, then stood before Guerrero, who was slicing excerpts from newspapers.

He glanced up. "I will take sentry duty until four A.M.," he said.

"That is not my topic," she replied quietly, too quietly to be heard down the hallway. "You came very near disrespect, a moment ago.^"

"I meant no disrespect." Guerrero seemed to think the matter was closed.

She chose her words carefully: "You left room for an inference that Hakim's stamina is less than your own."

Guerrero frowned; it was something she rarely saw. "He had a brush with disaster; anyone would be exhausted," he explained, watching carefully to assess her response. "Under the circumstances—"

"Under any circumstances, Hakim is your superior. In every way. Believe what you like, Bernal, but pay service to that idea in his pres­ence. Always."

From a camp chair near the window, Chaim: "More than with your training instructors in El-Hamma, Guerrero. I know him: before he would accept your insolence, he would accept your resignation." Chaim Mardor flicked the safety back and forth on the weapon across his knees. Guerrero heard, not taking his gaze from Talith. He nodded. It was unnecessary to state that no one resigned from Fat'ah while he was still breathing.

"I must go. I want to go," she corrected herself quickly, and disappeared into the gloom. Guer­rero stared after her, then began to detach another clipping for Hakim. He was smiling.

Hakim lay in his bed awaiting the girl. He had read the latino's implied criticism, but would absorb it for now. He could not afford to waste Guerrero. Yet.

MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER, 1980:

As Hakim awaited the girl, Maurice Everett's evening had hardly begun in Colorado Springs. He selected a fresh log from the bin and thrust it into his fireplace, holding it with two fingers like a rolled newspaper.

"It'll catch," David Engels grinned from his chair, waving the mug lazily. "Sit down, Maury, you're nervous as a bridegroom. Forget she's coming."

"I'd like to," Everett said, dusting his hands. He reached for a poker, then realized it was more makework, more fuel for Engels whose amuse­ment was beginning to grate on the nerves. "Some more rum in your toddy?"

"I'm fine." Engels placed a hand over the bev­erage. At times of stress, he knew, Everett drank sparingly but wanted everybody else drunk as lords. "It's Vercours you should be plying with booze. I'd rather you did it tonight, out of your own pocket, than later with contingency funds."

"That raises a nice question, Dave. I'm grate­ful, and I won't ask what contingency funds those are—"

"Wouldn't tell you anyhow."

"—But who decides when I need Vercours? Let's assume my intuition's screwed up, and it works out so well I use her for every public appearance. That's twenty times a year."

"Fifty thou? Pretty steep,^" Engels replied. "I'd probably palm you off on a bureau man; maybe switch 'em around."

"So you do decide." He saw the Engels fea­tures become opaque and knew that he was right. "Well then, why didn't you suggest that to begin with?"

"I told you on the phone, and I told you today, and for the last time I'm telling you: if a female can handle this work, she's better. She raises fewer suspicions. The Secret Service used to make bodyguards obvious on the theory that it'd put a case of the shakes on the assassin. But for some of these fanatics it just shows 'em in which direction to start the spray of lead."

"Or at least that's the current theory."

"All God's chillun got theories," said Engels, and sipped. "If you don't like ours, pick another one."

"And fund it myself."

Engels winked: "You got it. Look, Maury, I can't locate any bureau women who'd be as available. Besides," he went on, ticking off details on his fingers, "Vercours takes it seriously. She's been taking lessons in defensive driving at Riverside. And Wally Conklin likes the ENG coverage she does on him. She even tapes his speeches. What more could you ask? I'll tell you one thing sure, Wally Conklin isn't going to be singing any hosannas over your hiring her away."

"Your hiring her away!"

One eye closed in an outre horsewink: "If you won't tell, I won't tell."

Everett's laugh rattled crockery in the next room. "Okay, you bastard: so you foot the bills and I take the heat. And what'd you say about Vercours and defensive driving? What doesn't she do?"

"She doesn't do-wacka-doo, if that's what you mean," Engels said archly. "Not with our likes, at least. Think of Gina Vercours as one of the boys."

"But she might run off with my secretary?"

"Doubtful. Wouldn't be good business, and Vercours sounds like all business on the phone. She picked the time tonight—"

The door chime echoed. Everett stood up too quickly, then forced himself to move toward the door as though relaxed. He told himself that it was not lack of self-confidence. It was simply that he did not know how to behave with most women, never had, which was why his early marriage had failed early. He was ill at ease because—all right, then, it was lack of self-confidence with women. While traversing his carpet, Maurice Everett had made a valuable dis­covery.

He made another as he swung the door open. Gina Vercours, in heels, was taller than most men. Her "Hi," the smile on the wide mouth, and the handshake were greetings to an equal. He ushered her in, saw her drape the suede coat and a bag that was half purse, half equipment satch­el, on his closet doorknob. Everett's crockery rattled again.

David Engels hurried toward them. "What'd I miss?"

"That's what I do," Everett said, pointing to the coat and bag. "But I put my coat in the closet tonight to—to—you know," he said feebly.

Gina nodded, then studied the closet door. "If you'd put a dozen doorknobs on that wall, you wouldn't need a closet. I'll bill you later," she said, shaking hands with Engels. "Or you can buy me off now with whatever I smell in the air."

In five minutes, Everett had forgot his fidgets over Gina Vercours. She sipped the steaming toddy and asked for more rum, then knelt to warm her hands at the fire. She meddled with the antique kettle that swung on its bracket over the hearth. "God, this iron kettle must weigh ten pounds."

"Five kilos," Everett corrected.

"I'm old-fashioned," she said, grinning.

"Sure you are. I don't think it's polite to fly false colors."

Still grinning, she said, "Then I don't think you should ever do it," and he laughed again. It was his own stance, here I am, take it or leave it; but she wore it more gracefully.

Engels, an expert interviewer, drew Gina out with ease, dropping asides on Everett now and then. A service brat, Gina had attended schools in Texas, Virginia, Texas, California, Massachusetts, and Texas before parlaying a tennis scholarship into a business degree at Arizona State.

"Funny," Engels frowned in faked concern, "you don't look like a jock."

"The hell I don't," she countered, pinching her browned forearm. "I'll have skin like an alligator when I'm forty."

"Which will be—?"

"In four years, Mr. Engels, don't be coy. I'm not." Everett inwardly seconded her observation. She had no reluctance to list her strengths or her weaknesses. Health, lack of attachments, and media training were her perceived strengths. "But I'm not really a people person, if you follow me," she admitted. "I like to live well, and I'm pretty selfish."

"That's laying it on the line," said Everett. "Why are you interested in this escort, bodyguard, iffy kind of work? It isn't exactly steady employment, Gina. As you must know, I may not need you at all."

For the first time, the smile she turned on him was wily, secretive, somehow very female, the wide-set hazel eyes steady on his. "You'll need me," she insisted softly. "Maybe not tomorrow or next month, but if you have heavy clout in media, sooner or later you're going to need somebody." She smiled to herself. "I still keep ENG contacts in Phoenix, and of course I mix around when I'm on duty with Conklin. If you never before saw reporters looking over their shoulders, you can see it now. It's a feeling you can reach out and touch," she finished.

Everett persisted. "So why do you like it?"

"I don't like it, Mr. Everett. I like the money. Let's say you use me twice a year and Wally does the same. Added to my fees in tennis, that's a new 'vette every year." She arched an eyebrow. "You could use some work on the courts, Com­missioner. Work off some of that, ah, good liv­ing.^"

Engels laughed at Everett's discomfort. "He thinks he's a bear, Gina. Fattens up every autumn, snores all winter, runs up mountains every spring. Catch him early in the morning and you'll think he's a sure-nough grizzly."

"I don't expect to be chasing him early in the morning," she replied smoothly, and patted Everett's knee as he flushed the hue of berry juice. "Nothing personal, Mr. Everett—but it seemed worth clarifying."

Everett cleared his throat, wondering how he had triggered this conversational trap. "Understood. But you can be personal enough to call me Maury. I don't know what to call a Corvette freak, but I'll think of something suitable."

David Engels sat back, watching the au­tomobile buffs unload on each other. Everett's dislike for `big iron' was easily supported by every datum an ecologist might cite. At one point he threatened to show photographs of Mini-Coopers beating factory Corvettes at Laguna Seca. Gina claimed to be wary of any car that could be stolen by a tumble-bug. "Not that I blame the tumble-bug," she cracked; "one little ball of crap looks pretty much like another."

Eventually, after a pizza had been delivered and demolished, Gina Vercours stretched the strong svelte legs and yawned. Everett noticed the highly developed calf muscles swelling above slender ankles, and remembered something else as she arose. "You used to have differ­ent hair, didn't you?"

"Still do," she said, tugging at a brunette curl. "It's under here. You can pile a lot of hair under a wig." A throaty laugh: "I even have a gray one. One of my mannnny dis-guis-es," she said, without elaboration.

Everett snorted good-naturedly. "You wouldn't fool a leg man at two hundred paces."

It seemed that Gina had two laughs; this one was a whoop, unabashed and piercing. She promised to wear knickers with the gray wig and readied herself to leave.

Engels strolled companionably with them toward the closet. "One thing more, Gina: what sort of martial arts training have you had?"

She broke off a sentence to say, lightly, "Noth­ing, really, until the past few weeks. I'm going twice a week now—"

"Horseshit. I mean before you met Wallace Conklin."

Something came into the yellow-green eyes that did not affect the voice or smile. "I told you. Oh, I picked up a few tricks from a friend in Tempe, back in college."

Engels was not smiling. "Horseshit," he re­peated.

She shrugged, expressionless, and reached for her coat.

"We've both seen videotapes of you taking that kid with the Schmeisser, Gina," Engels said to break the silence. "Those were killing techniques; black belt stuff."

She continued with the coat, calm with her buttons and collar. She reached for her bag, then turned. Her face was still noncommittal, the voice calm and pleasant. "Wallace Conklin thinks of me as a brilliant opportunist, Mr. Commissioner David Engels. He would not like to think of me as a deadly weapon. Help me keep it that way." She came to some decision as her shoulders dropped. "All right. You won't be satisfied until I give you a motive. So.

"When I was fourteen, I was raped. He was a friend of my father's, an old army buddy on a visit. Bob was very macho, very old-shoe. I guess he was what he was all the way through. I knew it would destroy an important friendship with my dad if I said anything. So I didn't say anything. Six months later, Bob came to visit again." The voice was edged with obsidian now. "And raped me again."