Vertical Run

1

On the morning of the day he disappeared, David Elliot awoke, as he did every weekday, at precisely 5:45 A.M. Twenty-five years earlier in a hot, green place, he’d learned the trick of waking whenever he wanted. Now it was just another habit.

Dave slid his legs out from beneath Pratesi sheets. He glanced neutrally at where his wife, Helen, lay curled into a small, tight ball, on the right-hand side of the bed. The Panasonic clock radio on her nightstand was set for 8:20. By the time she awoke to her more cultured business day, he’d be in his midtown office, hard at work.

He stepped into the closet and swept his Nikes, sweatsuit, socks, and headband off a shelf. Then, padding over to the long, low, far-too-modern bureau — the most recent fruit of Helen’s obsessive redecorating — he fumbled a fanny pack out of a drawer, dropping a rolled-up change of underwear and his wallet, keys, and gold Rolex President watch into it.

After visiting the guest bathroom to relieve himself and brush his teeth, he went to the kitchen. The Toshiba coffee maker’s brew light glowed green. The timer’s digital display read 5:48. He decanted the pot into a large enameled mug decorated with a picture of the 47 Ronin, the souvenir of a visit to the Sengakuji Temple during a business trip to Tokyo. He emptied the grounds from the brewer basket, filled the machine’s reservoir, and reset the timer for 8:15. Helen needed her morning coffee just as much as he did. Or maybe more so — Helen was far from sociable upon rising, and it was not until she opened the doors of her Lexington Avenue gallery that she put on her best behavior.

Warm, thick coffee slid down Dave’s throat. He shivered with pleasure.

Something soft brushed his pajama leg. Dave reached down to tickle the cat’s chin. “Bon matin, ma belle,” he said, knowing that all cats speak French of preference. The cat, who was named Apache, arched her neck, stretched, and purred.

Helen loathed Apache’s name. She had insisted more than once that Dave change it. Second marriages produce more compromises than first marriages. Dave knew that, and knew that he should accede to his wife’s request. But a cat’s name is a cat’s name; it has nothing to do with its owner’s wishes. And so after five years of marriage Dave still called the animal “Apache,” while Helen (who, being blonde, was used to having her way) icily referred to it as “that cat.”

Apache padded away on her morning rounds. “Au revoir, Apache,” Dave whispered, thus satisfying in some small way a sense of honor sullied by too many concessions.

Thinking improper thoughts about the difference between cats and cattiness, Dave retrieved the morning’s New York Times from outside the apartment door. For the next several minutes, he sat at the dining room table nursing his coffee and flipping through the newspaper. He did not read it closely. His early morning ritual of scanning the paper was merely an excuse to enjoy the day’s first cup of coffee.

As he turned to the business section he noticed that, quite unconsciously, his right hand had crept up to pat the left side of his chest. Dave grimaced. A sly, sardonic inner voice — Dave always thought of it as his guardian angel — whispered, Still looking for a pack of cigarettes. Twelve years after you quit, and the body still wants its morning hit of nicotine. Say, pal, maybe you should get back into tobacco stocks after all.

“Mornin’, Mr. Elliot. Nice day for a run.” The doorman believed it to be his duty to assure the building’s joggers that every day was a “nice day for a run.”

“Good morning, Tad. Anything in the papers today about Lithuania?”

Tad’s ancestors had migrated to the United States in the 1880s. As far as Tad was concerned, it had been only yesterday. He was staunchly nationalistic about the land of his ancestors. Dave did not think that one day had passed, in the three years since he and Helen had purchased their apartment, upon which Tad had not had something to say about Lithuania.

“Nothin’ in the News or the Times, Mr. Elliot. But I get the papers from Vilnius, you know, by mail. They usually show up on Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll letchya know what’s happening tomorrow.”

“Great.”

“Say, whatchya do to your hand?” Tad pointed at the gauze pad taped around Dave’s left palm.

“An employee bit me.”

Tad blinked. “Ya gotta be kiddin’ me.”

“Nope. We … my company that is, bought a research outfit out on Long Island. I was there yesterday on a tour. One of the … production workers expressed its disapproval of the new management.” Dave grinned wryly. “And it wasn’t even a hostile takeover.”

Tad guffawed as he pushed the front door open. “You’re makin’ this up, right?”

“Nope. You get a lot of that in corporate life — biting the hand that feeds you.”

Tad chortled again. “I guess I’m glad I’m just a doorman, Mr. Elliot. Have a nice day.”

“Same to you, Tad. See you tomorrow.”

“Sure, Mr. Elliot. Have a nice day.”

On Saturdays and Sundays, Dave ran west, jogging across Fifty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue, then north to Central Park. On those days, the running was purest pleasure. There were fewer menacing crazies on the street — or so it seemed — and the runner could concentrate on the running. Best of all, it was on the weekends that Mark came down from Columbia University to run at his father’s side. Mark, his son, his and Annie’s, was Dave’s special pride. Running with Mark was the best part of Dave’s week, the thing to which he most looked forward.

Dave always made a point of asking Helen to join them on their weekend runs. She never accepted. Helen found a jogger’s sweat lacking in gentility, favoring instead chic perspiration extracted by pricey exercise centers, by even pricier private trainers.

No matter. Mark was with him, and, rain or shine, the running was a delight.

Less so the weekdays. No matter how you ran, no matter where you ran, watchfulness was called for. Certain blocks were to be avoided; alleys were a risk; none but the reckless jogged beneath bridges and overpasses; nor did the prudent begin their runs before dawn. On a morning run even a man like David Elliot, a man who did not have an enemy in the world, sometimes glanced warily over his shoulder.

His workday route took him east on Fifty-seventh to Sutton Place, then north on York Avenue until he reached a pedestrian bridge across FDR Drive. He ran up the path by the East River until he reached the high Nineties. Once there, he turned south again, retracing his steps. After crossing the bridge a second time, he jogged west to Park Avenue, and then south to the corner of Fiftieth and Park.

It usually was just after 7:00 A.M. when he entered his office.

As an executive vice president of his company, David Elliot was entitled to, and enjoyed, the perquisites of rank. His forty-fifth floor suite consisted of eight hundred square feet of expensively understated space, a walk-in closet, a discreet wet bar, and a full bathroom with tub and shower.

Dave liked his water hot. Steam filled the bathroom as he lathered himself from top to bottom twice over. Still in the shower, he took a Gillette safety razor and a can of shaving cream from the shelf above the spigots. He never used a mirror when shaving, and hadn’t for so long he couldn’t remember. It was another habit he had picked up in a war unwillingly remembered.

7:20 A.M.

David Elliot, with a towel around his waist, stepped out of the bathroom and into his office. On the mahogany credenza behind his matching mahogany desk, a Toshiba brewer, the twin of the model at home, beeped three times, signaling that his coffee was ready. Dave filled a chocolate-brown mug with it. The cup was decorated with a raised, angular, silver-enameled design: the Senterex corporate logo.

Dave took a sip and sighed. Life without coffee is too awful to contemplate.

He noticed, damnit, that the watercolor over his credenza was askew. Every week or two, some dust-rag-wielding vandal from the nightly cleaning crew knocked the thing sideways. It was a minor irritation, but one that was growing in its power to annoy.

He put his coffee cup on a brass coaster (also embossed with the Senterex logo), and straightened the painting — Hua Yen, a portrait of a sleeping tiger dating from the mid-1700s — quite lovely, quite valuable, one of the nicer perquisites of working for Senterex. The company’s chairman, Bernie Levy, savvier than most corporate moguls, let the purchase of executive artwork fall into the hands of neither high-priced interior designers nor, worse, his corporate officers’ wives. Rather he demanded that quality art, only the work of masters, decorate the company’s headquarters offices. For this reason a sextet of Leonor Freni chalks decorated the forty-fifth floor reception area. Orozco, Rouault, Beckmann, Barlach, and Ensor could be found in the hallways. Elsewhere, on the walls of various corporate offices, a visitor could find Picasso, Munch, Thomas Eakins (in the office of Senterex’s chief counsel, of course), a most expensive Matisse, and a startlingly abstract Whistler. Bernie himself had a special affection for Camille Pissarro, two of whose oils hung on proud display in the corporate boardroom. Of course Bernie, being Bernie, denied that Senterex acquired art for aesthetic reasons; rather, when guests commented on the company’s collection, he boasted of how much it appreciated in value, and the cash the company could accumulate were it sold. But Bernie lied. He’d never sell the Senterex collection, not a single piece of it. He loved it too much.

Dave stepped back, eyeing the tiger. It was straight again, or straight enough.

And now for a little music. He switched on his stereo. The opening bars of Ding Shan-de’s Long March Symphony came softly through the speakers. Idly, Dave wondered why the American music establishment ignored the Chinese romantics.

Having no answers to his own question, and caring about cultural politics even less than he cared about the civic kind, Dave put the thought out of his mind. Instead, he reached for his coffee cup and took another sip. God, that’s good!

Almost invariably Dave was the first person in the office — or at least the first in the executive suite. Bernie Levy, master of the corporate ship, didn’t show up until 8:00 or so, his limousine leaving Short Hills, New Jersey, at 6:50 sharp. The rest of the executive cadre drifted in between 8:15 and 8:45, depending on what train they caught from Greenwich, Scarsdale, or Darien, and always much conditional upon that train running on time. The first of the secretaries arrived at 8:30 punctually.

For this reason, Dave knew he could, as was his unvarying morning habit, lounge buck naked (but for a towel) at his desk, savoring the day’s second cup of coffee, and studying the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Several peaceful minutes later, with a third cup of coffee in his hand, he ambled into his walk-in closet to select his suit for the day.

Today he chose a lightweight tan, almost khaki, number. Although the brutal humidity of the past summer had broken, the late September weather was still warm. Dave’s wool suits would remain on their hangers for a few weeks longer.

With suit pants donned and belted, and feet comfortably placed in soft, glove leather Bally loafers, Dave unwrapped a fresh, starched white shirt. He put it on, and after some consideration selected from his tie rack a pale yellow tie with a blue motif. A full-length mirror backed Dave’s closet door. He pulled the door three-quarters closed so that he could study himself.

Never learned how to knot a tie without a mirror, did you? his guardian angel asked.

He looked himself over carefully. Not bad. Not bad at all. His waistline hadn’t changed since college. Forty-seven years old, but looking younger than that. Oh, you handsome dog, you’re going to live forever. Dave nodded as if in agreement. The daily jogging, the two nights a week workout with weights, no smoking but for an occasional and much prized cigar, a diet about which even Helen couldn’t complain, alcohol consumption that was modest by any …

“Davy?”

The questioning voice came from the office behind him — Bernie Levy’s voice, its gruff Brooklyn accent unmistakable. Dave glanced at his Rolex. 7:43. Traffic must have been light this morning. Senterex’s chairman and CEO was in the office well ahead of schedule.

Dave shrugged on his jacket, nudged his tie knot imperceptibly to the left, and gripping his coffee cup, pushed open the closet door.

“Yes, Bernie. What’s up?”

Bernie was facing away from the closet. Dave didn’t see his gun until he turned around.

2

Here in the jungle there are two kinds of time — long time and slow time. Long time is what you usually get. You sit beneath a tree or in a hooch or in a field tent, or maybe you’re tiptoeing Indian file through the boonies, and nothing happens. Hours pass, and nothing happens. Then you look at your Timex and discover that it has only been five minutes since the last time you looked at it. Long time.

The other kind of time is slow time. There’s a flat metallic snap, the receiver of an AK-47 chambering a round. Then there is fire and explosions and screams and the whine of bullets all around and each one aimed at you for unending eternity. And when, after hours of hot terror, and no little rage, the shooting stops, you come back from hell and glance at your Timex.

Guess what? Five minutes have passed since the last time you looked at it.

Slow time. The clock gets choked with molasses. Men weep at how slow the seconds pass. They are MACVSOG. Their shoulder patch is a fanged skull wearing a green beret. They are the hardest of the hard, the baddest of the bad. Nothing fazes them. They look at their watches. They weep.

One afternoon, the smell of cordite and hot brass still fresh in the air, First Lieutenant David Elliot places his blued-steel Timex on a rotten tree stump, slaps a full magazine into his Model 1911A Colt .45 automatic, and blasts the watch to fragments.

The pistol in Bernie Levy’s hand seemed preposterously tiny. Bernie was five inches shorter than Dave and twenty pounds heavier. His hands were large and fleshy. The gun was almost lost in his grip. It was nickel-plated. Dave was willing to bet that the grips were ivory. Small caliber, Dave’s guardian angel whispered. Twenty-five? Maybe a .22. Not much stopping power. Enough at this distance, though.

“Bernie, why do you have …”

Bernie looked exhausted. His eyes were red and ringed with dark smudges, as if he had been too long without sleep. His face, once all sharp and hawklike, had gone flabby with age. His jowls quivered with some emotion that Dave couldn’t read. How old is he? Sixty-three, isn’t it? Dave thought he should know precisely.

“… a gun?”

Bernie’s eyes were empty, the lids half closed. They looked reptilian, cold and empty. There was nothing in them at all. Dave expected to see something in them. He didn’t know what.

“Why, in God’s name?”

Bernie inched his hand forward, lifting the pistol.

Holy Christ, he’s going to pull the trigger!

“Bernie, come on, speak to me.”

Bernie rolled his lips, tightening them and then loosening them. Dave watched his hand tense.

“Bernie, you can’t. Not without saying something. Bernie, for the love of God …”

Bernie’s shoulders twitched. He licked his lips. “Davy, this is … If I only had a choice … You don’t know, Davy … Bernie Levy blames himself, and God will not forgive. Davy, Davy, you can’t know how bad this makes me feel.”

Oddly enough, Dave almost felt like snickering. Almost. “This is going to hurt you more than it will me, huh? Is that what you are trying to say, Bernie?”

Bernie sighed and pursed his lips. “Always with the funny stuff, Davy, always with the wisenheimer spritz.” The hand holding the gun went tense again.

Slow time. Though the coffee wasn’t scalding, it was hot enough. It seemed to take forever to reach Bernie’s face, his wide-open eyes. The coffee burned right into them. Bernie yelped. Dave took one, two, three steps forward, his left arm low and straight. It took him hours to do it, walking straight into the muzzle of Bernie’s wavering gun.

He swept Bernie’s arm up, wincing at the pain in his bandaged hand. He drove a knee into Bernie’s groin. Bernie made a noise like a punctured tire. The pistol tumbled loose. Dave snatched it from the air. Bernie was bent forward, his head at Dave’s waistline. Dave brought the pistol butt down on the back of his skull. Hard. Twice.

Bernie lay still on the floor. David Elliot stood above him, gasping for air, waiting for the clock to recalibrate itself to normal time, but most of all wondering what the hell to do next.

Corporate office life is not without its moments of excitement. There are villains and heroes, triumphs and defeats, and clashes of eager ferocity. Friendships are made, and later broken; hard words are exchanged; there are bitter rivalries, and even open animosity. However, political infighting, not the physical kind, is the stuff of executive conflict; only on television, and then only in the sillier kinds of programs, do business people pull guns on one another.

Such thoughts, in a highly abbreviated form, flashed through David Elliot’s mind as he tried to regain his breath. He spun through the past few seconds, finding in them no clue as to why his boss, a man whom he counted as a friend, would come after him with a loaded firearm.

Unless this was some sort of stupid joke.

A joke? Uh-oh …

Dave’s stomach sank. Then he glanced at the pistol. A baby Browning. No toy. No ivory grips either. He ejected the magazine. Eight rounds full. He racked back the slide. A bullet popped from its chamber and rolled to the floor. He picked it up. Hollow point, 25 caliber.

No joke.

What then? What could have driven Bernard Levy, whom Dave knew to be as even-tempered an executive as was ever born, to point a gun at one of his corporate officers?

Nothing. There was no reason in the world that could account for it. The very morning of the previous day, shortly before leaving to tour the new Long Island acquisition, Dave had sat in Bernie’s office and reviewed a series of marketing reports with him. It had been a good meeting, warm and cordial, and had closed with Bernie endorsing Dave’s recommendations.

There had not been a negative word. Not even a hint of one.

Something earlier? Not likely. Dave ran a handful of Senterex’s two dozen divisions. He managed them smoothly, and the results were always as expected. There were no sources of conflict there.

Not that he and Bernie always agreed. Bernie was a deal-maker, a grand conglomerator of the old school. He had come up from the streets of Brooklyn, the son of immigrants. With no assets other than nerve, a nose for opportunity, and a flair for canny acquisitions, he had built Senterex from the ground up.

And Bernie still made acquisitions. He couldn’t resist them. They were his life’s blood. He loved finding smallish companies — sometimes marginally profitable, sometimes not — that he could buy on the cheap and then improve. Some he kept as part of the Senterex portfolio. Some he sold, but never at a loss. All fit his vision of financial synergy. Every now and then other Senterex executives didn’t concur with Bernie’s acquisition targets, and argued with him. Dave himself had strongly challenged Bernie’s decision to purchase Lockyear Laboratories, and even more strongly resisted Bernie’s subsequent assignment of responsibility for the operation to him once the deal was consummated.

But was that worth killing someone over? Never in a million years.

Could it be something personal? Had Dave done something outside the office to affront Bernie, to insult him, to humiliate or betray him? Not likely. Bernie lived a quiet, almost wholly private life. Dave never saw him socially. Although their relationship was more than merely friendly, it was largely limited to the confines of the forty-fifth floor.

Now Bernie wanted to kill him. Not a word of explanation. Just a gun, and mournful Bernie saying, “Bernie Levy blames himself, and God will not forgive.”

“Hell, Bernie,” Dave whispered, although he was only speaking to himself, “if you want to shoot somebody, for Christ’s sake shoot somebody special. Not an ordinary schmuck like me.”

Ordinary — David Elliot knew himself, knew precisely who he was, knew he was an ordinary man, devoutly committed to the ordinary predictability of an ordinary life. Sure, when he was young, little more than a boy off an Indiana farm, he’d wanted more than farm boys should — gallant deeds rewarded with medals and great renown. But he soon learned that those things came at a price. And so now, and for a very long time now, he was just an ordinary, ordinary guy. Hell, more than merely ordinary, he was a statistic. What is the profile of the average, upper-income corporate executive? David P.-for-Perry Elliot, that’s what. Two marriages, one divorce, far from religiously ardent, a fiscal conservative and social moderate, ethnically hybrid, physically fit, fond of football, bored by baseball, reads less than he should, watches more television than he should, is boringly monogamous and slightly prudish, is nonetheless occasionally tempted, works an average of fifty-six hours a week, worries about the stock market, complains about his taxes, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t take drugs, and doesn’t look forward to his annual physical exam. He vacations in the ordinary places. He socializes with the ordinary companions. He adheres to the ordinary codes. For twenty-five years, he’s devoted himself to ordinariness. He has positively embraced it, wanting nothing else from life than what is ordinary. It is how he defines the word “good.” He is, goddamnit, just an ordinary man and nothing more.

So why, Bernie, why the hell did you try to kill me?

David Elliot, an ordinary man, could conceive of no answer to the question.

Dave looked at his watch. It was 7:45 A.M. exactly. Two minutes. Slow time had ended. The thing to do, he realized, the only thing to do, was to get help. Maybe Bernie had suffered some sort of attack. Maybe brain damage or …

… or whatever, his cynical angel growled. It’s irrelevant. My friend, you’ve just cold-cocked the pistol-packin’ chief executive of an $8 billion NYSE-listed company onto the floor of your expensively carpeted office. By definition, you now have problems that lie well beyond your competence as a businessman. Besides which, let me point out, you hit Bernie kind of hard. What happens if he is more than merely out cold? Like, for example … oh hell …

Dave dropped the pistol into the pocket of his suit coat. He stepped out of his office, took one deep breath, and began to jog down the long carpeted corridor that connected his corner office with the rest of the executive suite. He was hoping that one of his fellow corporate officers had come in early. Or one of the secretaries. Or the receptionist. Or anyone.

He got as far as the reception area at the end of the hall. Two cold-eyed men were standing there, just around the corner. As soon as they saw him, they began reaching beneath their jackets.

David Elliot’s clock slowed down again.

3

Dave forced his face into a smile. “Good morning. I’m Pete Ashby. Can I help you?”

Both men froze. The eyes of the taller one narrowed, studying Dave’s face.

“Are you waiting for Dave Elliot? He’s usually the first one in, but I just walked by his office and his door is still closed.”

The two men relaxed, but only slightly. Neither was as tall as Dave, but both were, by any measure, big—real big, the kind of big that makes you think of weight lifters, professional wrestlers, and jackhammer operators. The collars of their off-the-rack wash ’n’ wear shirts were at least size 18. Their suit coats, brown and grey respectively (and not, Dave observed, entirely natural fiber), were of the sort of loose cut muscular men prefer — albeit neither was cut loosely enough to disguise the silhouettes of their shoulder holsters.

They don’t know you, pal. Lucky you. They don’t know what you look like. At best they’ve seen a photograph, and not a very good one. Stay cool, you may just be able to pull this off.

The taller of the two, a square-faced man whose close-cropped hair was turning grey, spoke. “No, Mr. Ashley …”

“Ashby, Pete Ashby. I’m vice president of engineering.”

“Excuse me. Mr. Ashby, then. My colleague and I are here to see Mr. Levy.” There was a trace of the Appalachians in his voice — eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, somewhere in the mountains. It was an accent that many found musical, but that made Dave’s skin prickle.

“Bernie’s office is down the hall to your left. He usually gets in just about now. Do you want me to check for you?”

The taller man flicked his eyes left. It was the first time they had left Dave’s face. “No need. He said he’d meet us here.”

Dave felt sweat break out on his palms. The doors to the Senterex executive reception area were locked until 8:30. No one could get in without a key. “Can I get you some coffee or something, Mr.… ahh, I don’t think I caught your name.”

“John.” There was a pause. The man didn’t like to give his name. “Ransome. And my colleague is Mark Carlucci. We are … accountants. We’re here … to go over the audit report with Mr. Levy.”

Right. Coopers Lybrand is recruiting retired NFL linebackers to balance its clients’ books. That’ll be the day.

“Pleased to meet you.” Dave observed that neither man offered to shake hands. “Now about that coffee? Let me get you some. We all have our own coffee makers on this floor. Most companies, you know, have a kitchenette or …”

Shut up, shut up, shut up. You’re babbling. You’ll blow it.

“… well, mine’s brewed up. I can …”

“No thanks, Mr. Ashey.”

That was your second try, you cunning bastard.

“Ashby.”

“Sorry. I’m terrible with names.”

Dave’s mind was racing. The two men had to be involved with what Bernie had done — or tried to do — minutes earlier. There could be no other explanation for their presence in the executive reception room at this hour. But how were they involved, and who were they? The holsters outlined beneath each man’s suit coat told him … What? Were these guys cops? Mafia? The KGB? What kind of thugs had Bernie gotten himself involved with?

“Well, I ought to get to work. Bernie should be here any minute now. So if you’ll excuse me …”

“Certainly. Don’t let us keep you.”

The reception area lay at the intersection of four corridors. Dave’s office, like those of the other divisional executives, was at the distant end of the south hall. Bernie’s suite was on the opposite side of the building, occupying the northeast corner and commanding the best view. The corporate staff officers — finance, legal affairs, human resources, and so forth — had their offices to the east. A short hall led west through double glass doors to the elevator bank.

Dave started to turn west.

Wrong, you idiot, wrong! You said that your coffee maker was on this floor. You said you were a corporate officer. You can’t go to the elevators.…

He jerked himself to a stop. Both men were looking at him now. Their expressions had changed.

Dave tried to improvise a smile. He didn’t succeed. “You didn’t happen to see a stack of Wall Street Journals by the elevator, did you? They usually leave them right outside the glass doors.” Weak, but it was worth a try.

The man who called himself Ransome slowly shook his head. His eyes had gone flat.

Dave nodded, and turned east. He walked across the reception room toward the hall. There was a small hot ache in the center of his back. He hadn’t felt that particular sensation for twenty-five years, not since he was on patrol in Indian country. Charlie’s here. Charlie’s got a gun. Oh my, now Charlie’s leveling his sights. He’s drawing a bead. He’s tightening his finger. Hey, man, Charlie’s getting ready to smile.…

Every nerve in his body was on fire. Sweat broke out from his forehead and trickled down his cheeks. His throat scalded with rising vomit.

In the hall now. Almost home free. Another ten seconds and you’re out of sight. He wanted to scream and run. He felt his knees quiver. The pounding of his heart was deafening. Keep cool. You can make it, same as you did in the old days.…

There was a small nook two dozen feet down the hallway. It had been built to hold a photocopier that was never installed. As Dave passed it, he heard Ransome’s softly drawling voice behind him. “Oh, Mr. Elliot, there’s just one other thing.”

“Yes.”

Aw shit!

4

Dave hurled himself into the nook. His shoulder butted hard against the wall. Four ragged holes burst open in the plaster. Chalky fragments exploded into the air. The dust stung his eyes. He slid to the floor, fumbling Bernie’s pistol from his pocket. Two more holes opened. The only sound he heard was the thud of bullets tearing into Sheetrock. Ransome and Carlucci were using silencers.

He tucked his feet back, seeking purchase against the wall behind him. He pulled back the slide on the small automatic and, as he released it, thrust himself forward into the corridor.

Carlucci was just entering the hallway, a step ahead of Ransome, his gun cradled in two hands. The muzzle was aimed high, well above where Dave lay. Dave fired twice, and two times more. Carlucci stopped. A bouquet of flowers, blood roses, bloomed on the pocket of his shirt. His mouth fell open. He whispered, “Mary, mother of God have mercy …” Dave rolled back into the nook.

Ransome, still in the reception room, snapped off a badly aimed shot, then dodged left and out of sight.

Dave looked curiously at the small, shiny pistol in his palm. My, my, his guardian angel opined. Just like riding a bicycle, isn’t it? Once you learn how to do it, you never forget.

Ransome’s voice, low but not inaudible, came from the reception area. “Partridge, this is Robin. Thrush is down. I have incoming. Repeat. I have incoming.”

Great, he’s got a radio and he’s got a friend.

Ransome paused, listening to a reply that Dave could not hear.

“Affirmative on the weapons team, Partridge. Negative on the medic, it’s too late for that. Negative on sealing the premises. This is supposed to be a private party. Let’s keep it that way.” He paused again. “For the record, six foot one, 170 pounds, medium build and very trim. Hair: light brown, parted on the left, expensive cut. No facial hair. Eyes: brown. No glasses, no distinguishing marks. Belay that. No distinguishing marks except for a gauze bandage on his left hand. Khaki-colored lightweight suit, two-buttoned jacket, no vest. White shirt, yellow tie with blue pattern. Gold cuff links with an onyx setting …” A second of silence. “An onyx is a shiny black stone, Partridge. Jesus, where do they find you guys? Continuing: black loafers, plain, with no bangles or tassels. Gold watch worn on left wrist. Wedding band on ring finger. One more thing — add an ‘armed and dangerous’ to the description.” Ransome stopped again, then replied, “Right now? Right now he’s cocky as a nigger with a knife. He thinks he’s in control of the situation. But he’s not.” Ransome paused one last time, then said, “No problem. We can wait. Neither of us are going anywhere. Roger, forty-fifth floor, that’s an affirmative. Robin out.”

Ransome’s voice was cool, without a hint of emotion in it, and his hill country accent made the small hairs on the back of Dave’s neck rise. His heart was beating faster now, and his breath was coming short. That voice, that goddamned Appalachian voice … so much like the voice of Sergeant Michael Mullins … the very late Sergeant Mullins …

Now is not a good time for reminiscing, pal. Now is the time you’ve got to think. Think fast, and think …

“… sharp, gentlemen.” The survival training instructor is a slender, intense colonel in perfectly tailored fatigues. There is something about his bearing, the way he stands and the way he moves, that tells his audience that he knows his subject firsthand. The colonel is not talking about abstract theory. The topic of his lecture is hard-won personal experience.

“Gentlemen, would you like to know what we call a man who panics under fire? Let me tell you. Gentlemen, the technical term for a man who panics under fire is ‘target.’ That sort of soldier is the sort of soldier who gets chalked up on the other side’s scoreboard before the end of the first inning. Accordingly, when you hear a round coming your way, you must not panic. You must not cringe. You must not feel the least apprehension or agitation. Instead, you must think. Thinking is the only way out. Only logic and reason will preserve you. And what do logic and reason tell us, gentlemen? What they tell us is this: when someone shoots at you, the only rational response is to — with dispassion and dispatch — render that enemy incapable of shooting at you again. There is, gentlemen, no reasonable alternative to this course of action.”

Dave mentally reviewed the layout of the forty-fifth floor. The corridor in which he was trapped led east, passing a half dozen inner offices — cubbyholes occupied by the executive cadre’s aides and assistants. The doors to those offices were spaced about twelve feet apart. At its far end the hall intersected another corridor — one that ran around the perimeter of the building. That’s where the executives lived.

One other thing. The fire exits. There were three of them, heavy metal doors that opened, on stairwells. One of them was … off this hall … where? Twenty or thirty feet away, he supposed. If Ransome was as good as Dave guessed he was, Dave would be dead long before he reached it.

But then, you’re going to be dead anyway, aren’t you? Ransome just said something about a weapons team. They’re probably in the lobby, an elevator ride away. High side, pal, you’ve got maybe three, maybe four minutes of breathing time left.

Dave winced at his inner voice’s jibe. Ransome, he thought. The only way out was through Ransome. Cupping his hand to the side of his mouth Dave called out, “Hey, Ransome.”

“Yes, Mr. Elliot. How can I help you?” Ransome’s tone was neutral, flat. He sounded, if anything, relaxed.

“I’m sorry about your friend Carlucci.”

“No sweat. I barely knew the man.”

“Good. Besides, I think you have to agree that it was your fault.”

“Really, why is that?” Ransome did not sound the least interested.

“You’re the senior man. Besides, you should have known that if I got past Bernie, then I almost certainly would have gotten his weapon.”

There was a short pause before Ransome replied, “Point taken.” His voice was still utterly unemotional.

Well, that idea’s not going to work. You’re not going to make him lose his cool. By the way, I bet the weapons team is in the elevators by now.

(Think, gentlemen. Think fast, and think sharp.)

Dave glanced around the nook. It was a little more than three feet deep with walls like all those in the executive suite, papered with a stiff, beige fabric. In six places, the covering was gouged open, jagged, and showing the empty places behind. There was nothing else to be seen except a small red box marked ALARM — FIRE.

Reaching up with his bandaged left hand, Dave yanked open the fire alarm box and tugged down the lever. A harsh siren blared through the halls. It sounded like a buzzsaw on sheet metal, and made the fillings in Dave’s teeth ache.

Ransome raised his voice over the shriek. “No good, Mr. Elliot. We’ll just call it in as a false alarm.”

Dave shouted back, “Think about it, Ransome.”

“What do you … Ah! Very good, Mr. Elliot. You’ve stopped the elevators, haven’t you? The law requires they automatically return to the ground floor when an alarm goes off. That’s just outstanding, truly superlative.”

“Thank you.”

“Congratulations, you’ve bought yourself some time that I didn’t think you had. However, be assured that my people will use the stairs.”

Ransome seemed to go silent. No … not silent. Dave could make out his voice, smothered by the sound of the alarm. He probably was on the radio explaining the situation.

Uh-uh. No good. You don’t want him talking to his men, you want him talking to you.

“Ransome!”

“Yes, Mr. Elliot.” As Ransome replied, the alarm shut off. The disappearance of the noise made Dave jump.

(You must not panic. You must not cringe.)

“Is Ransome really your name?”

“No.”

“How about John?”

“No.”

“Do you want to tell me what your name is?”

“No.”

“Mind if I keep calling you Ransome? Or would you prefer John?”

Ransome thought about it. “Ransome is better.”

“Okay, Ransome it is. Mr. Ransome, I’ve got a favor I’d like to ask.”

“Go ahead.”

“Tell me why you’re here. I mean, what’s this all about?”

“Sorry, no can do. All I can tell you is that it’s nothing personal. I hope you appreciate that.”

(You must think. Thinking is the only way out.)

Dave let a little bitterness creep into his voice. “Thanks a lot. So why can’t you tell me? What is it, don’t I have a need to know?”

“Something like that.”

He’s sniffing the bait. Now try a little whining.

“All right, then. What are my options? Can’t we cut a deal or something?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Elliot. There is only one way to end this thing. The best I can offer is to make it easy for you. Reflect upon your military experience; you will understand what I mean.”

Dave bit his lip. What did this man know about his Army record? And how dare he bring it up?

“What are you talking about?”

Ransome’s voice warmed. The change in inflection was almost unnoticeable, but it was there. “Last night I read your old 201 file.”

Just last night? What the hell …?

Ransome continued, “It turns out that we went through the same school and the same classes, you and me. Uncle Ho’s elite academy of elegant etiquette. You were an R.O.T.C. boy. Me, I was a 90 day wonder. Not that how we got there matters. What matters is that even though I was there ahead of you, we were in the same units, and the same places, and the same dire hell. We even reported to the same C.O.… ”

“Mamba Jack,” Dave blurted. This was bad, very bad.

“Yeah, Colonel Kreuter. I was on his team just like you were. And Jack only hired one kind of man — my kind of man, your kind of man. That kind of man.”

Dave forced himself to laugh. “Ransome, are you trying to tell me you think I’m some sort of hard case?”

“You know it, buddy. They don’t issue you a green beanie unless you are. You wore one. I wore one. We are who we are.”

Dave didn’t want to hear this. “Maybe. But I’ve been somebody else for a long time now.”

“I don’t think so. Once you’re one of us, you’re always one of us.” Ransome’s hill country voice was vibrant now, and he spoke with a warrior’s pride. “It’s like being a communist or being a Catholic. You can’t ever quit. Not really. Think about it — you still have all the moves; you’re still a pro. If you don’t believe me, just ask Carlucci.”

“I got lucky.”

“I think not.”

(Only logic and reason will preserve you.)

Dave raised the pitch of his voice, speaking faster and with calculated nervousness. “Okay, okay, what’s your point?”

“My point is very simple. You pulled an honorable tour of duty, at least until the end …”

Dave snapped, “Some people would say that was the only honorable part.”

“Yeah,” Ransome drawled, “but we both know what kind of people they are. But my point is that you wore the colors, did the tour, and served with the best.”

“So?”

“So, that buys you something in my book.”

Dave sent his voice higher. “What?” He sounded almost shrill.

“One favor. Only one. First, you toss me that little sissy peashooter of yours. Then you come out and assume the position. You remember the position, don’t you? On the knees, hands under the fanny. You put your head down, and I handle the rest. No muss, no fuss. That’s the best deal I can offer you, Mr. Elliot. Clean, quick, and painless. Otherwise — well, hell, buddy, we’re going to have us a messy morning here.”

“Jesus!” Dave made the word sound like a squeak of terror. He wanted to sound almost — but not quite — hysterical. “That’s your best offer? Jesus!”

“Think about it. It could be worse.”

(And what do logic and reason tell us, gentlemen?)

Dave sluffed off his suit coat and counted to fifty. “Uhh …,” he groaned.

“Come on, Mr. Elliot, be reasonable. Make it easy on yourself.”

“You can’t … I mean, we can’t … ahh, talk this over? If you’d just tell me what the problem is …”

Don’t lay it on too thick. Hell get suspicious.

“I wish I could, but I can’t. Look, Mr. Elliot, way back when, you and I were in the same line of business. Remember how it used to be? Well, I’m sorry to say that’s the way it is now. So, come on, Mr. Elliot, we both know how these things work, the same as we both know there’s no other way. Face the facts, man: the longer you wait, the worse it’s going to get. Please, Mr. Elliot, I’m asking you — wouldn’t you rather make it easy on yourself?” Ransome’s voice was soft, sympathetic, encouraging.

(The only rational response is to render the enemy incapable of shooting at you.)

“Uhh … I mean … uh … But can’t we … uh …” Dave cocked his arm for a hard throw, and tossed his wadded-up jacket into the hall. A small hail of silent slugs shredded it to ribbons while it was still in the air.

Dave smiled, mentally tallying the number of times Ransome had fired. His inner voice, his guardian angel, sneered in a Daffy Duck voice, Of courth you realithe thith meanth war.…

5

He hadn’t hated war. Twenty-five years earlier he hadn’t hated it one little bit. Other men did. But not Dave Elliot. Dave Elliot rather enjoyed it — or at least he enjoyed it until he realized what it was turning him into.

He especially enjoyed it when his enemies were good. The better they were, the happier he was. There was something about knowing your opponents were hardened, smart professionals that made it … that made it …

… almost fun.

“Ransome, I consider that to be a pretty goddamned unfriendly gesture.”

“I understand your perspective, Mr. Elliot, but try to look at the situation from my point of view. I’m just trying to do my job here.” There was not the least hint of an apology in Ransome’s voice.

Come on, Ransome, do it. Please, Ransome, please. You know you have to do it.

Dave’s heart was thundering. He forced himself to take long, deep breaths, hyperventilating, keeping his adrenaline high, pumping himself up for what he was about to do. Get psyched, get psyched, get psyched! That was what Mamba Jack had always barked just before the lead began to fly. Get psyched!

Yeah!

“I thought we were supposed to be comrades-in-arms.”

“I want you to know that I was sincere about that, Mr. Elliot.”

Listen for it. Get ready. The muscles in Dave’s legs tingled. His face burned red with anticipation. He obsessively rubbed his thumb rapidly back and forth against his index finger.

“You know I’m not going to believe another word you say.”

“I can respect that.”

Any second now. Any second …

The sound was very faint. Just a tiny click — the noise made, Dave prayed, by a magazine being ejected from a pistol butt.

That has to be it. If it isn’t, you’re about to die.

He jerked down hard on the fire alarm lever, using it to pull himself to his feet. The siren squalled, filling the hallway with its grating shriek. Dave spun out of the nook, stretching his legs, pumping his elbows, running headlong as hard and as fast as he could, running as he ran every morning but running faster, running toward where, if the gods chose to smile on David Elliot, the man who called himself John Ransome crouched with a temporarily empty gun.

And the gods did smile. Ransome was stretched prone on the reception room floor, his head and shoulders angled into the hallway in a classic shooter’s sprawl. An empty clip lay under his chin. He was off balance, rolled sideways to reload. As Dave hurtled forward, he saw anger flit across Ransome’s face. The man knew that he had been suckered.

Well, thank you, Mr. Ransome. It was most kindly of you to lie down in that position — excellent for target practice, but a little lacking when it comes to mobility.

Ransome snaked back, raising his arms defensively. Dave was five feet away. Ransome pulled into a crouch, started coming out of it.

It was going to be close. Too close. He’d have to use Bernie’s gun, and he didn’t want to do that unless he had to. And he’d have to unless …

The one thing, his instructors at Fort Bragg had told him, the one thing you never, never do in hand-to-hand combat is kick your opponent. Forget everything you’ve ever seen or heard or read about karate, judo, and kung-fu. Forget Batman and forget Bruce Lee on that Green Hornet TV show. That’s Hollywood stuff, not the real world. In the real world, there are twenty different things your opponent can do to you if you’ve got a leg up in the air, and nineteen of them make you dead. Never kick! The drill sergeants had screamed it over and over again. Never kick!

He kicked Ransome in the face.

Same school and same classes? Is that what you said, Mr. Ransome? If so, you weren’t expecting that particular move, were you?

Dave’s heel caught Ransome squarely under the left cheek, snapping his head back and spinning him over, belly-up. Dave cocked his right elbow into a spear, dove forward, came down hard onto — into — Ransome’s solar plexus. Ransome’s face went white. Dave drew his arm back, flattening his palm, aiming a killing stroke at the tip of Ransome’s chin.

He never delivered the blow. Ransome’s face went slack, and his eyes closed.

Dave levered his right arm across Ransome’s neck with choking force. Ransome didn’t move. Dave peeled Ransome’s right eyelid open. Only white showed. Most people can roll their eyeballs back. A trained man can fake unconsciousness persuasively. Dave flicked a finger against the white of Ransome’s eye. There wasn’t the slightest twitch. No one can fake that. Ransome was out cold.

David Elliot wanted a cigarette more than anything else in the world.

According to the contents of his wallet, John Michael Ransome was a vice president with something called The Specialist Consulting Group. The late Mark Carlucci was a senior associate with the same organization. Neither of the two men’s business cards showed an address, only a phone number: area code 703—Virginia. Nor was there a home address on either’s driver’s license, only a post office box number — the same box number for both Ransome and Carlucci.

Now there’s a little coincidence for you. Dave’s inner voice, at least for the moment, was sounding a little smug.

“Sparrow, this is Partridge. Report.” Carlucci’s radio was miniature, black, and bore no manufacturer’s stamp or other indication of who produced it. Carlucci had worn it clipped on his belt. Now Dave wore it clipped to his.

“Roger. This is Sparrow. There are one goddamn lot of stairs in this sucker.”

“Where are you and what’s your E.T.A.?”

“We’re on thirty-four in the south stairwell, and the men need a breather. Give us three, Partridge.”

“Is three more minutes acceptable to you, Robin?”

Dave answered, trying to mimic Ransome’s soft Appalachian drawl, “Affirmative on that.”

“Roger. Take a break, Sparrow. Partridge out.”

Whew.

Dave backed away from Ransome. Even though the man was unconscious and bound with his own belt, Dave didn’t want to take his eyes off him — nor the sights of the very odd pistol he had removed from the late Mark Carlucci’s hand.

You gotta give that shootin’ iron some thought.

Later. Not now.

He lifted the telephone on the receptionist’s desk, punched 9 for an outside line, and dialed the number on Ransome’s business card. There was a pause while the call connected. The phone at the other end of the line rang once before a mechanical voice answered, “Enter authorization code.”

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Mr. Ransome’s secretary.”

“Enter authorization code now.” It was some sort of a robot, a computer telephone operator. Dave pushed a few of the telephone buttons, entering a random number. “Access denied.” Click.

Dave shrugged. If he was going to get answers, he would have to get them somewhere else. In the meantime …

He stepped back to where Ransome lay. The man was still unconscious. Even if he was awake, Dave doubted if he would tell him anything. Ransome was not the kind of man who could easily be made to talk. It would take hours of interrogation — MACV-SOG-style interrogation — to break him down.

Dave started to drop Ransome’s wallet onto the man’s chest. He stopped, frowned, and opened it. He fingered the bills inside. Eighty-three dollars. He really didn’t like doing this.

Aw, go ahead. How many times can they hang you?

If he was in as much trouble as he thought he was—what better definition of trouble is there than having a team of bad attitude gunmen on your case? — then he would need cash. It would be suicide to use his credit cards. Every card transaction in America is captured electronically. Buy something in a store, and the sales clerk slides your card into one of those little grey Verifone terminals to log your purchase into a distant computer. The Verifone box automatically registers the identity of the merchant entering the transaction. If someone wants to know where you are — precisely where you are — all they have to do is tap a few computers. And if you’re stupid enough to use a cash dispensing machine, the job is even easier.

Dave folded Ransome’s bills over twice, and put them in his pants. Then he emptied Carlucci’s wallet. Sixty-seven dollars. He knew he should have picked Bernie Levy’s pocket as well, but it was too late to do it. He’d already been back to his office preparing a little surprise for Ransome’s weapons team. It wouldn’t be a good idea to enter it again.

Instead he walked to the west fire door, and entered the stairwell. With any luck, he’d find help only three flights away.

6

Fire stairs — every office tower has them. Usually they’re concrete, but sometimes steel. It all depends on the building code. Dave’s were concrete.

The stairwell reminded him of a prison movie — Cagney and Raft circa 1939. The walls were featureless, uniform, grey. The cold monotony was broken only by insulated pipes and, every five floors, by a red-enameled cabinet containing an emergency fire hose.

The stairs themselves were wide enough for three people to walk side by side; they wound from the top of the building to its ground floor, quite perfect in geometry, a spiral in cement. There was a seven-by-twelve-foot concrete platform at every floor, and another halfway between each floor. Fifty floors, one hundred platforms, and twelve stairs linking each platform to the next. No landmarks but for enameled metal plates announcing the floor number.

At every platform, the stairs turned 180 degrees. Twelve stairs up, turn. Twelve stairs up, turn. Twelve stairs up, turn. If you ran too fast, you’d become dizzy.

Dizzy … If you’ve got a problem with heights, you don’t want to look over the railing and down the stairwell.

Dave gnawed his lip. The gap between the spiraling stairs was wide enough for a man. If you wanted an easy way to end it all, you need do nothing more than step through a fire door, cross a platform, straddle your legs across a cold iron banister, and …

My, aren’t we in a cheerful frame of mind this morning?

The top five floors of the building housed Howe & Hummel, attorneys-at-law. Harry Halliwell, senior partner and Dave’s lawyer, occupied an oversized corner office on the forty-eighth floor. Like Dave, Harry was an early riser and a committed jogger. The two often arrived at the corner of Fiftieth and Park Avenue at the same time, Harry running north from his Murray Hill townhouse, Dave coming from the opposite direction.

He counted Harry not only as his lawyer, but also as his friend. Five years earlier, when Dave and Helen wed, Harry had been the best man and his wife, Susan, had been matron of honor. At least once a month, and sometimes more frequently, the two couples went out together for a night on the town. Once they had gone on a vacation to Hawaii together, although Harry had spent most of his time on the beach with a cellular telephone glued to his ear.

If there was anyone who could help Dave now, it was Harry. Shrewdly logical and disarmingly soft-spoken, Harry Halliwell was a lawyer’s lawyer. More than that, he was one of those rare men of unquestioned integrity whom both politicians and corporate potentates term “an honest broker.” He was called upon to arbitrate conflicts between unions and management, between business and government, and sometimes even between nations. No matter how bitter the disagreement, Harry always managed to negotiate a compromise that both sides felt was fair.

Harry seemed to know everybody, and everybody seemed to know him. His clients ranged from Forbes 400 moguls to Mafia chieftains. There was no problem that Harry Halliwell couldn’t handle.

Including, one hopes, counseling a client who suddenly seems to have a contract on his head.

Dave raced up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time, running as he had all his life, and running perfectly. When he reached the forty-eighth floor, he wasn’t even breathing hard.

He pushed the fire door. It didn’t move.

He jogged the handle. It was locked. A fire alarm was supposed to unlock all the building’s doors automatically. Either something had gone wrong, or Ransome’s men knew their business.

The fire doors are one-way only. They open from the inside, but are locked on the outside. In this town there are too many desperadoes to do it any other way.

No problem. Dave might not be able to use his American Express Platinum Card to buy his way out of trouble, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use it at all. His instructors — not the Special Forces trainers at Fort Bragg, but the other ones, the ones who never mentioned their last names — had taught him, among other less-than-licit skills, how to shim a lock.

The latch clicked. The fire door swung open.

Moments later he was outside Harry’s office. Harry’s door was cracked. The lights were on. He could hear Harry’s muted voice on the telephone.

Dave tapped on the door and then entered. Harry was stretched out in his chair, still dressed in his running gear. His feet were resting on top of the cluttered, much-scarred Parsons table that he used as a desk. Behind him, his bookcases overflowed with loose paper, bound volumes, and an astonishingly untidy collection of bric-a-brac accumulated, who knows how or why, over the course of his thirty-plus year career.

The lawyer looked up at Dave, raised an eyebrow, and spoke into the telephone. “Yes. Yes. I do understand. Really. Don’t worry, Congress will come around. I’ve spoken to Bob, and I think we can find a common ground. No, I think not. Really. Indeed. Well, now I have another appointment I must move on to. Certainly. Oh, and sorry I missed Chelsea’s birthday party. I trust she got my gift. Good. Of course. Think nothing of it. Yes, good-bye.”

Harry sighed as he set the telephone down on the cradle. “Ahh, me.” First he frowned, then he looked up smiling. “It’s that time of year again. Appropriations hearings. One would think that after two hundred years of practice the executive and legislative branches would have learned how to reach accommodation.” He gestured at a silver Tiffany decanter. “Coffee, David?”

“Thanks. I need it.”

“Have a seat, and tell me what brings you to my chambers at this unholy hour?” Harry hefted the decanter. He looked at it and grimaced.

Dave pulled up a chair. He tried to frame some appropriate way to say what had to be said. He couldn’t. Instead, he blurted out, “Harry, this is nuts, but Bernie just tried to kill me.”

Halliwell’s eyebrow shot up again. He removed the decanter’s lid and peered inside. “You are joking of course.”

“No joke. And he wasn’t alone. There were these two other guys — gunmen, Harry.”

Halliwell shook the coffee pitcher and frowned. “Hmpf. I seem to have emptied this in rather less than a half hour’s time. No good for your heart drinking that much coffee. Gunmen, you say? Well, they couldn’t have been very competent, could they? Not if you’re …” He stopped, holding the decanter in mid-air, and studied Dave’s face.

Dave nodded. “It’s not a joke, Harry. There’s a dead body on the forty-fifth floor. Maybe two. I’m in trouble.”

Harry pulled his feet off the desk. He stood and whispered, “You are serious, aren’t you?”

Dave nodded again.

“How did you, ahh, manage to … well …”

“Good luck, Harry. Old reflexes and good luck. And if I wasn’t in the kind of shape I’m in, I think I’d be dead.”

Harry’s eyebrows reached their ultimate height, hovered for some few seconds, and then fell into a frown. “Uh … well. My, my, my …”

“I need help.”

Harry smiled his most practiced and professional smile, the one that made his clients feel better. “And you shall have it. But first you shall have some coffee. As shall I.” He walked out from behind his desk. “Whatever this … well … problem is, Dave, it strikes me as one that shall involve the consumption of rather more caffeine than is good for either of us. I will go fetch a fresh pot.”

So saying, he walked past Dave and toward the door. He didn’t time his next act correctly. If he had, Dave would not have caught the arc of heavy silver out of the corner of his eye.

Dave lurched left. The coffee pitcher smashed down on the back of his chair, missing his skull by less than an inch. It tumbled from Harry’s hand and rolled across the carpet.

“Harry! What the hell …?” Dave was on his feet. Harry, his face contorted and red, was backing toward the door.

“You’re a dead man, Elliot! A dead man!”

Dave stood stunned, his mouth open. Something made of acid and ice uncoiled in his stomach. “Harry …”

But Harry turned and ran.

7

So far, he had been operating on intuition and no small amount of luck. Now he needed a plan.

Ransome was a professional, and so were his people. There would be men in the lobby watching the elevators and fire stairs. Ransome had told them what Dave looked like and how he was dressed. At this time of day, the lobby was empty. Ransome’s people would spot him in a second if he tried to escape from the building.

Nor was there any question of finding a phone and calling for help. He couldn’t call a friend, call his wife, call his brother. He couldn’t even call the police. At least not right away. Not until he knew why — why, why, why — his boss, his best friend, and several people he didn’t even know seemed to want him dead.

Because if they wanted him dead, they might want some other people dead too. And David Elliot had no intention of putting anyone he cared for in harm’s way.

Besides, he could make it on his own. At least for a little while. Maybe longer than that. After all, in the old days they’d trained him well — gratifyingly well. It seemed his body had not forgotten the lessons that his mind had long rejected.

That scared him. It scared him more than Bernie had. Or Harry. Or Ransome. Or the sound that bullets make, close, too close, to where you cower.

Beneath the skin, after all these years, it seemed there still lived the man he had almost become. And no one — neither Ransome, nor anyone else — terrified him more than that man.

Dave had to find a place to hide — to hide and reflect and plan. He thought he knew where to find it.

Now he was on the fortieth floor, Senterex’s working class district and home to the corporation’s lowest echelons. There was no high-priced artwork in this part of the corporate castle. Most of the floor was given over to a maze of partitioned cubicles occupied by junior accountants, order entry clerks, and other worker bees. They were strictly nine-to-fivers. The entire floor was sure to be empty.

The fortieth was also the floor where the employee cafeteria was located, a white-walled room furnished with Formica-topped tables, and containing a bank of vending machines. Dave walked past it, stopped, and turned around. He wanted something from the cafeteria. Two things, actually …

He slid a stolen dollar bill into the change machine. Four quarters jingled into the change slot. He pumped two of them into the coffee machine. A paper cup tumbled into the dispenser. The machine burped and spat steaming brown liquid into the cup. Dave lifted it.

Ouch! It’s damned near boiling!

He took a sip. It was scalding, far too hot, and …

Blah! Ugh! Terrible! Christ, that’s the worst coffee you’ve had since the Army. If I worked in this joint, I’d file a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency!

He hesitantly took a second taste. Nope, it isn’t going to grow on you, and you don’t want it to.

Dave walked over to the counter where the cafeteria’s condiments and tableware were stored. He thought momentarily about dosing his coffee with a suspiciously colored substance labeled “Imitation Coffee Creamer Substitute,” but decided against it. Instead, he selected two stainless steel forks and a table knife from the collection of utensils. Then he walked briskly back to the corridor.

Now where is it? It used to be just around the corner and …

The door was painted a scuffed off-white. There were two locks set in it, one the standard lockset used in all Senterex office doors and the other a heavy-duty deadbolt. A grey embossed sign hung next to the door: ROOM 4017, TELEPHONE ROOM.

The deadbolt would be a problem. Dave pursed his lips, remembered lessons from long ago, and set to work with the forks.

1

In every business and in every corporation there is at least one high-ranking executive who, no matter how competent his or her people may be, believes that they are not quite competent enough — but that they can be made so. Easily. Overnight. All it takes is a little training, a little inspiration, a little exposure to the right motivational training program.

Ahh, but which one is the right one? There are, after all, so many.

Such executives know deep in their hearts that the “right” program really does exist. It is a magic elixir that, once found, will alchemically transmute ordinary corporate drones into nonpareil paragons of productivity. This one simple thing, this philosopher’s stone, is perhaps to be found in a book, or on a videocassette, or in a computer software program, or, most likely of all, is the surefire result of a three-day seminar staged by some oddly named company headquartered (inevitably) in Northern California.

No matter. Wherever it is and whatever it is, it exists, and once located will have on the staff the same effect the word “SHAZAM” has on Billy Batson — a clap of thunder, a bolt of celestial lightning, and behold: Captain Marvel!

It was David Elliot’s misfortune that in Senterex, the chief acolyte of this particular dogma was also the chief executive, Bernard E. Levy. Bernie’s enthusiasm for the latest rages in chic managerial theory was unquenchable. He embraced them all, each and every one, with religious zeal. Worse, having been born again in the church of this, that, or the other new high priest of corporate productivity, he insisted that his entire executive cadre join him among the ranks of the converted.

During his six-year tenure on the forty-fifth floor, Dave had been subjected to the ministrations of quite nearly a dozen motivational ju-ju men, managerial messiahs, and behavioral gurus. He had sat through interminable weekend seminars staged by temporarily popular business school professors, wallowed with his fellow executives in hot tubs at the Esalen Institute, and sweated with them in saunas at the Aspen Institute. He had jogged side by side with his wheezing and purple-faced boss at an In Search of Excellence “skunkworks bootcamp,” and, a year later, had helped carry him down from the mountain upon which, during an Outward Bound “team-building adventure,” Bernie had sprained an ankle. On another occasion, Bernie locked the entire managerial cadre in a windowless room at the University of Arizona, demanding that they spend a day silently typing “brainstorming” ideas into personal computers. There had even been something called a “Wolverine Management Seminar,” a program that, as far as Dave could tell, consisted principally of sitting around the conference room and growling an ardent desire to eat the hearts of Senterex’s competitors raw.

Just a few months earlier, Bernie had recruited the services of a self-styled “organizational psychologist.” The man, who, like most of Bernie’s pet witch doctors, operated out of California, came to New York to subject Senterex’s top managers to an interminable regimen of pattern recognition tests and elliptic question-and-answer sessions.

Dave remembered the only one of these sessions from which he’d learned something about himself — or, for that matter, about anything else.

The psychologist had subjected Dave to a series of free form association-preference questions.

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Green.”

“Any particular shade?”

“Emerald green.”

Green as a green bottle.

“What’s your favorite car?”

“What I drive? A Mercedes.”

“No, what would you like to drive?”

“A Porsche.”

“An emerald green Porsche?”

“No. I think a yellow one.”

“Yellow is a sexual color. Did you know that?”

“No, but I’m not surprised.”

“If you were reincarnated as an animal, what animal would you like to come back as?”

“A sea otter.”

“Why?”

“They just float with the tide, don’t they?”

“What animal would you expect to come back as?”

Dave didn’t answer.

“Come, Mr. Elliot. What animal would your fate — your karma, as it were — cause you to be reincarnated as?”

Dave shook his head. “I have no idea. I like to run. Maybe I’d come back as some sort of deer or something.”

“Ah, the hunted not the hunter.”

“If you say so.” But the answer that formed in Dave’s mind, the karma he feared himself to have, had nothing to do with herbivores.

“Do you have fantasies?”

“Of course.”

“Power fantasies?”

“Don’t we all?”

“Achievement fantasies?”

“Certainly.”

“I don’t mean success.”

“I know that.”

“What achievement do you fantasize about? What ultimate achievement? The pinnacle of your dreams?”

Without thinking Dave blurted, “Mark Twain.” Then he blushed.

The psychologist looked perplexed. “Mark Twain? Would you explain that for me, please?”

Dave felt uncomfortable. He had never mentioned his Mark Twain fantasy to anyone, not even to Helen, who would not have appreciated it anyway. In fact, he had barely admitted it to himself. He stuttered, “The achievement I dream about is … well … I’d like to write a book … a book about Mark Twain. In fact, I’d like to write a study of his life and works. That’s what I dream about.”

“A best-seller?”

“No, not necessarily. But critically … well, acclaimed would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Now this is very interesting, Mr. Elliot. Most business people of your seniority fantasize about sports — buying a baseball team, becoming a PGA champion, sailing around the world, and things like that. But you, Mr. Elliot, you dream about something else entirely. You dream of becoming an erudite literary figure. This is exceptionally peculiar.”

Once upon a time, David himself would have agreed that it was, indeed, exceptionally peculiar.

2

Once upon a time, a young man wants to be a lawyer, but his ultimate goal is more ambitious than that. Becoming a lawyer will be only a step along the way. In the end, he wants to be in politics. The Senate, the governor’s mansion, a member of the Cabinet, perhaps even … well, who knows how far he can go.

He’ll need a degree from a prestigious law school, Harvard or Columbia of preference. And, he’ll need grades good enough to clerk for a Justice of the Supreme Court — or, at a minimum, a Court of Appeals judge. Then he’ll spend a few years working for the state government, making contacts, building relationships with the right people. After that, he’ll be ready to run for office. First, the state legislature. Later something higher. The public life is what he has been made for.

He grins as he frames the witticisms he’ll make during televised debates. Already he can see his smiling photograph in the newspapers, on campaign posters, on magazine covers … standing in the spotlight, on the platform, behind the rostrum … proud and upright and popular and dynamic and respected and a leader of men … and, of course, a champion of the people. Always that. That more than anything else. He will be the man they call “the conscience of the Senate,” or something similar. Just like Jimmy Stewart in that old movie, he will be the one who …

These are daydreams, of course. He uses them to keep awake while, at a wage of seventy-five cents an hour, he works the graveyard shift in an aluminum extrusion plant some twenty miles from the university. Between classes and homework, between R.O.T.C. drill and the job he holds to pay his tuition, he usually manages to get four hours of sleep on weekdays. He catches up on the weekends.

He is shooting for cum laude. He almost makes it, but not quite.

He doesn’t mind R.O.T.C. Drill is relaxing in a mindless sort of way, and the classwork is undemanding. His only objection to the Reserve Officer Training Corps is that — in this year when more American boys enroll in it than ever before — it obliges him to associate with the jocks, frat boys, and engineering majors who actually enjoy playing soldier. It is a minor objection, easily outweighed by the stipend the program pays, and, when he reflects on it, by the certainty that an honorable military record — ideally with a decoration or two — will be an important asset for a rising young politician.

He gets his decorations, all right. One of them is a Bronze Star.

But by then the medals are irrelevant, as is a record of military duty bravely served. He abandons his political dreams before the court-martials even begin. Instead of yearning for a public life and political power, David Elliot decides that he wants to live his years as comfortably, even prosperously, as he can; but regardless of comfort and regardless of prosperity, to slip through the world as silently as possible, leaving no footprints behind.

The village of My Lai is still fresh in the Army’s mind. Four or five hundred civilians, they never can quite agree on how many, methodically slaughtered by the baby boys of Company C. It being war, and the victims being blameless and unarmed civilians, all the time-honored traditions are followed. Torture. Rape. Scalp-taking. The conventional customs of war.

Enough of it has leaked into the press that the powers that be are mightily embarrassed. But they’re even more embarrassed by Lieutenant David Perry Elliot.

So when the time comes for the court-martials, They (with a capital “T”) decide to move slowly, cautiously, and with a great deal of secrecy.

The protracted procedures involved result in Dave having nothing but time on his hands. He is confined to base, forbidden to communicate with the outside world. Apart from his daily — some would say obsessive — workouts, the only recreation open to him is reading.

He’s never been much of a reader. High school had seen him consume the obligatory works — all carefully selected to demonstrate that reading is, or at least should be, dull. In college, between his night job and his classes he had little time for anything other than textbooks. Nor has his subsequent career, involving as it did the practice of covert warfare, lent itself to leisurely reading.

However, for these months of waiting for the trials to begin, he has little to do but read. What he reads is what he finds, largely such worn and much-thumbed volumes as are stored in the day room of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.

Two passages that he reads make upon him a singular impression. The first is by Hiram Ulysses Grant, later, due to a clerical error at West Point, renamed Ulysses S. Grant. The second is by Mark Twain.

Here is the first, written while he was dying by possibly the greatest, surely the most reluctant, general America ever produced: “Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate war, pestilence, and famine, than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun.”

And here is the second, good Sam Clemens speaking: “Patriotism is patriotism. Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it. Even though it be a political mistake, and a thousand times a political mistake, that does not affect it; it is honorable — always honorable, always noble — and privileged to hold its head up and look the nations in the face.”

David Elliot has been reading, and re-reading, Mark Twain ever since.

3

Safe behind the telephone room’s locked door, Dave talked things over with his cynical guardian angel.

Let’s tally up the facts in the case of the likely to be late David Elliot, shall we, pal? Maybe there’s some sort of sense you can make of this mess. Maybe you’ll even find a clue as to how to save your butt.

Probably not.

True, but it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do with your time. So, first question: Who is Ransome and who are his pals?

Dave answered silently: All I really know is who he was and where he came from. Special Operations. Covert warfare. Just like me — in Army uniform, but not entirely under Army command. Not merely raw muscle either. They never recruited muscle just for muscle’s sake.

And what else?

A survivor. No kamikaze pilots need apply. We don’t do heroes and we don’t do Custer’s last stand. That’s what Mamba Jack kept telling us.

Brains, brawn, and an instinct to survive. Your basic sine qua non for the biz. So now what do you know?

Not much. After the war ended most of us in that line of business simply came back home, hung up our spurs, and tried to get on with our lives. Those who didn’t — well, some of them stayed in, or so I heard. Not necessarily in the Army, but still on active duty.

So maybe Ransome is a Fed?

No way. Why would someone from the government want to kill me? I don’t have anything to do with politics. I don’t sign petitions. I don’t join causes. Hell, I don’t even vote.

Still, the Feds have been known to …

Nuts! I doubt if I have so much as spoken to a government employee in twenty-five years.

What about year twenty-six?

Not possible. If they had wanted to shut me up, they would have shut me up then. Not now. It would be crazy to wait all this time. Besides, those days are ancient history. Nobody cares anymore.

Maybe. Maybe not. And if Ransome isn’t one of Los Federales, then what is he?

Who knows? A mere maybe. After the war some people took their skills elsewhere. Became mercenaries — trusted advisors to the local dictator in Singapore, Iraq, Ecuador, or wherever. One year I’d see them mentioned in some story about Chile or South Africa, and the next year I’d hear they were in Ethiopia or Guatemala. Colonel Kreuter, good old Mamba Jack himself, started his own company. War Dog, Inc., he called it.

You think Ransome comes from Kreuter? That after all these years Mamba Jack is settling his bill?

No. If Jack ever decides to pay off old debts, he’ll do it personally. Not that that’s any consolation.

So?

So, I’m still in the dark.

What about the mob?

Not possible. Businessmen don’t do deals with gangsters except in the movies. Least of all does Bernie Levy deal with them. He wouldn’t touch anything the mob was involved in. He’s the most ethical businessman I’ve ever met — the original Straight Arrow.

Straight Arrow just tried to shorten your life span with a Browning.

I’m aware of that.

What about Harry? He defended that guy, Joey whatshisname, the Mafia kingpin from New Jersey.

Harry Halliwell might defend a gangster, but he’d never go into business with one.

Not the Feds, not the mob. Maybe it’s Con Ed, mad because you forgot to pay the light bill.

Oh, give me a break! I don’t have enough information to even guess what’s going on.

You have some information. Like for instance, Ransome saying that he read your 201 file.

My military personnel jacket. That crack he made about my service being honorable until the end means he knows what’s in it. But no one is supposed to know that. They sealed the records. They’re stamped “Top Secret,” and buried in the vaults of the Army Judge Advocate General. Nobody could read my 201 file unless he carried a high-level security clearance. Or knew someone with a clearance.

Another puzzle: It was Bernie rather than Ransome who came to pull the trigger. What do you make of that?

Ransome is a pro. My guess is that he’s been in the business — whatever his business is — all his life. He’s good at it, and killing people doesn’t bother him one little bit. So, why did he send Bernie to do it? If the contract was on me, and Ransome was there, why did he let a civilian like Bernie Levy try to do the job?

Think about the mise-en-scene, pal.

Right. Right you are. I’d almost missed that. They tried to do it in the office. Why there? Why didn’t they just take me out from a moving car while I was jogging, or put one behind my ear while I was walking home at night? There’s only one answer to that. The answer is that early in the morning on the forty-fifth floor of a Park Avenue high-rise, there aren’t very many people around. Nobody to watch. Nobody to ask questions. It would have been very quiet, and no one ever would have known. Remember Ransome said, “This is supposed to be a private party. Let’s keep it that way.”

And, therefore …

Colonel John James Kreuter is slouched behind a field table in a candlelit hooch. No one calls him Colonel Kreuter. They call him Mamba Jack. The nickname pays tribute to the Black Mamba, a snake whose venom is a neurotoxin, the most swiftly acting and lethal poison in the world — one bite and ten seconds later, you’re history.

Mamba Jack is proud of his nickname.

A three-quarters-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label sits before the colonel. The stub of an unfiltered Lucky Strike dangles from his lips. He takes one last, deep drag, and flicks the butt to the dirt floor. He smiles at Dave. His teeth are phenomenally white, and he has the longest set of canines that Dave has ever seen.

“Well now, here’s our young Lew-tenant Elliot lookin’ all bright-eyed an’ bushy-tailed.” Mamba Jack speaks with a long East Texas drawl, the accent of a redneck born and bred. Unless you had been told, as Dave has been by the company clerk, that Colonel Kreuter had graduated third in his class at West Point, you would think him to be an ignorant hick.

“I think the time done come for yew to loose yer virginity, Lew-tenant.”

“Sir?”

Kreuter leers. It makes him look like Disney’s Big Bad Wolf, and he knows it. “I got a li’l job for yew. Seems like Charlie’s got hisself this ol’ Roosian KGB major up there north of the Dee Em Zee. Now this here Roosian he’s become a bit of a botheration. Seems like he’s a-passin’ out guns an’ he’s a-passin’ out supplies an’ he’s a-passin’ out advice. Now, I don’t much mind the guns, an’ I don’t much mind the supplies, but that advice — why, son, that just irks the living hell out of me. Become a real burr beneath my saddle, as it were. So what I want yew to do, Lew-tenant, is yew take some men up ’cross the Dee Em Zee an’ communicate to this aforementioned Roosky Mamba Jack Kreuter’s sincerest displeasure with the sit-e-achyun.”

“Sir. You want me to bring him back?”

“Naw. What for? Hellfire, what would I want with a smelly ol’ Roosian? Can’t speak to him. Don’t know the language. ’Sides which, nobody don’t need no live, palpitatin’ Rooskies lyin’ around. Got enough po-lick-tickle trouble as it is.”

“Termination, sir?”

“Yessir, Lew-tenant Elliot, that is the accepted terminology. But y’ain’t a-gonna do it messy. No bodies, an’ no evidence. What we want, Lew-tenant Elliot, is for that ol’ KGB major’s boss to worry some. Want him to worry that his boy done cut an’ run. Worry that he’s down our way a-talkin’ an’ a-gabbin’ an’ a-singin’ his li’l heart out. Want him to have nightmares ’bout that there major showin’ up on teevee a-talkin’ to Mike Wallace an’ good ol’ Walter Cronkite. Yew got that, Lew-tenant, yew know what we want yew to do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An’ that is, what, Lew-tenant?” You remember what you answered, of course? Dave’s sarcastic angel asked.

David Elliot, slumped on the linoleum floor of the Senterex telephone room, smiled ambivalently at the memory of his answer: “Yes, sir,” he’d said. “You want the major to get disappeared.”

Right. And now somebody wants you to get disappeared.

4

In the early 1970s, when Dave was beginning his business career, telephone equipment rooms were large, noisy places. All the equipment was electromechanical — endless banks of chattering relays and clicking switches. It took work to maintain the PBX systems in those days, and a team of telephone company men usually would show up to tinker with the hardware once or twice a week. Dave, whose first position was in the administration department of what was then called the First National City Corporation, remembered them. They always seemed to be big guys, a little overweight, with cigar butts clinched between their teeth. They all wore heavy grey work pants and answered to Irish or Italian names.

Most important, they kept lockers in the telephone rooms. Spare clothes, overalls, jackets, sometimes work-boots. Dave had hoped to find something similar in the room containing Senterex’s switching equipment. No such luck. The days of the electromechanical PBX had gone. Modern telephone systems are small, compact, and computerized. The only sound they make is the whir of their cooling fans.

Yes, there was a locker in the room. But all it contained, apart from shelves of miniature electronic parts and spools of colored wire, was two back issues of Hustler magazine, a tool belt, and a pair of gloves. Only the belt and gloves would be useful for what Dave had in mind.

The one other useful thing in the room was a wall-mounted beige telephone. After more than an hour of hard thought, Dave had decided to use it. He’d call his brother. Not Helen. Helen didn’t handle crises well, and was swift to assign him blame for anything that went wrong. Dave had long since decided that if his second marriage was going to work (and he badly wanted it to), he and he alone would have to handle the rough spots.

Rough spot? A category into which the present moment fits nicely, don’t you think?

Better to call his brother than to deal with Helen. Frank would be flabbergasted, but at least he could be relied upon to act. All Helen would do was … “bitch” is the word you’re looking for … complain. That and ask accusatory questions he didn’t have the time to answer — didn’t have answers to anyway.

Dave eyed the phone, checked his watch, and was ready to make the call when Ransome’s Appalachian drawl crackled over the radio. “This is Robin.”

“You okay, Robin?” Dave recognized the voice — the man called Partridge. His accents were crisp and military. Perhaps he, like Ransome, was a former officer.

“More damage to my pride than anything else, Partridge.” Dave nodded approvingly. Ransome’s answer was just right. Exhibiting a little chagrin (but never apologizing) is the smartest thing a commander can do after screwing up a mission.

“All right,” Ransome continued, “I want a full status, but before you give it to me, I want you to get on the horn to homebase and order up taps and traces. I want the subject’s little black book of phone numbers locked up and locked down. His wife, his ex-wife, his kid, his brother, his doctor, his dentist, his broker, and the guy who shines his shoes. His neighbors and his friends. Everyone he knows. Bug them all, and bug them now. If the subject calls anyone, pull the plug. I do not, repeat, do not, want the subject uttering one single word to anyone. Copy that, Partridge?”

“Affirmative. I’m on it.”

“Sir?” Another voice. Not Partridge, and not as professional.

“Yes, Bluejay,” Ransome answered.

“Sir … uh … given the situation, the subject escaping and so forth, do you think we could be given some background on the … uh …”

“Negative. You know what you need to know.”

“But, sir, I mean … like, why are we after this guy? Wouldn’t it help if we knew the reasons for …”

“NFW on that, Bluejay. Don’t ask questions. Trust me on this, you’re better off not knowing.”

“Sir …”

“Robin out.” The radio went silent.

Dave chewed his lip, drew his hand back from the phone, and changed his plans. But later he used the phone anyway. He called 411—information.

His watch read 9:37. It was almost time to go.

He sipped the dregs of his now tepid coffee and grimaced. There is little art and less expense involved in making a halfway decent cup of coffee. He wondered why the distributors of coin-operated dispensing machines couldn’t master the job.

Dave rose, hitching the tool belt around his hips. It was made of wide, tan leather, and was hung with screwdrivers, pliers, a pair of wire strippers, a soldering iron, a holstered blue telephone test set with dangling leads, and one or two odd-looking implements whose functions he could not fathom. The belt had been a nice find; it would help alter his appearance. He stuffed a pair of thick work gloves over the front of the tool belt, hiding the distinctive buckle of the Gucci belt that held up his tan trousers.

Nobody looks at the telephone man. He’s part of the furniture.

Dave had changed the part in his hair, sluffed off his tie, removed his collar stays, untaped the bandage on his left hand, and rolled up his cuffs. His watch and wedding ring were in his trouser pocket. Thick wedges of dirt were caked beneath his well-manicured nails. He planned to walk with lips slightly parted, breathing through his mouth. Just another blue-collar worker trying to do his job.

His shoes were his biggest problem. They were far more expensive than a telephone repairman could afford, and looked it. He prayed that no one would notice them, and cursed himself for not having the sense to retrieve his Nikes from his office closet.

Another problem: he needed to use the bathroom. He thought momentarily about leaving his bolt hole and trotting down the hall to the men’s room, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The pressure on his bladder was sufficiently uncomfortable that he did not wish to wait the fifteen minutes or so before he intended to leave the telephone room, the fortieth floor, and the Senterex building itself. The planned circumstances of his impending departure left little leeway for a trip to the head. And, once out on the street — well, there aren’t very many public toilets on the island of Manhattan, nor do prudent people use them.

Reluctantly, he urinated in the paper coffee cup, filling it to its brim.

A new voice came over Carlucci’s radio. “Robin, do you read me?”

Ransome answered. “Robin here.”

“This is Myna. Robin, there’s been a screw-up.”

“Seems to me there’s been more than one.” Ransome spoke without inflection.

“Affirmative. However, this one is a current issue. Homebase just took Thrush out of his body bag and started the procedures.”

“So?”

“Inventory reports his weapon is missing.”

“No surprise.”

“So’s his radio.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then Ransome muttered flatly, “I am exceptionally disappointed to hear that.”

“The subject has been listening to every word we’ve said.”

“I already worked that out, Myna. Attention all stations. All right, ladies, listen up. I have something to say. I want our Mr. Elliot to hear it too. Mr. Elliot, please acknowledge.”

Dave’s thumb twitched toward the transmit button. He didn’t push it.

Ransome took a deep breath and blew it out. “Mr. Elliot?” he said. “Mr. Elliot? Very well, have it your way. You have so far. The rest of you people, pay attention. I am going to outline the agenda for the rest of this little soiree.”

Ransome’s tone was smooth. He spoke slowly and clearly, with not the least trace of emotion. “I want double teams on the ground floor. I want extra watchers on the elevators and the stairs, and two reserve teams on call outside. Partridge, tell homebase to order those people up here ASAP. Mr. Elliot, I imagine that your current thinking calls for attempted exit during the lunch hour or at the end of the business day. You are, I presume, hoping that you won’t be noticed in the crowd. But you will be. Bank on it. You are not going to get out of this building. Now, as you have no doubt deduced, there is a security blanket on this operation, and we really don’t want to alarm the civilians. It will be business as usual for all the good folk and gentle people who work in these premises. Tonight, after everyone has cleared out, we’ll run a floor-by-floor sweep. Partridge, alert homebase that I will be requiring dogs. Dogs, Mr. Elliot. I am confident that they will get a good solid taste of your scent from the running gear you stow in your office. Unless I miss my bet, it will be over well before midnight.”

Ransome paused, waiting for a reaction. Dave gave him none. Instead he stood still, his head cocked slightly to the left, listening to an unwelcomely familiar vocabulary and vocal rhythm.

“No comment, Mr. Elliot? So be it. Let me say with all candor, that I find your conduct this morning to be unseemly. However, in light of your service record, I suppose I should not be surprised. You know, I trust, the portion of the record to which I refer?”

Dave winced.

“Well, you surprised me. Perhaps you even surprised yourself. And speaking of surprises, you may rest assured that the booby trap you rigged in your office performed as per specification. It cost us ten minutes figuring that one out.”

Dave had gimmicked Bernie’s.25 automatic so that it would fire into the floor as soon as someone opened his office door. He had hoped Ransome’s people would think he was in there, making his last stand. Apparently they’d fallen for the trick.

“Another thing, Mr. Elliot. I have examined my weapon. What you did to it was a nice touch. Please accept my compliments. If I hadn’t found that paper clip you wedged in the muzzle of my pistol, the next time I fired a round I would have had a nasty surprise, wouldn’t I?”

If that’s all you found, you still may be in for a nasty surprise, you jerk!

“Now I’m thinking that there is more to the merry hell you are raising with this operation than your fine training — the best Uncle Sam could provide — can account for. What I’m thinking, Mr. Elliot, is that it’s in your blood. I think what you are doing just comes naturally. That makes you an especially dangerous man.”

Ransome paused again.

“But then, so am I.”

Dave felt his lips tighten. Ransome was turning up the heat. He had something in mind … something drawn, no doubt, from one of the standard psychological warfare textbooks.

“I’ve lost two of my troops so far, one to your marksmanship and one to an unfortunate accident outside your office. I do not wish to lose another. Therefore I am going to offer you a proposition. Given your present circumstances, you would be well advised to accept it. I hope, therefore, you will do the reasonable thing, and cooperate.”

Reasonable? Good God! The man is trying to kill you, and he wants you to cooperate!

“The deal is as follows. I will contact my superiors and I will seek their approval to communicate certain facts to you. I hope to persuade them that, if you are made aware of these facts, an accommodation can be reached. It may be possible to negotiate a revision of my current orders. Those orders, as I am sure you have concluded, are of a sanctionary nature. To do that — for you and I to discuss the terms upon which the sanction can be canceled — we will have to speak. So, Mr. Elliot, please do as I tell you. It really is quite important. Momentarily we will be changing the encrypt codes on our radios. Once that is done, you will be unable to descramble our transmissions. Indeed, you will hear absolutely nothing. However, do not, I repeat, do not discard your radio. Keep it with you at all times, and keep it activated. Should my superiors determine that we might arrange an amiable conclusion to this affair, I will reset the encrypt codes so that you can hear me. Let me reiterate that. Keep your radio on. I will be using it to contact you again, relatively soon I hope.”

Ransome halted, then added, “I really would appreciate an acknowledgment, Mr. Elliot.”

Aw, go ahead, say something. Get it out of your system.

Dave depressed the transmit button and spoke. “Ransome?”

“Yes, Mr. Elliot?”

“Up your poop with an ice cream scoop.”

Ransome inhaled sharply. “Mr. Elliot, I am coming to believe that you lack the maturity one expects of a man of your age and experience. Nonetheless, and despite your unseemly comment, I am going to give you a very important piece of information. It is something that I should not say, but I’m going to say it anyway. Right now you think your best case scenario is to get out of this building and into the streets. Well, Mr. Elliot, I’m here to tell you that it is not your best case scenario. Indeed, it is your worst case scenario. If you get out of this building, what will happen is worse than any worst case scenario you ever dreamt of.”

5

The radio went dead, just as Ransome promised. Dave shrugged, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and reached for the phone. His call was answered on the first ring. “WNBC-TV, Channel Four Action News. Can I help you?”

When he first concocted his plan, Dave thought it would be best to speak with an accent — Irish or Arabic or vaguely Hispanic. But for the scheme to work, he would have to sound credibly foreign, and he wasn’t sure he could manage that. It was simpler to sound like an ordinary, conventional lunatic. New Yorkers were used to those.

Babbling as fast as his tongue would let him, Dave spewed out the words: “Can you help me? No. But I can help you. I can help everyone. And I will. I’ve had enough. Enough! Now I’m going to do something about it. Remember that movie. ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.’ Well, I’m not going to take it anymore. That’s why they’re going to die!”

“Sir?”

“Rivers of blood. The opening of the seventh seal. Behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death. I am Death, and I am come today upon the unrighteous. Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more. I bring the fire of the Lord this morning, and it will purge evil from the earth!”

“Sir, I’m not following you.”

“Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. That’s what I’m saying, and I’m saying that today they are cast into the pit!”

“Yes. Yes sir, but can I …”

“The corner of Fiftieth Street and Park Avenue. Send a camera crew. Just tell them to point at the middle of the building. They’ll see it. This morning. Soon. Satan and his legions are going out of business. They are going out of business with a bang. Do you take my meaning? With a bang!”

“Sir? Sir? Are you still there?”

“I am. They won’t be! They’ll be in hell!”

“Please, can I ask you a question? Just one …”

“You cannot.” Dave hung up the phone. He allowed himself a satisfied grin.

6

Minutes later he heard the sounds of the evacuation. A moment after that someone rattled the handle of the telephone room door and called out, “Is there anyone in there? Hello? We’ve got a bomb threat. Everyone has to get out of the building.”

Success, Dave’s acerbic guardian angel crowed. The television people called the cops. The cops sent the bomb squad. Ransome couldn’t stop them from ordering an evacuation if he tried. And he wouldn’t dare try — because, if you were a guy like Ransome, you’d know that it just might be true. Some loony-toon actually could have planted a bomb in this building. The odds might be a hundred to one against it, but it could happen. And you’d know that if you did try to stop an evacuation and if a bomb did go off, then you, a.k.a. John Ransome, would be swimming in a sea of sorrow.

The doorknob rattled again. “Anyone there?” Dave didn’t answer. He heard whoever it was walk away.

He forced himself to wait. After a little time, it became quieter outside. Only a few hurried footsteps passed. Then it was silent. He flicked the thumb latch and pushed the door open. He stepped out, looking left and right. The corridor was empty. He peered down it, studying the distant wall of the intersecting hallway. He listened for the echo of heels on linoleum, looked for a shadow against the beige painted plaster.

It’s not really beige, is it? More of a light taupe or a café au lait, don’t you think?

Who gives a damn what color it is?

Just trying to be helpful.

Satisfied that everyone had left, Dave sprinted up the hall, turned right, and ran past the cafeteria. Empty. Everyone gone. Next stop …

The accounting department’s bullpen. Five thousand square feet of commodity office space, separated into eight-by-eight cubicles by grey …

More of a dove color, I’d say.

… fabric dividers. Each cubicle contained a small desk, a chair, and a two-drawer file cabinet.

The dividers were low enough for Dave to peer over. He hurried by them, glancing into each cubicle as he passed. In an environment carefully designed to eliminate individuality, each cubicle’s occupant had injected a small personal touch. Here a Garfield doll crouched on a file cabinet; there a flower vase with fresh cut irises; elsewhere photographs of children or their crayon drawings tacked to the grey, or rather dove-colored dividers. One or two art posters; a photograph of a castle in Bavaria and another of a man and woman, their arms around each other, standing on a bright gold beach; an amateur oil painting; a model plane; a framed piece of pseudo-needlework reading, EMPLOYEE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.

But nowhere could he find what he needed. And time was short.

There! Whoops. No. Not those. They’re a woman’s.

Dave ground his teeth in frustration. It was such a simple thing. So simple, but so important. It should have been easy. There is always someone who …

Aha!

A pair of reading glasses. Wire-rim, a man’s style, about the right size. Somebody farsighted had set them down before evacuating the floor. Most bomb scares are false alarms. The owner of the glasses wouldn’t need them, wouldn’t want them while he walked down the stairs. He was sure he’d be back in a few minutes.

Dave put the glasses on. His world turned tiny, slanted the wrong way, and out of focus. He removed them and popped the lenses out. From a distance no one would notice — he hoped — that the frames were empty.

Bound to work. In a crowd, you’ll just be another big galoot with glasses. No tie, no jacket, tool belt, wearing glasses and a pair of slacks that could pass for khaki workpants — yeah, you’ll make it. None of them but Ransome has ever seen you face-to-face. Pal, you’re out of here!

And indeed he was — down the hall, around a corridor, through a fire door, into a stairwell and then …

Aw, hell.

There were people on the stairs, and not merely stragglers. The occupants of the upper ten floors were still coming down. Hundreds of them. The stairs were packed.

First the good news: Some of those people might come from the forty-fifth floor. They could be your friends. Now the bad news, you thought Bernie and Harry were your friends.…

Dave glanced at faces. Nobody looked familiar. He stepped into the pack. Nervous, alert, he listened to every voice, trying to catch the tones of someone he might know or who might recognize him.

“… probably the Arabs, again.”

“No, I was in the office when the call came in. They think it’s the damned stupid Irish.”

“I’m Irish.”

“Oh. Well, then …”

Nope. He’d never heard those voices before.

Just ahead of him. Two women. “… so he says he thinks he can move me out of the word processing pool on a direct report to him. But, I don’t know, he’s so creepy.”

“Honey, he’s a lawyer. They’re born creepy!”

He knew neither of them.

Two more voices, even farther ahead. Dave strained to hear them. “… with a formal proposal letter in two weeks. Not that they’ll accept our proposal or pay our fees. That particular company never does.”

“Why? They know somebody has to do the job, don’t they?”

The speakers were two men, one younger, one older, both impeccably attired and expensively coiffed. Dave guessed they were management consultants from the firm of McKinley-Allan, headquartered on floors thirty-four to thirty-nine. Charging price tags of $3,000 and up for a day of professional time, McKinley-Allan was, if not the bluest of the blue chip consulting organizations, surely the most expensive.

The older man, probably one of the senior partners, answered in a voice reminiscent of Orson Welles, “The reason, as our more insightful partners will allow, is that in the final analysis the consultant’s profession is not dissimilar from that of the common prostitute — the competitor we must always fear most is the enthusiastic amateur.”

The younger man guffawed a little too loudly. The older shot him a look. Dave recognized his movie star profile. It was Elliot Milestone, one of McKinley-Allan’s best-known partners.

You’ve only met him once. He probably doesn’t remember you. Be careful anyway.

Another voice, this one behind him. It spoke a language only heard in boardrooms and executive suites — mellifluous multisyllabic corporate executive-ese: “… tell Bernie that we ought to seriously consider moving the company out of New York.” Dave jerked. The speaker was Mark Whiting, Senterex’s chief financial officer. “The taxes are horrendous, the commute is unspeakable, and who the devil needs to put up with walking down forty-five flights of stairs every time some lunatic decides to phone in a bomb threat?”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.” It was getting worse and worse. The answering voice belonged to Sylvester Lucas, vice chairman of Senterex. “We’ve received development proposals from Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Ohio.… ”

“Forget Ohio.”

“Most assuredly. Nonetheless, they all afford appreciable benefits in taxes, labor costs, and other expense categories. Accepting any one of them would drop better than one additional point of margin to our bottom line. At the current P/E, that would bump our market cap by an appreciable sum.”

“The P/E would go up too.”

“Just so. Those of us whose compensation package involves a healthy spicing of stock options would enjoy certain gains.”

“Well, hell. Why don’t you bug Bernie? Bring it up at the next Board meeting.”

“Indeed. I would be bugging Bernie, as you put it, at this very moment, were it not for this unfortunate business with Dave Elliot.”

“Em. Yes. I was told — strictly on the QT, you know — that it was some sort of flashback episode. Vietnam, I gather it is not unknown among those who had the misfortune to serve.”

“Oh? That would explain it.”

“And some other things as well. This Ransome chap told me quite a lot about our good colleague. It was not a pleasant story. Apparently there have been other episodes. I intend to bring the whole matter before the Board.”

“Ah. Well, Bernie has called for a meeting later.… ”

The eighteenth floor landing was just ahead. As Dave reached it, he drew back, facing the wall and fiddling with his belt until Whiting and Lucas passed. He was having trouble breathing, although he was not at all out of breath.

7

The closer the evacuees came to the ground floor, the less they spoke. Many were winded and gasping. A handful slumped against landing walls, massaging out-of-shape thighs.

David Elliot’s legs felt fine. His runner’s muscles could take more punishment than forty flights of stairs could dish out.

There was a door just ahead of him — dull, matte green, and dented. A large “2” was painted on it. Just in case someone missed the point, a sign overhead read SECOND FLOOR.

This is it. Last stop coming up. All off, please. Please be sure to check the overhead bins for your personal belongings.…

The worst that could happen was that Ransome would be waiting on the ground floor, standing next to the door from the fire stairs, scrutinizing every face that passed. If he was, then someone was going to die. Ransome wouldn’t have his gun out. Dave was sure of that. But he also was sure that Ransome’s hand would be close to his pistol, that he wouldn’t hesitate to use it, and that he’d make his apologies to the witnesses later. If Ransome was waiting, Dave would have only a second or two to …

Kill him.

Right.

With a screwdriver.

Through the heart.

Then you run.

Then I run.

Dave tightened his hand around a long Phillips screwdriver. He drew it out of his tool belt, holding it flat against his leg. The muscles in his right arm coiled, tense and ready.

He reached the bottom of the stairs. Ahead of him the crowd shoved through the fire door and into the ground floor lobby. Dave pushed behind them, his eyes flicking right and left, his screwdriver ready.

Ransome was elsewhere. Dave wiped his palms against his trousers. He could feel the dampness through the fabric. That was bad. The screwdriver could have slipped out of his fingers.

So far so good. You really didn’t want to shiv him anyway. You’re out of the shivving business.

And have been for a long time.

Dave took a slow, deep breath and tried to concentrate on what was going on around him. Something was wrong. The lobby was packed. No one was moving. The crowd was pushing forward, but not getting anywhere. And tempers were rising.

It does not matter whether he or she is a Harvard-trained lawyer or a Queens-born cabby. New Yorkers are New Yorkers, and when their voices are raised in the very special anger that only frustrated New Yorkers can muster, all speak with the same accent. “Come on, move it, toots.” “Who you calling ‘toots’?” “Whadsdamatta up dere?” “You think I’m in charge of this Chinese fire drill or something?” “Hey, jerk, get yer hand off my butt.” “It wasn’t me, lady.” “My ass, it wasn’t.” “Let’s go up there!” “Put out that cigarette before I put it out for you.” “Try it.” “Quitchyershovin’.” “Look, youse, some Ay-rab is plannin’ on torchin’ dis joint any minute now, so get the lead out.” “Who you callin’ a Ay-rab, you wop?” “In your ear, guy.” “Yeah?” “Yeah!”

The bottleneck was at the bright, glassed front of the lobby. Four of the six revolving doors leading to Park Avenue were out of order. That left two sets of revolvers and a pair of regular doors as the only exits.

I bet those doors didn’t jam by accident.

The crowd surged forward across the lobby. Dave was still at the rear, and still a long — too damn long — way from the street and from safety. His height was sufficiently above average that he could see over the heads of the packed mass of bodies in front of him. He searched across it, looking for points of danger.

There they are.

Four teams of men stood clumped by the exits, off to the side where the crowd wouldn’t jostle them. They were big, like Ransome, and wore the same kind of off-the-rack suits as he. Each man’s arm was bent at the elbow, resting across his chest, ready to reach beneath his jacket.

Pushed from behind, Dave had no choice but to move forward. He kept his eyes fixed on the watchers. The watchers kept their eyes fixed on the faces of the evacuees nearest the exit.

The man beside Dave growled, “Goddamned landlord can’t maintain the goddamned doors in the goddamned building. Welcome to goddamned New York goddamned City.” Dave ignored him.

Just behind him a woman yelped, “Ouch, you’re on my foot!” Dave lifted his shoe. “Sorry, lady.”

“Geez, some people …” Dave tuned her out.

Now he was at the rear elevator bank. The building was served by two sets of elevators, one for the top twenty-five floors and one for the lower twenty-five. Each bank was set in its own dead-ended corridor off the lobby. Between them was a third, shorter corridor housing the building’s newsstand.

He heard something. At first it didn’t register on him. It was just another voice in the crowd, albeit a little louder than most. He almost missed it. His attention was focused on the men by the door. If she hadn’t repeated herself, he would have ignored her.

“There he is! Over there! Look! Over there! Look!”

Then it registered. He turned his head. He saw … he was confused … he couldn’t believe …

“That’s him! There! There he is! Get him!”

8

In every boy’s life there is, or should be, a pond. Ideally, this pond is to be found in a remote and private place, far from the eyes of adults. It should be deep (for diving), cool (for the heat of summer), and surrounded by tall, leafy trees (for meditative loafing).

In the best of all possible worlds, it also will be a little dangerous.

Dave’s pond is perfect, a nonpareil. It lies beyond a low string of hills — just steep enough to be spared plowing and planting — and down a shallow valley. Three miles of bicycling among tall corn and toasty blowing wheat brings him to the hills. Fifteen minutes more, straining and pushing his bike every step of the way, and he is standing by its shore.

It is three quarters of a mile wide, and a half mile across. Most of it is fringed with green-brown cattails and pussy willows. A wobbly, ill-built raft — no more than planks and rusty fifty-gallon drums — drifts in its center. No one but boys of a certain age ever visit it.

Perfect.

Dave first was invited to its sacred precincts when he reached the age of ten. It is understood that those of younger years are not welcome at the pond. And it is understood that those older than fifteen are, in their growing maturity, expected to find other summer recreations. It is a place for boys, and intended to remain eternally thus.

Not that the adults don’t know of it. Far from it. They all are aware of its existence, and all, to a man and to a woman, forbid their offspring to go there. “That pond — you’ll get tetanus if you swim in it. Besides, it’s full of cottonmouths, and the bottom is nothing but quicksand.”

Great! Quicksand! And snakes! Wow!

Although, in truth, Dave and all his friends have never seen so much as a grass snake in the hollow. And as for the quicksand … well, the boys know that if any of their number had ever been lost to quicksand, the story would have resounded for a hundred miles around, and lasted for a hundred years. Since no such story is current, the quicksand theory can be discounted.

Except …

Except that one of the most notable allures of the pond is its depth, which is very great indeed. Try though they might, none has ever dived deep enough to reach bottom. Thus, the existence (or lack thereof) of quicksand cannot be confirmed. Maybe the peril is real after all. Maybe the bottom of the pond is treacherous muck that will grab hold of your legs like a gigantic, slimy octopus and suck you screaming and thrashing down, down, down …

Or, maybe there is something else at the bottom of the pond. Something alive. Something that gets you and leaves no trace. Something with teeth and appetite that gives rise to rumors about quicksand, but in reality is a gigantic …

… pike, with fangs …

… squid like in that movie …

… clam like in that other movie …

… dinosaur, an ichthyo-whatchyamacallit …

… snapping turtle, five hundred years old and so big …

Well, they have to dive, don’t they? It is essential It is the done thing. No boy can resist it. One of them will succeed. Certainly. Someday, someone will. And when he does, his heroic name and brave achievement will ring down the ages.

Dave dives. The other boys do cannonballs off the raft, or push off its side, or plummet in a deadman’s fall. Dave dives. He works on it, perfecting his spring up, his fold over, his straightening into a perfect jackknife that slices down through the water, deep, and deeper still.

One day he triumphantly makes it to the bottom.

The pond water is brown, thick, muddy. You can’t see your hand before your face. The deeper you swim, the darker it becomes. Eventually, there is nothing, no light at all except for a dull bronze glow way away and far above you.

On the day he reaches the bottom, even that bronze is gone. Dave has passed beyond where the light can penetrate. He claws downward blindly, knowing that he has made it farther than anyone else, into a realm no boy has ever reached. Satisfied at this accomplishment, and despite the fact that he knows he should turn back, he pulls another stroke, straight down, cocking his arms forward. His hand brushes something.

Slime. Slippery. His heart is in his mouth. The squid! No, strands of something. What? Weeds. Weeds on the bottom. I made it! He wraps his hands around them and pulls himself down. Careful now, it really could be quicksand. No, just ordinary mud. He jerks at the weeds. He wants evidence, proof that he, David Elliot, has finally done the thing to which all aspire. The weeds come away easily.

Time to go now. Been here too long. Need air.

He kicks up. He has pushed his luck going so deep, staying down so long. His face feels red with the strain of it. Saliva fills his mouth. He really needs air. The surface can’t be far, can it?

He swims harder, taking long powerful strokes. This is getting bad. There is a sharp pain around his sinuses. His lungs are aching.

He can see the bronze glow. Brighter now. Not far to go. Everyone on the raft is going to go nuts when they see what’s in my hands. Red spots, match flames in the dark, dance before his eyes. Bright. Very bright. Any moment the air …

His hands smash into something. If he hadn’t been pulling into a stroke, he would have cracked his head into it. He does anyway. But not hard. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that he needs air now. Now, please, God, now! And something is holding him down, keeping him from the air, trapping him in the cold dark water, killing him, drowning him. Brass bands tighten around his chest. He has never known anything to hurt as much. Any moment now his mouth will open, water will rush in, his lungs will fill, he will drown and die. He pushes and struggles against the thing holding him in the water, in the dark, away from life and air. It is malevolent and active and evil and hatred personified and it wants him to die and he can’t get past it and he will open his mouth and scream and …

It is the raft. He is beneath the raft. He shoves away and bursts gasping, blue-faced and empty-handed, into the air.

Until he reached the age of forty-seven, that moment beneath the water marked the greatest despair that David Elliot had ever known, and the greatest fear. He could not imagine anything more horrifying or more blackly agonizing than to be utterly out of breath, and held prisoner beneath some — God knows what — thing in the water. The immediacy of death paled in comparison to the sickening, hopeless, and bleak terror involved in knowing that fate has set its hand against you and there is no escape.

However, at the age of forty-seven, which is not a good age for such revelations, Dave discovered that there was a kind of despair that was even worse. He discovered it as he watched Helen, his wife, a woman whom he sincerely tried to love, point at him and shout, “That’s him! There! There he is! Get him!”

1

Later, Dave’s ill-tempered inner voice would berate him for behaving precisely as Ransome unquestionably had hoped.

The shock of Helen’s betrayal immobilized him. He couldn’t handle it, couldn’t move. He saw her standing near the high lobby windows, surrounded by sullen gunmen, and could not believe the evidence of his eyes. She was looking at him, pointing at him, aiming Ransome’s trained killers his way. It was unthinkable. His mind rejected it. Helen would never do such a thing. Dave was hypnotized, a rabbit petrified before a snake.

He would retain only a blurred recollection of what followed. Shoulders jostling him from behind. A nasal voice growling, “Push ahead, youse.” Ransome’s goons wading into the crowd, forcing themselves through a tide of irritated New Yorkers. Someone thumping his back, “Come on, fella, we gotta get outta here.”

His body saved him. His mind had nothing to do with it. A cramp shot through his midriff. He gasped. In the crush of the mob he was unable to bend or turn. His gorge began to rise. He gagged and choked and made a long wet sound.

“Wassamatta, mista?”

Vomit spewed out of his mouth and through his nose. Someone screeched, “Oh shit!” The crowd surged away from him. As the people nearest him shouted and pushed to escape his retching, those nearer the exit doors were crushed forward.

Someone screamed. New Yorkers know that when the screaming starts, it is time to move on. Fast.

The mob in the lobby surged toward the blocked exit. A high plate glass window next to one of the revolving doors shattered outward. A male voice shrieked in pain. Another window burst. People bolted through the falling shards, running for the street. Ransome’s men were washed back; one went down, bellowing; the bellows turned to whimpers; shortly silence.

Dave stumbled away from the pack, into the elevator corridor.

Some few moments later he found himself dazed and shaking, and no longer on the ground floor. He wasn’t quite sure where he was or how he had gotten there. The elevators had been standing open, idle until reactivated by the authorities. Each elevator car had, as mandated by the building code, a trapdoor in its ceiling. All it took to open them was twisting four thumbscrews. He had — he thought he had — he wasn’t sure he had — what …?

Just like the movies, pal. You and Tarzan.

I didn’t do that.

Oh yeah, take a look at the grease and grunge on your clothes.

The numbness had begun to fade. He bent over, placed his hands on his knees, and forced himself to take deep, gulping breaths. Jesus! It had been bad. It had been the worst. He hadn’t frozen like that since …

Don’t think about it.

Helen! Why? How? What could …

Don’t think about that, either. Think about something else. Like maybe how cruddy your mouth tastes.

He wanted a drink of water. Badly. A little soap and a washcloth wouldn’t hurt either.

He looked around dully. It seemed he was … where? … it didn’t look familiar, but …

The second floor. That had to be it.

What was on the second floor? What the hell occupied the second floor of any New York office building? Most Park Avenue high-rises don’t even have second floors. Their elevator lobbies, all marble and modern sculpture, extend up two or three stories. And, as for those few buildings that do make use of their second floors, it is the least desirable office space on the premises — eye level with roofs of buses, sitting atop the cacophony of New York street life, cursed with perpetually dirty windows that have no view. The second floor is an unrentable albatross around every landlord’s neck.

In Dave’s experience, real business people didn’t have offices on second floors. They were always higher — up in the aeries where corporate eagles nest. No one would be caught dead with a second-floor address — at least no one who was not engaged in some odd and arcane form of endeavor, wholly alien to normal New York business practices. DO-do-DO-do DO-do-DO-do. You are traveling in a different dimension.…

Suddenly it came back to him. He had been on this floor. New York landlords use their second floors for temporary space, renting offices like rooms in a hot pillow motel to people who need (don’t ask why) an office for an hour or two or a day or two. Or alternatively, the landlords put luncheon clubs on their second floors — private restaurants available on a members-only basis to the elite tenants of the upper floors. Mediocre foods, overpriced wines, but decent service and convenient privacy when you want to impress that out-of-town customer (“I’ve asked Suzy to make us lunch reservations at the club.…”).

Like all Senterex executives, Dave held a membership in his building’s club. He hadn’t used it in years. He wasn’t even sure he remembered what the landlord called the place. It was something British. It was always something British. The Churchill Club? The Windsor Club? The Parliament Club?

No matter. There would be water in the club, and a washroom. Dave was grimly eager to visit a washroom. One with soap and hot running water.

He stepped out of the second floor elevator corridor and turned left. The hall was papered with a dark scarlet design and hung with gilt-framed oil paintings of deceased prime ministers, Tories to a man.

Right, the Prime Minister’s Club.

The entrance was a thick, heavy-looking door, veneered to give the appearance of improbably venerable Tudor oak. A small brass plaque was nailed at eye level: MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY.

The door swung open to a velvet-lined anteroom and more pictures of dead English politicians. The maître d’s podium, with leather bound reservation book and brass inkwell—complete with quill pen, for God’s sake—stood to the left. Heavy plush draperies with ridiculous golden tassels separated the anteroom from the restaurant proper.

The toilets are at the far end of the restaurant.

The dining room was large, and brightly lit. The tables were covered with snowy linen, laid with gleaming silverware. At a center table, facing the door, a half-empty glass of orange juice resting near his left hand, sat Ransome. His right hand held his gun level and well-aimed at Dave’s chest. The expression on his face was as neutral as ever. He didn’t say a word, but simply pulled the trigger.

2

The firing pin snapped. A wisp of smoke drifted out of the automatic’s silenced muzzle. The bruise beneath Ransome’s eye — a souvenir of Dave’s shoe — reddened. A look of faint irritation flitted across his face. He lifted his left hand to pull back the slide and chamber another round. By that time Dave had drawn his own weapon. Ransome dropped his hand back to the table.

The two men looked at one another in silence. Dave felt a small smile grow on his face. Ransome’s expression did not change.

Ransome broke the ice. “Mr. Elliot, you are truly a bird of rare plumage. I am beginning to develop a certain affection for you.”

“Not to be rude, but I feel exactly the opposite.”

“Mr. Elliot, I sympathize with you completely.”

“Thank you.” Dave made a small gesture with his gun hand. “By the way, I’d appreciate it if you would drop your piece. Just let it slide out of your fingers. And then …”

The weapon, a twin of the pistol in Dave’s hand, thumped on the carpet. Ransome spoke before Dave could finish his thought, “Kick it away, Mr. Elliot? That’s traditional, and I am, if nothing else, a believer in the traditional values.” He shot out the toe of his shoe. The pistol skidded three yards forward. Ransome continued, “Just as a matter of curiosity, would you mind telling if you gimmicked all the rounds in the magazine?”

“Only the first one. When you don’t have the right tools, it takes a lot of time to jimmy the slug out of the case and empty the powder.”

“As I well know.” Ransome seemed thoroughly relaxed, a quiet man having a polite chat with a distant friend. “However, given the direction our relationship has taken this morning, I believe I’ll inspect the rest of my bullets when I have the chance.”

His control is amazing. The man must be the coolest dude on the planet. “What makes you assume that you will have a chance?”

Ransome arched an eyebrow at the muzzle of Dave’s pistol, now pointed at the center of his midriff. He shook his head. “You don’t have it in you. Oh, certainly, in the heat of combat you can kill a man. I’ve seen you do it. But in cold blood? I think not.”

Right on schedule Ransome casually began toying with a table knife. His expression was poker-faced, but his pupils dilated. The muscles in his neck tensed. He was ready to move. “No, Mr. Elliot, you won’t shoot me.”

Dave shot him.

The silenced pistol made a small thump, sounding like a fist punched into a pillow. Ransome howled. He clutched his thigh where, just below the groin, blood welled out. “GODDAMN YOU SONOFABITCH YOU SHOT ME YOU SONOFABITCH RATFUCK BASTARD!”

Dave ignored him. He was on the floor, had begun to drop while squeezing off the shot. He rolled left, once, twice, three times, looking for where Ransome’s backup man should be.

And was.

Dave aimed, breathed, squeezed. Another fist punched the pillow. Twice. Three times. The sound was so soft. The backup man’s face disappeared in a red rain. He never even managed to lift his gun.

“I’M GOING TO KILL YOU YOU COCKSUCKER YOU BASTARD YOU SHOT ME!”

“Shut up, you’re behaving like a baby.” Dave had rolled one more time, bringing his pistol around toward Ransome.

“FUCK YOU JACK THAT’S WHAT I HAVE TO SAY YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” Ransome was doubled over, pressing both hands against the wound. His face was turned up, and his lips were drawn back. His eyes rolled, and he looked like a Doberman gone berserk.

Dave blew through his lips with no little disgust. “Come off it, Ransome. It’s a flesh wound. I doubt if I nicked more than a millimeter of meat. If I’d wanted to do you any real damage, you know I could have.”

“JUST FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU MAN HOW DARE YOU FUCKING SHOOT ME!”

Three tables — four counting Ransome’s — were set for breakfast. Someone had been having a morning conference when Dave called in his bomb threat. Dave snatched a beaker of ice water off one of the tables and flung its contents in Ransome’s face. “Ransome, take a table napkin, hold it up against your thigh, and shut the hell up. The way you’re acting, you’ll die of a heart attack before you die of that wound.”

The ice water plastered down Ransome’s hair. Rivulets dripped down his cheeks. The look on his face made Dave shiver. It was First Sergeant Mullins’s face, just before the end. In a voice low and very, very cold, Ransome hissed, “Elliot, you lousy shit, you could have blown my balls off.”

“Risks of the game, my friend. Besides, you said you read my 201 file. You should remember my marksmanship rating.”

“I’m going to kill you for this.”

Dave sighed with exasperation. “So what else is new?”

“How I do it, asshole. How much it hurts and how long it takes. That’s what’s new.”

“Thank you for defining our relationship. Meanwhile, don’t sit there like a jerk dripping blood all over the place. Put a piece of ice up against the cut. It’ll ease the pain and slow the bleeding.”

Ransome snarled, pursed his lips, and swiveled to fumble an ice cube out of a water glass. As he turned, Dave whipped the gun against the back of his skull. Ransome sprawled across the table and slid gently to the floor.

A caesura of the clock. Time at full stop. He had (hello, old friend) a loaded firearm in his hand. His enemy was unconscious at his feet. Merely out of curiosity, no malice in his heart, Dave aimed the muzzle at the base of Ransome’s skull. The gesture felt comfortable, felt right. He thumbed back the hammer. That felt even better.

It would be a very, very easy thing to do.

It is the easy things that damn you, not the hard.

Twenty-five years earlier, David Elliot, not entirely sane at the time, stood in the heart of horror and promised God that he would never, never, again fire a gun in anger. I will, he prayed, hurt no one, never again, no act of anger, no deed of violence, oh God, I will war no more.…

Now, in the course of a single morning, he had killed two men. It had been easy — easy as it ever was — and quite automatic. He hadn’t felt a thing.

However, now, at just this moment, a pistol in his hand and a worthy target in his sights, he was feeling something — feeling a sense of accomplishment, the comfortable emotion of a skilled man who has exercised his skills with perfection. With two fresh deaths on his hands and the perfume of cordite on his fingers, he knew he was at no small risk of feeling fine, quite fine, and feeling better every minute.

Never again, he thought. Never. He’d almost lost. They’d almost won. Now it was happening again. If he let it. But he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, let himself be turned back into the kind of man they once had wanted him to be.

Ransome expected otherwise. Ransome and his people. They’d think they knew what he’d do. Take a civilian hostage or two. Set up an ambush. Build up the body count. Start a firefight. Try to shoot his way out of the building.

Dave smiled grimly. He lifted the pistol’s sights from Ransome’s head, flicked on the safety, uncocked the hammer, and slid the weapon beneath his belt. Although he knew his enemy could not hear him, he spoke to Ransome anyway: “How many people have you got watching the exits, buddy? Twenty? Thirty? More? Whatever the number is, I’m not going to get by them, am I?” Dave glanced down at his trousers, torn and thick with grease. “Nope, I’m a real eye-catcher. Hell, looking the way I do, they’d shoot me on general principle. But I will get out, Ransome. Count on it. Also count on me doing it my way, not your way. I’d sooner take a gun to my head than do anything that way.”

3

It was dark, warm, cozy, and safe. Nearby, the equipment made a soothing humming sound. The air was a little stale, but not bad. Dave lay on his side, curled comfortably. His stomach was full and he felt like taking a nap. He liked it here.

Always wanted to go crawl back into the womb, didn’t you, pal?

The perfect hiding place. Dave was delighted to find it, and a little surprised. Senterex had long since moved its Management Information Systems department out to suburban New Jersey. He had thought that just about every other company in New York, including the Wall Street brokerages, had done the same. Manhattan office space was too expensive to waste on computer hardware. Besides, programmers are a delicate sort of breed, and more productive when removed from the pressures of city life.

However, at least one New York company hadn’t relocated its computers yet. The outfit was a subsidiary of American Interdyne Worldwide. American Interdyne, perpetrator of one of the 1980s’ last great kamikaze junk bond raids, was operating under the protection of the bankruptcy courts and an especially senile federal judge. Maybe that was why the company still had its computers located on the twelfth floor of a very expensive Park Avenue office tower.

What does space in this joint rent for, anyway? Forty bucks a square foot, plus or minus.

American Interdyne’s computer room was in the grand old style — weighty with heavy-duty mainframe computers, whirring peripherals, and blinking consoles. Other companies were dismantling their enormous centralized systems empires, replacing banks of balky $15 million IBM behemoths with sleek workstations and high speed client/server networks. American Interdyne had not. Its systems department sprawled across an entire floor, a quarter of which was given over to the sort of ponderous mainframes that most executives, Dave among them, thought of as dinosaurs.

He was happy to see them now, though. The nicest thing about the monsters, he thought, was their finicky complexity The pampered giants demanded endless care and feeding. Legions of high paid technicians to coddle them. Custom power systems. Heavy-duty air conditioning. Endless rows of peripherals. Special monitoring and control equipment.

And wire.

Lots of wire. More wire than you can imagine. Large mainframe installations consume oodles of cabling. And you don’t simply hook these suckers up once and then forget about them. No way. You always have to fiddle with the cabling, reconnecting ports, plugs, and interfaces. Oh, the DASD’s connected to the mainframe, and the mainframes connected to the frontend, and the frontend’s connected to the multiplexer, now hear de word of de lawd!

Which meant raised flooring. American Interdyne’s computer room, like that of every other big mainframe user, was built on a raised floor. The wires and the cables snaked beneath. The floor was paneled so that, as was required every so often, the computer staff could open it up and reconfigure the wiring.

Dark, warm, and cozy. It really was quite peaceful under the floor.

Dave needed the peace. Twice after leaving the Prime Minister’s Club he had almost bumped into members of the NYPD Bomb Squad. If they had seen him … tattered, filthy, stinking of vomit, his arms full of stolen food and supplies, and with a brace of exceptionally illicit pistols stuck in his belt …

Would’ve had a little trouble talking your way out of that one, pal. Especially explaining the shootin’ irons.

The pistols were automatics. One belonged to Carlucci, and one to Ransome’s backup man. They were the same make and model, although what that make and model was, Dave could not say. Neither bore a manufacturer’s stamp nor a serial number. Both had lightweight polymer fiber frames, factory silencers, laser sights, and staggered clips holding twenty-one rounds of ammunition.

Those rounds were cause for reflection — TUGs, they were called, short for Torpedo Universal Geschoss. Dave had never known that pistol versions were manufactured. The bullets were hunting ammo, designed to penetrate deep, mushroom inside the body, rip a target’s heart out. A man hit in the torso with one of those rounds would die where he stood; even a grazing wound would render him immobile.

Just above their safety levers, the pistols had slightly recessed slide bars. Dave guessed that pushing these slides forward converted the pistols to fully automatic operation, turning the pistols into handheld machine guns.

Room brooms. Not quite your old Ingram MAC with the WerBell Sionics suppressor, but wicked enough. Thirty-eight auto, 130 grains for a muzzle velocity just a skosh below the sound barrier. Optimal silencing that way. Punches your target up with a bit more than three-hundred foot pounds of energy. Ouch.

Also ouch if the authorities ever caught a civilian carrying one. Dave suspected that even thinking about such a gun was a violation of the Sullivan Law.

Which raises a few questions about where they come from — and the people who carry them.

Safe beneath the floor, his head pillowed on a nest of comfortable, rubber-clad 22 AWG wire, Dave tried to doze. His argumentative guardian angel wouldn’t let him. The issue was Helen, of course. Why had she materialized at the side of Ransome’s men? How had they persuaded her to turn on her own husband?

Dave doubted that she’d betrayed him intentionally. Ransome’s people probably had told her some godawful lie (or worse, cautioned his inner voice, some godawful truth) to trick her into identifying him.

What lie? he asked himself. What truth? the angel countered.

He could find answers to neither question. Nor could he — not quite yet — allow himself to explore the alternative explanation to Helen’s behavior. Maybe she is on their side. Maybe she wants you dead the same as everybody else.

Nonsense. He’d spent five years working as hard as he could to turn the marriage into a success.

How hard has she worked?

Shut up! I don’t need this!

You know what they say about guys who argue with themselves, and then lose.…

Dave growled and rolled over, trying to find a more comfortable posture. As he turned, the radio that he’d taken, together with sixty-seven dollars, from the corpes of Ransome’s backup man, slipped away. He retrieved it and placed it close to his ear. The volume was low. Sooner or later American Interdyne’s technical staff would be coming back to the computer room. Dave didn’t want them wondering where that odd noise—sounds like a walkie-talkie to me, Frank—was coming from.

A conversation was in progress: “… like someone had dropped a ketchup sandwich and smeared it all over the floor. Half of New York City must’ve stepped on the poor bastard’s face.”

Another voice answered. “Aww, man, that’s nasty. That’s just a nasty way to go. Somebody’s gotta call Don … Robin and get us some goddamned orders around here.”

“Negative. Robin’s on personal radio silence. We don’t speak to him until he speaks to us.”

“Aww, man. The cops are letting people back into the building. I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to do, but I think we should get our hairy asses out of here.”

“Not without orders.”

“Screw the orders, man. And another thing, screw only Robin and Partridge knowing what this happy horseshit is about. I mean, man, so we’re supposed to ice this guy, right? No big deal, they say. Just an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, right? Yeah, no big deal. Well, man, if it’s no big deal, then why the hell won’t they tell us what it’s all about? Christ, it ain’t like we don’t all have clearances or something. But, uh-uh, no questions, Robin says. No answers, Robin says. Well, bullshit is what I says. You know what I think? I think this guy, the subject, has got something on somebody. I mean he knows some bad shit about one of the big boys. And whoever that big boy is …”

“Belay that!” Dave knew the voice. It belonged to Partridge.

“No, man, listen …”

“At ease, Warbler. And don’t call me ‘man.’ ”

Hmm. Sounds like Partridge is as much of a hard case as Ransome.

Warbler’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Well, excuse me. Sir.”

“Warbler, if you’ve got a problem with the chain of command, I am the man to resolve it for you. And if any of you men have a problem with your duty, I’ll be pleased to discuss it with you one on one. Otherwise, you know what your job is, and that’s all you need to know. Am I understood, gentlemen?”

Second-in-command. Partridge is Ransome’s second-in-command.

Someone mumbled, “Yessir.”

“I didn’t quite hear that, soldier.”

“Sorry, sir. I said yes, sir.”

“Clear the channel.” It was Ransome’s voice, cool enough, but not quite as cool as it had been. “This is Robin. Our friend has got another radio.”

“Son of a …”

“I said clear the channel. In case you have forgotten, that translates as zip your lip.”

Sounds a mite touchy, doesn’t he.

“Point number one: Momentarily, I will be issuing a code change. On my mark we will go to Xylophone Delta Niner. Point number two: I want everyone back to their assigned stations immediately. Point number three: I require a medical kit for personal use. Point number four: We need a cleanup team on the second floor, in the restaurant. A body bag will be required.”

“You tagged him, Robin?”

“Negative. The bag is for Oriole.”

“Aww, man …”

“Zip it!” Dave heard a snap. Ransome inhaled deeply and blew out. He’d just lit a cigarette. Well, we all have our little weaknesses.

“Mr. Elliot, I trust you are listening to this. I am immediately declaring a unilateral cease-fire.”

To quote Mark Twain, I suspect our friend is somewhat economical with the truth.

“I repeat, it’s truce time, Mr. Elliot. We all will return to our posts and take a little breather. As I promised, I will communicate the current status to my superiors and urge them to authorize a negotiated settlement. In the interim, my people will stay on watch where they are. You, I presume, will do much the same. Given the coverage I have on the exits, that is your sole rational course of action.”

Ransome stopped, waiting for an answer. “A confirmation would be useful, Mr. Elliot.”

Dave pushed the send button on his radio and whispered, “I copy, Robin.”

“Thank you. I have one more thing for you. We will direct the management of this restaurant to take an inventory of their supplies. If some quantity of pepper is missing, I will revise my earlier orders accordingly.”

Three bags of pepper rested near Dave’s feet. He had always been skeptical when waiters politely asked, “Some fresh ground pepper, sir?” New York being the sort of place it is, he didn’t really believe that those oversized wooden pepper mills really had fresh peppercorns in them. They were, he conjectured, merely elaborate reservoirs designed to make the customers believe they were getting what they paid for. In the kitchen of the Prime Minister’s Club Dave had found a row of open quote pepper mills unquote, a funnel, and three bags of pre-ground pepper. Welcome to New York.

“Which means, Mr. Elliot, that you won’t have to waste your time spreading it around for the dogs.”

Too bad. If you use enough pepper, the dogs go berserk and turn on their masters.

“All right, men, reset to Xylophone Delta Niner. Do it now.”

Dave expected the radio to go silent as Ransome and his men activated a code change. But, after a moment, Ransome’s voice continued. “I have one other thing to say, Mr. Elliot. Now that the troops are off the air, I can say it in confidence. You’re a former officer. You know what a commander can and cannot say in front of his men.”

“I copy, Robin.”

Ransome inhaled, then exhaled a long slow hiss. Dave was willing to bet he’d taken an extra heavy drag off his cigarette. “Okay. Here goes. I lost it down here, Mr. Elliot, and therefore owe you an apology. I don’t lose my cool easily. But, when I saw the blood between my legs, I thought you’d gotten my equipment. That’s why I behaved as I did. Now let me confess that I’m sorry. I know I was out of line, and I know you did what was only right. You were one of Colonel Kreuter’s people. He taught you the rules, the same as he taught me. No one-man bands and no solo pilots. Even the Lone Ranger has got a faithful Indian companion. You knew that. You knew I’d have a backup man with me. And you handled it just the way you were supposed to. I respect that. I hope you’ll forgive my behavior and my remarks. I mean that sincerely. You have my word the episode won’t be repeated.”

Not bad. Right out of the psych-warfare books. Credible, sincere, level-headed — you know, for an absolute psycho, Ransome almost sounds like a nice guy.

“Mr. Elliot? Are you reading this, Mr. Elliot?”

“I copy, Robin.”

“Over and out.” The radio went dead. Ransome had changed codes.

Dave pushed his head back into the wire, making himself comfortable. He burped. The food he’d taken from the Prime Minister’s Club had tasted as good as any meal he’d ever eaten. But that was not surprising. After all, the first law of soldiery is: stolen food tastes best.

“Always take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find someone that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot.” Huck Finn said that.

And the second law of soldiery is this: once the shooting has stopped it’s time to take a nap.

Shortly, David Elliot was asleep.

4

The instructor’s tweed jacket gives him an appropriately professorial appearance. He is of average stature, but seems taller. The way he holds his head, nose lifted slightly, adds to the illusion of height. His hair is a little on the long side, but well-trimmed and fashionable for the late sixties. Nonetheless, it seems slightly out of place in a room full of military-issue brushcuts.

He speaks with a pronounced New England accent — not the lace curtain Irish burr of the Kennedys, but something more aristocratic. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Lieutenant Elliot and his fellow students — there are only a dozen of them — have spent the morning touring the facilities. They are a big improvement over Fort Bragg. “My name is Robert. You can call me Rob if you so desire. I, like everyone whom you will meet here, prefer to be addressed by my first name. As for our family names, well, I fear we all have developed a slight amnesia.”

The class gives an appreciative titter.

“The training you will receive here at Camp P may come as a surprise to you. It is not this institution’s goal to further the lessons you have already learned. We assume that you have mastered the honorable arts of soldiery. You would not be here if you had not. Rather, our curriculum is devoted to a different craft. This craft has two dimensions. The dimension you doubtless yearn to hear of is our craft’s outer manifestation — uncommon arms, infernal devices, devilish pranks, and the other rather feral skills demanded of saboteurs, subversives, and assassins. Certainly we shall be teaching you those things. But not immediately. First, we shall focus on the second dimension of the craft, the psychological dimension, the inner dimension, the dimension of the mind. In the end, gentlemen, it is in the mind that the game is played, and it is in the mind that it is either lost or won. Do you take my meaning?”

A few people nod. A Marine officer behind Dave barks, “Yes, sir!”

“Do try to forget the word ‘sir.’ We are a college of equals here. Now, to begin, as good Americans, you gentlemen have grown up in a culture that holds team sports in high esteem. I am sure you all have gone to many games and spiritedly cheered your home team. Like as not, you yourselves have been on the fields, good team players each and every one of you. Perhaps you have even had a moment or two of sporting glory. If so, then you are justly entitled to take pride in it, for surely team sports are affairs of honor. But, alas, they are also matters of a certain primitive simplicity and structure. Consider: the field has but two goalposts. The teams have but two sides. The game is played out over a designated period of time, as governed by a single, simple rule book that is known and respected by referees and players alike. Some have said that sport is a metaphor for war, and war a metaphor for sport. This is not, I fear, the case, although it is a common American mistake to believe so. During the coming few weeks, I hope to disabuse you of this unfortunate error, because, you see, war, and most particularly the sort of warfare for which you gentlemen will be preparing yourselves, has rather more than two sides and rather more than two teams. Nor is there a single set of rules. The game you seek to learn is layered like an onion. Peel off a strip, and another awaits you. And another, and another. The man who seeks to find the secret heart of an onion, gentlemen, is a man who will be bitterly disappointed. For when he has peeled the onion to its heart, he will hold in his hands nothing. The psychology of that particular truth can be most unsettling. It is my mission to ready you for it. I hope to teach you how to look beneath the surface of things, how to perceive how many layers the onion has, and how to recognize that it is the layers that are the soul of the onion. This is a matter of some urgency, gentlemen, because once you are out of the classroom and into such fresh hells as we will dispatch you, you will swiftly discover that beneath the surface of the game, another game is being played, and beneath that game another still. And their rules, gentlemen, ahh, all their rules will be very, very different.”

Mamba Jack Kreuter is too smart to send a green lieutenant, three weeks in-country, as officer in charge of an assassination mission across the DMZ. Dave Elliot works this much out while he is still in the colonel’s hooch. The fact of the matter is that the good colonel regards Dave as little more than a sacrificial lamb.

Not that Jack isn’t fair about it. He’s given Dave enough — just enough — information to reason his way to the truth.

Kreuter let slip the fact that the Russian Dave is supposed to kill is a KGB major. Kreuter also made it clear that the issue with the major is not his provisioning the VC, but rather the advice he’s giving them.

Question: What sort of advice would a KGB major be giving the Vietcong?

Answer: Advice based on KGB intelligence, intelligence being the stock-in-trade of the good old Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.

Question: Where does the KGB get its intelligence from?

Answer: From agents and informers.

Dave sits in his own hooch, drinking warm beer as he puzzles it through. The Russian major is being fed his material by an informer — maybe one of the Vietnamese officers attached to Kreuter’s command, or maybe somebody else. Whoever it is has to be highly positioned and delivering quality material. Neither Mamba Jack Kreuter nor any other commander would risk an incursion across the DMZ unless the intelligence loss was serious.

Question: How would you go about catching this particular traitor?

Answer: Set a trap to bag a senior Cong — or better yet, the Russian.

Question: What bait?

Answer: A team of expendable grunts led by an equally expendable lieutenant.

Dave is being sent north to lure the enemy out of his lair. Kreuter expects that he’ll blunder up through the boonies, get close enough to the Russian’s headquarters to attract some attention, and draw enough fire to cause some confusion. Meanwhile, a second American team — a larger one with more experienced leaders — will be flanking around the Russian’s base of operation. Once the shooting starts, they’ll move in and seize their prey. That is what the mission is all about. “Beneath the surface of the game, another game is being played.… ”

Question: What do they call the bait they stake for the tiger?

Answer: A Judas goat.

Question: How many Judas goats get to eat tiger cutlets?

Answer: There’s always a first time.

5

Although he did not dream of onions, David Elliot awoke thinking of them. Or rather one in particular. Its top layer, he said to himself, was named Bernie Levy.

Tell me more.

People like Ransome don’t send people like Bernie to do their dirty work for them. They do it themselves. That’s what they’re paid for. The only way that Ransome would have — could have — sent Bernie to kill me was if Bernie made a case, convinced him, argued him down. He and Ransome probably battled it out. Bernie Levy is a stubborn man. God knows he is a stubborn man. Once he decides that something is right, he sticks with the decision.

That’s only part of the answer.

The other part is what he said. “Bernie Levy blames himself, and God will not forgive.”

So?

Somehow Bernie thinks that he is responsible for Ransome wanting me dead. If he believes this nightmare is his fault, then he’d believe that killing me was his job. More than his job. His duty. Bernie’s an ex-Marine. Semper Fidelis. Duty has always been a big deal with him.

You think Bernie is behind this mess?

Maybe not. He might be just another victim, same as me. My guess is that he is. He had a choice between letting Ransome ice me or shooting me himself. When he came into my office, he was muttering and stammering about not having any alternative. That’s what he meant. He thought he owed it to me. I had to be killed because of a mistake he had made. He owed it to me to be the one who pulled the trigger. He owed it to me to not let a stranger do it.

Nice gesture.

Honorable, I’d say. Bernie was taking the sin on his own soul. It would have been a point of conscience with him.

Okay, so what kind of ungodly hell has Bernie gotten himself into and how are you involved?

I don’t know. I can’t even guess.

You sure you didn’t witness a mob hit or something while my back was turned?

What have I seen? What have I heard? What do I know?

6

Someone walked overhead, across the raised floor of the computer room. A voice, male, tenor and unaccented, called out: “It’s almost 3:30, people. El Supremo wants all of the ops staff in the conference room. He’s got a new decree that’s come down from on high.”

Someone sighed. “More salary cuts.”

“Yeah,” another person added. “To offset the growing burden of top management bonuses.”

“Look, people,” the tenor said, “I know it’s been rough around here, but at least we’ve still got our jobs.”

“At least until 3:30.”

The tenor ignored the wisecrack. “El Supremo says he needs an hour with you. Have we got anything major scheduled between then and now?”

A woman answered, “Nothing big, but there is an RJE run on the receivables that’s supposed to init at 4:00. It’s for Fort Fumble, our esteemed corporate headquarters.”

“Okay, Marge, you’re the one who runs that job anyway. You skip the meeting and handle it. I’ll stick around in case you need some help. El Supremo and I ride home together on the train. He can fill me in then. Everyone else, head ’em up and move ’em out. You know how much the boss hates people to be late for his meetings.”

A chorus of three or four voices broke into the opening chorus of Showboat, “Niggers all work on de …”

“Cut that out!”

Heels and soles clicked across the flooring tiles. Dave heard a door open and slam shut. It was quiet for a moment. Then steps came his way. Light, tapping — a woman’s shoes, the woman named Marge. She stopped just above his head.

The tenor spoke. “Do you run it from that console?”

“Em, yes.”

The man’s heavier footsteps thumped over Dave’s head. “That’s a 3178, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“I didn’t even know they still made those. Not exactly the right terminal for the job, is it?”

“Make do or do without. That’s the American Interdyne way.”

“Well, how do you …”

“Look, Greg, I’ve been handling this run all by my little lonesome for seven months. You don’t need to hang around. Why don’t you trot off to that meeting? Make El Supremo happy.”

Dave heard Greg scuff his toe across the tiles. “Well … Marge, the thing is that I didn’t really stay here to help you with the job run.”

“Oh?” Dave thought that Marge’s tone of voice turned a little sharp.

“Uh, yeah. Well, the thing is, Marge, that I … Look, I’ve said this before. You’re a good-looking girl, and I don’t think I’m a bad-looking guy.”

“So are Ken and Barbie, but they don’t come in the same box.” Dave guessed that these were the words of a woman who had held this particular discussion before.

“Come on, Marge. I’m your sort of guy, and you know it.”

“My sort of guy doesn’t have a wife and a kid in Great Neck.”

“I’ve already told you that’s history. You want evidence? Fine! I can show you the lawyer bills!”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“All I’m asking is that we go out together once or twice. Loosen up and have some fun. Have a few drinks, eat a nice dinner. Maybe take in a movie. Just get to know one another a little better. What’s wrong with that? Why won’t you even think about it?”

“Greg, let me make this very, very clear. I have thought about it. A lot.”

“Good. I knew that it couldn’t …”

“And I decided no.”

“What? Why?” Greg’s voice was a little louder than was polite.

“There aren’t any ‘whys,’ Greg. Just a plain old no.”

“You’re not taking me seriously. Listen, Marge, I am serious about this. Very serious. You’ve become important to me, and I won’t have … Hey! Don’t you walk away from me, lady!”

There was a scuffle. Marge’s voice was raised too, higher than Greg’s. “Let go of me, Greg. Let go of me now!”

“Not until you settle down and listen up! Just who do you think you’re dealing with here anyway? I’m your boss, Marge. Have you forgotten that? I’m the guy who fills out your appraisal form and decides what kind of raise you get. I’m the one who kept you off the last round of layoffs. And if you want to be off the next round, lady, you’d better clean up your act!”

“What? Greg …”

“Forget what the White House says about the economy, babe. It’s a cold hard world out there, and good jobs aren’t that easy to find.”

“No, Greg. There’s some …”

“Especially if you’ve got a black mark on your record. On the other hand, Marge, if you stay with American Interdyne, there are opportunities. You might even get promoted if you play your cards right.”

“Someone else, Greg …”

“Screw him! Just screw your boyfriend, babe.”

“No. I mean behind you.”

Greg, who was holding Marge’s arm twisted behind her back, glanced over his shoulder.

David Elliot smiled at him, although not in a friendly way.

7

Nudging Greg with his toe, Dave confirmed that lover boy was down for the count.

He shook his wrist, trying to throw off the pain. The knuckles of his left hand were bruised, and blood beaded along his unbandaged wound.

Your hand is filthy. Along with everything else you’re going to get gangrene.

After a last look at the quite unconscious Greg, Dave glanced up at Marge. His first thought was: great cheekbones. His second thought was: she’s going to scream any second now. He blurted, “Hi, I’m Dave Elliot and I’ve been having a bad day.”

Marge’s jaw — square, firm, attractive — fell. Her green (deep green, emerald green, green as a small mountain lake) eyes, large behind oversized, rectangular, red-framed glasses, goggled. She opened and closed her mouth twice. No sound came out.

“Actually, a very bad day.”

Humor her. Act a little boyish, a little chagrined.

Marge backed away. She made a limp gesture with her right hand, as if trying to push something away.

“I guess I look like a mess.”

Marge finally managed to mutter something. “Buster, you don’t know the half of it.”

“A really, really bad day.”

“And you smell.” She wrinkled her nose. Dave liked the way it wrinkled.

“Actually, it’s been the worst day of my life. Look, Marge — that’s your name, isn’t it? — Marge, if you back away any farther you’ll bump into the wall. What I’m going to do is to move over here, away from the door. So if you want to sort of sidle over to the exit, I’ll understand.”

Marge pursed her lips, giving him a narrow look. “Really?”

“Yup, really.” She was an attractive woman. Greg had gotten that part right. A little short, perhaps five foot three, but well proportioned. Black hair, glistening like polished coal, trimmed in an oriental bell cut. In her mid-twenties. Humorous green eyes and lips made to smile. A cute Jewish nose that was sort of, well, saucy, and …

Hadn’t you better drop that line of thought, pal? The lady’s already had to deal with one masher today.

Marge kept her back to the wall and her eyes fastened on Dave. She edged around the perimeter of the room until she reached the door. Once she had her hand firmly on the knob she spoke again. “I guess I’m supposed to thank you or something. I mean about that slob Greg. So thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Dave glanced down at his once white shirt. He brushed at its coating of dirt. No improvement.

She looked at him, cocked her head, and put her hands on her hips. “That’s it? You say, ‘You’re welcome,’ and that’s it?”

“Pretty much, I guess.” Soft’y, soft’y, catchee monkey.

“You come up out of the floor like some Stephen King thing, kung-fu lover boy here, and then heigh-ho Silver and who was that masked man, is that what you’re saying?”

Time for a boyish smile. Come on, pal, make her believe you.

He sighed and looked down. “It sounded like you needed a hand. With Greg, I mean. And …” He looked up and grinned. “… anyway, I needed to do something to … I don’t know … cheer myself up or prove I’m a nice guy or something. So … maybe the reason I belted him is … that I sort of did it as much for myself as for you.”

“What?” she growled. “Do you always solve your self-image problems by punching people out?”

“Can’t say. I haven’t had any self-image problems until just today.”

She studied him. The way she did it was almost clinical, inch by inch, top to bottom. Dave suspected she was trying to decide what he looked like beneath his coating of grime and filth. Finally she spoke. “Are you in … I don’t know … some sort of trouble or something?”

He heaved another sigh. “An understatement.”

She put her hands on her hips, puffed her cheeks, and cocked her head. Dave found her expression utterly adorable. “Okay. I know I’m going to regret this, but okay. I suppose I owe you something for …” She waved a disdainful hand at Greg’s prone form.

Perfect. Now give her one last out.

“Marge, I need a hand. I’d like to ask you for it. But I don’t want you to feel like you owe it to me.”

Marge blew out between her lips. “Okay, Mr.… what did you say your name was?”

“Elliot. Dave Elliot.”

“All right, Mr. Dave Elliot. You’ve got five minutes, wall clock time. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

She tapped her foot on the tiles and fingered her lower lip. Finally she spoke, “I’m supposed to believe this, huh?”

Dave shrugged. “There’s a phone on the wall there. Call Senterex. My extension is 4412 and my secretary is named Jo Courtner. Her extension is 4411. Tell her that you’re my dentist’s assistant and that you’re calling to reschedule the appointment I had for tomorrow. The dentist is named Schweber, by the way. See what happens.”

“What’s the main number?”

Dave gave it to her. She dialed, asked for extension 4412, and spoke. “Good afternoon. This is Marge from Dr. Schweber’s office. Mr. Elliot has an appointment tomorrow that we need to change.” She paused, listening. “Oh. Well, do you have any idea when he’ll be back?” Another pause. “Several weeks. Well, why don’t I call back the middle of next month? Okay. Good. Thank you and have a nice day.”

She set down the phone. “You’re out of town. Family emergency. No one knows how long you will be away.”

“Now call my brother. If there was a family emergency he’d be back in Indiana too. Say you’re calling from my attorney’s office — Harry Halliwell is his name — and you need to speak to him about the revocable trust I set up.”

Marge made the call. Her eyebrows arched as she heard the answer. After hanging up the phone she said, “Your brother says you’re on a business trip to Tokyo. He says you won’t be back for a month.”

Dave turned on his best, his warmest smile. “I sure could use some help, Marge.”

She shook her head and stared down at the floor. “Look, I’m just a simple working girl. People with guns … Mafia or whatever … and besides, you’ve … I mean … you’ve hurt people.”

Marge stopped speaking, licked her lips, and glanced at Greg’s unconscious form.

Careful, pal, you’re losing her.

Dave brushed his fingers through his hair. “Only to stop them from hurting me.”

Her eyes were still on Greg.

“Do you know anything about guns, Marge?”

Her lips thinned. “When I was eight, my family moved to Idaho. NRA country. Everyone’s a hunter. I’ve seen every kind of gun there is.”

“Good. Look at this.” Dave reached behind his back and removed one of the pistols hidden beneath his shirt. He squatted, placed it on the floor, and sent it spinning toward Marge. “I took it off of one of Ransome’s men.”

She bent down and picked the weapon up. She held it with the respect of an experienced marksman. After a moment or two of studying it, she nodded. “High-tech stuff, right? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Dave didn’t say anything. He simply waited for her to make up her mind.

She did. She checked the safety on the pistol, turned it butt first, and walked away from the door. She held out the gun to him. “I think you’re in real trouble, mister.”

He took the pistol and slipped it beneath his shirt. “I need some help. Just a little. Nothing that could get you involved. I promise. Word of honor.”

Liar!

“No, I …”

“Three things. That’s all I ask. One: find me a roll of duct tape or something — whatever it is you guys use to wrap the wire under the floor. Two: find me a tape recorder or a dictation machine. Three: watch in the hallway while I go to the men’s room and wash up and change.”

“Use the ladies’.”

“Pardon?”

“The only women on this floor are in this department. They’re all in a meeting now. The ladies’ will be safer.”

8

Dave — freshly washed, materially less odorous, and dressed in the amorous Greg’s slacks and shirt — was back in the computer room.

Marge eyed him approvingly. “You look like a computer nerd. Lopsided glasses, pants too short, shirt untucked. All you need is one of those plastic pocket protectors.”

“Thanks. If I had white socks and a pair of sneakers, my disguise would be perfect.”

Even though Greg was two inches shorter than Dave and one waist size larger, his clothes weren’t a bad fit. The looseness of the shirt was a definite plus. It made the guns easier to conceal. Greg’s shoes, unfortunately, were another matter. They were too small. Dave was still wearing his obviously expensive Bally loafers. He wanted to get rid of them.

Marge hefted the handheld dictation recorder that Dave had given her. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“I hope so. It’s my best shot.”

“And you’re certain you’ve got this radio set right?”

Dave had taken two radios — the first from Carlucci and the second from the man he had shot in the Prime Minister’s Club. While hiding beneath the computer room floor, he had examined them. Both had small, removable panels on their backs. Once the panels were taken off, Dave found a row of miniature red LEDs displaying what were undoubtedly encryption codes. A bank of toggle switches was set directly below the LEDs. It had taken him only a moment to reset the second radio to the same codes as those displayed on Carlucci’s radio — the radio that Ransome had said he would use to call Dave.

“Yes, Marge, the radio is the way it should be.”

“So all I do is I push down this transmit button and play your tape?” She pointed with a long, slender finger. Dave liked long fingers. He hated stubby ones. Marge, he thought, really had excellent fingers. Other things too. She was, he thought, the very antithesis of his wife — pleasantly rounded where Helen was New York thin; petite where Helen was, well, let’s face it, too tall; street-smart where Helen was coolly sophisticated; and unabashedly sexual where Helen …

Hey, pal! Yeah, you!

He forced his mind back to the business at hand. “Right. As soon as you hear a voice — any voice — you play the tape. But only if you’re out of the building. If you hear a voice while you’re in the building, just ignore it. If Ransome calls before you get out of here, I’ll have to come up with another plan.”

She took a deep breath and flashed him a smile. “What about Greg?”

Nice smile!

“Somebody will hear him sooner or later. Either that, or the janitors will find him tonight when they’re cleaning up. Until then he isn’t going anywhere.”

She studied her shoes. “By the way, I meant to ask you — why did you wrap so much of that stuff around … well, you know … his little thingie?”

“When it comes time for someone to pull the duct tape off that bozo, I want him to say ‘ouch.’ ”

She giggled. “You’re a mean guy, Mr. David Elliot.” Her grin lit up the room.

And she had a look in her eye. Or at least Dave thought she had a look in her eye. Or rather, perhaps it was that he hoped she had a look in her eye. “Yeah,” he smirked, “that’s me, mean as a junkyard dog.”

She tilted her chin up. The tint of her cheeks brightened. “But not mean to everyone?”

Marge’s voice had softened. Quite the contrary, Dave’s was husky. “No, not everyone.” He took a step forward. It was pure reflex. Marge did the same. There wasn’t anything reflexive about it. Dave observed that the air-conditioned computer room had become warmer. Not an unpleasant kind of warmth. More like a languid summer breeze.

She stood closer to him. Her eyes sparkled. Only a foot of space separated them. Either he was reading the signals wrong, or she liked having him closer. He was drawn to her, and she to him. There was a magnetism — real, instantaneous, unavoidable. It was rare, but it happened. Some people call it love at first sight, although, of course, it’s not.

An especially foolish thought flashed through Dave’s mind. He liked the thought, and he liked the foolishness, and most of all he liked Marge, and so …

He brought himself up short — a jerk on his psychic reins so abrupt as to be painful. To even think what he’d been thinking was so utterly wrong as to be insane, if not suicidal. And to involve this woman, who was already too deeply involved …

Nice to know you’ve still got at least a few morals left, pal.

Dave snatched Marge’s hand, shaking it as he would the hand of a business colleague. “Thanks for all your help, Marge. Really, really, really thanks. But I’d better get moving. Your friends — the other people in this department — will be back from that meeting pretty soon, I think.”

The sparkle in her eye was brighter. “Okay, but look, my full name’s Marigold Fields Cohen — don’t look at me that way, I was born in 1968 and my parents were living in San Francisco. It’s not my fault they gave me a dumb name. Anyway, I’m in the book. West Ninety-fourth Street, just off Amsterdam. When you get out of this mess, you give me a call, okay? Or you could even drop by.”

Dave smiled back at her. She was simply delightful. He was utterly beguiled. He was tempted to say something rash. Something very, very rash …

Pity you’re a happily married man. Or, then again, maybe you’re not anymore.

Or perhaps he never was.

“Sure, Marigold.” He tried to sound sincere. Maybe he was.

“Don’t you dare call me Marigold again.”

“Never. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die. Now there’s one last thing.”

Marge nodded eagerly.

“The last thing is that I don’t want you to get in trouble over this. I don’t want anyone suspecting that you helped me. But when they find Greg, there will be questions. So, what we need to do is to give you an alibi. What I have in mind is going to be an absolutely perfect alibi. No one will even think about questioning it. You understand that your alibi has to be bulletproof, don’t you?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“This.” Dave drove an uppercut into her jaw. He caught her as she slumped unconscious, and gently lowered her to the floor. Then he took all the cash out of her purse. It was only twenty-three dollars, poor girl. He did, however, leave her a subway token so she could get home.

1

Bowing to the silliest sort of superstition, the organization that erected and managed Dave’s building had decided that it would have no thirteenth floor. Instead, the floors were numbered 11, 12, 14, 15—as if such gods or demons who mete out bad luck are so dull-witted as to be unable to count.

American Interdyne occupied only two floors—12 and 14. Reception was on 14.

The receptionist was crawling on her hands and knees, squinting at the carpet, and sniffling. Dave gaped at her.

She was a 1980s yuppie caricature. The hemline of her all-natural-fiber, herringbone skirt ended well below her knees. An NFL tackle might envy the shoulder pads of her matching jacket. Her white cotton blouse was so heavily starched that it seemed to crackle as she bent, and the dark burgundy bow around her neck resembled nothing so much as a large dead fowl of a statutorily endangered species. The woman’s outfit almost screamed that it had been purchased at Alcott & Andrews — and Alcott & Andrews had been out of business for quite a few years.

“Excuse me.” Dave’s tones were the politest he could muster under the circumstances. “I’m from the phone company.”

She lifted her head, squinting in his approximate direction. “Don’t move (sniff). Just stand there and don’t move.”

“Lost a contact?”

“Both of them (sniff), would you believe?”

“Can I give you a hand?”

“Only if you’re careful (sniff).”

“I will be.”

Squatting down, Dave began studying the carpet. He spotted a glimmer of reflected light near where the woman crawled. “A little to your left, just about eleven o’clock from where your hand is. See it?”

“Yeah, thanks (sniff). One down, one to go.”

“The other one is just north of it.”

“Oh. Great. I’ve got it (sniff).”

The woman went through her rituals, licking a finger, peeling each eyelid back, tilting her nose at the ceiling, and then popping the contacts in. Dave found the practices of contact lens wearers just slightly less distasteful than those of people who pick their noses in public.

She jerked a tissue out of a box on her desk and dabbed at her eyes. The paper went purple with mascara.

“Get something in your eye?” Even as he asked the question, Dave knew he shouldn’t have.

“No.” She gulped and sniffed and blotted up a tear. “I was … I was …”

He loathed being made the confidant of people whom he did not know.

“… crying.”

On the other hand, he needed the woman’s help. Trying hard to sound sympathetic, Dave sighed. “Oh. Is something wrong?”

Ten minutes later, Dave knew more than he wanted about the receptionist’s life history. At the end of the eighties, she had earned an MBA from one of the better business schools, gone to Wall Street as an investment banker, been let go during the most recent wave of financial industry layoffs, and remained hopelessly unemployed until, in desperation, she applied for and obtained the position of receptionist at American Interdyne Worldwide.

Dave made soothing sounds.

“And so the only place I can get a job is in a dump like this (sniff), and I’m still paying off my student loans (sniff), and I can barely feed my cat (sniff), and my ex is out of work too and can’t pay child support (sniff), and I’d make more money as a dental assistant (sniff), and my landlord is on my case (sniff), and … and …”

Dave touched her hand. “What? You can tell me.”

“I got patted on the butt again.”

“Who, Greg?” Dave swallowed. That had been a mistake. Fortunately the woman missed it.

“Him too. All of them! From the lousy Chairman of the Board of this lousy company whenever he’s in this lousy town all the way down to the lousy office manager!”

Dave folded his arms and closed his eyes.

First Marge, now this woman. There seems to be a distinctive corporate culture at American lnterdyne.

“She’s a bitch, too.”

“Pardon?”

“The office manager.”

Later, after he had calmed her down, Dave asked for what he wanted. She smiled trustingly, and gave it to him. He had been so understanding, so helpful, that she didn’t even think about it. Besides, he still had a telephone repairman’s tool belt around his waist. All she asked was his promise that he return it to her when he was done.

A key.

Dave, lying through his teeth, promised. She glanced at her watch. “Will you be through before 5:00? I go home at 5:00.”

Dave smiled at her one last time, saying, “Probably not. But I’ll just slip it beneath the blotter on your desk. Will that be okay?”

“Oh, sure. Or drop it in the center drawer.”

“Certainly. Oh, one last thing, do you know a woman named Marge Cohen? She works down in the computer department.”

The receptionist nodded.

“You might want to give her a call. She’s good people, and I think she knows something about dealing with harassment.”

“I’ll call her at home this evening.” She brandished the American Interdyne corporate telephone directory.

Dave turned to leave. “You said the telephone room’s on this floor?”

“Right down the hall and to the left.”

“Thanks. See you later.”

“See you later.”

She’d given him the master key to American Interdyne’s utility and supply rooms. With any luck, it would fit every utility room in the building. Telephone rooms. Janitor’s closets. The little nooks and cubbyholes wherein the building manager, the electric company, and a fair number of other organizations stored this, that, or the other thing.

The key was just what he needed.

2

Dave was inventorying the contents of AIW’s supply room when Ransome did, at long last, the unforgivable.

The radio in Dave’s shirt pocket hissed alive. Ransome’s hauntingly familiar Appalachian drawl came through the speaker. “Mr. Elliot, I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Dave’s jaw tightened. Now what? Another cheap trick. A little psychological warfare to unbalance your prey. Something to destroy his self-confidence or make him question …

“I know from your record that loyalty is not one of your personal values. Not to your flag. Nor to your comrades. Nonetheless, it is my hope that you feel a certain bond to your own flesh and blood.”

What!

“Dad?”

No!

“Dad, are you there?”

Mark, his son. His only child. His and his first wife’s. His and Annie’s.

“Dad, it’s me, Mark.”

He was a junior at Columbia, lived in a dorm on West 110th Street, came down for dinner with his father at least once a week. Jealous Helen never joined them. She knew that Mark was the most important person in Dave’s life.

“Dad, listen to me.”

The boy wanted to be a philosopher. In his freshman year he’d taken the introductory course. Something in it had touched his soul. He found meaning in Plato, relevance in Kant, and joy in Hegel. On his own, with no prodding from his professors, he had, during his second year, read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time from cover to cover, all five hundred densely worded pages of it, and written a critical article that, mirabile dictu, had been accepted for publication.

“Please, Dad. This is important.”

Oh, Ransome, you sonofabitch, how dare you drag my boy into this? I will see you pay for this. Well and truly shall you pay.

“You’ve got to listen, Dad.”

Dave, who doubted if he himself had even used the word “philosophy” since his undergraduate days, enthusiastically encouraged Mark in his studies. If other fathers might look askance upon a son’s desire to invest his college years in a subject not renowned for its relevance to commercial pursuits — well, the more fool they.

“I’m downstairs. Mom is on a plane. She’ll be here in a couple of hours.”

I’m going to kill you, Ransome. I am going to kill you and wash my hands in your blood.

“Dad, you’ve got to listen. Agent Ransome told me everything. He’s shown me the records, Dad.”

What gruesome lie is this?

“It’s happened to other people, Dad. You’re not the only one. There were twenty or twenty-five of you. They gave you drugs. In Vietnam, Dad, before I was born, they gave you drugs.”

I will cut you with my knives. I will brand you with my fires. Oh Ransome, Ransome, you thing of evil, there will be no end to the tortures I will inflict on you.

“It was an experiment, Dad. They didn’t know what would happen. But the drug, Dad, the drug has long-term effects. Even after all these years, people get flashbacks. They can go nuts, Dad. They can go nuts even after all this time. The Army is trying to keep it quiet. They are trying to round up everyone who was given the stuff. They say they can treat it. They say …”

What? What do they say? This is going to be the worst. This is the one that Ransome hopes will drive me right over the edge.

“… Dad, they say there are genetic effects. They say that they have to test me too. They say that it’s probably why Mom … what made Mom have those problems.”

Angela. College sweetheart. June bride. One son. Two spontaneous abortions. Deep depression. A bout with the bottle. Divorce. Then psychiatric care, remarriage, two charming daughters, and a life of goodness and grace with another man.

“Dad, you’re seeing things, but it’s not your fault. It’s drugs, Dad. It’s bad stuff that’s been in your system all of these years. They showed me the records. They showed me the other guys’ records, too. It’s happening to all of you. Something happens to your body when you get close to being fifty years old. It sets it off. You start imagining things, seeing people come after you with guns and knives and stuff. You begin to believe that everyone is out to get you. So you start trying to get them before they get you. You start trying to get everyone. It’s all in your mind, Dad, but they can cure it. If you’ll come in, they can cure it. If you don’t, it’s going to get worse. And fast, Dad, real fast. You’ve got to let them treat you for it. It’s making you see things that aren’t there. It’s making you want to hurt people. Dad, for God’s sake, let Agent Ransome help you. That’s what he’s here for, Dad. He’s your friend. He’s here to help.”

The gun felt good in his hand. The rake of the butt was comforting. His finger caressed the trigger. It was smooth to the touch. He slid his thumb across the safety and pushed. He moved the select switch from semiautomatic to automatic. He was feeling better with each passing moment.

“Can’t you feel it, Dad? The rage? Can’t you see that what you are feeling is absolutely out of control rage?”

Goddamned right.

3

He wanted to kill and kill and kill.

“In the end, gentlemen, it is eminently more useful to destroy an enemy’s spirit than it is to destroy an enemy’s body.”

He could barely wait for the shooting to start.

Good old Professor Robert-call-me-Rob said that.

He was on the third floor.

The other thing he said was, “Do the one, and the other becomes a vastly less complicated task.”

He’d traveled there through a crimson fog.

It’s what Ransome wants, pal.

The fog was clearing.

You’re tying it up with a ribbon and giving it to him in a box.

Soon all would be visible, bathed in a pure light of great clarity.

Christ! Can’t you see what he’s doing to you?

Dave ejected the magazine from the pistol, and checked it. Full.

Ransome’s lied to your wife, he’s lied to your son, he’s lied to you. It’s bait! It’s a trap!

He jacked the clip back into the butt, pulled back the slide, and chambered a round. Killing these people was going to feel good.

You’re walking straight into it. They’re going to be waiting.

Dave wanted them waiting. He was looking forward to it.

“An enemy whose mind is distressed is an uncommonly vulnerable enemy. The demoralized are most easily defeated, the disheartened most readily destroyed. Such is the first principle of psychological warfare, and the first commandment of our honorable profession.”

Our honorable profession? Which honorable profession might that be? Ransome’s? Mamba Jack’s? Sergeant Mullins’s? Mine?

His hand was tightly around the banister. It was metal, painted battleship grey, and cold.

Cold. Concentrate on the cold. Don’t think about anything else. Just the cold.

Dave stopped. He held himself perfectly still.

Good. Now breathe. Take it long and slow.

He forced himself to inhale as deep as he could, so deep it hurt. He held it until he saw spots before his eyes, then let it out slowly. He blotted sweat off his brow with his shirttail.

That’s better, pal.

He held his right hand out. It was trembling.

That’s the idea. Guys with shaking hands aren’t the best marksmen in the world.

It had been close. Ransome had almost gotten him.

“He who overcomes his enemies by stratagem, is as much to be praised as he who overcomes them by force.” Machiavelli said that. Remember? Remember Professor Rob used to quote him all the time?

Dave snapped the safety on and reset the pistol to semiautomatic. He tried to slip the gun back into his belt. It took him three tries.

Hell do it again. Hell do anything to mindfuck you.

Dave’s knees went weak. He collapsed on the stairs, motionless and shivering, until his fury ebbed.

It had to have been Ransome’s best shot. There was nothing more guilefully evil that the man could do than calling Mark, persuading him to try to seduce his father into a death trap, lying to him …

You’re sure it was a lie?

No, he was not. That was the special hell of it. Someone — one of his own people—might have given him an experimental drug. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the intelligence crowd had pulled that particular trick. At least one hapless CIA contractor had been surreptitiously fed a dose of LSD and committed suicide as a result. It took twenty-five years before the Agency admitted to the episode and grudgingly recompensed the man’s family.

There had been other incidents as well. During the 1950s, the Army secretly sprayed the skies over San Francisco with an aerosol-borne microbe, Serratia marcescens. A decade later a group of covert warfare researchers filled glass bulbs full of moderately nasty germs, dropped them on the tracks of the New York subway system, and then monitored the spread of the resulting sniffles and runny noses. Around the same time, out in Utah, herds of sheep had died when something unspecified got loose from a classified laboratory. Elsewhere there were rumors of biologists, immunologists, and genetic engineers who took an unhealthy interest in the results of prison camp experiments performed by the Axis powers during World War II. Then too there were the American penitentiary inmates who had been injected with infectious viruses, untested medicines, and, most notoriously of all, syphilis spirochetes. Add to that the Army’s horrific testing of radioactive substances on members of its own ranks, and it wasn’t hard to believe that some dirty tricks specialist might feel motivated to feed a mind-bending drug to a few of his colleagues.

The intelligence establishment had been a law unto itself, more than capable of performing ill-conceived experiments on soldiers and civilians alike. It was, after all, being done in the ultimate best interest of American national security, and thus a necessity if you believed, as everyone did, that the Soviets were doing precisely the same. If a few lab rats, imprisoned felons, or men in uniform suffered along the way — well, was that too high a price to pay for insuring the preservation of democracy? Indeed, when during the 1970s Senate investigators first learned of the operations and voiced their horror, no small number of the people responsible were more than merely indignant. What’s all the uproar about? We’re just doing the job you pay us to do. You can’t blame us — we’re the good guys!

Ransome had come up with a particularly insidious lie, all the more insidious for being believable. It guaranteed that everyone—everyone—who knew Dave and who might help him would now be on Ransome’s side. Better still, it would cause Dave to doubt himself.

It could be true, you know.

I know. God help me, I know.

He shivered in the stairwell’s half light, his arms wrapped around his knees, despairing in the knowledge that now he was utterly, utterly alone. There was no one to talk to, no one who would listen. Wife, child, friends — everyone who should believe in him believed lies. Every hand would be raised against him, and there was no one he could trust.

Such is the stuff of waking nightmares, incipient madness, the sort of now-bewildered but soon-to-be-de-ranged thoughts that cause once well-balanced people to peek under their beds at night, suspect that their phones are tapped, and, in time, become certain that sinister forces are monitoring their every move. Maybe it’s the government, maybe it’s the Trilateral Commission, maybe it’s the saucer people. You can’t trust anyone because anyone and everyone may be one of Them or one of Their Agents. And pretty soon you begin writing long letters to the editor of Scientific American, or maybe you don’t because the editors are probably part of the conspiracy too. And you think about lining your room with aluminum foil to keep the radio waves out, and at night you roam the streets spray-painting mystic symbols on the walls to repel strange forces, and all the while you gibber to yourself and what you say makes sense to you if to no one else, and in the end you put your belongings in a shopping bag, better to be mobile, and you look for a dark place you can hide during the daylight hours, because They are out there, and They are searching, and They want you in their crosshairs.…

The headshrinkers call it paranoia, and when it gets bad they put you away.

Because, after all, people who think everyone in the world wants to kill them can be dangerous.

1

With any luck Marge — Marigold Fields Cohen, who probably had been conceived the very summer he had ridden into the high Sierra mountains and slept by a lake, perfect and green and never forgotten — Marge would still be unconscious. If so, she wouldn’t have heard his son. If so, she’d still use the tape recorder when the time came for Dave to make his escape.

Better have a fallback plan anyway.

Right. Dave wanted nothing more than to avoid Ransome and his people. But if something went wrong before Marge played the tape, he would need geography through which he could pass swiftly, and through which his enemies could not. So far he’d managed to keep one short step ahead of them, and largely played a defensive game. The time had come to change that. Besides, he owed Ransome something for bringing his son into the picture. Indeed, he owed Ransome rather a lot.

1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47.

Prime numbers. A prime divided by any number other than 1 or itself will produce a fractional number as an answer. Primes are an infinite source of fascination to mathematicians, and easy to calculate — or, rather, easy to calculate if you are only interested in the ones lower than 50.

Professor Rob speaking: “Gentlemen, can you imagine how downright embarrassing it is when a saboteur blunders into his own booby trap? Just think of it. Picture yourself, lying there in the smoldering rubble, a leg blown off perhaps, or possibly with your entrails unraveling before your eyes. Think how chagrined you would feel if you knew that the infernal device that had done the damage was one that you yourself had set. My goodness, but wouldn’t your face blush pink? One of life’s more nonplussing little experiences, I should say. In order that you may avoid such awkward and humbling moments, it is my mission today to teach you some arithmetic. What I will discuss, and what you will learn, are some few, simple mathematical progressions. Such formulae are quite useful in keeping track of the locales in which you might happen to have prepared a little prank for the edification of your opponents.”

There are sixteen prime numbers lower than 50. Dave laid traps in the fire stairs on sixteen floors. Sixteen in the east stairwell, sixteen in the west, and sixteen in the south.

His instructors at Camp P had emphasized the importance of simplicity. A good snare is a plain snare, designed to produce maximum effects with minimal materials. As in almost every field of endeavor, so too in the art of dirty tricks — K.I.S.S. is the greater wisdom.

Dave respected K.I.S.S. His traps—“jokes” the instructors would have called them — included strands of dark green telephone cable strung as tripwires near the top of flights of stairs; buckets of slippery liquid soap (the kind used in bathroom dispensers) set in corners where they might be retrieved easily by a running man; jars of sticky rubber cement ready to be tilted over; containers full of flammable industrial cleaning solvent placed conveniently ready to hand; much heavier gauges of wire, this time carefully coiled around a water pipe and easily unraveled; a handful of cheap letter openers taped in spiky groups of three; power staplers left in various strategic positions; seemingly innocent wads of paper blanketing two platforms in the stairwells; a fire hose unwound from its spool and stretched up five flights of stairs; three canisters of photocopier toner ready to belch out blinding black powder; and other things as well.

His teachers would have been proud of him. K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Dave doubted that all of his traps would be effective. Many wouldn’t even be tripped. And as for those that were, at worst they’d cause broken limbs and punctured flesh. Most were merely inconveniences and none were guaranteed mankillers. They didn’t need to be. All they needed to do was slow Ransome and his people down.

On the other hand, pal, if you want to cause some real damage …

In a janitor’s closet he’d found five large cartons — two dozen bottles to the box — of ammonia cleanser.

Ammonia is common stuff. Everyone uses it to wash windows, sanitize toilets, and scrub porcelain. It is an ordinary household ingredient.

At Camp P they had taught him about ordinary household ingredients. They had taught him that, to the knowing, the average kitchen pantry is an arsenal of poisons, incendiaries, and explosives. When combined in the correct ratios, no small numbers of quote ordinary household ingredients unquote are lethal weapons.

Among them ammonia.

When mixed with iodine — the kind found in almost any office emergency medical kit — ammonia produces a precipitate of tiny nitrogen triiodide crystals. Once properly treated and dried, nitrogen triiodide becomes a substance of some commercial value. Indeed, DuPont sells it under a brand name well known in the mining industry — well known as being the perfect tool for blasting open new ore seams. The only problem with the stuff is its instability. A mere sixty pounds of pressure placed on a batch of triiodide crystals and …

Dave’s guardian angel smirked. Baby go boom!

2

Shortly after 6:00, David Elliot walked into an ambush.

While laying his traps, he’d concluded that Ransome’s goons were keeping out of the stairwells. Guarding the ground-floor exits was enough to ensure that their prey did not escape. Besides, occasional smokers — exiled from their offices, lepers of the late twentieth century — snuck out to the stairwells to enjoy secret, shameful cigarettes. While the presence of a telephone repairman carrying spools of wire up and down the stairs was unremarkable to the nicotine addicts, the presence of patrolling thugs would have raised their suspicions.

Had Dave been in Ransome’s shoes, he would have ordered his men to steer clear of the stairs until long after the business day had ended. Unfortunately, now the day had ended, and some of Ransome’s people were getting playful. Dave wondered whether their boss knew what they were up to. Probably not. A man like Ransome would never approve of such an ineptly prepared trap. It was inconsistent with Ransome’s professional standards. Dave himself found it sufficiently amateurish as to be offensive.

You just can’t get good help anymore.

Two of Ransome’s men had positioned themselves in the west stairwell. They were crouched in a corner on the thirty-third floor near the fire door. One of them, doubtless thinking himself cunning, had disconnected the fluorescent lights above the door. The concrete platform, the cold grey walls, and the door itself were masked in shadow.

The shadows were the giveaway. If they’d left the lights on, Dave might not have noticed until it was too late.

The old turn-off-the-lights trick. These guys read too many Robert Ludlum novels.

They couldn’t have been in place long. As he’d put the finishing touches on his booby traps, Dave had climbed past the thirty-third floor twice during the last fifteen minutes.

If they have any training at all, there’ll be another pair of them on the thirty-second floor, waiting on the other side of the fire door. Standard ambush tactics, straight out of the manual.

The idea would be to trap him between the thirty-second and thirty-third floors. Two men shooting from above, two from below. “Flanking crossfire” was the technical term. It turned your target into shredded beef.

Which means the excitement won’t start until you’re halfway up the next flight of stairs.

Dave climbed the last few stairs to the thirty-second floor. His shoe heels echoed on the concrete steps. The two men in the shadows knew he was coming. They would have heard him, would have been following his progress, and would have been whispering eagerly into their radios.

How long have they been there? How long have they been listening? Have they had time to summon more men?

The space between the stairs, the empty well that plummeted from the roof of the building to the ground, was wide enough that he could see his waiting enemies. Both were flattened against the wall. Both held stubby, ugly assault rifles to their shoulders.

AR-15s? No, something else. Something with bigger magazines and more rounds.

Dave stopped and puffed hard, as if catching his breath. He untucked his shirttail and swiped it across his face. He blew heavily. “I hate these goddamned stairs,” he muttered in a voice just loud enough to be heard. One of the men above him jiggled a radio closer to his mouth.

Idiot. You can’t yammer into a radio and point a rifle at the same time. Don’t they teach you people anything?

Dave rolled his shoulders and resumed climbing. The two men on the next floor would not shoot. Not now. They wanted to be sure they got him, and the only way to do that was to take him in a crossfire. They wouldn’t fire until he had reached the platform halfway between the thirty-second and thirty-third floors. He was certain of it.

The certainty did not help. His heart hammered, and now, all at once, he did feel short of breath. Sweat beaded on his forehead. A small muscle beneath his left eye twitched uncontrollably. His knees felt wobbly. He wanted a cigarette.

There are times when you knowingly walk into a trap. Sometimes you do it because it’s the only way to flush out the enemy. Sometimes you do it because the only way to achieve your objective is to spring the trap. But mostly you do it to bait a trap of your own.

Which doesn’t make it any easier.

The muscle beneath his left eye was out of control. His wrists, just where the veins are closest to the surface, tingled. It took conscious effort to keep his hands away from his guns.

Dave climbed. One step. Two steps. Three steps. Four …

He was, just for this moment, invisible. The men on the thirty-third floor could no longer see him. They would be shifting their aim to the platform eight steps ahead of him, waiting for him to blunder into their sights. The men stationed behind the door would be coiling their muscles, readying themselves to spring out. Both teams thought they knew where their target would be. They were ready for it, looking forward to it, and perhaps even thinking about how, once it was over, they would pat one another on the back, crack rough jokes, light cigarettes, and assure one another that, when all was said and done, the David Elliot affair hadn’t been an especially difficult assignment.

Dave put his hand on the stair rail — cold, hollow, tubular.

One deep breath.

He pulled, kicked, pushed, and vaulted.

Thirty-two stories to the ground floor. If he missed, he missed, and that was that.

He cleared the stairwell, cleared the rail opposite, and landed on the balls of his feet. It had been a short, easy jump — only a moment of danger to take him from one flight above the thirty-second floor stairwell to one flight below it.

“Shit!” A voice from above. Silenced bullets pocked the concrete where he had landed. Dave was already gone.

He snatched at the banister, seized it, and hurled himself downward. He took two and three stairs at a time. He had to get past the next platform. If he was still on the stairs leading down from the thirty-second floor …

The fire door slammed open. Shoes slapped on concrete.

… then the men behind him would have a lovely view of his back.

He swung over the rail and leapt. A hail of bullets cut the air above, behind, and beside him.

A scream of frustration: “Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, sonofabitch!”

David Elliot ran.

“This is Egret! He’s on thirty-one, on thirty, headed down! Where are you? What? In the west stairwell, you jackass! Get here, fast!”

Someone, maybe more than one person, emptied a magazine, maybe more than one magazine, down the stairwell. The bullets punched into walls, blasting out rock hard splinters of concrete shrapnel. Dave felt a bee-sting of pain in his shoulder.

They were thundering down the stairs, firing as they ran. Flattened bullets ricocheted all around.

Standard operating procedure. If you can’t hit your target with a straight shot, get him on the bounce.

Dave vaulted another banister. A shot, a ricochet, whined under his chin. He flinched. Far away, down — how many? — flights of stairs, another door flew open. Men were running up now. They were trying to catch him in between.

Twenty-sixth floor. One more floor to go.

He slipped, caught himself, pulled himself straight. He was where he wanted to be — on the twenty-fifth floor.

He glanced up the stairs. There it was, snaking up the steps, long and flat, just as he’d left it. It had been surprisingly heavy work to unwind it all the way up to the twenty-ninth floor. He hadn’t really expected to have to use it.

Ransome’s men were running past its end now. They didn’t see it, or if they did, they didn’t think about it. An emergency fire hose.

Dave took the red-enameled wheel in both hands, and turned. It was stuck. Dave gave it a panicked jerk. The wheel was frozen.

Aw, God, don’t do this to us.

He braced his legs, and strained. The wheel moved. The pipe gurgled and hissed. Water was flowing through it. Dave pulled harder. The wheel turned freely. The hiss mounted to a roar. The fire hose was no longer flat and motionless. It filled, rounded, moved. Water boiled through it, up one flight of stairs, up a second flight, the pressure mounting with each passing inch.

How much water pressure? If memory serves, three hundred pounds. And that, my friend, is one hell of a lot of pressure.

The hose jolted, swayed left to right, and began to rise. It looked alive, like an enormous tan snake shaking itself awake. And if it was shaking here, five flights from its end, then the nozzle would be …

A scream echoed down the stairwell.

… whipping back and forth uncontrollably. Three hundred pounds of pressure in rapid motion. Six or seven pounds of heavy brass nozzle. One blow would break a strong man’s legs.

The scream rose. It was coming closer, and with awful speed. Dave looked up just in time to see the body pass. The man was plummeting down the stairwell, wind-milling his arms, trying to seize the banister. His face was white with hopeless terror.

Damn.

Damn, indeed. He hadn’t wanted to kill them. He just wanted to slow them down.

From up above there were more screams, more shouts, and no small amount of swearing. Dave ignored it. He had more serious concerns. The men coming up from the lower floors were uncomfortably close. If he shimmed the lock and fled onto the twenty-fifth floor, they’d be right behind him, and he’d be an easy target.

He could hear them — how near? — two or three flights of stairs below. One of them, almost out of breath, gasped, “What’s going on up there?”

Another voice, less winded, replied, “Only one way to find out.” Shoe soles clattered on concrete. They were running.

A barrage of bullets, automatic fire, stitched across the fire hose. Water geysered as the hose, losing pressure at every bullet hole, slowed its furious undulations. Now, the men racing down the stairs could pass it safely.

Earlier, while laying his traps, Dave had wound double lengths of thick coaxial cable around several standpipes. One of them was on this floor. The cable was anchored firmly and would not come loose. He snatched it up, looping it between his legs.

Tell me you’re not going to do this.

Twice around the left leg, twice around the right.

You are utterly fucking insane.

Up over the left shoulder, beneath the crotch, crisscross the back, and over the right and left shoulders.

Pal, let me make this as clear as I can. I do not want to die.

A quick hitch knot. He was done.

He gave the cable a tug. It was secure. And the harness in which he had wrapped himself was a hasty but nonetheless credible imitation of a parachutist’s jump rig.

Oh no, pal! No!

A bullet whipped by his chest. He didn’t think about it. He took a short step forward, brisk but not hurried, bounced once on his toes, and sprang over the handrail. He dove with a perfection long-practiced, and never forgotten. He dove into the muddy-brown pond of his youth, into a green, green mountain lake. A jackknife, folded at the waist, now turning in the air, the torque of his body rotating him upright. A swimmer into cleanness leaping.

And it felt good.

Dave plunged through the empty space between the stairs. As he fell, he caught a glimpse of a face, a man wide-eyed and gaping. “Jesus God!” the man whispered.

A bullet whined somewhere, too far away to be worrisome.

He clutched the cable, bracing himself for the coming jolt. It would be no worse, he guessed, than his first jump. Twenty-five hundred feet over Fort Bragg. One or two men, the company clowns, were cracking weak jokes. Everyone else was solemnly avoiding their comrades’ eyes. That sonofabitch Cuban staff sergeant was jumpmaster. He was standing by the open door, screaming above the wind, screaming the countoff, and screaming obscenities. What was that Cuban’s name …?

The cable snapped taut. Thinner than the flat canvas straps of a jump rig, the wire sliced into his legs. Unexpected pain drove the breath from his lungs.

Christ! That hurts.

He swung left, arcing up over the twenty-first floor handrail, and slamming into the wall with bruising force. Reflexively, he yanked the hitch knot, tumbled to the concrete, and rolled.

“Sheee-it!” someone yelled. “Did you see that sucker?”

Someone else was bellowing, “Down! Get down there! Don’t let the bastard get away!”

Dave plucked a pistol from beneath his shirt. His legs were numb and shaking. He forced himself erect. He grinned, showing his teeth, and emptied a twenty round magazine up the stairs.

Are we having fun yet?

Time to move on. Soft bullets pinged and bounced on the stairs above him. Dispassionately, Dave criticized his pursuers’ aim. He’d been in clear sight. If they had been better marksmen, they would have gotten him. He guessed his little do-it-yourself bungee stunt had rattled them.

Can we get out of here now?

David Elliot ran. He ran vertically as he had all day, and thus advanced not one step nearer freedom. Nor, in all fairness, did he fall one step closer to capture.

On the nineteenth floor, he lightly vaulted a tripwire. On the seventeenth, he heard a man — perhaps two men — come a cropper of it. Smiling faintly at their screams, he emptied two buckets of slippery soap on the stairs.

His pursuers swore when they reached those stairs. Or rather some swore. Others cried and moaned — they were the ones with broken bones. Dave heard their pain and stifled a laugh.

Now on the fifteenth floor he heard the sputtered but nonetheless gratifying profanities of someone who up above, had lost his shoes to the sticky embrace of quick-drying rubber cement. His cursing was heartfelt, Dave could tell, and all the more appreciated for its sincerity.

In contrast, the man who had been near the microwave oven at the wrong time didn’t swear. He merely whimpered. Dave thought he sounded in shock. Probably needed a medic, and soon. Too bad. Besides, he’d live. It was no big deal, only a small microwave, a countertop model stolen from an employee lounge. Dave had secreted a brace of two liter bottles of diet cola into it, and plugged the machine into an emergency outlet. As he ran past it, he had hit its on switch. Forty-seven seconds later an explosion of scalding cola and the shrapnel of a shattered oven door eliminated yet another of his pursuers.

Dave heard it all — all the outraged wounded, all their obscene invective, all their cries for help — as he ran, and as he ran he giggled.

The thirteenth floor (fourteen by the building manager’s logic) was where Dave remembered placing a bottle of cleaning solvent. With no little foresight, he had taped a book of pilfered matches to its side.

Because the men chasing him had cautiously slowed their steps — no reason for that, those seemingly innocent wads of balled up copier paper were no more than they seemed to be — Dave had ample time to empty the bottle, light a match, and, while descending to the twelfth floor, flick it into the puddled cleanser. When it exploded in flame, he could no longer contain himself.

The last thing his pursuers heard was his laughter, deep rolling belly laughs, boundless joy, guffaws of sheerest pleasure, echoing through the stairwell. They stopped, looked questioningly at one another, and shook their heads.

Two pieces of enameled brass ring musically as they bounce across Colonel John James Kreuter’s field desk. The colonel picks them up, holds them to the light, and squints. He rolls his tongue around in his mouth, scratches the side of his head, and frowns. “Aw right, Lew-tenant, yew gonna stand there all day lookin’ like yew jest et a canary bird or are yew gonna tell me whut these here doohickeys is supposed to be?”

“Ensigns, sir. Those are the insignia of a Russian officer.” Dave can’t keep the smugness out of his voice. He doesn’t even try.

Kreuter rubs his hand across his cheek. He looks up at Dave, and then back down again at the two brass emblems. “Like as not, a field grade officer. A major, meybe.”

“Yes, sir. That’s precisely what they are.” Dave places a folded piece of paper on the colonel’s desk. Kreuter looks at it like it was a dead rat. “An’ whut’s this, yer Christmas list for Santy Claus?”

“No, sir. It’s the name of an ARVN captain, one of our loyal allies. The major gave it to me shortly before his untimely demise.” He bites his tongue. He has to. If he doesn’t, he’s going to laugh.

Kreuter unfolds the paper and nods. He taps an unfiltered Camel out of a pack, flicks his thumbnail across a wooden match, frowning as he inhales. “An’ jest how is it, young Lew-tenant Elliot, that yew managed to work this here par-tic-u-larly miraculous feat?”

Dave shows his teeth. “Well, sir …” He feels the laughter boiling up from his belly. “… it’s that I figured …” His face flushes with the effort to control himself. “… living is …” He can’t bottle it up. “… a hell of a lot more fun …” No hope for it. “… than dying!” The laughter explodes.

Mamba Jack throws his head back and laughs with him. “Well, well, well, Lew-tenant, and ain’t yew some piece of work. That’s whut I got to say to yew. Jest well, well, well, and meybe yew and me got us here the start of a bee-utiful friendship.”

3

7:03 P.M.

David Elliot stepped out of the elevator and onto the forty-fifth floor.

About time you returned to the scene of the crime. If there are any answers, this is where you’re going to find them.

The Senterex executive suite was locked. The receptionist had long since departed, and all the secretaries would have left for home before 6:00. There still might be one or two workaholic executives hanging around at this hour. There usually were. Dave hoped to avoid them, but if he didn’t, he was quite prepared to deal with them.

He slid his office key in the lock, turned, and pushed.

Now aren’t you glad Bernie didn’t have one of those electronic card gizmos installed on this floor? Those suckers automatically log the ID numbers of everyone who comes in and everyone who goes out.

He strode quickly across the reception room, turning left into the corridor leading to Bernie Levy’s office. Then, on impulse, he stopped, spun around, and jogged east down the hallway where, twelve hours earlier, he’d cowered beneath Ransome’s and Carlucci’s bullets.

The repair job was flawless. The bullet holes had been filled in, the gouges papered over; there wasn’t a scratch, a dent, or a scar.

No evidence. If you try to show anyone the proof of what happened this morning, they’ll just look at you and sadly shake their heads. Poor old Dave, they’ll say, it’s all in his mind.

He glanced at the carpet, at the spot where Carlucci’s blood had spilled. No stain remained, no evidence, no hint that here, at this place, a man had bled to death. The carpet had been replaced with fabric the same shade, the same nap, and even the same wear as every other inch of carpet in the corridor.

A nice professional job. But then would you expect anything less from Mr. John Ransome and company?

He turned back toward Bernie’s office and, as he entered the reception room, almost collided with the sartorially resplendent frame of Dr. Frederick L. M. Sandberg, Jr.

Sandberg took a short step back, glanced over his shoulder, and collected himself. With patrician politeness he intoned, “Good evening, David.”

“Hi, Doc.” Fred Sandberg was the eldest member of Senterex’s Board of Directors. He had retired some years earlier as the dean of the Yale medical faculty, but remained active in private practice. His clientele was limited to senior corporate executives, and he was as good as he was expensive. So good, in fact, that he acted as personal physician to Bernie, Dave, and most of the Senterex executive cadre.

“And how are you this evening, David?” Sandberg’s tones were soft, smooth, inimitably well-bred.

“I’ve been better.”

Sandberg smiled gently. “So I have heard.”

Dave grimaced. “You and everyone else, I presume.”

“Quite so. Bernie called a Board meeting late this afternoon. You were, need I say, the sole subject on the agenda.” The doctor stroked a perfectly shaved cheek, as if framing a further remark. Dave spoke first.

“Doc, you know me, right? You’ve been seeing me for at least five years. You know me inside out and five inches up the large intestine.”

Sandberg peered over the frames of his gold-rimmed glasses. “Indeed.”

“So you know I’m not nuts.”

Sandberg gave him an exceptionally professional smile. “Of course I do. And, David, I must assure you that neither I nor anyone else thinks that you are actually …” He wrinkled his aristocratic nose in anticipation of using an improperly unmedical word. “… nuts.”

“The story is drug flashback. Right?”

“It is more than a story, David. I have seen proof. Agent Ransome …”

“Agent? Is that what he says he is?” Mark had also used the word.

“It is not merely what he says he is. It is what he is, a federal …”

“He’s lying. He’s a paid killer.”

The expression on Sandberg’s face was both sympathetic and pitying. Beneath a sienna brown sports jacket, he was wearing a canary yellow waistcoat. Not a vest, a waistcoat. Only a man of his style and presence could pull off such sartorial outlandishness. Sandberg fumbled his fingers into one of its pockets.

“Careful, Doc. They should have warned you that I’m violent.”

“As indeed they did.” He withdrew a white rectangle from his waistcoat. “Ah, here it is. Agent Ransome’s business card. Do take a look at it.”

Dave snapped the card out of Sandberg’s fingers.

There was a phone number, a Washington address, and an embossed official seal.

Dave curled his lip. “Nice print job. But printing’s cheap.”

“It is not a forgery, David.” Sandberg’s voice was low, and a little sad.

“When I picked the bastard’s pocket this morning he was carrying a different card. The Specialist Consulting Group. It said he was …”

“David, I assure you, I have checked Agent Ransome’s credentials quite thoroughly. One does not, you know, reach my age and position without developing a certain circle of acquaintances. Accordingly, I made some discreet inquiries among old friends. They assured me that he is very much what he claims to be.”

Dave shook his head. “The man’s a professional, Fred. He’s fooled you and he’s fooled your friends. That’s what professionals do.”

“Very well, David, if you say so. But then tell me, if he is not a government officer, what is he?”

“Damned if I know. All I know is that ever since breakfast, he and a bunch more like him have been trying to kill me.”

Sandberg’s face wore a look of intense professional interest. It was the sort of expression that said, Yes, Mr. Elliot, and what did the space aliens do to you after abducting you to Planet X? It made Dave stutter. “Doc … Fred, don’t look at me like that. You’ve got to listen to my side of the story.”

“Of course, David. I’ll be pleased to. However, I am afraid that I can imagine the substance of your tale. Succinctly stated, your story is that nameless men from a faceless organization want to kill you for reasons which you cannot fathom. You’ve done nothing. You are an innocent and blameless man. But They — capital ‘T’ They — want you dead. Does that capture the essence of it, David? Is that the tale you wish to recount?”

Dave’s stomach sank. He rubbed his lips and looked at his shoes. Sandberg continued, “David, be so kind as to do me a favor. Think about the yarn you propose to tell me. Consider its credibility. Then tell me if you think that it is not suspect. Tell me that it is not … well … symptomatic of a certain mental malaise.”

Dave frowned, shaking his head. “It’s your turn to be so kind as to do me a favor. Think about my story. Think about what would happen if it was true. Think about the kind of lies they would tell if they wanted to persuade everybody that I had gone off my rocker.”

Sandberg spoke as if gently rebuking a recalcitrant child. “It is not a question of stories, David, it is a question of record. They have shown me the papers. All of the papers. As you know, I sit on the Boards of two defense contractors and I am privileged to hold a rather august security clearance. Consequently, the gentlemen who are seeking to … hmm … detain you, were rather easily persuaded to share their files with me. I must say, the portrait they paint is not a pretty picture. No blame falls to you, of course. You were merely an innocent victim. Quite horrifyingly innocent, it seems. I fear it was not our nation’s finest hour, and what they did to you — to you and your good comrades — goes quite beyond the pale.”

Dave spoke through his teeth. “They didn’t do anything to me. They didn’t do anything to us. Whatever any of us did, we did to ourselves. Look, Doc … Fred, the files they showed you are fake. It’s a lie, a swindle — perfect, rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal.”

“Still quoting Mark Twain, are we, David?”

“I wouldn’t do that if I was crazy.”

“You very well might. David, we have spoken of something relevant to your situation before. I remember your reaction to my concern, and for that reason I hesitate to bring the matter up.”

“What?” Dave bit the word off. “Go ahead, Doc. Lay it on me.”

“Are you still … pardon me, David, I truly dislike asking this … are you still hearing voices?”

“Aw cripes, Doc! That’s … that’s nothing. It’s just my way of … Just like I told you, it’s not really a voice, it’s just me sort of talking to myself.”

Sandberg repeated slowly. “Talking. To. Yourself.” He nodded. The nod said it all.

“Damnit, I …”

“You will remember when you first spoke to me of this — shall we say — idiosyncrasy, I suggested that it would not be a bad thing were you to see a colleague of mine, a specialist as it were.”

“Doc, I said it then and I’ll say it now: I don’t need to see a shrink. I am as sane as you are.”

Sandberg shook his head. “David, David, let me repeat, and it is critical that you understand this — no one claims you are insane. I assure you, you are not deranged, not in the usual sense. What has happened, and I have seen irrefutable evidence confirming it, is that you and many of the other men in your Army unit were fed an experimental psychotropic substance. Unforeseen complexities resulted. I am told your own commanding officer …”

Dave slammed his palm into the wall. “Oh Christ! Is that what they are saying? That everything that happened was because we all were on drugs? Jesus!”

“David, do be calm.” Sandberg reached into his waistcoat pocket again. Dave lifted his pistol. Sandberg withdrew a roll of breath mints. “Please, David, you need not point that thing at me.” He removed one from the pack, popped it into his mouth, and proffered the roll to Dave. Dave shook his head. The doctor continued, “David, I do not doubt that you believe that people are trying to kill you. However, you must realize that all the evidence …”

“What about this?” Dave brandished his pistol.

“They warned me about that. You wrested it away from a policeman.”

“Doc, this is not a policeman’s gun. Look at it. It’s …”

“I know nothing about firearms other than the fact that I despise them.”

Dave growled with frustration.

Sandberg lowered his voice, adopting a more intimate tone. “There’s another thing, David. Helen has called me.”

“Oh hell.”

“She is naturally concerned for you, concerned about the effects of such experimental drugs as you were given. And because she feels that for some time your marriage has not been …”

“Drop it, Doc. I might need to talk to a marriage counselor, but right now it’s not high on my priorities.”

“I might argue that a man whose feelings for his wife are not foremost in his mind is in need of more than mere marital counsel.” Sandberg slipped the roll of mints back into his pocket.

Dave blew out a long sigh. “Damnit, Doc, I …” His voice hardened as he saw what the doctor was up to. “Hand out of the vest pocket, Doc.”

“Waistcoat.”

“Right. What’s in there? What do you have in there other than a pack of Certs?”

Dr. Sandberg smiled sorrowfully. “A small spray dispenser of chemical Mace. They gave them to all of us. The idea, David, is simply to subdue you. I promise you that is all that is intended.”

“Doc, you and I — we are friends, aren’t we?”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“Good, because what I am about to do to you is in the spirit of friendship.”

Sandberg tried to step backward. He couldn’t. Without his noticing it, Dave had maneuvered him so that his back was against the wall.

4

The decor of a chief executive’s office often discloses more about a company than its annual report. For example, as every stock market analyst knows, it is wise to be wary of any enterprise whose president decorates his inner sanctum with models of jet aircraft — especially Gulf-streams, Learjets, and other high-priced private planes. The presence of such miniatures inevitably means that the corporation owns an awesomely expensive jet fleet, a luxury purchased at shareholder expense because the boss believes it beneath his imperial dignity to travel, like an ordinary commoner, via United, American, or Delta.

By the same token, experienced investors are justifiably suspicious of a corporate leader who subcontracts the decoration of his chambers to an “interior architect” managed by or employing his wife (the second one, the younger one, the blonde one). Usually the results involve opulently upholstered but geometrically odd furniture, ceramic bric-a-brac cast in primary colors by Mercedes-owning folk artists, and lithographs in the styles of Jim Dine, Frank Stella, Sean Scully, or Bruce Nauman, but costing rather more than the genuine works of those modern masters.

At the other end of the spectrum — found less often in New York City than in the high-tech environs of California’s Silicon Valley and Massachusetts’s Route 128—there are the chief executives whose offices are ostentatiously egalitarian: metal desks, vinyl-covered chairs, uncarpeted floors, nothing on the walls but an erasable whiteboard and, perhaps, a few wiring diagrams. Insiders know that it is wise to be watchful of these officers too. A corporate president is, by definition, the enterprise’s ultimate decision-making authority. However, some CEOs find such responsibility fearfully intimidating. To avoid it, they surround themselves with plebeian trappings, cowering behind a mask of democratic corporate governance. Frugal furnishings are the first and most visible sign of an executive who is too timid to make a decision.

Bernie Levy’s office bespoke none of these things. Like the man who occupied it, it was subdued and representative of traditional values. Only a little larger than the offices of Senterex’s other corporate executives, Bernie’s place of business occupied the northeast corner of the forty-fifth floor. Its windows opened on a panorama that included Central Park to the north (on rare clear days he could see far up the Hudson into Westchester County and beyond), and to the east the United Nations building, the East River, Queens, Long Island, and the sharp, slate gleam of the distant Atlantic. Bernie’s desk was dark mahogany lovingly carved in classic style; his high-backed leather chair had been purchased from the same craftsmen who provision the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States; his sofas came from the same source, and were plump and comfortable. Of knick-knacks, gimcracks, and souvenirs there were few: a set of Mont Blanc pens in an obsidian holder, an antique abacus given him by his partner in a Chinese joint venture, a single silver-framed photograph of his wife and children, an etched crystal hexahedron paperweight commemorating one of his many charitable efforts, and an enormous, ugly 14.5-millimeter round for a Soviet PTRD antitank gun. The bullet, seven inches long and one inch in diameter, was engraved with Bernie’s name and a message reading, “Company B, 3rd Battalion: Inchon to the Chosen Reservoir and back, 1950–1952. Semper Fidelis.”

For art Bernie had hung a handful of paintings created by the Wyeth family — N. C. through Andrew — and all paid for out of Bernie’s, rather than Senterex’s, pocket. Dave suspected that the artwork had as much to do with Bernie’s eclectic tastes as with the fact that one of Senterex’s Board members, Scott Thatcher, was an art collector of no small reputation and especially fond of the Brandywine school.

Bernie’s office decor exhibited only two eccentricities: his books and his coffee maker. The books were a decade and a half’s compilation of a genre that Dave thought of as “executive faith healing”—everything from In Search of Excellence to Reengineering the Corporation. Senterex’s chief executive could not resist a volume that promised to reveal heretofore unknown secrets of improving managerial effectiveness. He bought them all, read them all, believed them all — at least until a new one came along.

Dave ran his finger along their jackets and smiled at the memories they brought.

Then there was Bernie’s coffee maker. That too made Dave smile. Somewhere along the line, probably under the influence of one of his California-based motivational gurus, Bernie had decided that Senterex’s executive secretaries should not be required to perform coffee duties. No longer would visitors to the executive suite be politely met by a gracious secretary who offered them their choice of coffee, tea, or cocoa. Rather it would become the responsibility of each executive to have his or her own coffee maker, supply of tea bags, and cache of hot chocolate.

No one could fathom why Bernie thought it important that executives drawing six-figure salaries should waste their time fumbling with pots, filters, and grounds, but he was adamant about it. The forty-fifth floor kitchenette was converted to a photocopier room, and every executive office was issued a Toshiba coffee maker.

The results were a catastrophe: stained carpets, coffee grounds splattered on critical documents, expensive credenzas bereft of their glossy finishes — to say nothing of embarrassed visitors who, choking at the wretchedness of the stuff they were served, surreptitiously emptied their cups into potted plants.

After a month of mounting disaster, the secretarial staff rebelled. They started coming in early, sneaking into their bosses’ offices, and making the coffee themselves. Shortly peace was restored to the forty-fifth floor, and everyone, from Bernie downward, seemed to have gotten what they wanted.

Bernie, forgetful in such matters and more reliant on his secretary than he was willing to admit, seemed to have left his coffee machine on again. Dave flicked the off switch. “You’re welcome, Bernie,” he muttered.

The pot was half-full of Bernie’s personal blend, the envy of everyone on the floor. Dave poured himself a cup, sipped, and smiled. Bernie asserted that San Francisco was the only American city in which every business prides itself on offering guests a great-tasting brew. Consequently, he arranged for a special San Francisco blend — arabica, Kona, and something else — to be air-freighted to Senterex monthly. But he refused to disclose the name of the source from which he purchased it, or to make the beans available to any other Senterex executives. “I want,” Bernie smirked, “people should remember the best cup of coffee in New York came from Bernie Levy. That way, maybe they come back to have another cup and we do some business. If you want to do the same, you go find your own coffee.”

Bernie. He’s got an angle on everything. The last great deal maker.

Dave savored the coffee. It was so absolutely perfect. He wondered if he could find the name of the supplier somewhere in Bernie’s files.

Gotten your priorities wrong there, pal. If you’re going to check Bernie’s files, you should be looking for something else.

Dave placed the coffee cup down carefully on one of Bernie’s brass coasters. He spun the chair around so that he was facing Bernie’s credenza, and jimmied open its lock.

The top drawer contained the personal and the confidential files of Senterex’s chairman — a double row of olive drab Pendaflex Esselte file folders, each bearing a colored tab identifying its contents. Yellow tabs for Board meeting minutes. Green tabs marking the charities nearest to Bernie’s heart: Salvation Army, Children’s Hospital, United Jewish Appeal, Lighthouse for the Blind, ASPCA. Clear tabs on eight folders bearing the name of each Senterex operating division. One blue tab reading “Lockyear Laboratories.” Orange tabs for business projections and forecasts. Purple for the investment bankers’ analyses of potential acquisition targets. A dozen red-tabbed folders bearing the names of each of Senterex’s most senior executives.

Dave drew out the one with his name.

It was surprisingly thin. It began with, of all things, a photocopy of his original Senterex employment application. The photograph stapled to it showed an eager young man in a two-dollar haircut. The application was followed by a handful of memos to and from the Personnel Department back before its name had been changed to “Human Resources.” They dealt with promotions, pay raises, and changes in assignment. There were some insurance forms, an appraisal or two from people who had supervised him in his early days at Senterex, and copies of the various agreements and commitments he had signed as he moved up the corporate ladder. Toward the very end of the file he found some correspondence between Senterex’s chief counsel and the Securities and Exchange Commission. As soon as Dave had been made an officer of the company, any trades he might make in its stock became a subject of interest to that agency.

The last piece of paper in the folder was a letter on FBI stationery.

Dave’s stomach did a somersault.

“Dear Mr. Levy,” it read, “In reference Mr. David P. Elliot, an individual known to you and in your employ, this will apprise you that this office has been charged with conducting a background investigation of the aforenamed individual, with said investigation being deemed necessary and appropriate under the conditions provided for by the Defense Supplier and Contractor Act of 1953, as amended, and pertaining to the issuance of security clearances to executives and directors of corporations engaged in business operations involving classified, restricted, privileged and/or other secure affairs. The requester of said investigation has directed the undersigned to coordinate with you as relates to specifics to be discussed at your earliest convenience. Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.”

Uh-oh.

Defense Supplier and Contractor Act? But Senterex didn’t do any defense work. In fact, it didn’t do any government work at all.

Or does it?

Dave read the letter over twice. It really didn’t say much.

What about the date?

Three days ago. The letter was dated just three days ago. Now what the devil did that mean? And why—why, why, why—after all of these years was someone trying to renew security clearance that had been canceled the day he was discharged from the Army?

Worse yet …

Worse yet, unless the letter was a forgery, Dave was the subject of a federal investigation. And Ransome was telling everyone that he was a federal officer.

Suppose Doc Sandberg was right: Ransome really is a Fed!

That didn’t make sense. The government doesn’t put out contracts on innocent civilians. It doesn’t dispatch teams of hard case hitmen to assassinate forty-seven year old businessmen. That was movie stuff, pulp fiction, conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone, Geraldo Rivera, Rush Limbaugh.

There have been allegations — Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Bill Casey, Martha Mitchell …

Only the lunatic fringe made those kinds of claims. Besides, even if the conspiracy buffs were right, the people who had been assassinated were killed for a reason. They knew something. They were involved in something. They had secrets.

What have you seen, what have you heard, what do you know?

Nothing. Dave had no secrets — no state secrets. There wasn’t …

Those court-martials were secret. They sealed the records. They made you sign a promise never to disclose what happened.

No, no, no. That was too long ago. Besides, Dave wasn’t the only person who knew. There had been other witnesses. And everyone, everyone, who had been involved in the trials knew — board members, prosecutors, defenders, steno clerks. It was crazy even to think that …

Crazy.

He took one more look at the FBI letter. Was it real? Was it a forgery? Was there some way to find out why it had been sent?

He lifted Bernie’s telephone and tapped the number printed beneath the name of the man who had signed the thing. The phone was answered on the first ring. “You have reached the Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York City. Our office hours are 8:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. If you know the extension of the person you are trying to reach, please enter it now. If you do not, please touch the star key now.”

Dave hated these damned robotized telephone systems. He punched the star key. “If you wish to leave a message for the switchboard attendant, please touch the pound key now. If you wish to access the voice mail system, please touch the ‘0’ key now.”

He hit “0.”

“Please enter the last name of the individual whose voice mailbox you wish to reach, using the keypad on your telephone. For the letter ‘Q,’ please substitute ‘0.’ ”

Dave looked at the signature on the letter. He pecked in the name.

“No one with the name you have entered is accessible through this voice mail system. If you have mis-entered the name or wish to try again, please touch the star key now.”

He hung up.

Maybe the man who sent the letter wasn’t with the FBI. Maybe he was, but his name hadn’t been entered in the goddamned telephone system’s database. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Dave didn’t know. He had no answers. There were no answers anywhere.

Or were there?

He needed to think. There was something that he had forgotten or put out of his mind. It was the key to what was going on. But first …

He studied the files in Bernie’s credenza. Personnel, Charities, Forecasts, Board Meetings, Acquisition Candidates, Division Operations. One of them might hold a clue. He reached for the first in the drawer. As he did, Bernie backed into the room.

Bernie entered not from his secretary’s foyer, but rather from a door to the west. It connected his office with the Senterex corporate boardroom. As he walked backward, he spoke to somebody who was still in the boardroom. “… Don’t you know it?”

Dave jumped, gasped, was certain that his heart had stopped.

Bernie continued, “Wait a minute. That’s yours, isn’t it, the portfolio back there?” He stepped back into the boardroom.

Dave hurled himself out of Bernie’s chair, scrambling for the closet. It was, like the closet in his own office, a spacious walk-in. Bernie used it to store a miscellany of meeting supplies — oversized easel pads, marking pens, tape, and a half dozen tripod-mounted easel stands. Senterex’s chairman was incapable of holding a business meeting without writing something on an easel.

Dave flattened himself against the far wall, pulling the door almost but not quite closed.

Bernie came back into the office. “… like a knife to my heart, that’s what it is.”

Another voice answered, “You’re not alone. Olivia and I are quite fond of David.”

Dave knew the voice. Its distinctive New England twang belonged to Scott C. Thatcher, a member of Senterex’s Board of Directors, chief executive of his own company, and one of Dave’s few intimate friends.

“So maybe it will all work out in the end,” Bernie said. “This Ransome, he’s no schmuck.”

“Emmm.” Dave could picture Thatcher. He’d be stroking his bushy, Mark Twain moustache or running his fingers through his unruly, long white hair. “Bernard, on the subject of your Mr. Ransome, I wonder if you have been a little less than forthcoming.”

Go out. Go out there right now. Thatcher will believe you. He’s the only person in the world who will.

“Me? What do you mean?”

“Today is not the first time I have encountered the man. I do not forget faces. I have seen him before, and I have seen him in this building.”

Now. Do it now. Thatcher will be on your side.

“Uh …”

“In the reception room some four or five weeks ago, I should say. He was leaving as I was entering. Indeed, I distinctly remember asking you about him.”

Just walk out of the closet, pal. “Hi, Scotty! Boy, am I glad to see you!”

He couldn’t. It would draw Thatcher into the thing. It would put Thatcher’s life in as much jeopardy as his own.

Idiot! Thatcher is the CEO of the second largest computer company in the world. They put his picture on the cover of Forbes, Fortune, Business Week. No one is going to mess with him.

“Nonsense. Mishegaas.”

“Not at all. He gave me an uncommonly arrogant look. I remarked upon it to you. You replied that he was an executive of a company you planned to acquire. Given the man’s demeanor, I thought your answer improbable.”

Dave put his hand on the closet’s doorknob.

Do it! Do it!

“Not me. It’s something with somebody else, you’re remembering.”

“Bernard, though aged and feeble and far beyond the springtime of my buoyant youth, I am not yet senile. That man was here, and you were his host.”

Dave turned the knob slowly, gently pushing at the door.

“Bernie Levy does not lie.”

“A misstatement. Better put, one would say, ‘Bernard Levy rarely lies because he knows himself to be frightfully inept at it.’ ”

“Scotty, my friend …”

Through the widening crack Dave saw Bernie spread his hands in a false gesture of openness.

“We are friends, Bernard, and have been for forty years and more. I am a member of your Board, and you a member of mine. There is a trust between us. If it happens that there is more to this problem with David than you are willing to disclose, then I must respect that — as I must assume that your reasons are good.”

It’s now or never, pal.

Dave pressed his palm against the door. The radio in his pocket hissed awake. Thatcher said, “If you need a hand, you can call me at any time.” Dave pushed. Bernie said, “It’s tougher than you know.” Ransome’s voice came over the radio, calling, “Mr. Elliott? Do you copy?” Thatcher said, “Just bear in mind that David is as much my friend as you are.” Ransome said, “I have authority to offer you a mutually acceptable compromise solution, Mr. Elliot.” Dave took his hand from the door. Bernie said, “He’s like a son to me.” Thatcher replied, “I’ll say good night, then. Olivia’s expecting me home.” Ransome said, “Mr. Elliot, I truly would appreciate your answering me.” Bernie said, “Good night.” Dave’s voice said, “Forget it, turkey. By now you’ve got your tracers and your triangulation equipment set up all over the building, right, Ransome? So tell them to take a fix on me. Tell them to find what floor I’m on. Guess what, buddy, I’m not on any floor. I’m outside, and I’m not coming back. Hey, Ransome, you can run and run as fast as you can, but you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!” Ransome’s voice was flat as ice, and as cold. “Mr. Elliot, this is unacceptably immature behavior.” Bernie spoke from near the door, “You’ll be at the audit committee meeting next week?” A second voice, Partridge’s voice, came over the radio. “He’s telling the truth. He’s somewhere on the Upper West Side.” Thatcher, now outside Bernie’s office, answered, “Sorry. I’ve got to be in Singapore. An issue with our largest supplier.”

Somewhere in Manhattan, Marge Cohen switched off a tape recorder.

Partridge whispered, “He’s gone. We’re all dead men.”

Dave stood motionless, turning that last remark over in his mind.

5

He stepped out of the closet, his pistol held lightly at waist level. “If you move, Bernie, I’ll shoot you.” He tried to sound like he meant it.

Bernie was sitting at his desk, shuffling through papers. He looked up with an expression of desolate weariness on his face. “Hello, Davy. It’s good to see you.” He sounded like a man who was a million years old.

“Bernie, I want you to keep your hands on the desk. I don’t want you pulling another gun …”

“No more guns.” Bernie gave him the ghost of a smile.

“… or a can of Mace.”

Bernie nodded. “You know about that?”

“I know.” Dave walked closer. “I know some other things too. But I want to know more.”

Bernie’s face was a model of sadness. He turned his hands palms-down on the desk. When he spoke, Dave sensed that his words were meant more for himself than for anyone else. “Yeah. So go figure. You spend all of your life trying to be a mensch, you know, a real mensch. Work hard, play fair, tell the truth, do the right thing, be a patriot. When it’s all over, you know what? I’ll tell you what. To them you’re still nothing but a lousy little Jew. Here, Jew, do this. Here, Jew, do that. Thanks, you’re a good American. For a Jew, that is.”

He shook his head slowly, sadly, all the weight of the world on his shoulders. “They gave me the Silver Star. Me. Bernie Levy. Did you know that, Davy?”

Dave replied with such gentleness as he could muster, “No, Bernie, I didn’t.”

“Scotty, he got one. Me, I got one too. Damnedest thing you ever saw. Two crazy soldiers, completely fartootst, Lieutenant Thatcher and Corporal Levy. Charged a North Korean tank, is what we did. Him with a .45 and a hand grenade, me with an M-1 rifle. Totally insane, I’m telling you. Dead is what we should have been. Instead we both get the Silver Star. MacArthur, he’s the one who pinned them on. Oh, but you should have seen it, Davy, you should have seen it. Scotty is lying in bed with a shot-up leg. Bernie Levy is standing next to him. The old man comes in. There’s a photographer from Life magazine taking pictures. I tell you, it was some moment, Davy, maybe the best I ever had. And so MacArthur starts to pin on the medal, and you know what? Scotty, he’s nothing but a lowly lieutenant, Scotty starts chewing out the general. The general! Can you believe? It was wonderful. It was a miracle. No one has ever seen anything like it. I was — I was in awe. Did he ever tell you about that, Scotty, I mean?”

Dave shook his head.

“Amazed. Bernie Levy was amazed. You see, Scotty’s father, he was this doctor on MacArthur’s staff. In Japan, I mean, just after the war. He and this Russian and this OSS guy are investigating the war crimes. So they find out something and they bring it to the general and the general says hush it up. But they say no way and so the general fires everyone home and gets himself a new doctor. So — you gotta picture this — so five or six years later, there is this nothing lieutenant lying in his bed with the most important general in the world — in the world! — pinning the Silver Star on his pajamas, and the photographer is taking pictures, and all of a sudden the lieutenant is telling off the general for firing his father. Oh, Davy, you should have seen it. Such chutzpah! Bernie Levy has never seen its like!”

Dave grinned. “That’s a pretty good story, Bernie.”

A small smile flitted across Bernie’s lips. “I know,” he said, looking Dave in the eye and nodding. Suddenly the smile disappeared. Bernie looked weary again. “Okay, okay. So you want to talk, Davy, we talk. Maybe I tell you something, maybe I don’t. A man’s still got his honor, you know. That, they cannot take away from me. So sit down, make yourself comfortable.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Sit, stand, what’s the difference?” Bernie wrapped a pudgy hand around a coffee cup, lifted it to his lips, and took a sip. “You want I should pour you a nice cup of coffee, Davy?”

“That’s my coffee you’re drinking, Bernie.”

Bernie’s face changed. “Your coffee?”

“Yeah. I poured it while I was looking through your files.”

“You’ve been drinking my coffee?” Bernie suddenly leaned back in his chair. The worn expression on his face was replaced by an ironic smile. The smile widened. Bernie laughed. “How wonderful. You drink my coffee. Now, I’m drinking your coffee. Isn’t that wonderful? Davy, it is so wonderful, you don’t know.”

He laughed harder, the guffaws growing into whoops.

Dave frowned. “I don’t get the joke.”

“The joke? It’s a wonderful joke, Davy! Wonderful! And best of all, the joke’s on Bernie Levy!” Shaking with laughter, Bernie rose and, coffee cup in hand, walked across the office. A circular worktable and four straight-backed chairs sat by the northern window. Bernie put a pudgy hand down on the back of one of the chairs, gripped it tightly, and turned to Dave. “It’s the most wonderful joke in the world!”

Suddenly, with surprising strength, Bernie lifted the chair and hurled it through the window. Glass exploded outward, spinning in the night, wind-whipped and looking for a moment like a jeweled storm, an ice blizzard, white light reflected and refracted and sparkling among diamond shards. A gust spun glass needles back into the office. One splinter opened a surgically straight line of red on Bernie’s left cheek. Dave took a halting step forward. Bernie held up his palm, as if to tell him to come no closer. All the sadness in his face had disappeared, and he seemed as happy as a child. “Bernie Levy has only Bernie Levy to blame. Turnabout is fair play. That’s some fine joke, Davy, that’s the best joke of all. Let me tell you, only God Himself could come up with a joke like that.”

Bernie took one last sip of coffee, and, still clutching his cup, stepped into space.

6

It takes an object six seconds to fall a thousand feet. Dave reached the window in plenty of time to see Bernie die. In Vietnam he had, of course, observed enough wet death. It had taken him more time than most to become hardened to it, but hardened he became, and hardened he remained. Nonetheless, the sight of Bernie’s end, even from a height, was bad. Very bad.

Poor pudgy Bernie exploded.

Orphaned limbs, pink strings of flesh, slick grey organs burst onto the street. Blood, quite black under the harsh glare of streetlights, splashed streamers. A car speeding east on Fiftieth Street veered up on the sidewalk, laid a trail of sparks as it careened along a building, and rolled steaming on its side. A woman washed in gore collapsed. Her male companion knelt retching where she lay. People farther away screamed. A lump of Bernie Levy the size of a soccer ball tumbled out into the Park Avenue intersection, there to cause brakes to shriek and fenders to crumple. A dog pulled free of its master’s slackly held leash and trotted eagerly toward the entrancing odor of fresh offal.

Forty-five stories aboveground, David Elliot leaned out a broken window, looked away, felt the wind cold and brisk, and was thankful that the air was so fresh. Speaking to the sky rather than the street, he whispered, “Aw Jesus, Bernie, why the hell did you do that? Christ, it can’t have been that bad. Whatever it was, I would have forgiven you. We could have worked it out, Bernie. You didn’t have to …”

Noises.

Not only in the street below, but also in the halls outside Bernie’s office. Feet running on carpet. The chunky metal sound of pump shotgun chambering a shell. A cool voice, an Appalachian voice: “Careful up there.”

Christ almighty! He’s been on this floor the whole time!

Dave wheeled away from the window, raced across the office, flung himself into the closet, cowered in the dark. The door to Bernie’s office flew open. Dave heard a thump and a shuffle. His mind’s eye formed a picture of the scene — standard assault tactics: one man prone in the doorway, his trigger finger tense; another kneeling, drawing a wide arc with a shotgun or automatic rifle as he searched out targets; a third man crouched behind and above, doing the same.

“Clear?” Ransome speaking from outside the office.

“Clear. But we got a problem.”

“What?”

“The Yid’s scragged himself. Done the dive.”

A burst of sirens from the street muffled the first half of Ransome’s answer. All Dave could hear was, “… should have known he couldn’t take the heat.”

“We’ve got minutes before the local law arrives.” Ransome was in the office now, in control, issuing orders with a soft, cool drawl. “Wren, take three men and move our gear down to base. Use the stairs.”

Base? Have they set up a base of operations on another floor?

“Bluejay, get on the horn — use a scrambler — tell pathology I want the subject’s blood sample ASAP. Tell them to put it in an ambulance and siren it up here double time.”

Blood sample? Where the hell did they get a blood sample? You haven’t had a blood sample taken in months, not since Doc Sandberg … uh-oh. Oh yes you have …

“Sir?”

“DNA fingerprinting, Bluejay. I intend to sprinkle a little of the subject’s blood on that broken glass.”

“I read you, sir. Nice going.”

“Move it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Another voice, duller, older. “I don’t get it, chief.”

“Bluejay and I will arrive a few minutes after the law. It will be suggested that this was not a simple suicide. Who the prime suspect is will also be suggested. Forensics will find two blood types at the scene of the crime. Bingo, it’s murder. And when they autopsy the subject, it will be bingo again.”

Autopsy? Now we know the kind of deal he wanted to offer you.

Ransome continued, “Greylag, I want you to open the spigot with the media. Maximum exposure. Radio, television, the papers. Lunatic throws boss out window. Maniac murderer on the loose. Mad dog. Shoot to kill. By 8:30 we’ll have every law enforcement officer in New York looking for him.”

“What if he decides to leave the city?”

“Contra-psychological. He’s one of us. He won’t cut and run.”

“Still …”

“Point taken. We’ve got coverage of everybody he knows or might try to contact, correct?”

“Yes, sir. Double teams.”

Jesus! How many regiments does this guy command?

“Okay. How many ways are there off this island?”

Greylag paused to think: “Four auto tunnels. Sixteen or seventeen bridges, I guess. Three heliports. Four or five subway routes, maybe more. The Ferry. Four airports counting Newark and Westchester. Three train lines. Oh yeah, he could take the cable car to Roosevelt Island and then …”

“Too much. We don’t have the resources to cover it all.”

“I could call Washington.”

Washington? Oh God, are these bastards from the government after all?

“At the moment, that is not a desirable option.” There was a new note in Ransome’s voice — slightly querulous, slightly uneasy. “Not desirable at all. Just put some men on the major arteries and at the airports. That’s the best we can do. The rest of you men, pass the word — if anyone bumps into the local law, keep it cool. These are New York cops, not the kind of Speedy Gonzales greasers you’re used to dealing with. They don’t bribe cheap. Keep your lips zipped and avoid confrontation. Okay, let’s move out.”

“Radio, sir. Incoming message for you. Urgent.”

“Give … Robin here … He what? … Beautiful, just beautiful.… Acknowledged. Robin out. Okay, you men, listen up. Wren is down on the seventeenth floor with a punji stake through his carotid.” His voice was as emotionless as a robot’s.

Dave, crouching in the closet, gnawed his lip. Thought those letter openers weren’t lethal, did you, pal?

Ransome’s frosty monotone continued, “Gentlemen, this is slovenly. I asked for a full sweep of those stairwells after this afternoon’s incompetent attempt to lure the subject into a firefight. I am disappointed in the results. Let us try to behave a bit more professionally from now on. Given our subject’s uncooperative attitude, caution is called for.”

“Sir, are we going to get him?”

“Affirmative, Greylag. If we don’t get him on the streets, we’ll get him when he comes back here. He will come back, you know.”

Like hell!

“Good. I’d like a little private time with Mr. Elliot.”

“Negative. I’m first on the chow line. There won’t be any leftovers.”