Soft Targets

"Oh, Christ," Everett whispered. "Hey, forget it, I understand why you'd want to gloss over it."

"You don't understand shit," said Gina Ver­cours. "The next morning I started looking for an academy. It made me scrimp and lie about going to the library, but it was worth it. Good of Bob paid us another visit a year later."

Engels was smiling now, expectant. "Took him fair and square?"

"I bushwhacked the sonofabitch," she said, "after I kissed him, the first time we were alone. He could've taken me or made it a standoff, I know that now. But he had it coming. And he got it, collapsed cheekbone and all. My dad never understood how Bob could've taken such a beat­ing on a little flight of stairs."

She reached for the outer door, opened it, still speaking to Engels. "To my knowledge, Bob never came around again. But you can't appreciate—and I didn't want to tell you—how much I enjoyed going through it in my mind twice a week at the academy for the next two years. I still enjoy it. I don't like you very much, you know. I mean you, collectively. Actually you two are okay, and that has affected my judgment. I'm still willing to be your escort if you ever need it, Maury."

"You mustn't ever lie to me again," Engels said, making it avuncular.

"And if I ever do, you mustn^'t pick me up on it because it'll be something I figure is none of your Goddamned business. I've done research on you, too. Sorry for the outburst," she said, raised her free hand in a wave, then pulled the door shut behind her.

For perhaps twenty seconds the two men stood motionless, listening to the long stride as it faded. Then an exchange of sheepish grins. "So much for the ineffable power of our federal gov­ernment," Engels grumbled, and swigged his toddy.

"She's her own man, by God," Everett said. He nodded absently as if testing his phrase and find­ing it apt. They shuffled back to the conversation pit to be near the fire, Engels beginning to chuckle, Everett taking it up. When they had finished, the Engels rasp and the Everett boom still hanging in the air, they made fresh drinks.

"I don't know why that was so funny," Everett admitted. "Charlie George's friend Althouse could probably tell me, the little fart is as sharp as a broken bottle."

Engels gestured toward the blank TV set in one corner. "All this stuff I'm seeing on terrorists and charlies is his idea, you said?"

A nod. "But will it have any effect?"

"Oh, it'll have one. Dear God only knows what it'll be in the end, Maury. And old Lasswell might have a guess. What'd he call it when you get some media effect you didn't expect?"

"Latent function," Everett grunted. "And when your media brainstorm turns around and chews your ass off, that's dysfunction." He leaned back on his couch, rubbing his temples. "Lord, don't I know it! Dave, you think I should get a permit for a gun?"

Shrugging: "Depends on how much time you'd put in with it. You can't walk around casually holding a blunderbuss; might cause talk. And if you're not reasonably good with it, a concealed piece is murder. Yours. You take Gina Vercours, now—"

"A perfectly appalling idea," Everett staged a shudder.

"But she goes heeled with Conklin, according to my source. A Beretta in a videotape cassette, which she uses once a week. Like I said: she takes it seriously."

Everett whistled. "That lady has more balls than a bowling alley," he rumbled. "I like her."

"That could be a problem."

"No, I mean I like the idea, because I don't like her. Wait, I'll get it right in a minute. Yeah, Dave, sure I like her, butch or no butch. But better still, I like knowing there's no chance of a personal attachment. Like parts in a machine: we link up, do our jobs, and disengage again. I can dig it."

Engels studied his mug, his thoughts survey­ing engagements of another day. He had seen some unlikely relationships develop between agents working closely together under pressure. Unrelenting pressure was the lens that gathered and focused emotions to white heat. It could leave permanent scars. So could a Schmeisser. "Well, you're a big boy, Zebulon Pike," he said, and drained his mug. "Are you going to use Vercours for the NAB convention in Reno?"

Everett yawned and banked the fire for the night, talking as he worked. "I thought about it. No, I guess not. Things haven't come to that point and I really don't think they will. You want to share a room at the Mapes or somewhere?"

"I won't be there," Engels smiled. "I'd rather see pornography than hear you drone on about it. And speaking of pornography, how would you rate Vercours's legs on a scale of one to ten?"

"Cut it out, Dave, I need to sleep, not sweat. But how does ten-point-five strike you?"

"That's what I thought," Engels chuckled, walking toward the guest bedroom. He turned at the doorway. "Parts in a machine, hm? Sure, you can dig it." Then David Engels turned in. He knew Everett too well to push it.

WEDNESDAY, 26 NOVEMBER, 1980:

As long as the National Association of Broadcasters wanted to hold a convention during Thanksgiving holidays, Everett admitted, it was nice that Reno was its choice. He wandered among the manufacturer's exhibits in the hotel foyer, grudgingly accepting some responsibility for the presence of so many new security devices. The Oracle Microelectronics display drew his attention briefly before he moved on. You could say what you liked about media men, their self-interest was intelligent. Cassette systems shared display space with microwave alarms. One import drew his admiration: an outgrowth of the English medical Thermovision system, it could display so small a mass of metal as coins in a pocket unless they were at body heat, no more, no less.

A voice behind him said, "Neat. Any charlie who sneaks his forty-five past that rig will have to carry it as a suppository," and Everett wheeled to face Rhone Althouse.

Everett's delight was real, though brief. "It's nice to see somebody I can ask questions of, instead of just answering 'em," he said.

"I heard your speech on porn," was the reply, "and I can't believe you have any answers. Seri­ously, I did want to—well, uh, actually Charlie George, ah—oh, shit." He cocked his head to one side. "The fact is, our little Palm Springs con­spiracy has become the worst-kept secret since the Bay of Pigs. Dahl D'Este couldn't sit on such a juicy tidbit for long. To begin with, his lady-love is a gossip columnist."

"It's a little late, but thanks for the warning. Lady? D'Este makes both scenes?"

A one-beat pause. "Yeah, ob and epi; and thanks for the straight line. Charlie and I thought you should know that the word will be leaking. It should have a positive effect in the Industry," Althouse added quickly. It had the sound of an excuse.

Everett nodded, hands thrust into pockets of his stylishly discomfiting jacket. "Well, you're answering my questions before I ask. I'll have to deny my part in it for the record; but just between us, Rhone, I'm willing to let it live as a rumor. The Commission is interested in this ethical epidemic, naturally. I've been asked how long you can keep it up." Raised eyebrows invited an answer.

"Hell, it's popular," the writer beamed. "With CBS taking it up, it's a trendy thing—oh," he said quickly. "You mean the reprisals?"

Everett's nod was quick. "Those Fat'ah pismires cost NBN a bundle when the net refused to air that videotape Arif sent them last week."

"Fortunes of war," Althouse grimaced. "Don't think our own Charlie isn't hurting, even if he doesn't flinch. He's got a piece of several sta­tions, and those transmission towers Fat'ah de­stroyed didn't do the dividends any good. Insur­ance tripled."

"Arif didn't flush out any friendly envoys from the nets to pay him off, I suppose.^"

Althouse squinted in the subdued light. "I think I would've heard if that were in the offing. If that's the crux of your concern—officially, I mean—I can't answer for the whole industry.

"Maury, it's become a grass-roots movement, just as I hoped. Doesn't have a single spokesman, and that's where its strength lies. But it looks to me like a full-scale media war brewing." He hesitated, glanced around, bit his lip. For the first time, Everett saw something in the writer that was not young, something of the mature hunted animal. "We haven't forgotten those scenarios you laid on us. Do you have—no, can­cel that, I don't want to know. Do you think we should have around-the-clock protection when our names hit the newspapers?"

"Let me put it this way: you and I both know D'Este can put us all on the list of endangered species. You think our names are due to hit the newsstands?"

"I know they are," said Althouse, with a sickly smile that told Everett why the writer had flown to Reno: face-to-face admission that Everett could expect the worst. There could be little pleasure in a print-media hero label that doubled as death warrant.

No point in asking how Rhone Althouse knew. His pallor said he knew. "Tell Charlie George we are about to learn what it's like to be a popular politico," Everett remarked, fashioning a cross-hair `X' with his forefingers. As an effort at levi­ty, the gesture fell sprawling. "How long before our oh-so-responsible press fingers us?"

"Tomorrow."

Everett drew a long breath. "Goddam the world's D'Estes, we ought to put out a contract on that guy ourselves. Well, I can't say I didn't expect this sooner or later."

"My fault. I knew Dahl was a gamble."'

"Uh-huh—with odds they'd be ashamed to quote in this town. I don't like the stakes, either."

"What're you going to do?"

"Find pressing business somewhere else. One thing I won't do is stick around in Reno. Thanks again; and luck, Rhone." Everett turned and moved off.

Althouse stood and watched the big man, wondering if Everett would hide, wondering if he too should disappear as D'Este had already done. He took some comfort in Everett's refusal to blame him for the original idea. But the Com­missioner had known the danger, even while he lent tacit bureaucratic support. D'Este gone to ground, Everett forewarned: better than nothing, yet a poor defense against the fury of terrorism which his own scripts had turned against them all.

An unfamiliar itch between his shoulders made Rhone Althouse aware that he was standing absolutely inert, alone and unarmed in a hotel, a perfect target. Althouse walked away quickly. He did not care who noticed that his path was a zigzag.

THURSDAY, 4 DECEMBER, 1980:

The news magazines spread across Hakim's bed made up in depth what they lacked in im­mediacy. The article before him was satisfyingly thorough under its head, "TV: No More Strange Bedfellows?" It began:

For weeks, every pundit in the sprawling tele­vision medium had matched his favorite terrorism rumor against the rumors in the next studio. The scathing satire on terrorism, newly unleashed and widespread in TV, was said to originate in an oval office. Or, less likely, that it was a propaganda ploy jointly financed by Israel and England. One pollster claimed that the new scripts merely reflect what the American viewer wanted to see.

The truth, as it filtered from CBS last week, was both likelier and stranger than whodunits. There had been no tugs at domestic political strings, and no foreign influence. But in the persons of four highly regarded media men, there was defi­nitely a plot. The top banana, to no one's great surprise, turned out to be NBN^'s answer to Jac­ques Tati, the protean Charlie George. Of consid­erably more interest to media analysts was the reputed anchorman, anomalous FCC sachem Maurice D. Everett (see box)... .

"All bedfellows are strange," muttered Hakim, patting the rump of the girl who slept as he scanned the stack of clippings. He read the four-page article carefully, marking some passages with a flow pen, then concentrated on the verbal sketch of Everett:

The Commission will not provide some trendy new definition of pornography every two years, or even every election year. True, our job is as the traffic cops of broadcasting. Well, we'd like to enter into a sort of public collusion with the National Association of Broadcasters: we won't give you speeding tickets, if you won't be too racy on public information channels. Fair enough?"

These were the closing words last Wednesday in an NAB address by Maurice Everett, the FCC^'s strapping executive-turned-Commissioner. The only son of a Des Moines merchant, his mother a 1936 emigre from Haifa, the eclectic Everett brings a lively open mind and informal clarity to media problems.

Everett, 42, has always marched to the music of a contrapuntal drum. His unpredictability was well-known as early as his undergraduate days in California Polytechnic where Everett switched majors four times while holding his position as second-string fullback. He emerged with a dou­ble major in American History and Engineering, and has not been second-string at anything since.

The Vietnam conflict drew Everett for a tour of combat duty where the towering young lieuten­ant won a Silver Star and, not incidentally, picked up fresh ideas on electronic informa­tion-gathering systems. His subsequent marriage was brief, ending in divorce in 1964.

Everett's career with a Colorado microelec­tronics firm seemed to orient the salty-tongued young executive toward narrow technical areas but, in a clean break with other industrialists in 1970, he thrust his hulking shoulders in with Denver ecologists. Between frequent solo jaunts into western wild areas, Everett championed several hobby and special-interest groups in what, at first, appeared to be playboy en­thusiasm. But Everett, long regarded as one of Colorado's most eligible rebounds, rarely fol­lowed the playboy mold. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment, small sedan racing, cross-country skiing, and bicyclists in a pattern that developed squarely in opposition to the philosophy of conspicuous consumption.

For the past two years a member of the Federal Communications Commission, Maurice Everett had seemed to be settling into a liberal position, confining his aggressiveness to the handball courts, even after a chance encounter with the Pueblo bombing that hospitalized him for a time. But late last week, acquaintance and set designer Dahl D'Este revealed an apparent about-face by Everett. Previously a staunch friend of press freedoms, the Commissioner was reportedly a key figure in the sub rosa group that planned a broad media counterattack on terrorism (see Media). Central to the group^'s strategy was a new treatment of the act of terrorism per se; and to some pundits this treatment was a dangerous excursion into media control. For free-swinging libertarians, the choice lies between the Scylla of manipulated media and the Charybdis of ram-pant terrorism. Whichever course the Commissioner charts, he will create new enemies. Judg­ing by his demeanor last week in Reno, Maurice Everett is losing little sleep over it.

Hakim made special note of the Commissioner's unpredictability, his stress on physical fitness, his military background, his direct methods of dealing with the world. Hakim did not find these details pleasant; the man could be a formidable challenge. Yet the element of surprise still resided with Fat'ah. Presently Hakim riffled through other clippings, finding—as he had expected—invaluable data on his enemies. His sullen longing found focus in names which he listed in alphabetical order: Althouse, D'Este, Everett, George.

Print media made one thing pellucid: no matter how brilliantly successful his coup, the ter­rorist was still to be treated as a charlie, a fool, on television. Hakim saw this dictum as a simple clash of wills. These strategists might give up their brave posturings if one of their number paid the price. Fat'ah might even subcontract the job.

If the fait accompli carried no leverage, Fat'ah could relocate again and try the threat. No hol­low promise, but one steeped in potency. The sort of threat one could employ when the enemy is reduced to a softened target; isolated, im­mobile, helpless. Hakim wondered which of the four he would concentrate on first. Perhaps he could find some means to make object lessons of all four, he thought, and felt a lambent surge of rekindled strength. He turned off the light and nudged Leah Talith. It had not once occurred to Hakim that others, less cautious than he, might react with a blinder savagery.

SATURDAY, 6 DECEMBER, 1980:

Young Donny Flynn drenched himself in mis­givings before he had driven the provos an hour out of South Boston, Massachusetts. It had been all very well to parade these two micks on the streets of Old Southie as his mysterious and powerful friends—even though the elder Flynn himself had never set eyes on them before they showed up, the previous Sunday, bearing the nearest thing to an illiterate letter of introduc­tion anybody could ask for. It didn't matter if they'd written the letter themselves, thought Donny; when you were nineteen and a recent flunkout from Boston College you could use the street status these old soddy friends conferred. Donny had made sure everybody knew he would be disappearing with them for a time, for Something Very Important. But cooped up in the goddam BMW with these jabbering drunks all the way to Colorado? Donny would go out of his gourd.

He remembered his father's confusion when Flaherty, the tall slender one with the voice like a fiddle string, and McTaggart, the nervous red-head, walked into their house in Old Southie. Da kept up with soccer and he read the Irish News, but he wasn't much for writing letters since Ma died and Donny couldn't recall when he had last seen a postmark from Ireland.

Donny had never seen Ireland and couldn't care less. Da spoke less about the Irish question than most of their friends, and was definitely not interested in visiting the country of his youth even though as a machinist in nearby Chelsea, he made enough to buy a nice place and little things like a twenty-thousand dollar BMW 733i. Other people went back to visit. Why not Da?

McTaggart, talking for the both of them, dumped a flood of lilting patter the minute he walked in. He wasn't much older than Donny but any dumb shit could see he'd been around. And if he couldn't see it he could hear it from McTag­gart. Donny had heard it, dropping his Playboy on his bed and putting his ear to the wall that separated him from his father's hobby room. McTaggart's musical brogue was a tune to make Donny smile, but the lyrics did not please his father much.

It was weird: the sound was muffled to begin with, but in addition to the opaque Irish slang of McTaggart it seemed that Da's own speech had curiously peeled its American frosting away so that Donny was listening to a father he had never heard before. Da had laughed a lot at first. And then Flaherty, the older one, had talked a little in that squeaky voice, not much, and after that Dawasn't laughing much and when he did, it had an undertone Donny did not recognize at first. But when he recognized it, he liked it. It was fear. Donny could use some pointers from anybody who could walk into his father's house and im­mediately make his father seem less like a fuck-in' knowitall and more like a man who could listen to reason. Who had to listen.

It was all mixed up with some old friend, a provo, who felt that it was time Da earned his keep. It was the Irish Republican Army, and again it wasn't. Donny might be lost in a classroom but he was bright enough to assemble the fact that provos, of the Provisional Wing of the IRA, had abiding disagreements with the IRA's main body. Jeez, it sounded like two entirely separate armies.

It also sounded like a lot of shit about Da earn­ing his keep and Da had made that point himself. But to the provos it seemed that you assumed a debt, boyo, by leaving the ould sod, especially if your machinist's skills were needed for weapons repair, and most particularly especially if you had planted a tin of jelly, whatever that was, in a London railway depot.

Sure, said McTaggart, an' it was a wee time back, but the sojers hadn't forgot and the fookin' protestants hadn't forgot but, as luck wud have it, ould Flynn had the chance to make the provos forget. And that wud break the chain of memories. All square, all debts repaid.

So Da had decided to think about it. The two micks had seemed to notice Donny for the first time after the talk in the hobby room, Flaherty succinct, McTaggart effusive. By bedtime, Donny was trying to get the hang of their melodious jargon, quick to realize that when Da was working during the day, Donny would be their guide and if he could manage it, their con­fidante. They went to the snooker hall on Monday with Donny, and found new friends with old brogues who helped them become chummily, gloriously drunk while Donny worked to confirm the image of Donny Flynn as a man with connections. But no matter how he hinted and pried, no matter how many stories he began about the swath he cut among the little broads from Brookline to Newton, somehow Donny Flynn was the outsider. He learned, as McTag­gart might say, fuck-all about the provo mission—which was to say, nothing whatever.

But Donny found them happy enough to talk about the United States. They found Boston ac­ceptable, though there was much to be said for Quebec, where they had visited before coming down, legal as the Pope, to see the States. The people in Quebec had a villainous language but they understood repression and martyrdom better, and their connections with rich men in Libya and Syria were excellent. Still, the Irish here in the States knew how to give for a good cause. At least they did until thon bunch of blirts on the telly started blatherin' like eejits, makin' sport of the provo cause.

Then Flaherty made an observation, eloquent for him, that thanks to the newspapers he knew how they could be accountin' w'it.

McTaggart had then suggested that Flaherty shut his gub. It was hard for Donny to tell whether McTaggart was the superior or merely the more loquacious. Certainly McTaggart was the talker. Donny wondered what might be Fla­herty's special talent.

The next nights had been a pleasure since Da had supplied Donny with money and, Jasus, even the car, so he could enjoy himself in Bos­ton. Donny would have loved to know what the men talked about at home while he cruised in the metallic blue BMW, looking for—he tried the phrase—some wee hoore. Actually he took in a movie each night, and remembered subplots so he could inject himself into them to describe his conquest of the evening, in case McTaggart might ask, or might be willing to listen. McTag­gart never asked, and hardly listened at all. It was hard to tell whether Flaherty was listening, the way those yellow-gray eyes roamed from deep in the narrow head. In fact, Donny was beginning to think he had made no impression on the visitors until Thursday, night before last. On that night, McTaggart had brewed up a real Irish stew, all by himself.

Halfway through the meal, articulated at the tail of a monologue extolling the luxuries of Old Southie folk, McTaggart singsonged, "An' ye've been a gracious host, Mr. Flynn sur, none better seein' the bloody great wad ye donated to buy us some proper togs in this cold weather. Mind, the Flaherty and meself, we cud hardly want fer more. But there'll be one more wee askin' fer the cause, and that'll be all."

The harried machinist laid down his spoon with a grizzled hand, wearing an expression of disgust. "An' that'll be what?"

"A car, sur; as the wee lad says, some wheels,"

McTaggart said, with a laughing wink, bestow­ing on Donny a camaraderie he had previously withheld. "A car an' a driver, d'ye mind, it's the papers to drive that we're needin' and between the Flaherty and meself there's nobbut—"

"Be damned t'ye," Flynn said, coloring. "Rent one. I'll buy ye airline tickets, if that's it, and then ye both can—"

"The BMW," Flaherty said then, his thin voice scything through Flynn's anger, scattering it like dead leaves. "Rental won't do, d'ye see? Ye trust the lad to drive. Aye, all he has t'do. On my honor an' then we'll be away on. Yell niver see us more."

There was a long silence, the two provos watching critically as old Flynn, now older than sin itself, picked up his spoon and nodded. "Af­ter that, we're quits,^" said Flynn. "We won't want to know ye."

McTaggart seemed about to take up the monologue again but he caught the look from Flaherty. Donny caught it too, there was enough of it to go around. It said stuff yer gub an' don't tinker wi' yer victory. Donny felt victorious as well. No one had asked him, but wherever they needed to go he was willing, especially cupped in the leather seat behind the wheel of the BMW. He'd take them clear to New Haven, if that was what they wanted. But they wanted Denver.

Denver, for Christ's sake! That was just one stop short of Mars, to Donny Flynn. And his father was willing! Perhaps `willing' was too strong a word, but he was going to permit it, Donny sought one of his new phrases—sure as flies on dog dirt.

Last night then, Friday, Donny's father had drilled him on ice conditions, tire pressures, uses of a credit card, and—repeatedly—on vari­ous cautions when riding with strangers. Donny reflected that Da spent more time talking with him that evening, while the micks were out buy­ing clothes with Flynn money, than he had spent in any previous month Donny could recall. It almost gave Donny a feeling of being dear, val­ued, even loved. For a wild moment he consid­ered saying the hell with it, he'd stay home and maybe talk with the old man sometimes in the evenings, but Donny Flynn sensed that it would not, could not turn out that way. The flesh had its patterns; he knew they would not talk like this many times.

Donny had not helped load the car that night, but packed food and cans of juice into a cardboard box as McTaggart swaggered back and forth to the car, wearing his new trenchcoat even though the weather was mild. Donny packed a single bag for himself, swiped Da's driving gloves and both pairs of sunglasses.

Finally, this morning, well before light, Donny had hurried to warm up the car. Presently Flaherty padded out, followed by McTaggart. Da waved for Donny, who left the car idling and ran up the steps. McTaggart was arranging packages in the back seat. Flaherty was staring toward the house. Donny was about to enter the house but found that Da wanted him to stay there in full view.

In the predawn he could see, on Da's face, a look he had not seen since the funeral in '71. The father put his hands on the son's shoulders, gripped them, seemed about to embrace Donny. He said, quietly, "I can't counsel ye further than this, boy, but if ye ever listen to advice, listen now." There was little of the pure Irish in his voice; it was his Da, but burdened with some new yet old and unspeakable dread. "Break no laws, even speed laws. Don't argue with those two. Think of them as grown children. Your job is to drive, nothing more. Nothing more, d'ye understand?"

Donny nodded, wincing under the steely grip. After a moment his father continued. "Maybe I'm lending ye to them for your own sake, maybe just for mine. I don't know. But the bargain is just for driving. Whatever ye do, do not let either of them put a weapon into your hands."

Donny nodded again.

"Swear it." The grip was excruciating.

"I swear to God I won't, Da,^" said Donny Flynn, wondering why his father's face made him want to cry.

"Ye've sworn it, Donegal Flynn," his father said, and then released him. A gentle fist tapped his bicep. "Ye know our telephone number, if it comes to that. Keep the credit card in your pocket. An' now, get yer arse out to Route Ninety-five afore the weekend rush."

At first Donny was too busy driving to pay attention to his passengers. Once on the interstate route, he began to listen. McTaggart, nursing a bottle of booze, luxuriated in leather cushions and entertained himself with an endless curse on American luxury. Bunch of girnin' soft cunts they were, aye, who'd risk nobbut filthy fookin' money fer the cause.

Occasionally Flaherty responded, snoozing, his legs stretched out as he slumped in the rear seat gloom. Once Donny tried to join in by agree­ing. They ignored him. Boozing and snoozing, they ignored Donny's route past Pawtucket and Providence, ignored his brief panic on the stretch of ice outside Warwick. It was not until he suggested a stop at New London, trying to invent some clever phrase from the bits and pieces he had collected, that they stopped ignor­ing him. He made the mistake of referring to them as oul sods.

The open-handed slap across the back of his head made Donny swerve, sent bright gobbets of light dancing across his vision. "What the fuck kind of answer is that," he yelled, half turning.

"The kind ye earn, ye wee bastid," Flaherty piped, "callin' yer betters sods." Flaherty would have made a good soprano, Donny thought, but a lousy debater.

McTaggart started to cackle, understanding the problem, explaining at great length between swigs that the oul sod was holy, but a couple of oul sods were sodomites. He did not blame Donny for his mistake. He did not blame Fla­herty, either. Flaherty had made no mistake. Flaherty had simply made his point in a way that even a wee lad could not fail to remember. Donny Flynn shook his head to clear it, and remembered.

In Newark they bought the biggest, most grossly oleaginous giantburgers the micks had ever seen, and Donny located two fresh bottles of John Jameson. Donny perceived something ritualized in their insistence on that particular whiskey from that particular part of Ireland, did not understand, and knew better than to ask. For one thing, McTaggart was so smashed he could not have interceded if Flaherty had fancied some fresh offense by Donny.

Donny wondered if the leather seats would ever be the same after McTaggart dropped his giantburger on his fly and, in a rage, ground the mess into the seat before hurling the debris from his window. It was shaping up to be a great little trip, thought Donny.

The following day, Sunday, Donny found it necessary to tell McTaggart about antilitter laws as they sped across Virginia. McTaggart cared fuck-all about that until Donny explained about the highway patrol cruisers that blossomed in thousands across the land like winter wildflow­ers, sitting in hidden spots to surprise the jaded traveler. Flaherty said nothing, only patting the Christmas package, nearly as long as his arm, that Donny had seen carried from his father's hobby room.

McTaggart saw the gesture. "None o' that, ye eejit," he cautioned, laughing; "yell have a chance in Colorado, by Jasus, an' not afore."

Monday, the whiskey consumed, Donny tried to find more John J. in St. Louis, feeling more like a nursemaid to grown men at every futile stop. Bushmill's was heretical, any Scotch just as bad. Donny bought two gray stoneware jugs of local Platte Valley straight corn and smiled at the sight of the two provos, slouching in new but outdated trenchcoats, cradling their booze and swilling it even as they reviled it. They looked wholly harmless, old-faced children in Sam Spade suits, playing at some unfathomable in­ternational game. Donny wondered if their mis­sion was to pick up money from some Denver Hibernian Relief fund. He was a little vague on that; couldn't they do it by mail? Or maybe they were carrying money to Denver, hundreds and thousands of dollars or pounds or whatever, in those packages. Couriers of the night, Donny thought, teasing himself with it. Maybe he was a key piece in some enormous intrigue. Maybe, while the BMW purred across central Missouri, cornfields a ragtag stubble in the hard snow-blown earth around him, Donny Flynn was a romantic figure.

He felt a chill blast of air on his scalp and sighed, expecting McTaggart to dump another load of trash along the deserted stretch. Then he heard a giggle. The next instant he was dodging hot brass casings amid a hail of small explosions inside the car. "Steady on, boyo," McTaggart slurred happily as the BMW lurched across the shoulder of the road, Donny slapping at the spent casing that sizzled between his collar and his neck.

It was a very close miss as Donny turned the wheel into the slide, waited for the Michelins to grip—or for the blue missile to plummet down into the cold dead cornfields below them.

At length, Donny could speak again, so shaken he did not care whether Flaherty liked it or not. "You gotta warn me, goddammit," he pleaded, trying to see what was happening be-hind him. "I thought I'd been shot."

"Had ta check out the oul persuader, lad," McTaggart crooned, fiddling with a small automatic weapon. "Yer da keeps nice toys an' he knows his wurruk, but I had ta check on it, d'ye see? Away on, Donegal Flynn, an' it's a foine thing ye're doin' fer the cause, me lovin' lad."

Donny knew what one of the packages con­tained, now. And knew why his father had called him 'Donegal', a name reserved for use under only the most serious possible circumstances. At every kilometer sign, Donny wished more devoutly that he was back home and away from these knotheaded assholes. It would make a great story, holy Mary it would make him a legend on the streets, only nobody would believe a fourth of it. But in the meantime, he must endure close company with men he wouldn't introduce to a wino. He tried to make himself smaller in the driver's seat, experiencing an unfamiliar emo­tion, neither fear nor anger. It was embarrass­ment.

How could you reconcile their professional standing in a holy cause with the swaggering boozing carelessness of this pair? Maybe you couldn't. Maybe this arrogant self-destructive romantic stupidity was the rule, not the excep­tion, which could've been a hell of a good reason why Da had left Ireland to begin with. One sure thing, McTaggart and Flaherty were the kind of friends your enemies would gladly donate. Why shit, they were worse than those skits he'd seen on TV; a proper couple of charlies.

Well, they'd be in Denver in another day and then, according to McTaggart, they'd do some surveillance. And after that maybe they would go away, or he could drive them back to Old Southie. Donny would do it, would go anywhere they told him, as long as he only had to drive. He would obey his Da. Surely, surely just driving couldn't get him in much trouble.

FRIDAY, 12 DECEMBER, 1980:

Maurice Everett urged his Mini-Cooper up the ice-slick highway out of Golden, Colorado, the rally tires biting hard through the gentle curves. He needed a weekend of solitude. Briefly and with a touch of cupidity he had thought of hiring Gina Vercours to go along. She was a skier, after all. But he had refused that notion, and the snub-nosed piece in a shoulder holster, on the same grounds: they would both cramp his style and they might call attention to him. He had already caught somebody's attention through the postal service but, during his new celebrity, the Denver office had intercepted only the lone ceramic letter bomb. Perhaps he was exaggerating his importance, but he would feel safer spending his weekend at one of the little rental cabins outside the little town of Empire. Even do a little winter stalking, who could say?

The three who could say, kept well to the rear. For a time the driver sweated to keep in sight of the Mini, settling for occasional glimpses of the tiny vehicle as the terrain permitted. There were few turnouts available after the new snow, and the further Everett isolated himself, the better two of them liked it.

Everett chose the roadhouse on impulse, back­ing the Mini in to assure easy return. The flakes were dusting down again, powdery dry on his face. He ordered coffee and began shucking his furlined coat before he realized that he was alone with the counterman. He slapped snow from the front of his winter hat, then saw the dark blue BMW ease off the highway. Everett took his cof­fee with hands that shook, watching through fogged windows as the sleek sedan began to emulate his parking maneuver. No, not quite; the BMW blocked his Mini, and only one of the car's three occupants emerged. Three coffees to go, or one Commissioner?

Everett saw the tall trenchcoated man cradle his long, gaily-wrapped package, speak briefly to the young driver; Everett noted the Mas­sachusetts license plate and used his time wise­ly. He walked to one end of the roadhouse, far from the windows and counterman, and piled his coat high in the last booth, placing his hat atop it. The coffee steamed in the center of the table, untasted bait.

Everett stepped directly across the aisle from his end booth into the men's room, hoping that his circumstantial case was nothing more than that, hoping that the lean trenchcoated man would get his coffee and go on to Empire, or Georgetown, or hell. He did not close the door or try the light switch.

There was nothing he could see in the semidarkness that would serve as a weapon and as he settled on the toilet, fully clothed and star­ing at his coffee three meters away, he felt the toilet seat move. One of its two attachment wingnuts was gone. Gently, silently, Everett set about removing the other, unconcerned by the stench of urine below his nose. Early or late, he reasoned, the audacious bird gets the worm.

He heard the front door of the roadhouse sigh shut, heard a mumbled exchange—one voice had a high lilt to it—at the counter ten meters from him, heard the counterman open a re­frigerator. So Mr. Trenchcoat wanted more than coffee. Cheeseburgers, or diversion?

Under the clank and scrape of short order cookery, Everett heard soft footfalls. He stood, breathing quickly and lightly through his mouth, gripping the toilet lid with no earthly thought of what he would do with it. He felt like a fool: oh, hello, t was just leaving, sorry about the lid, it didn't fit me anyhow . . . And then Mr. Trenchcoat stepped to Everett's booth as if offer­ing his package, one hand thrust into the false end of the package and he must have seen that he was confronting an uninhabited hat and coat just as Everett swung the lid, edge on, against the base of his skull from behind and to one side.

Everett was appalled at himself for an instant. He had drygulched a harmless holiday drunk, he thought, as the man toppled soundlessly onto Everett's coat. The contents of the package slidbackward onto the floor then, and Everett re­flected that harmless drunks do not usually carry sawed-off automatic shotguns in Christmas packages with false ends.

Everett's snowshoes were in the Mini and without them he would be stupid to run out the back way. The counterman, incredibly, was busy incinerating three steaks and had noticed noth­ing. Everett wrote the BMW license number on his table with catsup, though he could have used blood, and wrestled the trenchcoat from the un­conscious man.

The only way out was past the BMW. He hoped it would flee at his first warning shot, then realized that the occupants were waiting to hear that shot. How would Mr. Trenchcoat exit? Backward, no doubt, holding the shotgun on the counterman. Everett's trousers were the wrong shade of gray but he could not afford to dwell on that. The trenchcoat was of a cut he had not seen in years; perhaps they would not think beyond it for a few seconds. Then too, the blowing snow might help mask him for a moment. Or it might not.

He slid into the trenchcoat, which pinched at the armpits, turned its collar up, retrieved the shotgun and checked its safety. Gripped in a glacial calm that he knew would not last, he reminded himself of Pueblo and quashed his fear with one thought: my turn! Everett had time to pity the counterman, but not to question his own sanity, as he moved past windows near the door and turned his back on the door.

Everett's shotgun blast tore a fist-sized hole in the floor and sent a lance of pain through Everett's bad ear. The counterman ran without hesitation out the rear door into a snowdrift, screaming, and Everett backed out the front door fast. The driver of the blue car seemed to be screaming as well. The BMW engine blipped lustily and a voice called, "In, in, Flaherty, ye fookin' twit," and Everett spun to see a red-haired man holding a rear door open with one hand, a machine pistol forgotten in the other. Everett did not forget the weapon and aimed for it. His first shot blew the weapon and a hand out the BMW's front window from the inside.

Donegal Flynn accelerated to the highway, the left rear door of the car flapping open, and Ever­ett fired twice more. The next shot sent pellets caroming through the inside of the sedan and his last was a clean miss. Everett flopped hard into the snow and only heard, but could not see, the shiny BMW slide off the highway. It was a long vertical roll to the river and by the time they reached it neither of the occupants minded the cold water, being dead at the time.

Everett burst into the roadhouse to find that his first victim was still unconscious, a stroke of luck since Everett had neglected to check him for concealed weapons. There were things to set right. The counterman must be tamed, the tele­phone must be used; but first things first. He needed that toilet lid for a mundane purpose, and right now.

* * *

By the time the FBI mobile lab was en route from Denver, Highway Patrol units had things well in hand, had taken a sullen silent Irishman away in handcuffs, had even located the ruined sedan some distance down the river in three meters of water. Everett apologized for a dozen things including his prints, muddying those already on the shotgun; the instantaneous defec­tion of Smiley Bohlen, the counterman; and all the trouble he had caused in trying to defend himself. Despite his unquestioned identity, Maury Everett knew he was under informal ar­rest until the unmarked brown van pulled up outside the roadhouse. The atmosphere warmed quickly after that. Two of the FBI men in parkas mapped out the area while the third, an immacu­late cigar-chewing gentleman named Will Ful­ton, sat with Everett over coffee and a tape recorder.

As soon as a tape ended, Fulton would take it to the mobile lab for a fast-track transmission to Denver. Someone located the weapon Everett had blown from the BMW, which tickled Fulton no end even before its analysis in the van. Fi­nally grown hoarse, Everett asked, "How much longer do we go on, Fulton? I needed a rest before any of this happened, and right now all I want is to get in the Mini and disappear."

"Hard to say," said Fulton, glancing at his watch. "I got a bulletin from the van telling us to wait for a reinforcement. Somebody's flying into Denver, apparently, if the weather'll permit it. Besides, Commissioner, you thought you'd dis­appeared this morning. Care to think again?"

As Everett shook his head, a little fellow in a parka came in with a friendly nod to them both, then dropped a clipboard at Fulton's elbow before returning to the van.

Fulton, shifting the cigar no-hands, scanned the pages at length. "It was a hit, all right," he said finally as if to himself. "A Mr. Flynn owned that four-door BMW in a Boston suburb. Flynn's a naturalized citizen from Belfast, and he's already made a statement. Anxious to cooperate; even more anxious about his son. Would you recognize a facsimile photo when it comes in?"

"Not likely," Everett admitted. "I feel rotten about those two guys in the car."

"Because they didn't get a shot at you?"

"Sounds crazy when you put it that way. There was no doubt about that charlie with the shotgun, though. Was there?"

"None. Just got factual verification of your story; a print tally from him on the weapon. Yours too, of course." Fulton pursed his lips obscenely around the unlit cigar, running a forefinger along the lined paper. "Who's Sean McTaggart?^"

"Never heard of him. Or Flynn, that I recall."

"Eoin Flaherty?"

Pause. Headshake. "Nope. Wait; the guy with the automatic pistol? I think he called me `flirty'; maybe `Flaherty'. But why is some Boston Irishman I never heard of financing a hit on me? Doesn't make sense."

"Flynn claims he'd just met the two Irishers, mutual friends back in the old country and so on. Loaned 'em the car with his teen-aged son to drive it, out of a sense of loyalty. Claims he had no idea what they intended to do here beyond sightseeing:"

"Should we believe in that?"

"Sure; that and the Easter bunny." Fulton lifted a page to read another. "We have Flynn's prints too, and they're also on the magazine we took from the Vzor."

"Come again?"

"Vzor seven point six-five millimetre," Fulton said with satisfaction. "A Czech automatic with magazine, takes a silencer. Little thirty caliber slugs, more or less; it sprays 'em out the barrel like shit through a tin horn. The shotgun barrel was shortened very recently by an expert. And Flynn is a machinist. I'm betting we find metal from that shotgun barrel around his shop somewhere."

Everett put his hands over his face, sighed into his palms. "Why would American citizens be helping these people?"

"Lee Oswald was American. Charlie Manson, too," Fulton said. "But there's more to this attempt than your garden-variety political lunatic, Commissioner."

"How do you know? No, tell me later, Fulton. I've got a case of nerves that won't quit. What if I just drive out a ways, find a motel, and come hack later if you need me? I'd call here and tell you where I am."

The FBI agent inspected the tattered wet end of his cigar, discarded it, and drew another from his vest pocket before answering. "Go out back here and yell your head off for a minute. Cry, if it'll help. I would, and no apologies," he said, smiling candidly into Everett's face. "But someone you know has made you my responsibility until I'm relieved, since I'm senior in the office. Shouldn't be long."

Everett squinted, then smiled back. "Dave Engels," he said flatly.

A shrug. "A minute ago you were curious about something that I can tell you. Yesterday we got some information from a gent we can deport at any time. Jersey City fella; as long as he gets in touch now and then, he doesn't have to chase goats up hillsides in Sicily, or whatever the hell they do there.

"There are a hell of a lot of thorny types in the FLQ—that's the Front de Liberation du Quebec—who funnel arms to the Irish Provi­sionals. Some of the stuff is American, and some like the little Vzor comes from Eastern Europe through Libya and Syria to Canada. Long way around, but some countries are very sloppy about checking imports. Those are the same ones where the Customs people live on tips, like wait­ers.

"So the FLQ is well-placed to be middleman for terrorists. And that's where you came in; or rather, didn't come in."

"You've lost me," said Everett. "Can I borrow a cigar?"

"Long as you don't light it," Fulton grinned, fishing out another stogie. "They stink. Well, early this week the FLQ offered three hit contracts, a matched set, to—ah--certain undesirable elements, all with names ending in vowels, in the Big Apple area. That territory includes Philly and Jersey City. Ordinarily I suppose the contracts would've been fulfilled and we'd have three more unsolved snuffs on our hands, proba­bly from twenty-two pistols they're using these days and don't ask me why.

"But when the local banditti learned the names of the marks—people they were to hit—they turned the FLQ down flat." Fulton cocked his head; one side of his mouth twitched. "I like that; even the Mafia has scruples. You'll be in­terested in the marks," Fulton continued, hold­ing up three fingers. "A script writer named Althouse," he turned down his ring finger; "an artsy-fartsy swish named D'Este, and—" he turned down his forefinger, leaving the middle finger thrusting up in emulation of a familiar TV logo.

"And Charlie George," Everett supplied.

"You got it. Our informant says it was of Charlie who queered the whole job. It was suddenly obvious that this was a political thing, and believe it or not Charlie G. is a favorite of the Mafia boys. Who knows, they may own a piece of him."

"Nobody owns much of Charlie," Everett replied, wondering how accurate he was. "But I'm beginning to get your drift."

"Well, even your corrupt, stodgy old small-minded FBI can add the fourth name that belongs there."

"Mine."

"Only it wasn't. Why not? Then we got the call from the Colorado Highway Patrol about lunch-time, and somebody was awake in Washington, and now we think we know why not. The FLQ knew there was already a group setting you up. They must've taken that contract from another bunch, and had the money, and why waste dough they could use to buy more plastique? You were already spoken for."

Everett stared out the window, squinting as headlights swept the roadhouse in the evening murk. "What does the FLQ do now? What do I do? I mean, do they just give up, or is there an underworld all-points bulletin out for the four of us?^"

Fulton almost laughed. "Nicely put. We don^'t know who the FLQ finally set it up with, but there must've been somebody. Which brings me to some very unpleasant news. But first, I think what you should do is take a new ID. That's unofficial, man-to-man, Mr. Everett. But I think you should let us tell the media you did a long yoo-hoo-hoo over the cliff in the BMW. Flaherty won't tell on you; we can put him on more ice than Admiral Byrd."

Headlights swung toward them as a Pontiac Firebird slithered into the parking lot. Everett slapped the table. "That'll be Dave Engels."

"I doubt it," said Fulton, studying his cigar, "unless he's had a recent sex change."

The dark hair that emerged from the Firebird was unfamiliar, but the shoulder bag and the stride could not be forgotten. Everett began to smile as Gina Vercours hurried through the snow.

Her greeting was offhand, unhurried, anodyne for Everett's twanging nerves. Fulton stood up, a thumb tucked under the ornate buckle beneath his vest. "Good thing I remembered about the weather," she said, stamping her feet as she tossed her wrap over a booth. "It was eighty-seven degrees in Phoenix today. And don't tell me what that is in celsius, Maury," she grinned.

"Gina; still old-fashioned," he said, taking her hand in his.

"And you still don't believe me," she coun­tered, then turned to the other man. "Are you agent Fulton?"

Fulton nodded as she said, "I'm Gina Ver­cours, which Maury will verify, and in lieu of a pass phrase they said to give you this." She of­fered him the tiny tape machine, which he took after lowering his hand from his midriff. "Better than working with Wally Conklin," she added; "I don't have to rent cars, and at the air terminal they hand you a synopsis on tape with a very sex-y voice."

"Can I hear her?" Everett asked.

"Her? Him, fella." She tossed him a mock-suspicious frown. "So what's the drill, gentlemen?"

"Bury him somewhere," Fulton aimed his cigar at Everett, then clamped down on it again.

"What if I hadn't been me," Gina asked inno­cently.

"I'd have been disappointed." Fulton tapped his buckle. "Gas projector. You'd be in barf city," he explained. He took his coat and snap-brim hat, adjusting them with care. "And let us know where you bury him, Ms. Vercours, which means stay near a telephone. We may pick up more information for you. They gave you a phone scrambler?"

She nodded, patting the shoulder bag. As Ful­ton was leaving, Everett recalled their unfinished business, "One more thing, Fulton, if you don't mind. How do you know the Cana­dians found somebody to take their contracts after the Mafia refused?"

Fulton stopped, glanced toward Gina, then took Everett by the arm. Outside, his breath frosty, Fulton said, "Somebody bagged Dahl D'Este about one ayem this morning in San Francisco."

Everett sagged against the railing. "How?"

"That's what I didn't want to say in front of the lady. D'Este seemed to think he could lose himself among all the other homosexuals in the Gay city—Bay City, that is. He must've been cruising the gay strip near the downtown hotels where they make a lot of pickups off the streets. Pathet­ic little guys carrying overnight kits, feet hardly touching the pavement, waiting for a score like any other hooker; makes you sad to see it, Mr. Everett," he muttered, smug and sententious.

He picked up his cadence. "Well, we don't know how the contact was made but somebody got into D'Este's Cadillac with him. After shoo­ing the others off the street, maybe, I don't know how. We're checking. Anyway: A little later the Caddie piled into a building on O'Farrell Street. Must've been moving at a crawl. They found D'Este behind the wheel and an overnight kit on the floor.

"And it smelled like he'd been having an orgy with almond extract. Somebody had snuffed him with a dildo. You know, those rubber dicks they fill with who-knows-what? This one was full of hydrocyanic acid, prussic acid, same thing. He'd taken a full shot of it in the face, and they found the dildo in his mouth. Enough cyanide to snuff an elephant, I kid you not. No prints, just rubber goods."

Everett hugged himself and shivered. "Jesus. Oh, Jesus, what a way to go."

"Show me a nice way; I might take it," Fulton grumbled. He started down the steps. "But pass the word, Mr. Everett: beware of almond dil­does."

Everett, his thoughts racing forward, called out: "Fulton!"

The agent stopped at the van, unconsciously coming to attention. "Sir."

"Have you told Althouse and Charlie George about this?"

"Was Edgar Hoover a fed? Of course, Mr. Everett, we're not amateurs. At least Mr. George knows. Nobody's raised the Althouse guy yet but they'll get to him."

"Or somebody will."

"Is that a fact," Fulton said drily, and slammed the door.

Two minutes later, Gina and Everett were ar­guing. "Anybody could bully us off the road in that crackerbox of yours," she spat.

"If they could catch us in this ice, which they couldn't without a Porsche turbo and front-wheel drive," he returned.

"And besides, how many more crazy Irishmen know you drive that Mini."

"Good God, Vercours, who's the boss here?"

She dropped her shoulders and her voice. "You are, of course. I'll get my things out of the Firebird."

"You will like hell," Everett grunted. "I have the better car, but you have the better argument." He grinned. "Anyhow, the Mini's heater isn't worth a damn. The 'bird it is, ma'am."

They were laughing before his weekend gear was repacked in the Firebird. He drove back down the highway toward Golden, explaining that they needed more food. As they neared the town, she was glancing backward. "When you stop, pull out of sight and face the highway," she suggested.

He pulled in near a market, turning the car end-for-end in a rum-runner's switch on the icy ground. They waited. After several minutes a big tandem rig came steaming past, chains singing on the pavement. Then nothing. "I'll go in," she said; "I know what kind of junk food I like. And you can keep warm with this," she added, laying a compact automatic on the seat.

She was back very soon with a single brown sack, celery poking from its top. Everett eased the Firebird onto the highway, soon passed the roadhouse and his forlorn Mini without a glance. Near Empire they slowed at a neat row of cabins with overhead telephone lines stretching away to the office.

Quickly, then: "None of this two-adjoining rooms crap, Maury. We're together. That's my job."

He nodded and punched the car's nose through crusty snow into the drive. The owner was pleased to rent his best and most secluded cabin to Mr. and Mrs. Marks.

"Soda pop and cigarettes here, Mr. Marks," he said, "but I'll be locking up shortly."

"We'd appreciate it if you^'d patch the phone in so I can make calls directly."

"Can't do that." He found that he could indeed, with a fifty-dollar nonrefundable deposit.

"One more thing," Gina said. "We were supposed to meet some folks tomorrow who love to surprise us—and I detest surprises. If anyone asks for us—" A moment's thought "—tell them we're an old couple. And as soon as they leave, please give us a ring."

A collusive smirk spread across the leathery features. "I got it," he said archly, not getting it at all.

Inside the chill cabin, Everett turned up the heat and found a bonus in the dry wood piled beside the fireplace. Gina, blowing on her hands, checked the windows before taking a portable door lock from her bag. She emplaced the heavy steel assembly at breastbone height, wedged into the facing by a heavy setscrew. Then she made a call, using her scrambler over the mouthpiece, which reduced her conversation to gibberish for any monitoring device. Maury Everett imagined himself as a push-pin relocated on some FBI map, and knew he had no real alternative.

As the tiny blaze began to lick upward into the kindling, Maury turned to study the place. Well-furnished, plenty of blankets, electric range and a decent shower. Behind the cabins, he knew, lay an unbroken white expanse leading into the soaring trees beyond. Too bad he had only one set of snowshoes for his morning trek, but— "What on earth are you doing, Gina?"

"Setting our detectors," she said absently, ad­justing a dial on the device she had taken from her bag. "I can sleep with this little rig, and I don't want to be roused by every passing field mouse."

"That's new Oracle hardware," he laughed, and stood up to see. He explained his history with the firm that marketed her detectors, oddly warmed to find that the little wireless motion sensors were as useful as his sales people had claimed they would be. With one inside the Firebird, a second dropped into the snow outside the bathroom window, and another placed adhesively under the eaves away from steady winds, they would be forewarned of approach by anything larger than a rabbit. Gina emplaced the sensors while Everett rummaged in their groceries. When she returned he had spread the stuff on the table. He saw her turn quickly to sit on the bed, her head down.

"Problems?"

"I don't know," she said groggily, her breath­ing deep and rapid. "It's not time for my period. I just feel like a wet rag." She looked up, hearing him chuckle. "I'm glad it meets with your approval^" she growled.

"The altitude," he said gently; and turned his chair to sit facing her. "Hey, lady, you're two kilometers high, here. Takes a few days before you can scurry around, jock or no jock, without getting spots before your eyes."

He placed a tentative hand on her shoulder, felt her stiffen, patted her once, withdrew the hand. "Prescription is simple: just keep breathin'," he said, and moved back to the table. "Prognosis is simpler still: you'll be hungry as a hoot-owl in another five minutes."

Presently, as he sliced a second hunk of the petrified salami to go with his corn chips, he heard bedsprings creak. A moment later she was sitting across from him, the brunette wig dis­carded, her hair gleaming beryllium bronze in the firelight. "Don't mind me," she said, her buoyancy gradually returning. "When I'm not fully fit I feel vulnerable. And when I feel vulnerable, I am not the easiest person to approach. You know?" Her frown was questioning, seri­ous.

He nodded. "Like being fresh out of videotape when the bridge collapses," he offered.

"At least," she smiled, then sniffed. "What's this stuff?"

He watched her finger the soft disc of cheese he had taken from its airtight tin. "Camembert; Give it an hour to soften, and it makes the worst beer in Colorado taste like dark Lowenbrau."

"Can't just be dead, huh? It has to putrify."

She saw something shatter behind his eyes before he squeezed them shut. He shook off the outward display, turning to stare into the fire. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "That was stupid of me."

Everett told her, inflections low and halting, of the youth who almost certainly lay under swirl­ing rapids in his expensive metal coffin several kilometers away. "I keep hearing him yelling. He was scared out of his sphincter, Gina. I don't think he knew what was happening."

"My synopsis said he had an automatic weapon. He knew."

"That was the third guy, the one in the back seat; the one I—I aimed at."

"Then you didn't actually pull the plug on the kid driving?"

"Not intentionally." He swallowed with an effort. "I'm not like you, Gina. I don't have the killer instinct very well honed." He saw her start to protest and held up a restraining hand. "I've seen you move in when you didn't have to, lady. And I'm grateful, I admire you for it. Wouldn't want you any other way. Okay?" She gnawed her lip and gave silent assent. "But I think, I honestly think I wouldn't've pulled that trigger if I hadn't found myself within spitting distance of that Czech automatic. I was going to round the bastards up. I think."

She began to tear small shreds of celery leaf, placing them atop corn chips like hors d'oeuvres. "And I think we simply have differ­ent views of what constitutes self-defense," she mused, voice low and calm. "You defend only against immediate threat to your life. I have another view: when something has demon­strated that it is ready and willing to screw me good—and I'm wearing my Freudian half-slip there—I'm likely to defend against the possibil­ity; one demonstration is all I need."

"Screw me twice, shame on me," Everett quoted.

"Absolutely. I got screwed twice, 'way back when, and it left me with a sense of shame I don't want to feel again. Ever." the last word intense.

A thin piercing tone stuttered from the Oracle detector. Gina flashed to it, flicked off the audio alarm and checked the tiny lamp glowing on the detector face. "In back," she whispered. "Leave the lights alone but get down." He followed in­structions, watched her check the Beretta before she closed the bathroom door. A musical laugh, barely audible from the bathroom: "Come here a minute, Maury. This, you have to see."

He found her peering through the back win­dow, the scene outside a dazzling blue-white against black. Twenty meters away, a sleek four-point buck stood quartering toward them, the long neck arched up, antlers stark against the sky. "Testing our scent," Everett breathed, lips brushing her hair. They watched in silence for a long moment. "He doesn't want to get screwed, either."

"Is he in season?"

"Not for me. Always, for a camera. Maybe we can track him tomorrow."

"You're out of your mind," she chuckled. The buck, startled perhaps by some faint transmis­sion of her voice, swung gracefully around, sprang away into the trees with vast heart-stopping leaps.

"Nijinsky," Everett said. ^"They used to say his leaps were magic. Maybe he was just part deer."

Moving back toward their catastrophic array of foods on the table, Gina paused to reset the detector audio. Everett found his wine, wrenched the cork out, found two coffee cups and poured, yawning as she sat down again.

"Did I understand you right?" She was smiling quizzically. "You only hunt with a camera?"

"Don't let it get around. Some of my friends wouldn't understand."

"Or maybe they would, which'd be worse."

He swigged the wine, crooning happily. "Much worse," he agreed. "Don't get me wrong: I shot an elk once, to get his hide for a pair of trousers. Could've just bought the goddam hide but if I really needed a set of elkhides I figured it was only right to get 'em the hard way."

"How did you feel afterward?"

"Pretty good, to tell the truth. I packed a hindquarter down with the green hide. God, I was a bloody mess. The trousers turned out to be heavy as guilt, but I still have 'em. And if I ever need another pair, I'll go after another elk. It's all the shit we go after that we don't need; that's what puts my hackles up."

She tasted the wine. "Sherry? Wow."

"Harvey's Bristol Cream," he nodded. "The dirty old men with their Madeira just haven't discovered this stuff."

She slouched in her chair, feeling for the rungs beneath his own, and he moved his legs compan­ionably aside. "You don't need a whole lot, do you," she asked shrewdly. "I mean, you don't chase after much. Women, trophies over your mantel, man-of-the-year nominations—"

"Mark of the year, maybe," he snorted.

"Mr. and Mrs. Marks," she said; "I noticed that. But you're avoiding my interview, Commissioner."

"Ah, yes." Pompous clearing of his throat. "I chase what I need, Gina. Well, hell, sometimes I don't even do that. When my wife left me a lo-o-ong time back, I needed her. It wasn't pride that kept me from chasing her. It was knowing she'd just leave again. I didn't have what she needed, you see. Someone who'd stay down off the timberline and build furniture, mix drinks, mow lawns, lust after a silk tie or a smoking jacket."

That throaty laugh again. "David Engels was right, then. You're solitary as a bear. No wasted effort, no chasing all the lady bears out of raunch season. And definitely, no learning to ride a bicycle just to be a circus bear."

He sipped, took a bit of cheese. "Yeah, Dave's probably right. I'd like to think of me as being like Nijinsky out there," he nodded toward the back of the cabin, yawned. "But deer are gregari­ous critters, full of grace and helium. And they don't hibernate, and I do." He stretched until his joints cracked. "You must've figured out some sensible sleeping arrangement."

"The best. You under a sheet, me above 'em. Best-kept secret of the New England bundlers, or so Conklin tells me. But you go ahead. I'll stoke the fire later and set the detector up close."

He undressed, wondering that he felt no par­ticular unease in her presence. Once she glanced toward him and smiled, raising her cup in a silent toast, then faced the fire again. He doused the lights and, scissoring his legs briskly be­tween the sheets to warm them, heard her low chuckle. "Now what," he asked.

"That's what I do," she said. "Go to sleep." He rolled onto his side, faced the wall. Just parts in a machine, he insisted to the image of Dave Engels. You don't know everything, buddy. Yet the last image he recalled that night was the halo of yellow made by lambent firelight on the mane of Gina Vercours.

SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER, 1980:

He awoke to the odors of omelet and coffee, sat up quickly, noting that Gina evidently slept in a loose culotte arrangement. "Whoo," he rubbed hands briskly over his face as she turned; "for a second there, I forgot all this. Mind-bending."

"Your friends in Denver wouldn't let me forget," Gina replied. "You had a call a few minutes ago. Agent Fulton; I promised to have you coherent when he calls again. Did I lie?"

"Nope, unless you promised I'd be decisive, too." She gestured with a plate and he nodded, waving it to him with both hands. He took the steaming plate and settled it into his lap.

"Don't expect this kind of service every morn­ing," Gina teased, going back for the coffee. "I'm feeling sorry for you today, is all."

Between mouthfuls of omelet: "Why?"

" ‘Cause you're indecisive."

"Did I talk in my sleep?" He had stopped chewing, the cup poised halfway to his mouth.

"No-oo," she said, a full-octave drop within that one word managing to convey mild irritation, bewilderment, and desire to drop what had begun as banter. "Or if you did, I didn't listen. What's got into you—or should I ask?"

He destroyed the rest of the omelet before replying; and when he did, it was with reluctance. "I know what Fulton wants. And it isn't an easy decision. When I didn't respond to his hints yesterday, he finally laid it on the line. The FBI thinks I should drop out of sight, with a faked media release about my going into the river with those two men in the BMW."

"You mean take a new identity? Pretty dras­tic," she said, the hazel eyes unblinking over her cup.

"You have a real gift for understatement. But I've been thinking it out, and there may be an alternative," he said, as the telephone rang.

The scrambler was not perfect, requiring him to speak slowly for clarity. "Thanks, Fulton, I'm fine," he said, grateful that Gina had chosen to take her shower during the call. "Yeah, I've thought about it. God knows how you'd get total silence from that little cook, uh, Bohlen? And I couldn't very well continue to perform my Commission duties from the grave, so to speak."

He listened, nodding as if into a videophone. "I'll take your word for that, but look: what if I were listed as seriously injured?" Pause. "I don't know; Walter Reade, San Diego Naval Hospital, Brook General maybe; whatever sounds con­vincing. You could say I'd been shot or whacked, and collapsed later. Internal hemorrhage, even a relapse from the licking I took at Pueblo. Hell, call a doctor and work it out; I'm open to sugges­tion, so long as it'd let me continue my work through a mail drop."

He sipped the coffee through a longer pause, one corner of his mind occupied with the liquid slither of a nude blonde soaping herself a few paces away. A nude blonde butch, he reminded his libido; forget it.

Then he heard Will Fulton's last suggestion, which made it easy to forget women. "Oh no, fella; that's out." Brief pause. "I can't tell you why, exactly, but the idea lacks appeal. I've been Maury Everett too long. And who'd foot the bills?"

He barely noticed Gina's return, immersed in a debate he felt that he was losing. "Okay," he said at last. "I'll think about it, and you set up a scenario. I'll be around here somewhere until you can convince me this'll work. Remember, Fulton, in some ways I'm like any other working stiff." He watched Gina as she sat on the bed to slip from culottes to slacks, then forced himself to look away. "Sure; and I appreciate it, Will. 'Bye."

Everett would not discuss his problem with Gina until he had thought it out in a more pleasant setting. Over her objections, they canvassed Empire, then Golden, for an extra set of snow-shoes. She objected again at the price, observing that they made the ugliest, most expensive pair of hand-chewed tennis racquets in her experi­ence. It was past noon on Saturday before they were properly shod for the trek, Gina quickly learning the widestance shuffle, carrying her shoulder bag easily for the first hundred meters.

Maury Everett stopped frequently to let her rest, and laughed as she stumbled down a slope. "Lean back until you have the hang of it," he advised. "You're not on skis."

Grumbling pleasantly, wiping snow from her goggles, she moved with him across the mounded blue-white wilderness, pausing now and then to inspect animal tracks. They had cov­ered more than a kilometer before Everett found a sunny overhang sheltered from the wind and, with his clasp knife, cut boughs for insulation. They took off the snowshoes and sat on them, leaning against the green boughs, silently shar­ing cheddar and crackers.

The sunlight was warm on her face, distant peaks sharply visible in the thin clear air. It was no longer so difficult to see how a man of solitary habits might prefer winter in the Rockies, alone, to any other time, any other place. She said as much.

"Only we're not alone; and neither is Nijinsky," he replied, and indicated a copse of trees in a ravine far below. Gradually she traced the patterns that revealed several deer among the mass of conifers, as Everett launched into a dis­course on the fleet animals.

"My fanny's like a waffle from sitting on these snowshoes," she said, shifting, and provoked a lecture on the differences between her bobtailed `bearclaw' snowshoes and the long-tailed types used for less rugged country. Gina suddenly realized that the big man was temporizing, focusing on familiar topics, using her as a stimulus to deflect his thoughts. From what? "My face is frozen in a permanent squint," she said then, to change the subject. "Could we get moving again?^"

Single file, they followed the mountain's contours, Everett taking the lead. Eventually Gina admitted that her stamina was waning again in the high altitude and, after another quiet breath­er, they retraced their path. In another hour they stood in a grove of trees above the cabin.

"Let me go first," she insisted. "I'll wave you in if it's okay."

He hesitated, then shrugged. "I'll never get used to this," he said, motioning for her to go ahead.

He watched her circle the cabin, aware that there were ways to locate and deactivate the Oracle sensors, ways to counter the most sophis­ticated passive system. Gina Vercours herself was the active system that must probe the site. She disappeared into the cabin then, finally emerging to scan the heights where he stood.

At Gina's wave, Everett lurched forward in a shambling lope, traversing the steep declivity in a series of shallow zigzags. Exhalations con­densed in his wake, wafting upward in the still air, and as he trotted in, she was grinning. "You leave a contrail like a 747," she marveled.

"Just out of condition," he puffed, hypervent­ilating. "Can't afford to inhale fast, it'd shrivel all those poor little alveoli."

"I'll take your word for it," she said quickly. "No more lectures, please; whatever's bothering you, suffer in silence!"

He unstrapped the snowshoes, amused, then followed her into the cabin. "Am I all that transparent? Well, humor me, babe; I just need time to get used to new ideas."

She was heating water for instant coffee. "Such as?"

"Such as undergoing cosmetic surgery," he said, and was grimly pleased to see that the no­tion disturbed her. By tacit agreement they eased onto separate sides of the bed, sitting side-by-­side, sipping coffee as they argued the problem out.

At one point, Gina reached over to take the roll of fat at his waist between her thumb and forefinger. If he lost thirty pounds of suet, she joked, nobody would recognize him.

"That's the crux of it," he objected. "I hate being forced to extremes because a half-dozen gangs of charlies want my hide on their walls."

"Then repudiate your stand. You'd have all the media coverage you could want."

He was damned if he would. The very fact of his being hunted, he said, implied that young Rhone Althouse had found an Achilles tendon in terrorism. But between repudiation and a new identity there was an alternative. He could con­tinue as always, but with tight security around him.

That, Gina said flatly, was suicide. "And I won't be a party to it," she warned. "Get yourself another boy, fifteen of 'em. It might delay the inevitable but sooner or later—" she broke off, laid a hand on his arm, not looking at him. "You're not seriously considering that, are you?"

Everett laid his big paw over her hand, turned to face her. "I considered it, yes. But General Patton was right: don't die for your country; make some other sonofabitch die for his. I'm no martyr, Gina." He withdrew his hand, powerfully conscious that she had made no move to retreat from this small evidence of a growing rapport.

Gina levered herself up to sit cross-legged, facing him. The act somehow lent her a gamin charm; in other circumstances he would have worn a wide grin. "So you're damned if you'll repudiate, and you won't paint a bull's eye on your butt," she urged. "That leaves us with a new you. Any other alternatives?^"

"Only the choice between stories that I'm comatose, and stories that I'm dead. I like the coma; that, you can come back from. Only I'd have to come back with a different face."

"Just thinking about it must be a downer, huh?"

It was not so much a fear of surgery, he said; Fulton had hinted at temporary cosmetic techniques. The weight loss was a good idea in any event. He sighed, "I guess I'm just worried about the effects on the few people I care about."

"Ah," she breathed; "relationships." They were silent for a time before she added, "You have a solid self-image, Maury. No matter who you see in the mirror, you'll still be you."

He stared hard at her. "Tell me that when I have a new face."

"I will—assuming you'll still need me." It was a clear request for clarification; even a bit wist­ful, he thought, his gaze softening as he sought the frank hazel eyes.

To avoid making a fool of himself he swung from the bed. "That's your safest assumption of the day," he said. "I have a phone call to make."

Will Fulton did not have every detail worked out, but Everett accepted the story they had con­cocted for the press. Severe head injury during a kidnap attempt, condition improved but still critical, under heavy guard at an undisclosed location. "We can take you to Beverly Hills, Tuc­son, or San Antonio for the plas—uh, cosmetic surgery," Fulton said.

Everett glanced across the bed. "Tucson it is," he said, and exchanged slow smiles with Gina. "But why don't I just drive your Firebird down to Las Cruces and across?"

He frowned at the answer. "Okay, then the lady can do the driving and I'll hide my wallet. That's the way I want to do it, Fulton . . . I'm not asking you to take the responsibility."

There was more along this vein, the FBI loath to take chances on some accidental unmasking of Everett, and Everett determined to have his way. Everett finally terminated the call, met Gi­na's glance.

"What now?" she asked. There was something in her query that was calculated, yet far from cold.

"We head for Tucson tomorrow; and I start losing weight today. Get into your snowshoes," he smiled; "I'll tell you about it on the moun­tain."

She lay back on the bed, flexing the long bare legs in languid sensuality. "Tell me here," she purred. "I can think of better ways to lose weight." Her invitation left no room for misunderstanding.

Returning her smile: "I do believe your sense of duty is boundless." He took the hand that reached up for him, eased down beside her.

"Never think that," she whispered, graceful fingers sliding along the muscles corded at his neck. "I told you I was selfish." She felt his hands on her, tremblingly tentative, gentle in their vitality. "I won't break," she laughed, and thrust her breasts against his cupped hands. Murmuring with pleasure, she kissed his throat and then, her eyes wide and unfocused on his own, traced the surface of his lips with her tongue.

Maurice Everett, maltrained by a lifetime of cinema caresses, roamed weightless in the depths of the artless green-flecked eyes. It was a token of commitment, of sharing, that ravished him in its directness.

"When did you decide this was what you wanted," he asked, his hand moving down the voluptuous swell of her hip.

"When you called me `babe'." she murmured, lips fluttering against his, "and I didn't mind. Shut up and give me."

That lesbian contralto had fooled him badly. The moon was well up before he thought of snowshoes again.

Mr. and Mrs. Marks left their cabin on Monday, after defacing many kilometers of snow with their prints and breaking two slats in the bed. They found a motel in Socorro, New Mexico that night but were abashed into more quiescent love-making at two A.M. by the insomniac pounding on their wall. Tucson boasted a wealth of motels, at least one with a vibrating mattress and naughty movies on television. When Everett showed up Wednesday at the Tucson office of the FBI he was four kilos thinner, randy as a goat, and full of ideas for further weight reduction. Gina Vercours drove the Firebird on to Phoenix. En route, she saw the contrail of a commercial airliner at it lanced toward Los Angeles from El Paso. Gina stroked her thigh and smiled, think­ing of the contrails Maury Everett made when loping over snowdrifts. She did not consider the passengers of the aircraft, who included Hakim Arif and, several seats ahead, Leah Talith.

Neither Bernal Guerrero nor Chaim Mardor were on the flight, having driven the little van earlier with its fresh Quebecois supplies. There was just no way to get surface-to-air missiles through a baggage inspection, not even the little shoulder-fired SAMs Hakim had earmarked for his war on media...

SATURDAY, 27 DECEMBER, 1980:

Charlie George's solution to the security prob­lem was outlandish. He had paid a slather of money to NBN's best sound stage architect and three slathers to several independent special ef­fects crews. The moving van that had backed up to his earth berm in Palm Springs contained twelve blue-tinted, shallow reinforced fiberglass trays, each nearly three meters across; enough structural aluminum to erect a small dirigible; and panel after panel of clear two-centimeter polycarbonate lying atop ultramodern furnish­ings.

It had taken twelve days and over two hundred thousand dollars to put the materials in Palm Springs in holiday season. After another five days of furious labor by picked men, Charlie's atrium had disappeared. Now, in its place, was a pond formed by the interconnected trays, hold­ing eleven thousand kilos of water, complete with fountain and a ridiculous naked cherub for lagniappe. In the geometric center of the pond was a gorgeous rectangular dwelling, mostly clear polycarbonate and white aluminum, conforming to Charlie's idea of a three-holer by Mies van der Rohe. Anyone who climbed the new stairs over the berm could see, though not learn much from, the pair of armed churls who kept house there. He could not see into the fake fieldstone bathroom, which hid the stairs lead­ing down to Charlie's original lair.

The pond and the bulletproof plastic house rested on tubular aluminum columns that rose here and there from the atrium floor. Since the house and pond also had translucent floors, Charlie still had some daylight in the place. The sight of the aluminum maze in his atrium only made him madder, more determined to press his peculiar attack on the shadowy bastards who made it all necessary.

At least Charlie could feel secure behind rammed-earth walls, below the liquid armor, and beyond his stolid guards. He churned through his pre-opened mail alone on a warm Saturday afternoon in late December, fighting post-Christmas anomie, wishing there were some way he could tempt Rhone Althouse from his hideaway at Lake Arrowhead. The highly publicized fates of Maurice Everett and espe­cially of Dahl D'Este had reduced Althouse to something that approached paranoia. Surely, thought Charlie, I can jolly Rhone out of this mood. So far, he had been unsuccessful; even Charlie could not cheer a melancholy gagman.

But Charlie found a way, beginning with the package from the office of Commissioner David Engels. It contained an individualized tele­phone scrambler, and a number with a six-oh­-two area code. He called the number. Two min­utes later he was struggling with tears of repressed joy, partly because he no longer felt guilt over the Everett affair. The voice on the other end had the right scrambler, and he asked if Charlie still lived in a vacant lot.

"Maury, God damn, you sound terrific," Charlie stammered into the scrambler. He carried the wireless phone extension into his kitchen for a beer, knowing he sounded like a manic-depressive caught on the upswing, caring not a whit. "You weren't? It was all hype, the coma, the kidnapping, all of it?" He listened to the explanation, his expressions a barometer of his moods as he followed Everett's tale.

After twenty minutes, a sobering thought began to nag him. "As much as I like knowing you're skinny and tan and full of garbanzos, why'd you tell me? I mean, how d'you know I'm not another jabbering D'Este, God rest him?" He took a swallow of beer and nearly choked on it. "A JOB? You mean a real, union-dues-paying, NBN-salaried job?" Long pause before, "Nobody has to know your function but me, Maury; hell, even I don't know what some of my retinue do. And if you really want to work for nothing, yeh, I see your point; it'd be legal. But don't blame me if you get zapped for conflict of interest, one day."

The woman was another matter, but: "So long as NBN doesn't realize she's an armed guard. If I pass you off as a situations consultant, she can be your aide; carry a clipboard, gopher coffee, all that crap." He listened for another moment. Then, "I'll have to tell Althouse, you know. He'll see you on the sets anyhow and you won't fool him for long."

Charlie listened again, starting to laugh. "I know what he'll say; having the FCC doing unpaid liaison is like having God cry at your wedding ... All right, then, private consulting; don't go bureaucratic on me now, for Christ's sake."

When Charlie broke the connection, his cheeks ached from smiling. He immediately made a call to Lake Arrowhead, a two-hour drive away, and enticed Rhone Althouse to risk the trip. It was news, said Charlie, too heavy and too light to carry aver telephone lines.

There was heavier news to be shared by the time Althouse drove up in his cover identity, carrying a five-gallon bottle of distilled water into the van der Rohe miniature. As Charlie had spoken with Maurice Everett, a traffic watch helicopter had exploded in midair over South Pasadena while airing its live remote broadcast on a Los Angeles station.

The debris had fallen on a freeway cloverleaf to tangle in the clotted weekend traffic, with eight known fatalities and over thirty injuries, including the chain-reaction wrecks that resulted. Eyewitnesses had seen the faint scrawl of smoke that led from the ground to terminate in the aerial firebloom of metal, fuel, and flesh. Again, the group calling itself Fat'ah clamored for recognition of a direct hit with its SAM. But this time the news services reported no compet­ing claims. On the contrary, both the Palestine Liberation Organization and the more recent Chicano `Raza' group called to make specific denials.

It was hideous news, Althouse agreed, dropping into his favorite chair in Charlie's living room. "But there's a meta-message under it," he said. "It says maybe there's hope now. Three months ago, every unshelled nut in California would've been jostling the others to claim responsibility. At least today they're making a show of clean hands for a pure civilian atrocity." He glanced sharply at Charlie. "Now for the good news I risked my ass for."

Charlie told him.

The Althouse reaction was mixed and thoughtful: "I'll be glad to see Maury when I wander onto the set, but—I dunno, Charlie, all of us eggs in one basket?" He lifted one hand, made it waver in the air.

"If you're going to lay Cervantes on me, try Twain: he said put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket," Charlie retorted, pleased to recall his classics.

"Twain was a lousy administrator," Althouse grunted. "It's getting pretty late in the game for aphorisms, Charlie. You and I and Maury Everett shouldn't even occupy the same hemisphere!"

"Aw, Rhone, don't be skittish," Charlie said gently. "We've started a war, right?" He got an answering nod. "So think of this as a nonstop, floating summit meeting."

"All right," Althouse flashed, jerking a thumb toward the sky, "and you can think of that SAM as a commando raid. We're all crowding into L.A. together, Charlie, and God protect us if this leaks to the wrong people." He donned a horrendous prissy smile, spoke in a nasal sac­charine falsetto, "What great big handsome nose-bobbed FCC Commissioner, initials M. E., is hiding out on the set with what terrorist-baiting NBN star? Are they just good friends, or is it one-on-one, fellas?" He dropped the sham and glowered, "That's all you need, bubbe."

"If that should happen, we'd split," Charlie shrugged.

Althouse drew an imaginary line with his forefinger from throat to groin. "You might get split, Charlie. That Fat'ah bunch is getting too close." He stared into the gloom at nothing in particular. "Too damn close," he muttered.

Silently, Charlie scared up a pack of cards. He could think of no better answer.

THURSDAY, 8 JANUARY, 1981:

In the heyday of Paramount Studios it had been easier to locate watering troughs of the grips, gaffers, construction men and engineers who form an utterly indispensable lower eche­lon of the visual arts industry. Yet every shift of media brought shifting locations, and many a gaudy gin mill has passed through its own emi­nence to become musty and forgotten as techni­cians found work, and cheap bar whiskey, in other sections of Los Angeles.

It was Chaim Mardor, moving quietly among the devotees of arts and crafts, who first learned the site of one after-hours bar in current vogue with Industry people. There are many industries north of Wilshire Boulevard, but only one capital-I Industry.

Hakim's instructions to Leah Talith were explicit. "Call me from each location before you make inquiries, Talith. I must know your sequence. These people may have their own security elements and you could arouse interest."

She applied a fresh layer of scarlet to her mouth, cinched her belt to pull the blouse more tightly over her breasts. "How well you put it, Hakim," she said, studying the image in her compact mirror.

He swept his eyes over her body, impassive. "How readily you pose as a prostitute," he remarked.

"A New York prostitute, Hakim. Here I will pass as a secretary. You will see."

He would not argue. "Fat'ah is not interested in failure, Talith," he said. "Make certain your contact has access to the comedian's work."

"It may take several evenings of my time.^"

"Then you shall spend it," he said softly. "Spill no blood, but bring Fat'ah what you can, however you can."

She put away the compact, adjusted her feet to the new high-heeled sandals. Then, subdued: "Pray that I do not have to charm another wom­an."

"Fat'ah does not pray," he said, still more softly. "You will do what you must."

"And repeat the details to you later?^"

"If you would arouse me," he answered obliquely, "learn where the comedian can be reached."

She averted her face, nodding. Leah Talith sought the emotional tripwires of her leader in vain. She had no motive beyond the desire to cement Fat'ah together, which meant that she must please Hakim. Yet she knew his hostility against any prying into his own motives. Many of his actions seemed consistent with simple masochism, and she knew him to be jealous of her flesh. Yet he was able to cloister his desires with a dreadful efficiency. Classroom psychol­ogy, she reflected as she drove away from their Glendale site, was unequal to Hakim Arif.

The bar on Ventura Boulevard was nearly a waste of time. She invented an acquaintance with NBN to cloak her questions in innocence, and heard of a spa on San Fernando Road. Curs­ing the endless urban protraction of Los Angeles, she drove to the suburb of Pacoima, and resumed her inquiry. At last, just north of Burbank, she found in a quintet of listless drinkers two men whose varicolored badges had the NBN imprimatur. They were quiet, middle-aged folk who found less charm in the girl than in their highball glasses, and Talith fought against frus­tration. But the bartender, defending the honor of his turf, claimed the young lady was much too late for interesting conversation. Most weekdays during happy hours, he said morosely, the place was acrawl with NBN hardhats.

The young lady thanked him, nursed her ouzo while she listened to the quintet that steadily plastered itself into the booth. A carpenter from a cinema crew did his best to impress her. She was demure, cool, disinterested; he had nothing she needed.

She returned to Glendale long after midnight to find Hakim a sentry in the kitchenette. Somehow she knew that what she had overheard would trigger arousal in Hakim. "The network has a backlot, a great fenced area, north of Burbank," she told him. "I believe the men were connected with the Charlie George show."

An hour later she slid from their bed to take sentry duty, using her compact mirror as she daubed antiseptic on the marks left by Hakim's teeth on her shoulders and breasts. Perhaps, she told herself, psychology was a useless tool after all. She could intuit the onset of Hakim's savage needs, but despaired of discovering the mainspring that drove him. She wondered what Hakim would do if he learned that her nimble fingers gentled Chaim during the nights, as one might gentle a long-abused stallion. He would do nothing, perhaps. Anything, perhaps. It mat­tered little, so long as Chaim Mardor continued to function in the interests of Fat'ah. A less pa­tient man than Guerrero, modifying their vehic­les in their garage, might have found Chaim's help unacceptable.

Smiling to herself, she slipped to the bedside of Chaim, listening to the measured breathing. Presently, at her manual urging, his respiration quickened. She spoke to him then in their an­cient tongue, gently leading him as he slept. It never occurred to Talith that, in her role as suc­cubus, she had performed a displacement. To Chaim, Fat'ah was embodied, not in Hakim, but in Leah Talith herself.

The next morning, a few kilometers to the northwest, Gina Vercours introduced herself to Charlie George on the NBN backlot and indi­cated her strapping—and foolishly smirking—blond companion. "And you know Simon Kenton here," she said.

"Holy gawd," Charlie gaped, staring hard. In his costume as Idi Amin's twitchy analyst, Charlie was a study in contrasts. He glanced from the big man's stylish sandals to the yellow hair two meters above. "You're new!"

Everett hugged the comedian. "Refinished," he corrected. "We were glad to see tight security at the backlot gate, by the way. Hey, I think they're ready for you."

Charlie moved away toward the waiting crew; glanced back with an admiring headshake. He then proceeded to blow his lines so badly that his director suggested a break. "My mind is well and truly blown," Charlie admitted, taking his visitors by the arms. He guided them to a bench, out of the paths of technicians, and studied the face of Everett carefully. "Even the eyes," he said, bewildered. "I've seen a few good nose jobs in my time but Jee-zus, I'm even wondering if you're really you."

"Panoramic contact lenses," Everett said. "Would you believe they're as good as bifocals? The hard part, they told me, was dickering with my vocal chords. I'm supposed to fool a voice-printer, too."

^"In-damn-credible. Excuse my staring. You look thinner, too; what'd they do to your cheeks?"

Gina began to laugh. "Mostly kept food out of 'em," she said, as Everett strained to look aloof. "That was tougher than surgery, Mr. George. It still is."

Charlie darted a keen glance at Everett. "Something I keep trying to recall," he said, "about the meeting at my place. Somebody was sketching something." He seemed expectant, uneasy.

Everett sucked at a tooth. "No—except for D'Este, of course.^"

"Go on."

Everett spread his hands, nonplussed, then suddenly burst into laughter. "Charlie, you're testing me! You really aren't sure," he accused. "I feel more secure every minute," the comedian replied. But the concern did not leave Charlie's face until Everett passed his exam. The come­dian apologized for his suspicions, to Everett's genuine delight. At the end of the ten-minute break they had banished their reserve and Gina was saying `Charlie' instead of 'Mr. George'.

The comedian's reaction underlined for Everett the success of the cosmeticians in Tuc­son. Incisions at jaw and scalp had brought other subtle changes in the planes of the rugged features, and Gina's companionship accounted for much of the startling weight loss. Dental work, bleach, and a new hair style completed the pro­cess, though nothing had been done to alter Everett's fingerprints.

The name was a conceit, one he had de­manded over the objections of David Engels. He had chosen the name of an obscure early Ken­tucky woodsman, from whom he could claim descent. He claimed it gave him a built-in background, but with his obligatory change in clothing style, knew it was a substitute approach to his mountain-man fantasy. Gina, he found, had been wrong: no self-image could stay wholly unchanged under such an implosive as­sault.

Lunch was a set of informal choices between the NBN mobile lunch truck and a caterer's van, both parked outside the mammoth sound stage. Charlie insisted on buying. "Don't worry about fitting in today," he said around his mouthful of ham and cheese; "just get the feel of the place. We're doing all my stuff on the bacidot these days. Find the head, the script girl, and the union steward, and then you'll know where all the power is." He turned to Gina. "That place you rented: does it suit you?"

"Three exits, one from the patio," she nodded, "and a video monitor to check visitors. Besides," as though auditioning for Little Women, "who could possibly be interested in us?"

"Autograph hunters," Charlie said. "You two make an imposing pair. I might get you both some walk-ons if you like, Maury."

"Sy," Everett said quickly.

"Shit," Charlie hissed. "Sy it is. Keep harping on it." He became his imbecile bumpkin: "I ain't the quickest study on the set."

"As for going in front of cameras, we'll decline with thanks," Everett said, explaining Gina's need to maintain a low profile. "Face it, Charlie, union scale for bit players is a poor trade for the salary she rakes in now."

Charlie studied the auburn-wigged Gina with new interest. "Somehow I thought you had, uh, personal motives."

Gina bit into an apple, chewed a moment before: "Mr. Kenton is, as they say, my main man; no reservations on that, Charlie. But let me save you a lot of unasked questions: my client happens to be a very, very dear friend, and that's a bonus. Still, I am not independently wealthy." She aimed a forefinger toward him to punctuate her next phrase: "And I intend to be. That means I must think about other clients next year, and the next."

Charlie blinked. "You're very direct, Gina. In this business I tend to forget there are people like you.”

"There isn't anybody like her," Everett chor­tled. "She'll con you with a candid serve, but look out for her backhand."

This reminded Charlie of the nearby tennis courts. Before returning to the set, he advised them to get familiar with the self-contained world of the backlot. NBN officials had assured Charlie George that the vast fenced area was secure, far better than a leased location and near corporate offices as well. They had not added that their own security chief disagreed and avoided mentioning the obvious: the backlot was relatively cheap. The new passes gave an added measure of security with their integral electronic ID. It was a measure that diminished geometrically with the issuance of every new pass.

Larry Farquar toyed with his drink after work on Friday evening and assessed the dark roman-nosed beauty through the bar mirror. He had spotted her the previous evening, her huge serious eyes studying a carpenter from Warner's as he tried for a one-nighter that simply was not in the cards. For one thing, the wood-butcher's line was a string of Industry names, dropped like pennies in a trail to his sack. None of those names had done much for the girl, who seemed more interested in the baggy-eyed old NBN guys in the back booth.

But then, the carpenter didn't have the confi­dence of a Farquar, the best damn' electrician on NBN's backlot with a profile just a trifle too three-dimensional to make it through a screen test. Well, Farquar was a star at what he did, and knew that a steady job was as good an aphro­disiac as most girls needed.

Farquar decided the slender, high-breasted girl was not the sort to reveal what turned her on, and this turned Farquar on like a quartz-iodine key light. Genuine or faked, impassivity in ex­otic women was a challenge to be overcome. In­ternally as Larry Farquar moved in, he was buz­zing like a housefly. Leah Talith saw him from the edge of her vision, and waited in the web of her secret smile.

Sunday, Farquar learned from an honest bartender in Burbank that his wallet had turned up minus cash, but with papers intact. He would never know whether he had simply passed out on the bed Friday night, or if the girl had spiked his drink; but whatthehell, she hadn't trashed his apartment or taken his stereo. He retrieved the wallet, saw that his licenses and the new NBN security pass were accounted for, and had a drink to bank the fires of his confidence. He vowed to forget the girl with the dark eyes and the Gioconda smile. If he reported the temporary loss to NBN it would only make trouble. Besides, he had the security pass. How could you copy its electronic ID?

Fat'ah could have told him.

TUESDAY, 20 JANUARY, 1981:

It was midmorning, a week after Guerrero first drove into the backlot to test his forged pass, before Charlie George and his writers were mol­lified with the script. It was a tepid takeoff on an attempted prison break by Raza terrorists the previous week.

The skit had two things going for it: Charlie's Chicano accent was uproarious, and he could do pantomimic wonders as a terrorist sapper trying to wire a bomb and chew gum at the same time. They threw out the line identifying the leader as Irish. It was faithful to the new connections be­tween terrorist gangs, but it was also confusingly unfunny. Charlie fumed inside, wishing Rhone were around to bandage the wounded script. But Rhone Althouse was now ABC. He was also scared shitless.

The caterer's van left Glendale on time as usual, on its normal route. The driver noticed nothing unusual until a few minutes after some idiot girl swerved into the space ahead of him on Glenoaks Boulevard. He heard several metallic impacts as he started away from the stoplight but was not worried until his engine started to overheat.

He managed to coast safely to a stop when the engine seized, the girl in the little sedan now all but forgotten as she extended her lead and dis­appeared into Burbank traffic. He did not see the sedan pass him again, this time with a scarfaced youth at the wheel; he was wondering how his radiator had suffered so many punctures. Neither he nor anyone else had seen Chaim Mar­dor, prone and peering from a slot in the trunk of the little sedan, empty the clip of his small si­lenced target pistol into the radiator of the van.

By low-static FM citizen's band radio, Talith informed Hakim that the baby was sleeping soundly and without complication. She dropped Chaim where his rig was parked in the north end of Burbank, radioed again when they were in sight of the access road that lay between the NBN acreage and a freeway.

Bernal Guerrero replied from the inside of the backlot. All was well at home; the front door had not stuck and the side door would open.

Talith signaled to Chaim with her arm, and both moved over to the shoulder of the road. They took a small calculated risk in stopping, but far greater chances were being taken across the heavy chain-link fence.

The Charlie George crew managed a half-dozen takes before noon and, as lunch vans began their setups at unobtrusive locations away from the exterior set, Charlie's nose directed his eyes toward the new van which advertised hot Mexican food. Charlie's mania for Mexican food had been duly noted by news magazines.

"Okay, it's a wrap," the unit director called. "Eat it!" Charlie threw off his prop raincoat, ignoring the free spread by NBN. He drifted instead, with Everett and Gina Vercours, toward the menudo and its vendor, Bernal Guerrero.

Only one side panel of the van was raised, for the excellent reason that one side was rigged for lunch, the other for Charlie and one of his crew.

The comedian awaited his turn. The latino appeared to recognize his patron only at second glance, bestowed a grave smile on Charlie and said, "For you, Senor Carlito, something special. Bring a friend; there is enough for only two."

Charlie motioned with his head to his tall blond companion. "Rank hath its privileges," Everett muttered to Gina. "If you're nice, I'll share with you." She made a face and turned back to study the unfamiliar food. Somewhere in the far recesses of her mind, an alarm chittered for attention. But it was only something about the food, which did not tally with the Mexican dishes she knew. They were, in fact, Panama­nian. Prepared by Guerrero, mercury-poisoned by Hakim. Not that mercury was so lethal; it was really a matter of tradition.

Had Charlie not followed Guerrero to the hidden side of the van, Hakim could have shot him with the veterinarian's tranquilizer gun from inside the van, through one of the thin silvered mylar panels. Guerrero would then have been obliged to take their second hostage, preferably one known to the comedian, with the hypoder­mic. The second hostage was to be, in Hakim's wry parlance, the `demonstrator model'. But the tranquilizer was a recent fast-acting drug, and its dosage was determined by guesswork. Sometimes the target animal died within minutes. Hakim, peering closely through the mylar, poised himself to choose whichever target Guer­rero left him.

Gina turned, started to follow the men, then was rediverted by one of Hakim's deft touches as entire racks of warm lunch items began to spill from the display racks onto the macadam. She rushed instinctively to help minimize the spillage.

On the other side of the van, Guerrero heard the commotion Hakim had initiated. Charlie's smile was tentative until he felt Guerrero's nee­dle enter his side like a cold lightning bolt. He cried only, "Hey, that hurts," not convincingly, before Guerrero's gristly fingers numbed his diaphragm. Everett spun, had time to wrench Guerrero around as Charlie began to slump before a fletched dart caught the big man high on the left pectoral muscle, Hakim's round a muf­fled slam as he fired pointblank from inside the van.

Guerrero ducked under Charlie George to catch him by the thighs, then lifted, hurling the limp NBN star against the featureless side panel. Guerrero had delayed the operation for days, tinkering with pivots and countersprings until those panels worked to perfection. The panel swung inward, dumped Charlie at the feet of Hakim, and swung shut again. Hakim snatched up his stockless submachine gun and swung it toward the laughing group whose own minor panic had masked the sounds from Charlie's side of the van. Hakim would squeeze the trigger, a spray of forty rounds into their faces, the instant Guerrero dumped the second hostage inert at his feet.

But Everett, knocked too breathless by the dart to cry aloud, was a bigger specimen than Fat'ah had expected and was slow to succumb. He found the dart, gasping, tore it from his flesh, and took a step toward Guerrero whose foot caught him squarely in the crotch. The Panama­nian whirled him by his collar, slammed him against the panel, finally managed to thrust him inside, though mauled by the long legs that kicked as Everett began to lose consciousness. Hakim spat the single code word, "kuwa, power," and dropped over the struggling blond giant to smother his hoarse cry.

Guerrero rounded the rear of his van to find Gina Vercours stacking food on the lip of the narrow counter. "Charlie, Sy," she was laugh­ing, "come see what we've got.^"

Guerrero made a gesture of helplessness, said, "Keep it," and dropped the side panel which sideswiped Gina's head as it fell. She dropped to her knees as Guerrero reached the driver's seat and a technician, aghast, leaped to Gina's aid.

Guerrero was hard-pressed to keep from draw­ing his Browning parabellum sidearm because he could hear, two hundred meters away, screams from the script girl who had seen it all.

The van squealed away as Gina, swaying to her feet, realized who was missing and where they must be. She fumbled in her shoulder bag for a heartbeat too long and Hakim, locked against his second victim, heard two rounds from the Beretta ricochet from the chassis beneath him. She had missed the tires, and knew better than to fire blindly into the van's rear panel.

Gina, staring helplessly after the careening van, replaced the Beretta before she retrieved the tranquilizer dart, holding it by its needle tip with a tissue. "Warn the gate and get me to a tele­phone," she slurred, dizzied by the blow against her temple. All the way to the sound stage, two thoughts vied for primacy in her head. They were, I've lost Maury, and I've lost my job. She could not decide which thought had occurred first.

As the van howled between two of the hangar-like sound stages, Guerrero bore far to the right to begin his left turn. He had thirty seconds on his pursuers but Hakim had made it clear that they must expect communication between the exterior sets and the guarded backlot gate. Guer­rero smiled, hearing Hakim's curses as he strug­gled with dead weights greater than his own, and sped toward the perimeter cyclone fenc­ing. Outside the fence was the access road, de­serted except for a small foreign sedan and a larger car towing an old mobile home. These vehicles were motionless.

Guerrero slapped the button in plenty of time but was not gratified. He slapped it again, then pressed it with a rocking motion as he tapped the brakes hard. Five meters of cyclone fencing peeled back as the bangalore torpedo at last ac­cepted its microwave signal, and Guerrero felt the pressure wave cuff the van. He angled through the hole, negotiating the shallow ditch with elan, and exulted in his choice of a vehicle with high ground clearance. As he made a gear change, accelerating toward escape, he could see Chaim in his outside rearview, dutifully tow­ing the decrepit mobile home into position to block immediate pursuit along the access road. For once, Chaim Mardor performed above ex­pectation, the mobile home teetering for a mo­ment before it rolled onto its side, a barricade stretching from the ditch to the opposite side of the road.

Talith waited for Chaim in her small car, the only vehicle of their regular fleet that was not a van. Guerrero waited for nothing, but tossed quick glances to check the possibility of air sur­veillance. Van Nuys airport was soon sliding past on his right, and they would be vulnerable until he reached the state university campus where their other vans waited.

Minutes later, Guerrero eased the van into a campus parking lot. Hakim was ready with the crate and together they wrestled their burden, the bulk of a refrigerator, from their vehicle into the rear of a somewhat smaller van. As Hakim urged the smaller vehicle away, encouraging its cold engine with curses, Guerrero wheeled the kidnap van across the lot and abandoned it along with his vendor's uniform. It might be many hours before the abandoned van was noticed, among the hundreds of recreational vehicles on the campus. Guerrero knew what every undergraduate knew: a recreational vehicle was lim­ited only by what one defined as recreation.

He moved then to his last vehicle change, flex­ing his hands in the thin gloves as he waited for the engine to warm, for the flow of adrenaline to subside, for the next item on his private agenda. He had carefully planted Hakim's fingerprints on the abandoned kidnap vehicle after wiping away his own. On the other hand, Hakim had given him only a public rendezvous some kilometers to the west in Moorpark and not the location of the new Fat'ah site which, Guerrero knew, might be in any direction. Hakim's monolithic insistence on sole control was a con­tinuing problem, but Guerrero had to admit the little palo blanco was thorough. He checked the time and grinned to himself; it wouldn't do to be late picking up Chaim and Leah. Guerrero's mas­ters were thorough, too.

By six PM, Hakim was so far out of patience that he fairly leaped from his seat in the Moor-park bus station at his first sight of Guerrero. The Panamanian bought a newspaper, saw Hakim stand, then ambled out into the street. It was too dark to read the fine print but, waiting for Hakim to catch up, Guerrero saw that they had once again made the front page above the fold. Fat'ah still had friends in print media—whether they knew it or not.

Though Guerrero walked slowly, Hakim sounded breathless. "I told the girl to make ren­dezvous," he said, as they paused for a stop-light. "And you are four hours late!"

"The Americans had other ideas," Guerrero growled convincingly. "Talith and Chaim tried to run a blockade."

"Escape?"

"I was lucky to escape, myself. They were cut down, Hakim."

Hakim's voice was exceedingly soft. "This you saw?^"

"I saw. It may be here," he lied again, brandishing the folded newspaper, ready to grapple with the Iraqi if he saw his cover blown. Hakim Arif only looked straight ahead, and fashioned for himself a terrible smile.

They walked another block, forcing them-selves to study the window displays, checking for surveillance as they went. "The hostages will be conscious again soon," Hakim said as if to himself. "They will be noisy, no doubt. Your delay forced me to inject them again." Then, as a new possibility struck him: "Was your van com­promised?"

Guerrero gave a negative headshake, very much desiring to keep his own vehicle. "It is just ahead there," he indicated. "Do I abandon it now?" Always, he knew, Hakim was perversely biased against an underling's suggestion. He had seen it work many times for Leah Talith; but Talith would use it no longer.

"We have expended twelve thousand dollars in vehicles, and two Fat'ah lives this day," Hakim snarled. "No more waste. Stay here, wait for my van, then follow."

Guerrero nodded and sauntered to his parked van as Hakim hurried away. He knew that dis­tant friendly eyes were on him, but made no signal. One cigarette later, the latino saw Hakim's vehicle pass. He followed closely in traffic, then dropped back during Hakim's double-back maneuvers. When Hakim was satis­fied that only Guerrero was following, he turned north onto Highway Twenty-three toward the mountains.

Well beyond the town of Fillmore the lead van slowed abruptly, loitered along the highway until it was devoid of other traffic. Then Hakim swung onto a gravel road. Guerrero sensed that they were very near the new Fat'ah site and philosophically accepted his inability to share that suspicion with the men he reported to.

After two kilometers they turned again, and Guerrero saw that the new site was a renovated farmhouse in a small orchard. He hurried to help Hakim unload the crate at the porch, ignoring the awful sounds from inside it. Only when the crate was opened in the house did Guerrero learn why the massive blond hostage, gagged and tightly bound, was such a noisy passenger.

On both hostages, the legs had been taped flexed, so that muscle cramps would almost cer­tainly result. More tape looped from necks to thighs, assuring that tall men would make smal­ler packages. Heavy adhesive bands strapped arms across their chests, the left hand of the second hostage heavily retaped over a crimson­and-rust bandage. Guerrero did a brief double-take, rolling the captive over to see the maimed left hand. Both hostages were conscious. Despite his gag, the injured hostage moaned at the rough movement. From Guerrero, a sigh: "Will you rid the world of fingers, Hakim?"

The Fat'ah leader knelt to examine the ban­dage while Charlie, eyes wide in horror as he saw the hand of Maurice Everett, tried to speak through the gag. "An ancient and honored custom, my friend," said Hakim, smiling, and back-handed Charlie viciously to quell the interrup­tion. "I mailed his left small finger by special delivery to the National Broadcasting Network people. I added a promise to forward more pieces—some of them yours—until my demands are aired," he continued, staring into Charlie's face as he spoke. He wheeled to regard Guerrero. "I might have delivered it myself while waiting for you!"

"Your demands, not Fat'ah's," Guerrero mused aloud.

"I am Fat'ah," almost inaudible.

"It is reducing itself to that," Guerrero agreed ambiguously, then blunted the goad. "What may I do now?"

Hakim retained a precarious control. "Famil­iarize yourself with the house, cook a meal, mind your tongue if you would keep it. I shall arrange for our guests to—entertain us."

As the dusk became darkness, Guerrero found that the nearest lights were over a kilometer away, too far to carry the sounds of Charlie George's interrogation. The Panamanian took his time, kept away from the torture room, and waited for Hakim to kill their captives in outlet for his frustration. It sounded as though Hakim was devoting all his attention to the comedian. When the screams subsided, Guerrero began to heat their stew.

Charlie George had more stamina than either of them had thought. He managed to walk, a tape-wrapped garrotte wire looped as leash about his throat, to the table, but fell trying to sit in the folding chair.

Hakim's smile was a beatitude, so well did his captive behave. Charlie's nose was a ruin, his right ear torn—"It will come off anyway," Hakim chuckled—but his mouth had been left equipped for conversation. He was not disposed to eat and his hands shook so badly that Hakim laughed; but Hakim needed say only once, "Eat it all," softly. Charlie George ate it all. The sec­ond captive, trussed with tape and wire, moaned unheeded in the torture room, a supply of parts which might be maintained or dispensed at Fat'ah convenience. He was, Hakim felt, of only secondary importance.

Hakim produced a huge chocolate bar for des­sert and helped eat it. He felt no desire or need to deny himself the stuff, while the garrotte wire was in his hand. After the chocolate: "An hour ago, you maintained that this satire is too wide-spread to halt," he prodded the exhausted Charlie, "and I say you will halt it, piece by piece."

"You underestimate their greed," Charlie replied, scarcely above a whisper. From time to time he clenched his teeth hard. "Every night-club schlepper in the Catskills is inventing stealable material—and the public loves it." he managed something that could have been a smile. "You're a smash, Charlie."

"You will call me `Hakim'." The Iraqi flicked the garrotte wire, then looked at the wall a mo­ment. "And the new series you mentioned? What is the investment?"

"One on ABC, one on CBS," Charlie said. "Buy 'em off if you can. Start with ten million apiece; they'll laugh at you." With this unfortu­nate phrase he trailed off; exhaustion tugged at his eyelids. Hakim reached out with delicate precision and thumped the bloody ear. "Ahhhh—I don't see what you gain by torture," Charlie grunted. "I have no secrets." It was not a lie. Nor was it accurate.

Guerrero, taking notes, gestured at the captive with the butt of his pen. "Perhaps you do not know what you know."

"And perhaps you are being punished," Hakim murmured.

"What else is new," Charlie said, and was rewarded by a sudden tug on the wire. "Sorry," he managed to croak.

"Repeat after me: 'I beg forgiveness, Effendi'," Hakim smiled, and tugged again. Charlie did it. "Now, the amputee in the next room," Hakim continued. "What is he to you?"

The uncomprehending gaze became wonder as Charlie grappled with a new surmise. "Sy? Simon Kenton?" Charlie steeled himself for the garrotte.

"If that is his name. He is a close friend?"

Charlie swallowed. "We get along; I don't hunger for his bod. He's a consultant; why is he here?"

"You will not question Fat'ah," Hakim thumped the ear again, almost gaily. Charlie, through his agony, caught something subtly in­quisitive as his gaze swept past the face of Guer­rero. The Panamanian said nothing. Hakim pressed on with, "But the network will know him by the fingerprint." It was a question.

"They have his prints but he's my con­sultant—like twenty other people from time to time."

"Now tell me again how NBN amassed those tapes to be aired in the event one of their people was taken." With the change of topic, Charlie felt surer that the disguise of Maurice Everett had not been penetrated, that Fat'ah had kidnapped a major enemy by a fluke and still did not know it.

But how long before newspapers, in their zeal for all the news, made these murderous fanatics a present of the crucial datum? Perhaps Charlie could temporize, could claim he did not recog­nize Everett in his new guise, could hope for clemency. In his heart, Charlie knew it was all a crock of shit. They would tear him to pieces when they found out. Unless Everett's contacts could do a nose-job on the news, too. It was possible. Not likely, but...

Charlie, glad to change the subject, repeated the truth about NBN's contingency tapes. The networks had all considered the possibility that their stars might be ransomed, or worse, by ter­rorists. They would feel no pain.

The hostages would absorb all of that.

Hakim probed for some weak point in network thinking, asked questions that sometimes led nowhere. Eventually he saw that the answers were becoming more disjointed, less useful, and led the unprotesting Charlie to the torture room.

Guerrero saw the captive trussed flat on a ta­bletop, feet toward the door, before Hakim was satisfied. Guerrero kept the butt of his ballpoint pen aimed at the doorway, putting away his gear as Hakim returned. Slumped in a corner, radiat­ing silent hatred, the second captive gripped his wrist and stared at nothing.

"I will set up the media center," Hakim said mildly. "You will feed the big one, Kenton, then install this lock on their door." He handed Guer­rero a heavy push-bolt affair.

Guerrero ascertained that `Kenton' could feed himself with one hand temporarily freed, saw in the steady motions a reservoir of strength. He offered the big man a glass of water which was emptied in one draught, and reclaimed the glass by spreading his fingers inside the rim. Hakim had not seen the exchange. Guerrero caught the captive's eyes with his. "You are wondering how you can surprise me while securely lashed with wire, Senor Kenton," he said evenly. "Of course, you cannot. Even if you could, you cannot surprise us both. You would be dead in sec­onds if you tried. It would be small loss. Suit yourself," he added.

"I hear you," was the growled response. No promises, no pleas, no hollow threats.

Guerrero had seen the same stolid calm in corridas, as a wounded Miura waited for the matador to make one little mistake. But Bernal Guerrero had graduated from Panama by making very few mistakes. "Just remember that I know, and Hakim knows, what you are wondering," he said.

Guerrero was wrong. Everett was wondering why they called him `Kenton' even after captur­ing him; why the Iraqi had grilled Charlie George about so many things without once men­tioning Maurice Everett; whether it was all part of the torturer's art to wear him down by forcing him to stay in the room, to hear the guttural screams of a friend in agony without being able to cover his ears.

It simply had not yet occurred to Everett that he was a target of purest opportunity, a means to distribute more tokens of Fat'ah power and Fat'ah horror without killing the comedian too quickly. Everett considered the care with which Guerrero had handled his water glass. Not with aversion, but with delicacy, as though his own use of the glass had made it special. Yet all he had given it were smudges. Fingerprints. And why study those when they already had him?

Unless they didn't know they had him.

A filament of hope began to glow in the core of Everett's being. He did not think Fat'ah had ac­cess to print files. In this he was correct, but at certain levels of international quid pro quo, a more potent organization than Fat'ah did have access.

Guerrero set about clearing the bowls away, taking care with the water glass, as Hakim brought his HP unit and media monitors in. "I saw lights of a village from the porch," Guerrero reported. "With only two of us left, you might brief me to that extent."

"I might—when you need to know. Informa­tion is at a premium now, is it not? We have not even a telephone here. But no matter," he said, setting his small portable TV sets up. "We can do what we must."

Guerrero paused, framed another guarded question, then thought better of it and went after tools for the door lock. From his van, he saw that the windows of the torture room were boarded. Returning with the tools, he installed the simple lock, pausing to watch the monitors with Hakim. There was no mention of a shootout between Claim and police—naturally—but there was also absolute silence on the daring daylight abduction of Charlie George and the consultant. Guerrero saw Hakim's subliminal headshakes and was emboldened; the Iraqi might have doubted Guerrero's story if the kidnapping, but no capture of Fat'ah elements, had received major coverage. As it was, Hakim focused only on television as his primary source of dis-, mis-, and non-information.

When the last newscast was done, Hakim read and made notes on alternative courses of action, now and then consulting the HP unit which lay among his media equipment. The HP told Hakim what he already knew: Fat'ah was nearing bank­ruptcy now.

At last Hakim put away his tools of strategy, ascertained that Charlie George was breathing heavily, and sought his own bedroll. Then, for the first time, he missed Leah Talith until he thrust the image of her youthful body from him. ^"We shall see, tomorrow," he said to the sentry, Guerrero. Then he fell into a sleep of confidence.

The next morning, there was still no news of theabduction on television. Hakim made a quick trip into town for newspapers and chocolate, vaguely aware that his supremacy over the hostages permitted him to relinquish some control over his simpler desires.

The Panamanian checked the lashings of his captives as soon as Hakim was gone, loosening the wire that looped from behind Everett's knees to his neck. He withdrew the Browning automa­tic from his waistband, held it up, then replaced it. "A unique weapon," he said. "A bit heavy, but it carries seven rounds for each of you. See that you do not move closer together. I shall be back immediately."

They heard the bolt grind into its socket, heard the floor creak and the door slam. Charlie, taped supine to the table, moved his head to see his friend staring back at him. Neither spoke until they heard the engine of Guerrero's van start, a peculiar whine piercing its throb.

"He's leaving," Charlie wheezed.

"No he's not. Probably bugging us from outside."

Charlie considered the possibility. The engine note was unchanging, a fast idle. "Sorry I got you into this," he said, choosing his words carefully. "It's not as if you were responsible for it."

"I'm beginning to think you're right," was the reply. "But they're gonna snuff me anyhow."

"Maybe not. You have a better chance than I do, sure as your name is Simon Kenton.^"

A nod to Charlie. "Maybe if I stir around a bit I can get circulation going." With heels and rump, he began inching toward Charlie.

Charlie knew the words had covered another intent, but: "You can't chew wire, Simon. And there's dust on the floor." Fear in the voice. It was a thinly disguised plea. "I'm sorry, Simon."

After a long hesitation: "It was just an idea."

"Not one of your better ones." Charlie flexed his left hand, twisting the wrist within the tape. "How's your hand," he continued, straining to see if his motion was visible from the corner.

"Hurts like a bastard," Everett replied. "Not as healthy as yours."

Charlie continued to strain against the tape, perspiration aiding him as he gradually worked his wrist free of the adhesive which still bound him, like a manacle, to the table. A few moments later, Charlie heard the engine die outside. "I don't think we can play out this hand, Simon."

"They'll deal us another one."

But it was several minutes before Guerrero returned, sliding the bolt loose and waiting a full minute before he flung the door open. He eased to a vantage point that let him view the recum­bent Charlie, risked a quick look toward the corner, then walked in, the Browning drawn.

From the corner, "You don't take just a whole lot of chances."

"More than you know," Guerrero laughed, his spirits strangely buoyant. He strode to the corner and replaced the wire around the big man's throat with one hand, the muzzle of the automa­tic against the stubbled jaw. When he had tested the bonds of Charlie George, he added more tape. He chuckled ruefully to see Charlie's wrist raw from its struggle. "I would do the same as you, Carlito," he said, retaping, "but I would expect punishment for it."

"You don't think I'm being punished enough?"

"I think this conversation is pointless." From outside came the sound of an approaching vehi­cle. Quickly, Guerrero stepped to the next room, leaving the door open as he moved to a window. "Hakim is prompt," he said.

"You know what I think," Charlie said softly. "I think that sonofabitch is afraid to talk to us." Charlie was partly right. But Guerrero did not need to talk to them so long as the equipment in his van functioned properly.

Hakim's morning newspapers carried headlines on a reported kidnapping, although televi­sion sources still refused comment. Hakim released the comedian, his wrists taped, ankles hobbled, and forced him to eat a mighty breakfast—which was also lunch. He smiled fondly as Charlie complied. Charlie had bled a little during the night and morning but, Guer­rero judged, not nearly enough. Hakim seemed content to sit in their orchard site until their food ran out.

Only once did Charlie attempt to reason with his captor. "Look, you^'ve made your point with that poor devil in there," he jerked his head toward Everett in the torture room. "We don't even know where the hell we are. Maybe if you took him blindfolded and released him somewhere. It'd be a sign of good faith to—"

Instantly Hakim was on his feet, eyes glaring in a bright vacancy. He drew his knife from a pocket, rushed into the other room. Charlie heard a cry subside into a long groan before the Iraqi returned, flinging something onto Charlie's plate. "Shall I force you to eat that?"

It was a small piece of scalp, pinkish gray on the underside, the blond hair flecked with blood. Charlie George closed his eyes and swallowed convulsively. He shook his head.

"Good faith? That is the sign of my faith," Hakim said, his breathing very deep. "At your next suggestion you will dine on your friend Kenton." He then described the meal in detail.

Charlie saw that he was in the hands of a rabid animal and kept shaking his head long after Hakim moved away.

It was some time before Hakim thought to have Guerrero tend the new wound, and by that time the captive was faint from loss of blood. It was not a killing wound, Guerrero decided; but like all scalp wounds it had bled excessively. As usual, he said nothing.

The early evening news was innocent of Fat'ah, but Hakim was ebullient, hinting at his motive for optimism. "Your new show time is at eight tonight," he reminded Charlie. "If your people place any value on you, we shall have what we demand."

"The show was taped in pieces weeks ago, you know," Charlie replied, constant pain from his broken nose diluting his voice. "Before they moved us to Wednesdays, even. They don't have to worry about dead air."

"I shouldn't talk so casually about pieces or death if I were you," Hakim rejoined. "I shall bet you one ear that we get coverage."

Charlie made no reply, but tried to read a paperback which Guerrero had discarded. Shortly after his own show began, the captive showed signs of distress. Hakim handed the leash wire to Guerrero who waited in the bathroom while Charlie lost his supper. The audio was up, the door nearly closed. Guerrero took a calculated risk.

"You will not leave here alive, Carlito. If you hope, throw that up, too."

Charlie knelt, face in his hands as the ear began to bleed afresh, rocking fore and aft. Muffled by his hands: "Why d'you think I'm so puk­ing scared? NBN won't cave in; we agreed on that tactic. I wish I could retract it now but I can't. And if I could, they still wouldn't." He looked up through streaming silent tears, his hands bloodily beseeching. "And if they would?"

"You would still die," Guerrero said, wonder­ing if it were true. "It is an ancient custom among the bedouin to dismember their captives. Hakim is a bedouin in his heart."

"What can I do?" It was an agonized whisper.

"Die. Slowly, appeasing him, in a week; or quickly, avoiding pain, if you anger him enough." Their eyes met in a long moment of communion. Charlie retched again briefly, and the moment passed.

The Charlie George Show passed as well as Charlie sat near Hakim, the garrotte wire in place. There was no reference to the kidnapping until the end of the show. Charlie normally traded jokes with his audience for a few mo­ments but, instead of the sequence Charlie had taped, his rotund second-banana comic ap­peared. Standing before a familiar logo, a fiercely satirical sketch for which Dahl D'Este had paid with his life, the chubby comic mimicked a gossip columnist with barbed one-liners. Finally, he said, there was no rumor in the truth—his tongue pointedly explored his cheek—that Charlie and a friend were in a plummet conference with stagestruck terrorists. They wanted a big hand, but Charlie's boy only gave them the finger.

Hakim watched the credits roll, snapped off the set, and treated Charlie George to a malevo­lent smile. "You win," he said, "and you lose."

"You got coverage," Charlie husked, "and anyhow, you^'re going to do whatever you want to. NBN got your message, and you got theirs.^"

"I have other messages," Hakim said, and spat in Charlie's face.

Charlie saw cold rage in the zealot eyes and accepted, at last, that the network would not save him from consequences of events he had shaped. He spoke to Hakim, but looked at Guer­rero. "Have it your way, you pile of pigshit. We did a skit on that: used your profile on a sow's merkin, it's the only coverage you rate—"

The garrotte cut off the sudden tirade. Without Hakim's tape over the wire, Charlie would never have drawn another breath, as Hakim used the leash to throw Charlie to the floor. Hakim held the wire taut, kicking expertly at elbows and knees until his victim lay silent and gray on the red-smeared floor. Hakim squatted to loosen the wire and nodded with satisfaction as the uncon­scious man's breathing resumed in ragged spasms, the larynx bruised but not crushed. Guerrero kept his face blank as he helped drag their burden into the torture room, then laid his ballpoint pen on a shelf while Hakim trussed Charlie to the table. In the corner, surrounded by the odors of close captivity, Everett breathed un­evenly as he slept.

"Keep them alive for awhile," Guerrero urged. To his dismay, he heard Hakim grumble assent.

"The comedian must not cheat me of his awareness," the Fat'ah leader explained, "when I take more souvenirs." He paused, studying the inert hostage, then jerked his gaze to Guerrero. "What was he really saying, Guerrero? Damn you, or kill me?"

"Does it matter what the tree says to the axe?"

"If only your questions were all so cogent," Hakim laughed. "That was worthy of El Aurans himself—he who understood pain so well. No, it does not matter. Feed Kenton when he wakes. Let him eliminate his waste elsewhere. Tomor­row the comedian will be replenished, and wrung empty again." Hakim turned in im­mediately. He did not hear the engine of Guer­rero's van cough to life an hour later, its exhaust further muffled by a cardboard box.

THURSDAY, 22 JANUARY, 1981:

The man they knew as Kenton woke crying a name. It sounded like 'Jeana', thought Guerrero, forcing himself alert after only four hours of sleep, He handed a cup of cold soup to the bloody wreck of a man and returned to the kitchen, grumbling like a servant. He had taken an enormous risk in contacting his superiors but, he reflected, he was amply repaid in informa­tion.

Charlie was half-dragged to their morning meal; one arm useless, the other barely functional. He moaned softly as Guerrero and Hakim attacked their cereal. Then Hakim, using his own traditionally unclean left hand in private amusement, gravely took Charlie's spoon and began to feed him. Charlie knew better than to refuse, saying only, "You are one strange man."

"You must continue to function—and it is easy to be polite to an inferior. Another thing," watching Charlie's difficulty in swallowing, “your schoolboy taunts will not compel me to kill you. Fat'ah is not compelled. Fat'ah com­pels. And Fat'ah punishes.”

"The monitors," Guerrero said, indicating his wristwatch.

"You will watch them when we have taken the comedian to his room, and after you see to the consultant." Hakim had tired of his game with the spoon and, with the implacable Guerrero, conveyed Charlie George to the room he dreaded.

Hakim trussed Charlie to the table again as Guerrero helped his charge to the bathroom some distance away. Then Hakim tugged Charlie's torso to the table's edge. The captive lay face up, hanging half off the table, his head a foot from the spattered floor. He saw Hakim produce the knife, elastic bands, clear plastic tube and gossamer bag, and tried not to guess their uses. Hakim taped him firmly in place as blood gradu­ally pounded louder in the ears of Charlie George.

Hakim brought the knife to Charlie's throat, smiling, and Charlie closed his eyes. Hakim tugged at the torn ear until Charlie opened his eyes again and then, in two quick sweeps, he severed the ear.

The big man in the bathroom stiffened as he heard the scream. With the Browning nuzzling his, jaw, he had no option but self-control. At the moment he found the cool water in the basin far more important than anything else on earth. The raw flesh at his temple had clotted heavily, a black patch intruding into the yellow hair. As he inspected it in the mirror, he saw the Panamanian's reflection. It revealed faint sardonic amusement and something else, fainter still. It might have been pity.

"Look closely, Senor Kenton," the reflection said, in tones that would not carry far. "Not at the wound, but at the scalp around it." Everett did so, always conscious of the gun muzzle at his throat. "Is it possible that your hair is growing dark instead of gray?" Their eyes locked for an instant. "Very odd, no?"

Again the cold water over his face, to buy time. "I dye it," he said at last. In a few days, if he lived that long, they would know that much anyway.

"I am sure you do." Guerrero moved aside to let the other man drop his trousers.

"It makes me look younger." Everett strained against constipation, the necessary outcome of his forced inactivity.

"And those faint scars at your hairline; what do they do? What other little secrets do you have in store for me?"

This ape-raping little wetback was toying with him, Everett decided. Either the guy knew everything, or nothing. "It^'s very common—in the Industry," he grunted.

"Of course it is," Guerrero said in tones that implied denial. He waited until the gore-smeared trousers were in place again, his amusement more pronounced as he backed from the cubicle. With the Browning he waved toward the room where Charlie George lay.

Charlie fought his own screams through clenched teeth, sobbing, straining against his bonds. His face a study in dispassionate interest, Hakim stanched the flow of blood and, holding Charlie by his hair, sprinkled a clotting agent over the grisly mess before he applied a rough bandage. Guerrero again trussed his own cap­tive, this time in a different corner. He did not look toward Hakim but he no longer showed amusement. Guerrero placed his ballpoint pen on the shelf and laid the adhesive tape near it.

It took Charlie George four tries to say, be­tween gasps "Why?"

"Questions, questions," Hakim sighed. "Your ear will go to the Los Angeles Times, and its coverage may provoke your television people. This may even start a modest war between media. And this is because I choose," he con­tinued, quickly pulling the flimsy polyethylene bag over Charlie's head. At this point Guerrero glanced quickly toward Hakim and then stalked from the room, the spool of wire lying unused on the floor.

Hakim snapped the elastic bands around Charlie's neck and stood back, watching the red stain spread past his bandage inside the bag. Charlie's eyes became huge with horror as his first breath sucked the bag against his nose and mouth. After twenty seconds, as Charlie thrashed hopelessly against his bondage, Hakim thrust the plastic tube under the elastic and into Charlie's mouth before tugging the bag back into place. The tube was short and not entirely flac­cid, and Hakim pulled his chair near to hold the free end of the tube away from loose ends of the bag.

Hakim waited until the breathing steadied. Charlie's eyes were closed. "Open your eyes,"

Hakim said gently. No response. "Open them," he said, placing a fingertip lightly over the tube's end. Charlie's eyes flew open and Hakim's finger moved back.

"Have you heard of the dry submarine, my friend? You are wearing one. The wet submarine is favored in Chile; it features a variety of nasty liquids in the bag. Yours may soon qualify as wet," he added, seeing the runnel of crimson that painted the bag's interior in Charlie's feeble struggles.

Hakim did not glance toward his second cap­tive. Had he done so, he would have seen the big man tearing with his teeth at the fresh tape, gums bleeding, heedless of the pain.

"Why, you ask, and ask, and ask," Hakim con­tinued, crooning near as though speaking to a valued confidante, a beloved. "Because you will perhaps return to your sumptuous life, if it pleases me. You will be my message to your medium, a man who knows he has been totally broken. El Aurans, the Lawrence of Arabia, broke after long torture and found ambition gone. Few were his equal but," the dark eyes held a soft luminosity of madness as he quoted, "'My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance ... blow my empty soul away.' I do not think you can avoid carrying that mes­sage," Hakim added. "This is true eastern mar­tial art: corner the enemy, and leave him nothing. Your Machiavelli understood."

From the other room came Guerrero's call: "Coverage, Hakim!"

The little man turned in his chair, picked up the severed ear, and released the tube which lay nearly invisible against the bag. In three strides he was through the door, to loom at Guerrero's side.

The item was insignificant, merely an admis­sion that an NBN star was a possible kidnap victim. Television was carrying the news, but obviously was not going to dwell on the event. "So, I must contact another medium," Hakim said, and held up his ghastly trophy.

Guerrero blinked. "You do what you do only too well, Hakim."

"Praise, or criticism?"

"It is my mission to help you do all you possi­bly can." Guerrero smiled at the sharp glance from Hakim; he had spoken the truth, yet not all of it. Nor could he boldly state what he knew about their second captive. It must seem a bril­liant suspicion. "I have been studying Kenton very closely, Hakim," he went on. "I believe that his face is a masquerade. Either he or the come­dian might be persuaded to discuss the point."

"The comedian?" Hakim barked a laugh. "Not he; not now."

Guerrero was very, very still. "It has been quiet in there."

"He no longer complains," Hakim answered, deliberately vague.

"You are finished, then," Guerrero persisted.

It was Hakim's pleasure to joke, thinking of the abject terror in the eyes of Charlie George. "Say, rather, he is finished," he rejoined, and turned back toward the torture room.

Guerrero followed unbidden, his excitement mounting, with only a glance toward Everett, whose hands were hidden in his lap. He saw Charlie George hanging inert like some butch­ered animal, his head half-obscured in glisten­ing red polymer. He could not know that Charlie had spent the past moments desperately inhal­ing, exhaling, trying with an animal's simplicity to bathe his lungs in precious oxygen. Charlie's mind was not clear but it held tenaciously to the fact that Guerrero was anxious for his death. Mouth and eyes open wide, Charlie George ceased to breathe as Guerrero came into view.

Guerrero's mistake was his haste to believe what he wanted to believe. He saw the plastic sucked against nostrils, the obscenely gaping mouth and staring eyes. He did not seek the thud of Charlie's heart under his twisted clothing and failed to notice the slender tube emergent from the plastic bag. "The poor pendejo is dead, then?" He rapped the question out carelessly.

Hakim's mistake was the indirect lie, his au­tomatic response to questions asked in the tone Guerrero used now. "Truly, as you see," Hakim said, gesturing toward Charlie George, amused at Charlie's ploy.

Hakim's merriment was fleeting. From the tail of his eye he saw Guerrero's hand slide toward the Browning and, in that instant, Hakim resolved many small inconsistencies. Still, he flung the knife too hastily. Guerrero dodged, rolling as he aimed, but could not avoid the chair that struck him as he fired. The Iraqi sprang past the doorway, slammed the door and flicked the bolt in place as chunks of wallboard peppered his face. He had counted five shots from the Browning against the door lock, but knew the damned thing held many more. Half blinded by debris from Guerrero's fire, Hakim elected to run rather than retrieve his own sidearm. It lay at his media display in the path of Guerrero's contin­ued fire against the door. One slug hurled scat­tered fragments of his beloved Hewlett-Packard unit into the face of a video monitor.

Hakim reached his van quickly, almost forget­ting to snap the toggle he had hidden beneath the dash, and lurched toward the road with a dead-cold engine racing and spitting. He drop­ped low over the wheel, unable to see if Guerrero followed. Hakim had cash and the Uzi, an ex­quisite Israeli submachine gun, as Fat'ah emergency rations behind him in the van.

Hakim considered stopping to make a stand on the gravel road but checked his rearviews in time to reconsider. Guerrero was there, twenty seconds behind. Hakim would need ten to stop, ten more to reach and feed the weapon. He would fare better if he could increase his lead, and guessed that Guerrero would withhold fire as they passed through the village of Piru. It was worth a try.

Slowing at the edge of the little town, Hakim saw his rearviews fill with Guerrero^'s van. Whatever his motive, the Panamanian evidently had a hard contract to fulfill and might take insane chances, including a collision in public. Hakim wrenched the wheel hard, whirling through a market parking lot. A grizzled pickup truck avoided him by centimeters and stalled directly in Guerrero's path, and then Hakim was turning north, unable to see how much time he had gained.

The road steepened as Hakim learned from a road sign that Lake Piru and Blue Point lay ahead. He searched his rearviews but the road was too serpentine for clear observation, and Hakim began to scan every meter of roadside for possible cover.

He took the second possible turnoff, a rutted affair with warnings against trespassers, flanked by brush and high grass. The van threw up a momentary flag of dust, a small thing but suffi­cient for Guerrero who came thundering behind, alert for just such a possibility.

Hakim topped a low ridge and did not see Guerrero two turns back. Dropping toward a hol­low, he tried to spin the van but succeeded only in halting it broadside to the road. He hurtled from his bucket seat, threw open the toolbox, and withdrew the stockless Uzi with flashing precision. Two forty-round clips went into his jacket and then he was scrambling from the cargo door which thunked shut behind him. If Guerrero were near, let him assault the empty van while Hakim, on his flank, would cut him down from cover.

But he had not reached cover when the van of Bernal Guerrero appeared, daylight showing under all four tires as it crested the rise before the mighty whump of contact. Hakim stopped in the open, taking a splayed automatic-weapons stance, and fitted a clip in the Uzi.

Almost.

It may have been dirt from the jouncing ride, or a whisker of tempered steel projecting like a worrisome hangnail; whatever it was, it altered many futures.

Hakim dropped the clip and snatched at its twin, missed his footing, and sprawled in the dust. The van of Guerrero impended, crashing around Hakim's wheeled roadblock into the grassy verge, a great beast rushing upon him. Guerrero set the hand brake and exited running as Hakim, his weapon hoary with dirt, essayed a multiple side roll. He was mystified when Guer­rero merely kicked him in the head instead of triggering the automatic.

Hakim waited for death as he gazed into the murky nine-millimeter eye of the Browning. "Daoudist," he surmised bitterly.

"I am Fat'ah," Guerrero mimicked, breathing deeply. His face shone with sweat and elation. "And in Panama, a Torrijista, and everywhere, always, KGB." The Soviet agent wiped dust from his mouth, the gun muzzle absolutely unwaver­ing and much too distant for a foot sweep by Hakim. "Rise, turn, hands on your head." Hakim obeyed.

Guerrero marched him back to his own van and forced him to lie prone in the pungent dust. While Guerrero ransacked the toolbox, Hakim listened for distant engines, voices, a siren. In the primeval mountain stillness he could even hear ticks from his cooling engine, but nothing remotely suggested deliverance.

Presently, standing above the little Iraqi, Guerrero ordered his hands crossed behind him. Hakim recognized his garrotte wire by its bite and was briefly thankful it was not about his neck. At further orders, Hakim stalked to Guer­rero's own vehicle and lay on his face beside it as he tried to identify a succession of odd sounds.

"Had you the wit to take a four-wheel-drive path," Guerrero spoke pleasantly as he worked, "you might have escaped. Since the day before yesterday my front differential housing has been full of transceiver gear." Guerrero leaned into his van, arranged the controls, flicked the engine on and stood back. "You wanted coverage, Hakim Arif? Well, turn and stand—and smile, you are live on Soviet television."

The camera in Guerrero's hand looked very like a ballpoint pen but, unlike the unit he had left in the torture room, it did not store au­diovisual data. It merely fed its impressions to the transceiver equipment packed into the van's dummy differential case. Hakim considered the possibility of a hoax until he heard the fierce whine of a multikilowatt generator over the engine, and then saw the great inflated meter-broad balloon, spidery metallic film covering its lower segment, that sat on Guerrero's horizontal rear cargo door. Almost certainly a dish antenna, he marveled, for a Soviet Molniya satellite in clarkeian orbit.

Hakim did not show his relief but remained docile as Guerrero shoved him down at the base of a manzanita shrub. Such equipment was fiendishly expensive and tallied well with Guer­rero's claim to be a KGB infiltrator. Hakim was limp with gratification; at least his captor repre­sented law and order, not capricious revenge by some gang of charlies.

"There was no American blockade," Hakim accused, and drew a hissing breath as the wire tugged at his wrists.

"What does it matter to whom I turned them? It was neatly done except for the girl, and a bent mount on the differential housing," Guerrero replied, slitting Hakim's sleeves, tearing away the fifty-dollar shirt. "Chaim Mardor is enter­taining the KGB—as you would be, had we known your idiotic choice of sites in advance. We opted against a motorcade; even you might have been alerted by that in Moorpark. And later, they could not bring equipment from Long, Beach in time to pinpoint our location while you slept. Take credit, Hakim, for preventing us a regular transmission schedule." Pride forbade him to add that he had not been furnished with sophisticated receiving gear, so that feedback to Guerrero was relatively primitive.

"You are a fool, Guerrero; they could have homed in on your unit, had you only kept it going."

"And so might you, with the noise and mi­crowave interference." Hakim took a stinging slap. "That was for the lecture." Another slap, with an effect that shocked Hakim. "And that was for making it necessary to interrogate you here where the terrain impedes local transmission. I dare not pass that village again before dark."

Hakim swallowed hard. It was not Guerrero's brawn that bred such terror with each small suc­cessive violence. Hakim and pain were dearer friends than that. Yet he felt a rising sense of dread, and of something else; a betrayal of faith. And how could this be so, when Hakim's only faith was in Hakim?

Guerrero stepped away and laid the pencil-slim camera on an outcrop of weathered basalt. "You have seen these before," he chided. "A similar device recorded your last tender sessions with the comedian. Later I will retrieve the mi­crocorder and feed those scenes to the Molniya. Ravine or no ravine, the Molniya will receive me then, as it receives us now."

As he spoke, Guererro took a slender case from an inside pocket. Hakim feared the hypodermic but, far worse, dreaded the fact that he was bathed in sweat. He prepared to flail his body, hoping to destroy the injector or waste its un­known contents.

Guerrero was far too battle-wise. He chose a nearby stick of the iron-hard Manzanita and, with a by-your-leave gesture to the camera, sud­denly deluged Hakim with blows. It became a flood, a torrent, a sea of torment, and Hakim realized that the thin shrieking was his own. He, Hakim Arif, mewling like any craven Berber? He invoked his paladin's wisdom, ". . . no longer actor, but spectator, thought not to care how my body jerked and squealed."

Jerking and squealing, Hakim cared too much to feel the prick of the needle in his hip.

Hakim rallied with great shuddering gasps, rolled onto his back, and fought down a horror he had expected never to meet. His emissary, pain, had turned against him.

Guerrero leaned easily against a boulder, toss­ing and catching a drycell battery of respectable voltage. "You have long been a subject of KGB study at Lubianka in Moscow," he glowered, "and I am impressed by our psychologists. You built a legend with your vain volunteer anguish, Hakim, and never knew that the operative word was volunteer." His face changed to something still uglier. "You will divulge two items. The first, Fat'ah accounts. The second is your new Damascus site." He raised the stick and Hakim cowered, but the things that touched his naked flesh were merely the drycell terminals.

Merely an onslaught of unbearable suffering. Hakim needed no verbal assurance to learn that the drug made each joint in his body a locus of gruesome response to even the mildest electrical stimulus. When his spasm had passed he had fouled himself, to the syncopation of Guerrero's laughter.

"Your funds," Guerrero said, extending the drycell, and Hakim bleated out a stream of in-formation. Squinting into the overcast as if to confirm the satellite link thirty-six thousand kilometers away in its unchanging position overhead, Guerrero grinned. "Coding, I am told, is automatic, and gracias a Dios for small favors. But it may take minutes to check your figures. Perhaps in Los Angeles, perhaps Berne or at Lubianka. But if you lie, you must understand that I will quickly know it. Lie to me, Hakim. Please. It justifies me."

Raging at himself, Hakim hurriedly amended crucial figures. The pain in his joints did not linger but its memory overhung him like a cliff. Through it all, degrading, enervating, the sinu­ous path of Guerrero's amusement followed each of Hakim's capitulations.

When Hakim fell silent, Guerrero pressed his demand. "You are learning, I see. Now: the Damascus site, the new one. The Americans would like to know it, too, but they tend to impose order slowly. We shall be more efficient even without Pentothal." Hakim squeezed his eyes tight-shut, breathing quickly, wondering if it were really possible to swallow one's tongue—and then the drycell raked his bicep and jawline.

Hakim was transfixed, skewered on a billion lances that spun in his body, growing to fiery pinwheels that consumed him, drove all else from his being. Hakim was a synonym of appalling agony. Guerrero, who had previously laughed for the necessary effect, punished his lower lip between his teeth and looked away. He wished he were back soldiering under Torrijos, hauling garrison garbage, anything but this filthy duty.

Yet appearances were everything and, "Again? I hope you resist," he lied, and had to caution Hakim to answer more slowly. Under torture, the answers came in a fitful rhythm; a phrase, shallow breathing, another strangled phrase, a sob, and still another phrase. Hakim was finished so soon that Guerrero knew embar­rassment. He had hurried, and now he needed only wait. The military, he shrugged to himself, must be the same everywhere.

Waiting for his van's radio speaker to verify or deny, Guerrero viewed his keening captive with glum distaste. "The girl was more man than you," he said in innocent chauvinism. "Chaim accepted capture, but not she. Another agent took her knife. She fought. When he pointed the knife at her belly, she embraced him. I never heard the sound of a knife like that before, it—"

"Kill me," he heard Hakim plead.

"Before I know how truly you betray Fat'ah? For shame."

"Yes, for shame. Kill me!"

^"Because you were so quick to surrender? Because you are not your beloved Lawrence, but only a small puppeteer? Absurd, Hakim. Think yourself lucky to know what you are, at last: a primitive little executive, a controller—even of yourself as victim. Is it so much more glorious to be a masochist pure and simple, than what you really are?"

^"Enough! End it," Hakim begged.

"As you ended it for the comedian, perhaps. Let me tell you the greatest joke you will ever hear, Hakim, you snot-gobbling little coward. It is on both of us, but chiefly on you. The big blond one, Kenton, is neither a blond nor a Kenton. I dusted his fingerprints and transmitted them while you sought your damned newspapers. Something about him disturbed me.

"Last night I received a message which I deciphered twice to be certain—and still I wonder how it can be true: Kenton is your Jewish target, Maurice Everett." Guerrero laughed aloud, slapped his belly in a gesture more violent than pleasant. "I hoped you would learn it for your-self so that I could record more of your butchery. But it was unnecessary. As it was, I waited for days on orders to record your disposal of Charlie George. Without those orders, my work would have been simpler." Guerrero spat in irritation.

Hakim stared. The Soviet security organ had waited only to obtain audiovisual records of Fat'ah killing the comedian? He fathomed the KGB logic gradually, and concluded that they could use such evidence to justify reprisals in Syria, when and if it suited them.

Another thought brought a measure of calm: he still had control over Guerrero's future. Hakim exercised it. "It was not my intent to kill Charlie George," he said distinctly. "And we left him alive."

Guerrero said nothing for ten seconds. "The video record will show that he died," he as­serted, licking lips that were suddenly dry.

"It will show his breathing tube, and also what we both already know: that he is an actor." Their eyes met in angry silence.

Guerrero insisted, "The record will vindicate me," and Hakim knew that Guerrero too was posturing for the benefit of the camera pickup. His own effectiveness contaminated by haste, Guerrero would be forced to return—to kill Charlie George himself. And Everett as well, eliminating the last witness.

Guerrero approached again with the drycell and locked his gaze to Hakim's for the last time. Torture would prove nothing more, and Guer­rero feared what it might seem to prove. The crowning irony was that under further torture, Hakim might only further compromise his tor­turer. Hakim trembled in tears, but did not drop his eyes. Guerrero laid the drycell on a stone.

Hakim did not recognize the coded sequence from the van but saw Guerrero register relief at a musical signal. In any case, Hakim in his weak­ness had told the truth. Guerrero was lashing Hakim's feet with wire at the time, and resumed the job until his prisoner was positioned; feet spread, knees bent, face up. Enraged at Hakim's revelation, Guerrero had chosen a vengeance op­tion. He enjoyed that choice but did not realize its full expense to himself as he stalked to his van and returned.

Guerrero tore a strip of tape, placed it dangling from a branch before Hakim's eyes, and stuck a capsule to the tape within range of Hakim's mouth. "Before I knew you, Arif, I would not do what I do now. Let us say it is for Rashid, whom I hated to sacrifice. Did you think the bomb shack­les jammed themselves?" He read the surge of anger that raced across Hakim's face. "So: no, I will not end your life—but you will. I wonder if you are devout, and if your followers in Damas­cus are. In any event, the capsule acts quickly. Exercise your control, Hakim; take one last life on television." With that, he whisked Hakim's van keys away. He brought the drycell near Hakim's side and the Iraqi arched away as well as he might, lashed to bushes by lengths of his garrotte wire.

The drycell went beneath Hakim's naked back, centimeters from contact. Guerrero trotted away with one backward look and Hakim strained fitfully to hold his arch. Weeping, laughing, Hakim knew that Guerrero had left his own van to permit transmission of Hakim's death option. Presumably Guerrero intended to return for his van later.

But Guerrero did not know of the toggle be­neath Hakim's dash panel, which reduced the Panamanian's own options to zero.

There was no sound of starter engagement, only the slam of a door before, a moment later, the heavy concussion wave. The earth bucked and Hakim, muscles already past endurance, fell back. He cared nothing for the rain of metal and flesh that showered around him but, deafened and half stunned by the five kilos of explosive he had buried in the van, Hakim could still exult. The drycell had been turned on its side.

Hakim spent many minutes scrabbling at de­bris before he managed to grasp a stone that would abrade the garrotte wire. He kept enough tension on the wire to satisfy his hunger for torment, all the while glaring at the Soviet camera. He could perhaps make use of the van equipment. He might find most of the money in the wreckage of his own van.

And after that, what? His exploitation of media finally smothered, he had known for weeks that his enemy and erstwhile ally, televi­sion, had found an offense that could destroy him. Even before ransacking by the KGB, his coffers were too empty to maintain Fat'ah. The Soviet videotapes would produce hatred and scorn in the people who had previously financed him as easily as they bought English country estates and huge limousines. Hakim would find respect nowhere—not even within himself. There was no more Fat'ah, and Hakim was Fat'ah. Therefore there could be no Hakim.

The wire parted and Hakim rolled away. Even­tually he freed his feet, then sat squatting by the drycell. He had triumphed over Guerrero, but that triumph was his last. The proof was that he could not bring himself to touch the drycell.

Hakim took the capsule from the tape with gentle fingers, smashed the camera. "Forgive, El Aurans," he whispered, and swallowed.

It was minutes before he realized that the cap­sule was a harmless antihistamine, Guerrero's malignant joke. And an hour before he found that the injection, as Guerrero had known from the first, was the slow killer. But by that time Hakim had stumbled twitching into a stream far from the smouldering wreckage and was past caring. The body, a source of concern in some shadowy circles, was never found.

THURSDAY, 22 JANUARY, 1981:

Guerrero had been right about Chaim Mardor, in the letter if not in spirit: the wiry Israeli was a compelling entertainment. He had first enter­tained two field agents of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnostiy when he went into clinically certifiable shock at the suicide of Leah Talith. In that condition he was so far beyond reach with drugs, they found it necessary to feed him intravenously for two days, locked with his clothes in a windowless room of a safe house in Pasadena. The door was sturdy. No one but the physician, who had a key, could go through it.

Chaim went over it on Thursday morning, bat­tering a hole in the ceiling with his head and shoulders, the minute he returned to his mortal coil and found his clothes. While Maurice Everett had splashed water on his face, fighting his internal panic over Guerrero's broad hints about double identity, the KGB had a full-scale panic in its safe house.

Chaim Mardor stormed out of the attic that morning, dispatched a balding cipher clerk with a hatrack and kicked the perimeter guard into jelly before taking the guard's cash and pocket­ing his short-barreled .44 magnum revolver. He had walked several blocks to Colorado Boule­vard before he thought to set the red-smeared hatrack down.

The mind of Chaim Mardor was aflame with one concept that burned its way down into his belly: Fat'ah was dead. He had seen her self-sacrifice while Bernal Guerrero, the arm of Hakim Arif, stood by to gloat. And Chaim knew where the Iraqi had taken the hostages, to the frame house Chaim himself had furnished in the orchard past Fillmore. Hakim, Guerrero, even the hostages Chaim had never seen, all were culpable. Anyone in the farmhouse or near it would be equally culpable. Chaim Mardor was a death sentence in tennis shoes.

Chaim hitched a ride with a man in a Volks­wagen bus who was virtually his external twin, discounting Chaim's abrasions; dark shoulder-length hair, jeans, and pullover. The driver took his passenger's catatonic silence for simple dejection, but his profound mistake was in patting Chaim on the knee. The single .44 slug passed a hand's breadth from the driver's nose, momentarily blinding him, precipitating his exit without even tapping the brakes.

Chaim took the wheel as the little bus sped up the Ventura Freeway. He slid into the vacated driver's seat and took the next turnoff, oblivious to the traffic snarl behind him as cars avoided the man trying to hobble off the freeway with flash burns, lacerations, and a fractured tibia.

Chaim pawed through area maps in the glove compartment, throwing those he did not want over his shoulder into the cargo section. He found the San Fernando Valley map, located his position on it, and drove for his destination at a pace relinquished to the insane. This was perfect camouflage; everybody in Los Angeles drives exactly like that.

Had Chaim found the turnoff toward the orchard ten minutes earlier, he might have passed Hakim and Guerrero driving in the other direc­tion toward mutual destruction. More likely, if at all possible, Chaim would have smashed head-on into whichever of them he saw first. El-Hamma and Hakim had created in Chaim Mar­dor the ideal arm of Fat'ah; an arm that could reach out even after the head was severed, re­morseless, selfless, irrational. But Chaim had the road to himself as he neared the orchard sur­rounding the frame house that contained Maurice Everett and Charlie George.

Everett had torn at his tape in a frenzy the moment Guerrero kicked the door open to hurl himself cursing after Hakim. The glass fibers in the tape resisted him until he managed to roll to the splintered chair near the comedian. "Hang on, Charlie," he said, repeating the recitation like a prayer. He frayed the fibers away, bit by bit, calming his own harsh respiration, listening with hope to the whistled breathing of Charlie George.

Everett did not wait to peel the tape from his wrists when he had separated them. He ignored the tape around his ankles as well, springing up to attack the bindings that held Charlie George.

Charlie's feet were nearest. Everett did not think to rip the plastic bag from Charlie's head; perhaps in some way he was reluctant to spill Charlie's blood. It was an absurdly stupid error with bizarre consequences.

Peeling the tape from Charlie's ankles, Everett spotted the knife Hakim had thrown. It lay open near the doorway and in a moment Everett was slicing through the stuff at his ankles, then at Charlie's. He heard the Volkswagen engine then and rushed to the next room, fearing Hakim's return.

From the window he saw Chaim Mardor stalk from the little bus. He had seen the man some-where, could not place him, but had no difficulty in identifying the snub-nosed handgun. He whirled, struck the stump of his finger against a chair, and dropped the knife as pain bludgeoned him.

Everett stooped to retrieve the knife, mov­ing protectively toward the front door. Chaim stepped through.

Chaim was no one. There was no tomorrow; there was not even a now. But there was a big man with frightened eyes, and he held a knife, and a knife had caused the death of Fat'ah. He raised the handgun and fired as Everett ducked behind Hakim's media center.

The report was a cannonade in the confined space, blowing a tape machine into plastic con­fetti. Chaim needed an instant to recover from the recoil and to cock the single-action revolver, holding it in both hands, and in that instant Everett grabbed the handle of a portable televi­sion set. Both men shifted simultaneously, Chaim squeezing another round off, Everett swinging the portable set overhand. Everett had not released the set when the slug plowed into its steel chassis.

Chaim's handgun was one of a family of weapons designed to stop the headlong charge of a madman. At close range, the energy of one slug from a .44 magnum is such that its impact against any part of an onrushing enemy will literally stop him dead. Everett was hurled spinning away, stunned, his arm nearly dislocated at the shoulder as the television set absorbed the slug in its guts.

Charlie George concluded from the first explosion that Hakim Arif had returned. Only his ankles were free, his waist and wrists still taped to the table. Charlie, his feet facing the door, could not see Chaim or Everett but he knew mortal combat when he heard it. He brought his legs up, then flung them down again. The table tipped for an instant, almost brought him erect. Charlie hooked his heels over the lip of the table, levered his body along the table. This brought his head up. It was then that he lost his breathing tube. Frantically, Charlie folded his legs again, bringing them back nearly over his head, and gathered his strength.

Satisfied that he had blown the knife-wielder away, Chaim Mardor turned toward the doorway and looked into the gloom toward the noise, cocking the revolver again. He saw buttocks and widespread arms, Charlie's legs poised for an instant, and Chaim did not understand what he saw. It did not look like a human form from his view and his finger paused on the trigger.

Charlie's legs came crashing down, the table tipping him up as it fell, and Charlie stabilized himself to stagger upright, arms still pinioned horizontally, the table strapped to his waist. He faced Chaim, strangling.

Chaim Mardor stood rigid, facing the appari­tion that had appeared before him like every butchered victim of every war in history. Its arms carried no weapon, could carry none in their imitation of the crucified orthodox martyrs of Neturay Karta liturgy. Its head was an almost featureless filmy horror, eyes staring through a shining red slickness. To Chaim Mardor it was victim, retribution, and golem combined in one flesh. He brought the revolver up with great deliberation and fired. Through the roof of his mouth.

Everett was only half aware of the report, strangely muffled, that removed the top half of Chaim Mardor's head. He swung himself to a sitting position against the wall, saw Charlie George reel against the doorway before collaps­ing.

Everett needed an interminable ten seconds to clear the mist from his brain, to stumble forward and tear the plastic bag from the head of Charlie George. He found the knife, stepping over things he did not want to see, and separated his friend from the table top. Coughing, gasping, Charlie gulped free air, then relaxed with closed eyes.

"Come on, pal," Everett croaked, "don't go to sleep on me now." He saw the unspoken question as Charlie looked at him, chest still heaving. "Those other two cock-wallopers; which one will be coming back?"

The keys were still in the Volkswagen bus. Somehow, weaving like a drunk, Everett drove it to Moorpark.

SATURDAY, 24 JANUARY, 1981:

Everett did not attend the private cremation service for Charlie George in Pasadena, con­vinced by physicians, the eloquent threats of David Engels, and telephone pleas of Gina Vercours. Instead, he waited at a Beverly Hills ren­dezvous for Rhone Althouse, who did attend.

Althouse gained entry by way of a conduit tunnel with its own guarded entrance. The only identification procedure was a handprint analysis, but its brevity was deceptive. Gas chromatography assured that the whorls were not synthetic while standard optical matching techniques pronounced Althouse's hands to be the genuine articles.

"Somehow I never thought of you as a red-head," was Everett's first remark as Althouse entered the waiting room.

"Life is a puttynose factory," Althouse returned, taking the big hand. "I wouldn't have recognized you at all except for the newspaper shots of Simon Kenton."

"That's one photographer I'd like to get my hands on," Everett growled. "For those of us bent on nudging it, a free society can get awfully expensive.^"

"You'll slide off the back pages of the papers in a few days," Althouse predicted, "now that Charlie is dead."

Everett, frowning: "Helluva loss to NBN."

"We have to think of it that way: of Charlie is defunct, expired, gone to his reward. And that's okay, so long as my old friend Byron Krause is still sniffin' the breeze," Althouse waved a glee­ful finger.

Everett glanced at the wall clock. "Visiting hours are a sham in here, Rhone; let's jump the gun a few minutes."

"Don't say 'gun'," Althouse grumbled, follow­ing Everett to the elevator. Moments later they submitted to another print-check before entering the private room of Byron Krause. The attendant who opened the door never spoke but he did a lot of watching. Instinctively the visitors made every gesture slow and cautious.

The face behind the bandages must have tried to smile, to judge from the crinkles around the mouth and eyes: "Ow, dammit," said the famil­iar voice. "Maury, do you live here? I saw you this morning." The slurring was not any lack of alertness, but implied the constraints of the tiny anchors that kept the facial planes properly positioned.

"You were just whacked out this morning, Charlie. Sure I live here, until they get me patched. They're going to make me a new fingertip, too; guess where the skin is coming from," he smiled sadly, laying a hand on his hip.

"Pain in the ass, I expect," from Althouse.

From the bed: "Listen Rhone, glad as I am to see you, first good one-liner out of you and my silent partner here will cut you down."

"Don't say 'cut'," Althouse muttered, then slapped his own mouth. "Look: I'm a compulsive. Change the subject. What really happened at that farmhouse?"

Everett found a chair, Althouse another. Fed­eral agents had pieced much of the story to­gether, aided by tire tracks, reports of a high-speed chase, and fingerprints linking the destroyed van to the Iraqi, Hakim Arif. Everett supplied some of the information as he had it from Engels. "But I guess the biggest surprise, after all, was your opting for the identity change," Everett finished, nodding toward the comedian.

"I had a lot of time to think, before the media people got tipped off to who and where I was," was the reply. "I decided I'd rather be a live Krause than dead with all those other charlies. Funny thing is, that sadistic little shit Hakim messed me up so much, cosmetic surgery was necessary anyhow."

"How about the ear?"

"They can make me a new one. Some agent found my ear; stepped on it. Boy, some of the apologies I get," he shook the bandaged head ruefully.

Althouse brightened. "I gather from the news that Fat'ah's home base in Syria got creamed by some other bunch there—and that should write 'em all off, now that Hakim Arif is feeding flies all over Los Padres National Forest."

"No, he isn^'t," the big Commissioner said, and shrugged into the silence he had created. "This is for your ears only, God knows it's little enough. Seems that the Soviets get nervous when anybody but themselves begins to panic the American public. They leaked the word—don't ask me why, a quid pro quo maybe—that the Iraqi turned his whole fanatical gang under interrogation.^"

"Probably the kind we don't like to do," Althouse put in.

"I expect so. But Arif got away into the moun­tains afoot after that explosion. They think it was the other guy, Guerrero, who's the flies' breakfast. But the Soviets think Arif was dying."

"They think; they don't know," Althouse whispered.

"Disinformation at all levels," Everett replied. "It's inevitable. Our people hope they've con­vinced the KGB that they were wrong about an FCC Commissioner hiding behind the face of Simon Kenton."

"I'm resigned to being part of it,^" said the comedian. "But if they can alter my larynx properly along with the rest of it, I may show up as a retreaded top banana on TV again, one of these days. You can't beat the money."

Althouse: "And if they can't alter you enough?"

"Oh—I don't have to work. We'll get together again and gin up something for the three of us, maybe after the Commissioner's seven-year term is over."

"Could happen sooner than you think," Althouse said quickly. "I keep fingers into ABC surveys. It'd be easy to include a few items to find out who the public sees as enemies of terrorism. If the names vary widely or change quickly, I could see that the data gets published. Maybe an article in TV Guide."

"The point, Rhone, the point," said Everett.

"Isn't it clear? The point is, every charlie on earth should learn in time that it's the idea, and not the man, they're up against."

Everett cleared his throat. "And if you're wrong? If the same few names keep cropping up?”

"He'll falsify the data," chuckled the ban­daged head.

"The hell I will," said Althouse with asperity. "I have some ethics. Nope, but I wouldn't pub­lish the data, either. My ethics are, uh, flexible," he admitted.

"That's a relief," said the ex-Charlie George. "Your media theories have cost us all the parts we can spare. Oh, quit looking at me like that, Rhone, I'm not blaming you. You were right about the solution."

"And Everett was right about the odds against us," Althouse sighed.

"They ran out on D'Este," Everett agreed, add­ing, "and I'll miss the Charlie George Show."

"Just remind yourself it was all a lot of hype," Rhone Althouse said, grinning at the bandaged face for understanding. "When you think of the odds this funnyman beat, you realize he was never a very proper charlie.^"

Everett glanced at his watch. "Time for my ultraviolet treatment," he said, getting up.

"I'll see you here again, then?" said Althouse.

"For a few more days. Then I've got a date up in the high lonesome with a one-room cabin." He did not add, and a blonde I'm very fond of, who likes to ski when she isn't near a bed or a tennis court.

"In January? You're wacko, sire," Althouse laughed.

"There is that," said Everett, and sauntered out.

FRIDAY, 13 FEBRUARY, 1981:

Nearly three weeks crawled by before Everett's skin grafts satisfied the surgeons in Beverly Hills. The new finger would always be numb and stiff at the tip, and it would never leave a print. Fingerprints could be fashioned, but the technique was an outrage in time and money.

Maurice Everett gained almost no weight while in the clinic because the food all seemed to be vaseline in various disguises so the hell with it, and also because he daily performed all of the calisthenics he hated.

On a Friday evening, hair bleached afresh, implanted follicles flourishing in the graft at his temple, Everett bade his friend Byron Krause a brief farewell. "I'm going shopping," he crowed.

"Those are mighty domestic noises you're making," the ex-comedian called after him.

"Get your ear rebored," Everett called back, and walked on. He considered lingering to admit the truth; that he was feeling a call to upholster his cave, to ask a leggy lady bear to share it permanently, and intended to do so when he got the chance. No one knew his plans for the next week—except for Gina, of course. If he kept it that way there could be no slips, no vulnerabili­ty.

Engels had found him another superskate, a white virgin Mini-Cooper wearing Pennsylvania plates and sporty British car club badges as big as its hubcaps. It was, thought Everett, like pin­ning rhinestones on a gyrfalcon, but it would never be connected with Maurice Everett.

At an outfitter's store he found a down-filled bag that would zip onto his, laughing as he paid the ionospheric tab with Simon Kenton's charge card. He was remembering the night before his kidnapping, the first time he had found a grassy nook with Gina in the balm of a Southern California winter evening. ("Don't take off yuh coat, stranguh," she had deadpanned; "we could wind up half a mile from heah ...")

Browsing among the freeze-dried foods, he had no trouble choosing those Gina liked best. At three-kilometer altitudes above the ski lift near Tahoe, they would eat with the abandon of starving weasels.

At a bookstore he chose volumes they would both devour: Muir, Renault, Steinbeck, Sturgeon. The Lovecraft, he thought with a lewd grin, was for nights when the wind ululated in the eaves of the cabin, when she would nestle against him for more than physical warmth. Given enough books and dehydrated stroganoff, they might not come down for years.

Stroganoff. The Russian word provoked a thought-chain ending with David Engels. He stowed the packages in the Mini, using only the surface of his mind to begin the drive up Interstate Five where, at Sacramento, he would sleep.

Engels had visited him twice in the clinic. The first time there was only good news: Gina, rail­ing against the rules of the game to Engels, who did not have enough clout with physicians to get her into Everett's room. The Commission, which accepted Everett's participation via tapes and proxies, though Engels had caught some medita­tive glances in conference. The press, which had gone baying off after false musks when it determined that Simon Kenton was not worth a great deal of investigative reportage.

On his last visit, Engels had been more sub­dued, with good news and other news. The good news was that Gina had not stopped demanding to see her man. Everett knew that much; they spent too much money on scrambler-equipped telephone calls for him not to know. After one plaintive call from Phoenix, Everett had threatened to send her a vibrator. At the time, she had questioned his taste in coarse humor.

And two days later she had sent him the most startling dirty greeting card he had ever seen. As usual, some yahoo had already opened it as a routine precaution. But when he first picked it up, Everett thought he was empathizing a facet of Gina Vercours he had not felt before. It was a thin buckram volume filigreed with silver, restrained and elegant. It should have been the poetry of Keats, but its title was Apotheosis of Tissues. Inside was one page of onionskin with the couplet:

Could silk or satin aspire to moa'

Than sepulchre for spermatazoa?

And behind that page were fifty more pages—all of facial tissue. He had cursed because his left hand was strapped to his hip, and he tended to kick his legs when he laughed.

The other news from David Engels was pass­ing strange. A middleman from the Central In­telligence Agency had learned of some subtle backtracking into NBN visitors and consultants by a private-investigating firm. The firm's only mistake was in failing to realize early that its client was a foreign agency which they never did manage to identify.

Among the persons of interest was a big husky specimen named Simon Kenton. That was all Engels had. It might mean nothing. On the other hand, it suggested that Everett might be well-advised to pack a Browning parabellum and, Engels had tapped a stiletto forefinger on Ev­erett's breastbone, to get goddam good with it.

Everett thought about that, off and on, all the way to Sacramento.

SATURDAY, 14 FEBRUARY, 1981:

Gina Vercours rubbed her hands together as she watched the blaze spread under seasoned wood. She had found the cabin exactly where he had said it would be, a few kilometers above the top of the chairlift, just north of the saddleback behind which lay the very nascence of the turbu­lent American River. She was supposed to meet him at the foot of the chairlift at Sunday noon but, knowing Maury, she didn't trust the canny bastard. He'd come sneaking up to the cabin a day early, more than likely, to lay out some fey greeting as a surprise. Well, she could play that game too.

She smiled. Who would ever expect black satin sheets and a down comforter in a one-room cabin? After this, Maury Everett would.

A shadow crossed her mind. Everett would, she amended, if he lived. She stared into the flames as they grew, feeling the heat on her face, thinking it was how the sun might feel on a beach in Baia, thinking how it must feel when you are unextraditable on that beach in Brazil with the equivalent of a million dollars in Brazi­lian cruzeiros. That option was squarely in her lap, thanks to the KGB.

And all she had to do was show up there and claim it. That and one other detail, really the simplest detail of all. Because Maurice Everett trusted her.

It was a hell of a world, she reflected: you search until you are tired of searching for a man who has the virtues of machismo without its vices, and then they won't let you alone with him. They tangle him up in flags and finance, play political hockey using him as the puck, hound him finally into becoming something and someone he never wanted to be. And even that wasn't enough.

Better for her if she had never heard of Everett. She could have come to terms with a lower-middle-class life eventually, when the special jobs ran out. Everett, she was certain, had no intention of marrying. It hadn't been too late to leave Everett as he was when she'd met Charlie George, not even when she'd received the call, the only time she ever passed out from a tele­phone message, saying Everett was alive and en route from Moorpark to Beverly Hills in an un­marked FBI vehicle. It was not too late until the KGB, by some means she might never discover, connected her with Kenton, and Kenton with Everett. That was when the offer had come. All she had to do was kill Simon Kenton.

Why? No answer. Perhaps he had information connecting Fat'ah with the Soviets. Perhaps they only thought he might have it. Perhaps, after all, Maurice Everett was only a symbol to them; a flag the KGB would like to see at half-mast.

It wasn't fair. The act would be so simple with his trust, so unspeakably complex because of that trust. She still had not decided, could not decide without Maury's unwitting help. There was plenty of time, weeks of it, and several direc­tions to go across the high country if she should choose Baia over snowshoes.

Then she looked out the single window and saw him, standing tall in his leathers, staring across, probably at her tracks and the smoke from the chimney. He leaned back on the snow-shoes, jogging down in his easy lope, the skis still high on his back. He could easily have switched to skis, she knew,_sweeping down and around to impress her. And of course he would never dream of such a display, and this im­pressed her. She would ski better than he did, beat him six-oh in a million consecutive sets, and he would still be ready to take up the chal­lenge. She would kill him, but she could not defeat him.

She had decided. She threw open the cabin door, squinting in the dazzle, smiling as he ap­proached.

"I knew it, I goddam knew it," he puffed, grin­ning back, shaking his head as he removed the snowshoes. "Boy, did I have a surprise for you." Well, he still had a surprise for her, unless she expected his proposal already.

"What a coincidence," she said, the laugh throaty as she knew he liked it.

He stamped snow from his heavy shoes, swung the door shut behind him and lowered his pack to the floor. "Hey," he said, as she unsnapped his down jacket to run her hands inside.

She kissed him hungrily. "You'll run out of those one day," she murmured. "I'm gettin' it while it's good."

"Better than Kleenex," he grinned, "you randy bitch, you."

She persisted. "Another one, lover. The sec­ond thing you do is take off your coat."

He enjoyed her hunger; it matched his own. "Sorry I haven't shaved," he said into her ear. "I'll get handsome for you later."

She pulled back, the fire shining in her hair, amusement in her face. "You look," she said, "like a million dollars."

AFTERWORD

It's not always a joy to murmur, "I told you. so." For the record, the trade edition of Soft Targets was on bookshelves before Iranian ex­tremists stormed our embassy in November, 1979. A few people have asked whether the book may have even taught Middle-East militants to hold Americans hostage so that they could use our own media against us. It's a fair question.

Thank God I can live with the answer: trained political extremists already knew. The Soviets gleefully focus on any facet of our way of life that lends itself to our destruction—and carefully explain those facets to `students' recruited to Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University for graduate work in subversion and terrorism. For nonfictional details on Lumumba Tech, I refer you to John Barron's KGB, and Ovid Demaris's Brothers in Blood.

Not that our enemies have to attend Muscovite seminars for their tactics; the KGB opened branch schools in other countries a long time ago. It's an ill-trained extremist who hasn't al-ready learned that our laissez faire media—when their decisions are short-sighted—are ripe for his exploitation.

I first chewed on the problem during post-graduate work in media theory in the early 1970's. Terrorists were already gaining world-wide media forums by brutalizing innocents; it seemed to me only a matter of time before they'd do it to Americans. I didn't write about it then. I didn't have a remedy that would work in a free society.

Yes, I knew Orwell had written his future vis­ion of 1984 without offering detailed remedies. I also knew that some critics deny that Orwell's book is science fiction, although it contained stunningly original work in the psychology of language, not to mention political science. I felt that, if psycholinguistics theory and media theory are sciences, then speculative fiction in those disciplines must be science fiction.

Well, I was already a writer of sf. I was also frustrated at my own terrorism/media scenarios because, at first, I kept cobbling up government control remedies in my head; and none of them were exactly models of free enterprise. Gradu­ally, seeking alternative controls, I contrived the `media war' thesis that was woven into Soft Targets. But nobody wants to be harangued in a piece of entertainment (sorry, Ayn Rand); so the book is only five per cent media theory. If I've done my job, the rest is entertainment.

Some of my colleagues in communication theory warned me, "It's hopeless, Ing. You can^'t succeed in commercial media, grabbing it by the short hairs. You're biting the hand before it feeds you.^"

I said, "You're forgetting science fiction." Few of my scholar friends believe there are commer­cial media people like Jim Baen and Ben Bova, agents provocateurs of speculation.

And almost everyone said, "For God's sake don't admit you wrote Soft Targets with intent to commit message!" Well, the hell with lying about it. But my implied charter was to write an sf thriller and, if 1 failed in that, I was (at most) only five per cent successful. You judge.