Zero Hour

SIX

From the New York Post Online Edition:

Noriko Cousins was already having a supremely bad day, the kind she knew had to be governed by some Bitch Goddess of the Pit who would dispense illimitable random miseries to inhabitants of the world above, tacking on one after another until you wanted to mark the date box on the calendar with a big black X and then blow your vocal cords to shreds screaming for tomorrow to hurry up and come around.

A wretched day already, no question. A day Noriko was convinced would not pass into the next before taking a fairsized piece out of her, chewing it to a pulp, and spitting it into a particularly foul-smelling sewer… which was especially discouraging when she considered that it was only a few minutes past nine o’clock in the morning, and she had barely been at the office long enough to warm the seat behind her desk.

Now she slapped a hand down on her computer mouse and attacked its left button with a finger to close her Internet browser, resentfully casting the front page of The Post Online into cyberspacial exile. The Sullivan thing making tabloid headlines, a joint press conference in the offing from not one but two police departments… she needed this about as much as an epidemic of purple leprosy, which itself barely ranked lower on her wish list than the scheduled arrival later that afternoon of her supposed “help” from San Jose. One of Megan Breen’s designated hitters being the notorious Tom Ricci, who wasn’t quite a contagious leper, but did carry the rap of being an undesirable from sea to shining sea.

Noriko took a few moments to settle down and think. Maybe there was an upside here, something to console her. The news about Sullivan’s girlfriend and the towaway Jaguar had come as a double-barreled revelation — and while she would rather have learned of those disclosures before they got out to the general public, they did open new lines of independent investigation for Sword. In that respect, she had to grudgingly concede things might just work out. The same probably wouldn’t hold true for Camp SanJo’s decrees and impositions… but what she needed to get into her head was the inevitability of having to accept the variables she couldn’t control, and turn those she could to her benefit.

Noriko sat back, crossed her arms. Okay, she admitted, the situation could have been shaping up much worse. That still didn’t mean she had to like it, or that she didn’t feel it had the potential to turn into a total circus, with her having to don a polka-dotted jumpsuit and flop shoes, climb into a miniature railroad train with the rest of the performing clowns, and tumble humiliatingly out into the ring as it gathered steam. And when she thought about the guy who’d done the most to put her in that position, arriving last week to mention Sullivan’s name in her office for the first time, it grew hard to resist the urge to spread some unhappiness of her own in his direction.

He’d asked a favor from her, refused to take “no” for an answer, and then made sure he got his way regardless.

Time to see how he would appreciate a little tit for tat.

Noriko looked up his number in her company directory, reached for the phone, and started to punch in his area code — which had to be dialed despite being the same area code as hers, thanks to some regulatory stroke of genius by the FCC a couple of years back mandating the 1-plus-tendigits policy for local calls, as though New Yorkers didn’t have to contend with enough hassles besides having to reprogram the autodial features of every computer, fax machine, and telephone in the city.

Right around digit number eight, Noriko reconsidered her original idea, stopped pushing buttons, and instead got up to fetch her coat from the closet. Why let the phone company and government regulators kill her fun?

Lenny Reisenberg, who had showed up as an emissary of the Bitch Goddess, was about half an hour from finding out there was more than one to fear in the universe.

It would be a pure and distinct pleasure for Noriko to see the look on his face when he did.

“You know my problem with asking favors of people?” Brian Duncan said.

“Honestly,” Malisse said, “I cannot imagine.”

Duncan looked at him across their table in the glassenclosed public plaza outside an office tower entrance on Park Avenue and 55th Street.

“My problem with asking favors of people,” he said, “is that you always wind up having to return them sooner or later.”

Malisse selected a chocolate biscotti from an assortment box he’d bought at his hotel’s gift shop, dipped it into the coffee he’d picked up at an amenities stand across the plaza, and ate it with a little murmur of gratification. This was, he thought, a pleasant enough space. Warm, open, clean, planted with ficus trees and giant philodendron that stood lush and green in mid-January, even while the flower beds on the traffic islands outside were dead and smothered in sooty ice. Across the tiled floor from him a fountain gurgled softly into its shallow pool, reflecting the weak winter sun and low, strung-out clouds above.

His eyes momentarily drifted to a nearby table at which a pair of chess players sat amid a scrum of observers, all white-haired senior males, casually but neatly dressed. Members of a retirement club, perhaps.

Unable to imagine the idleness of life without work, Malisse shrank from the thought that some of them might not be too much older than himself.

He returned his eyes to Duncan — but Time, stripped naked for him like an unlovely exhibitionist, continued to distract. When Malisse had first crossed paths with the FBI surveillance expert — before calling on him yesterday, that was — his hair had been thick and brown as a mink’s. It had since thinned appreciably and faded to the color of rustspeckled tin… yet only three or four years had passed between their meetings. At fifty-three, Malisse could not help but wonder if he showed comparable signs of aging, or if his wise departure from the Sûreté had slowed down his own physical subtractions.

But right now there were other subjects to occupy his thoughts. What had been Duncan’s last comment? Ah, yes.

“To me, favors are the pollen of generosity, allowing sweet fruits to spring forth from friendship’s fertile soil,” Malisse replied belatedly. He drank some of his coffee, then lowered his voice to avoid being overheard by passersby. “Have I told you, for instance, what I take as my greatest and richest reward from the case we worked together?”

“You don’t have to go through this again, Delano—”

“My greatest, richest, most heartfelt reward has been the knowledge that furnishing you with the names of those sellers of blood diamonds from Sierra Leone — and a list of complicit money launderers in Europe and the States — has aided your efforts to dismantle their network…”

“Delano—”

“… taken tens of millions of dollars from the hands of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah murderers who would have used them to purchase guns, explosives, possibly even weapons of mass destruction…”

“Delano, enough—”

“… weapons that could have caused incalculable suffering to American, British, and Israeli civilians—”

“Delano, I promised I’d help you, so cut the shit before I change my mind.” Duncan paused. “You brought what I need?”

Malisse nodded, dabbed his chocolate-smudged fingertips clean on a napkin, and reached into his open overcoat for the memory stick he’d popped from his digital camera. He gave the stick to Duncan and then started on a macadamia biscotti, his eyes wandering back to the chessmen.

Their board was still crowded, the match in its preliminary stages. No doubt they were skillful to a high degree… how to otherwise explain the rapt interest of their watchers?

For his part, Malisse was ignorant of the game beyond the basic movement of its pieces, and had never desired to learn its rules and strategies. It took enough sweat to plot his moves through the twists and turns of reality’s difficult corridors, trying to keep a step or two ahead of the ignoble creatures he meant to bag, laying snares for them along the way.

“Delano, I give you credit.” Duncan had snapped the memory stick into a compact aluminum-clad case and pocketed it. “You’ve got balls.”

“For taking the photos?”

“In the schul at the DDC,” Duncan said in hushed voice. He shook his head with appreciation. “Monster fucking balls.”

Malisse absorbed the praise with what he hoped was a semblance of grace, if not humility.

“I did what you asked,” he said. “There are shots of the briefcase. The hat. And many of the coat. Its lining, seams, designer and dry cleaner’s tags. Closeups of every pull or flaw I noticed in its fabric. Even the lint on its sleeves.”

“Buttons?”

“Front, pocket, cuff. Inside and out,” Malisse said. “You stressed that would be important, did you not?”

Duncan nodded in the affirmative

“We have to decide where to put multiple power sources and signal boosters. Get some lithium microbatteries in the buttons. I figure it might be a solution to the first hurdle.”

“And the second?”

“I want to try out some ideas,” Duncan said. “Whether they can be practically applied depends on what the pictures show.”

Malisse looked at him.

“I can’t settle for trying,” he said. “I need success.”

Duncan sat a moment, then leaned forward on his elbows. “Exactly how much do you know about GPS systems?”

“They use satellites,” Malisse said. His face was blank. “And signals from space, no?”

Duncan studied him as if trying to decide whether or not he was joking.

“Okay, pay attention,” he said. “Bottom-of-the-line units lock on to three sats and provide a two-dimensional fix on position — latitude and longitude. The coordinates are arrived at by simple triangulation… the travel time of the satellite signals beamed to the receiver times the speed of light. If we mount a GPS tracker underneath a vehicle, that would be all we’d need to follow it from place to place in a surveillance.” He paused, dropped his voice another notch. “If you want to trace a person with a GPS device, it’s different. Especially in a city. Two-D doesn’t calculate up and down. And New Yorkers live and work in multistory buildings, not straw huts. The second your man starts climbing a flight of stairs or steps into the elevator of a seventy-floor high-rise, you’re going to lose him.”

Malisse nodded.

“Thank you for the technical instruction,” he said. “I might now await the ‘unless,’ were it not for the great lengths to which I was put photographing my man’s coat. Or did I somehow mistake your reasons for wanting that done?”

Duncan gave him another look.

“Pinpoint homing calls for a three-dimensional GPS receiver that acquires a fourth satellite to add altitude to the calculation,” he said. “And that’s at minimum. The more extra channels your unit picks up, the more data from other satellites it can use to refine the accuracy of its positional fix, or back up any or all of the four primary sats if communications get interrupted.” He shrugged. “This isn’t spy science. Anybody can buy ninety-five-percent-accurate three-D street-point navigators for a few hundred bucks. They weigh a pound, maybe a pound and a half, and are about the size of cordless phones… compact, but too large and heavy to fit in Max Smart’s heel.”

Malisse was puzzled. “Whose?”

“Never mind,” Duncan said. He leaned closer to him. “Here’s your unless, Delano. Once more, so I know you understand. The only way I see putting a hidden three-D GPS monitor on somebody with available tech is to integrate its hardware into his clothes, turn his whole dress ensemble into a receiver. It’s the same concept as smart suits, e-wear, whatever the term du jour might be.”

Malisse felt a coil of impatience in his belly. Or were his ulcers simply aggravated? He crunched into another biscotti, hopeful its honeyed coating would act as a balm in either case.

“This you indeed told me yesterday… to my thorough comprehension,” he said, swallowing. “Now tell me how fast you can do the job.”

Duncan looked at him, but didn’t answer at once.

Malisse waited. His stomach remained troublesome in spite of his attempted remedy, but nothing more could be done to settle it without a cigarette — and that was denied him. The smoke police could be anywhere about, waiting to pounce at the snap of the lighter’s lid, the flick of a spark off its flint. While Malisse might have fantasized about letting himself be nabbed just so he could fire up in a jail cell — a warm, indoor place, after all — Jeffreys had informed him the citywide ban extended even to penal institutions, public workplaces that they were. Woe to the convicted felon who dared a puff of tobacco!

He looked across the table, turning his thoughts back to business. Duncan had stalled him long enough.

“The job,” he repeated. “How fast?”

Duncan sighed. “Banking on the premise that it works, I’d estimate—”

Malisse shook his head.

“As I often told my pupils, we mustn’t skewer ourselves on the redundant,” he said, his tone short. “I ask you to reach deep into your black bag and make it work.”

Duncan released another breath.

“Give me a week,” he said.

Malisse shook his head.

“No good,” he said. “It has to be sooner.”

“How much sooner are you talking?”

“Tomorrow.”

Duncan blinked.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “I’ll push for, say, four, five days—”

“I can wait two.”

“Three.”

“Two,” Malisse insisted. “Two at the very most.”

Duncan continued to look unbelieving. “You’re sure you don’t want to check the phone book for a while-you-wait snoop shop?”

Malisse snapped him a glance.

“Do not scoff at me, Brian,” he said. “My man has been very active.”

“Still—”

“There is an old children’s tale,” Malisse said. “A brother and sister enter a deep, dark forest. The boy leaves a trail of bright pebbles to mark their way home. But when they next set out, the boy forgets the stones and instead drops only breadcrumbs from his knapsack. These are eaten by hungry birds, and the trail is lost to those who might follow in search. As are the children, who, as it happens, have stumbled upon a witch’s hoard, but are nowhere to be found with the jewels.”

Duncan looked at him.

“You think you’re onto something big,” he said.

Malisse shrugged over his box of treats.

“Once, African diamonds led us to terrorists and gun runners,” he said. “We must always remember a trail of shining stones can lead anywhere, and bear in mind how quickly it may turn to crumbs that are snatched away by whatever is in the air.”

“You want me to do what?” Lenny Reisenberg said from where he sat behind his desk.

“Assist in my investigation of Kiran,” Noriko Cousins said from where she stood in front of him.

He looked at her, groping for a response, his mouth a speechless O of surprise.

She looked back at him, waiting. Dressed in a black skirt, tights, boots. Black leather GI dress gloves stuffed halfway into a side pocket of her zippered black biker jacket. A leopard Carnaby hat tucked down over her straight, dark hair adding some Swinging Sixties flash to the ensemble.

It was a scant two minutes after she’d come barging into Lenny’s office.

“I’m a shipping officer,” he said at last, “not an investigator.”

“And I’m a corporate security agent, not a volunteer for the National Missing Persons Helpline,” Noriko replied. “Which, sad to say, didn’t give me the choice to stay out of something I didn’t want any part of.”

Lenny felt heat rush into his cheeks, thinking he could have kicked himself. That was one great answer he’d given her there. Some mighty original words popping out of his mouth. Or was his memory playing tricks by reminding him they were the very same words he’d used when Mary Sullivan had showed up to drop her little burden on his lap only a week, ten days ago? And how effective had they been for him then?

He realized his mouth was hanging open and shut it. His fate might be inevitably sealed, but he could still hold on to a little dignity.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me how I’m supposed to help.”

“You can start by tracing every one of Kiran’s export shipments from point of origin to final destination,” Noriko said. “Look at cargo manifests, modes of transport, travel routes, receiving terminals… pull together every available detail and give them a comprehensive evaluation. Any time-charters or tramp vessels should be red-flagged. The same goes for transshippers here or abroad, outfits you remotely suspect may be cutouts. If something smells fishy, I want to know before anyone else — meaning the police.”

There was a pause of several seconds.

“I’d need access to confidential filings to get anywhere,” Lenny said, then. “Nobody’s going to just hand them to me—”

Noriko stopped him with a slicing motion of her hand.

“That’s bullshit,” she said. “I was working the case when those lunatics blew up a piece of our city. You’ve got sources. Friends in the Customs office. I know you reached out to them for information.”

Lenny was shaking his head.

“Different circumstances,” he said. “You make it sound like it was easy—”

“Wrong,” Noriko said, interrupting him again. “What you hear is me sounding like I know what has to be done. How is up to you. Easy, hard, somewhere between, I don’t care. As long as it’s right away.”

More silence. Lenny exhaled. He was thinking that the next time he was mulling an important decision, he might have to stay away from kosher delicatessens. He was also thinking that the next time Noriko Cousins showed up at his office without notice, he’d be sure to instruct his admin to tell her he was out sick… which suddenly led him to wonder why she hadn’t lowered the boom over the phone.

“Kneeesh, kneeesh, ought to go back to school,” he muttered to himself. “Damn right.”

“What?” Noriko said.

“Never mind.” Lenny produced a defeated sigh. “I’ve got one question you could maybe answer. A condition of surrender.”

She nodded.

“Did you walk all the way here just to watch me squirm?”

Noriko pinned him with a look, cut a little smile.

“Of course not, Lenny,” she said. “I took a cab.”

His husky six-foot-four, hundred-ninety-five-pound frame outstretched in the passenger cabin of a custom Learjet 45, Derek Glenn was studying the menu on his lap, nursing his third Dewar’s Special Reserve on the rocks, and musing that there were certain rare and satisfying instances when the high concentration of melanin in his skin bequeathed by his African ancestors gave him a distinct social advantage over white men, one such being that it was tough to get pinned as red-in-the-face drunk when your face just so happened to be darker than chestnuts roasted on an open fire.

This fringe benefit of Glenn’s blackness was by no means the only enjoyable part of his flight from Santa Clara to New York. In fact, Glenn had been too busy marveling at the preposterous abundance of luxuries aboard the UpLink bizjet to even think about it until a few minutes ago. Get a little sample of its plump leather seats and expansive leg room, not to mention the fully stocked and flowing wet bar, the catered lunch of marinated chicken and greens, the hors d’oeuvre platters of fresh seafood, overstuffed finger sandwiches, imported cheese, and sliced fruit, and now the lavish dinner menu he’d just been handed with its main-course offerings of fettuccini Alfredo, rib-eye steak, veal in wine sauce, beef stroganoff, or blackened swordfish… get yourself a taste of these high-flying extravagances, and the next time some flight attendant on a commercial airliner offered you a rubbery cold-cut sandwich and pretzel nuggets from his or her food cart, you might be pushed into talking serious smack to the poor dupe.

Undecided between the veal and pasta dishes, Glenn glanced over his shoulder at Ricci, who had been sitting alone toward the rear of the cabin since takeoff, staring out his window into the blue. If there had been a single damper on the trip thus far, it was his complete and utter inapproachability. But Glenn was not so stupid that he didn’t realize Ricci’s worrisome state of mind was the reason he’d been pulled from his San Diego security detail for their current assignment, regardless of the spiel Pete Nimec had given about the two of them making a crackerjack team. For that matter, Glenn’s entire reason for having flown from his hometown roost without too much complaint was an awareness that Ricci had been in a slide since Big Sur, maybe even longer, and that he’d once been the closest thing on earth the guy had to a friend.

Glenn sighed. He had to admit helping Ricci did fit his pattern, this goddamned masochistic compulsion to take desperate causes upon himself. Born and raised in San Diego’s east side, Glenn had returned there after a decade of service with Delta’s Joint SpecOps unit and been doing the community activist bit whenever he had any time to spare, working to rescue his neighborhood from the termite gangbangers and wrecking-ball public developers who’d been moving in on its solid citizens from both ends. He didn’t want or need Ricci as an additional reclamation project, and yet had done nothing to stop the deal from being laid on him.

Glenn kept looking contemplatively toward the back of the plane. After coming up against a wall trying to talk to Ricci earlier, he’d figured it might be best to let him be. However, it seemed to him that now was one of those times when he ought to make another attempt at reestablishing communication. There was a lot about Ricci that he found hard to understand. A lot about him that was even harder to like. But Glenn thought he maybe understood and liked him more than it was convenient, or even healthy, to admit. Thought Ricci, for all the hardness that came along with him, might be the most stand-up human being he’d met in his entire life.

He expelled another breath, rose from his chair, started to take his whiskey with him, and then abruptly decided against it. The handful of times they’d hung out together at Nate’s Bar in San Diego, Ricci had ordered nothing stronger than a Coke. And though it hadn’t been brought up in so many words, Glenn had always figured he’d been keeping some kind of problem with the bottle in check. He didn’t seem to have too much trouble with it, not then, but it wasn’t the same when a man was slipping down a mineshaft, looking for anything that might slow his fall to the bottom.

Glenn knocked off the rest of his drink with one deep swallow, put his glass onto the lowered tray in front of him, slid into the aisle with the menu, and went on back past a group of four company officers, divisional COOs and CIOs who were sharing the flight east on their way to some sort of telecom industry conference. Gathered around their laptops at a circular table, they didn’t seem to notice him at all.

Neither did Ricci. He was turned toward the window as Glenn approached, still gazing into the layer of turquoise sky through which they were streaking above a thin, vaporous floor of cirrus clouds.

“Got a great menu,” Glenn said, and flapped it once to get his attention. “Want to come on up and order dinner?”

Ricci slowly shifted his attention from the window.

“No, thanks,” he said. “There are some things I want to think about.”

Glenn stood watching Ricci’s impassive face from the aisle.

“You don’t need to make this worse than it is,” he said. “Worse than it has to be between us, anyway.”

“Sure,” Ricci said. “It’s just a big adjustment for me, flying with a babysitter.”

Glenn hesitated a moment.

“Suit yourself, man,” he said. “But I didn’t put you in this predicament. Didn’t ask for this job. We’re on it together—”

“Like it or not?” Ricci said, and looked at him.

Glenn shrugged. The plane’s turbines droned smoothly on around the low conversational voices of the executives behind him.

“My only point’s that talking to each other wouldn’t hurt,” he said.

Another moment passed. Ricci kept looking at him, his eyes as pale and blue as the untouchable sky outside.

“Something needs to be shared,” he said, “we’ll talk.”

Glenn considered how to answer, didn’t take long to conclude there was really nothing more to say. Ricci’s quiet, relentless antagonism could wear you down fast.

He squared his shoulders into another shrug, but Ricci didn’t see it. His eyes had instead gone again to the window and whatever separate space might have drawn their attention.

“Enjoy the view,” Glenn said, his level tone betraying only a fraction of his discouragement as he turned and carried his menu back to his seat.

The sun was at its midday zenith in a cold, sickly gray sky as Hasul Benazir strode from the Kiran building’s front entrance, crossing its paved and landscaped grounds on his way toward the mountain woods. He was covered in full UV gear, wearing a shielded headpiece instead of the sunglasses, hood, and draping face guard he had used on the dusk of his self-exposure. Based on the design of a motocross helmet, the headpiece with its Velcro collar ring and dark pull-down visor sealed him in more completely to provide a superior level of protection.

Hasul would not have dared remove it for a moment this time. Even the bled-out light of a winter’s noon would ravage him, setting cancerous fire to his genes.

Zaheer walked with him, his face clinched with unhappiness over what he perceived as an abrupt change in their plans. Hasul understood his reaction and would not fault him for it — why else had he kept the entire truth from him, but for having anticipated his discontent?

Now they entered the forest growth, took a long slow natural path under the trees and down the slope, and after a time stepped out into a small, frost-browned knoll.

John Earl stood at the far side of the clearing in his black leather coat, a watchcap pulled down over his head, a muffler around his neck. As they appeared he reached into a pocket for a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, slid its filter between his lips, held a disposable lighter to its tip, and smoked, looking straight across the open space between them.

Zaheer turned toward Hasul as they stopped outside the treeline.

“This one, he is dangerous,” he said, and tilted his head in Earl’s direction.

Hasul nodded.

“What we do is dangerous, and it can only increase the likelihood of success to use him,” he said. “Your contribution will not be outshone, rest assured.”

Zaheer looked at him in tentative silence.

“It is not for myself that I ask you to reconsider,” he said.

Hasul reached out and placed a gloved hand on his shoulder. In a ventilator compartment at the back of his helmet, a small battery-powered airflow fan whirred softly to prevent his breath from fogging its visor.

“Trust me and wait,” he said. “I will only be a short while.”

His face dour, Zaheer did not answer.

At that, Hasul lowered his hand, then turned and went over to Earl, the bare winter earth of the field hard and ungiving under the ridged rubber soles of his boots.

“You found your way here without trouble, it seems,” he said, halting in front of him.

Earl slid his cigarette between his lips, absently holding the lighter, rotating it in his hand.

“Just an old country boy in the woods,” he said. “Long as I trust my feet, they’ll bring me to the right place by-and-by.”

Hasul was silent, his attentive expression partially obscured by the UV helmet’s tinted visor.

“Your vehicle,” he said. “You left it without being observed?”

“At a gas-and-food stop about a mile down the mountain and east of here.” Cigarette smoke laced from Earl’s thin smile. “Thank goodness for McDonald’s, don’t know what anybody the wide world ’round would do without them.”

Hasul looked at him. A gust of wind flapped the ultraviolet blocking fabric of his external garments. Overhead, the sun showed through a gap in the fast-moving clouds to send glancing rays off his visor.

“I have more work for you,” he said.

Earl shrugged, took a deep inhale off his cigarette, held his breath a moment.

“I don’t ever like to say no a job,” he said, blowing smoke. “But I’m not half finished with the last thing. The little woman, you know she couldn’t give me what I needed. Didn’t have it in her head.”

Hasul nodded.

“That is why it is crucial to move forward with added urgency,” he said. “The situation is not what I thought it to be. Whether he is dead or alive, Patrick Sullivan meant to betray me the night of his disappearance.”

“You’re sure of it.”

“Certain,” Hasul said. “He had something of mine in his possession when he went to meet his contact. Items I did not suspect he knew existed.”

“How’d he get hold of them?”

“They were stolen,” Hasul said. “I have yet to learn how.”

Earl looked at his helmeted face. A small mist of breath formed inside the UV shield and was almost immediately dried up by its airflow fan.

“Can we talk free and open?” he said.

Hasul nodded again.

“It is the reason I chose to meet out here rather than at my office,” he said.

Earl stood there smoking. The field around him dimmed and brightened under the patchwork shadows of the windherded clouds.

“My guess is your other missing items aren’t more of those sapphires,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me what they are?”

“It will be necessary if you agree to the mission.”

Earl looked at him, smoking. He seemed to just then realize he was still holding the Bic and dropped it into his coat pocket.

“Mission,” he repeated. “I thought we were talking job.”

“The word was of your choice, not mine,” Hasul said, meeting his gaze from behind the darkly tinted face shield. “In comparison, the whole of what you’ve done for me before amounts to a string of minor errands.”

Earl grunted. “What kind of risk are you talking?”

“High.”

“And the money?”

“Commensurate,” Hasul said. “A hundred thousand dollars, half on acceptance, the remainder upon completion. Payment in full would not be contingent upon a guaranteed outcome, but only the successful execution of your given role.”

Earl looked at him. “My role.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s got the other?”

“You will be assisted by Zaheer.”

A few seconds fell away. Quiet, Earl remembered something Hasul had told him at the conclusion of their last appointment.

“Later’s come up faster than expected,” he said. “But maybe your clock does it different from mine.”

Hasul had continued to regard him through the dark glass panel.

“I am the clock whose hand marks the hour,” he said. “And by my hand it comes as it is meant to.”

Earl was silent, smoking, his eyes ranging out to Hasul’s sideman back over near the trees. These were some crazy people. So crazy part of him wanted to get out of whatever Hasul was talking about before he even got in. But the money… the money was key. With enough of it a man would be able to open any door, get in and out of anything.

Earl stood there another moment as cloud shadows fled beneath the sun. Then he finally snapped away the remnant of his cigarette and gave Hasul a nod.

“Okay,” he said. “Talk to me.”

It was about half past noon and Avram Hoffman was at the Club, finished with Katari and going over the rest of the day’s appointments in his Palm computer’s date book. Farther down the long cafeteria table where he sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows, three men were bargaining over a parcel of mediocre diamonds — the Nadel brothers, who’d recently closed their retail business and moved into Internet jewelry sales, and an aging Hasidic broker named Taubman who’d come to show them his goods.

Avram could hear their obligatory back-and-forth. One of the brothers, Yussel, complaining about Taubman’s asking price while pointing out deliberately concealed flaws he insisted had become visible under his loupe. Taubman insisting there were no such flaws. Nadel’s exaggerated umbrage at the denial. “This is fracture filled, you should take a look here in the sun.” “Maybe you should look at the lab reports.” “I don’t need to look at the lab reports.” “How can you say I’m supposed to look at my own diamond, if you don’t think you need to look at the reports?” “You want to hear what I say?” “If you’re going be more reasonable than your brother.” “I say my tuchis makes better reports every morning than that Thai grader you use—”

Avram tuned them out with a surpassing disgust that bordered on contempt. The old broker’s reports, whatever artificial processing Yussel Taubman had or hadn’t seen in the dull light of an overcast January day… it all seemed recycled and trifling to him. He was moving up and on, and had heard enough of that sort of thing to last a lifetime.

Avram took his cellular from his pocket. Besides wearing on his tolerance, the negotiations he’d overheard had reminded him of his intention to call the GIA lab and nudge things along there.

The phone rang three times in his ear before Craig Brenner, the gemologist, picked up at the other end.

“Avram,” he said, “I can’t talk right now.”

“Was it clairvoyance or caller ID that told you it would be me?”

“You decide,” Brenner said. “Look, really, I am too backed up to talk.”

“This will only take a moment,” Avram said. “The sapphires…”

“I promised I’d look at them right away, and that’s what I’m doing,” Brenner said. “Pushed you ahead of twenty other clients who are wondering if I’ve looked at their stones, and that’s including Tiffany’s—”

“It was my brother-in-law’s company, not the Tiffany family, who gave your son his sponsorship at Brown University.”

A pause, a sigh.

“The golden rod again,” Brenner said. “You going to hold it over my head forever?”

“Forever and beyond,” Avram said. “I’m in a great hurry.”

“You’re in a hurry, I’m in a hurry, everybody’s in a hurry,” Brenner said. “Listen, Av. Turnaround for an analysis is usually a two-week minimum, and I’ve got an expert doing a Secondary Ion Mass Spec for you in two hours. That’s a quarter-million dollar unit I’ve tied up, plus his time, which isn’t cheap—”

“You’ve already examined the sapphire yourself?”

“I have, yes.”

“And your findings?”

“Obviously inconclusive,” Brenner said. “I’ve tested for specific gravity, run color filter and immersion tests, looked at them under a stereo microscope… the same kind of things you probably did at home. There’s no sign of heat or chemical color enhancement, and the crystallization patterns look natural, but it’s possible a specialized laboratory could make fools of us. Until the SIMS provides meaningful information on trace-element concentrations, we can’t be close to definitive. And even then, Avram, this isn’t an exact science. This tech’s so new, and the stone so rare, there just isn’t the kind of comprehensive database that allows for a hundred percent accurate comparison check.”

“I can settle for something less than a complete grading for now,” Avram said. “Every journey begins with a small step.”

“And the race is not to the swift.”

Avram smiled wanly at that. “Craig… what do your eyes and experience tell you?”

Brenner sighed again.

“Early opinion,” he said. “I mean very early, got it?”

“Yes.”

“This stone looks like a moneymaker to me,” Brenner said. “I don’t know how you managed to raid the Maharajah’s tomb, but it’s either an authentic Kashmir, or the most magnificent fake ever produced.”

Avram fell silent, his heart knocking in his chest, his hand suddenly moist with sweat around the cell phone.

“Now that I’ve lit up your existence,” Brenner said, “is it okay if I get back to my mundane one?”

Avram still didn’t say anything. A moment before he had glanced over at the Nadels, who were still quibbling with old Taubman’s prices. Now, suddenly, they seemed to vanish before him. Instead, he could see the talented guitarist from the subway the day before.

Soon, Avram, thought, he would be free. As free, in his own way, as that young man had been.

“Thank you, Craig,” he said at last. “I really do appreciate your help.”

Then he ended the call to make another on the spot, thinking it would be none too premature of him to contact the Russian.

Leaving the shelter of the hut with its central fire pit, Yousaf accompanied the others a short distance through bitter wind and cold toward a mud-brick stable.

He entered behind them and stood watching as the pack mules were saddled, harnessed, and loaded by their handlers, four hired Bakarwal nomads who would guide him out on his final passage from his homeland… one that had begun long days ago with the truck convoy out of Islamabad, and was soon to lead him across the northernmost strand of the Line of Command over high mountain trails negotiable only by foot and hoof.

With Yousaf were a half dozen of the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba fedayeen he had met near Halmat at the outskirts of the sixteen-kilometer-wide military buffer zone between Pakistan and Indian-administered Kashmir. All but their leader, Farris Ahmad, would be climbing the steep valley slopes with him tonight.

Yousaf leaned back against the wall of the stable, thinking. On his arrival at the fedayeen encampment — was it only yesterday? — he’d found a mixed group of political and tribal confederates, their practical alliance formed under the banner cause of Kashmiri independence. There were Sunni Dogras and Gujjars. Pashtuns from the vast Northwest frontier province. A considerable number were intelligence agents who had broken with the nation’s present government-by-coup and were Yousaf’s principal links to the fedayeen. He’d known some well enough to have called them by their first names; others were of familiar face. But life in the rough hills had so transformed them, it had been a struggle of sorts to recognize even those with whom he’d worked closely at the Directorate’s Karachi bureau.

Yousaf had been particularly struck by how much Ahmad — once his immediate superior, now a chief among outlaws — had changed in the year since his sudden desertion from the ISID. The holder of an exemplary record, he had been a robust, dashing man with a small, neatly trimmed mustache; a perfect model of distinction in his starched, pressed uniform and spit-polished shoes. But the officer Yousaf remembered was a distant cry from the hardened guerilla who had welcomed him back at the Halmat camp, and led him here to the Bakarwal enclave. Like the fedayeen under his command, Ahmad was gaunt and leathery, his lips cracked from undernourishment, his wild, shaggy growth of beard bushing down from his cheeks to his chest. Also like the other fighters, he had on threadbare combat fatigues that showed signs of frequent and hasty mending, and scuffed, worn-at-the-heel boots. And again, as did the rest, Ahmad carried a large backpack, multiple duffels, and a shoulder-slung Kalashnikov assault rifle. Distrustful of the profiteering nomads, some of his rebels had brought additional small and man-portable arms with them tonight, including RPG-7 launcher tubes.

Yousaf continued to observe the activity around the mules from his spot by the stable wall. Betrayal, he mused, could come from many unexpected directions.

This thought was still very much in his mind as Ahmad turned from the hurried preparations of the guides and approached him over the straw-covered floor.

“I expect you’ll be on your way in the shorter part of an hour,” Ahmad said. He angled his head back toward two of the stalls. “The laser components are transported on different mules from your provisions, you see?”

Yousaf nodded, looking past him at the splendid, barrel-chested animals. The Bakarwal had lashed wooden loading boards onto either side of their large-girthed saddles and were roping the precious cargo that would complete the Dragonfly cannon — boxed and bundled in canvas sacking — to the boards.

“Travel over the mountains is never easy, especially in winter, but night can be your best friend,” Ahmad said. “The guides know the terrain walking blindfolded, and you have been favored by a three-quarter moon and starlight.” He regarded Yousaf. “There is also a surplus of food should it be needed — we’d expected you to arrive with at least one other man.”

“And I would have, if the rangers outside Chikar had not forced me to set out alone and in haste.” Yousaf looked him in the face as he spoke his lie. “What are the chances of encountering more troops?”

Ahmad continued to appraise Yousaf, seemingly lost in a moment’s thought. “An outside possibility always exists,” he said. “Of late my scouts have seen no signs of either the president’s forces or Indian security, however.”

“And should that change?”

“They will keep their eyes open and be in immediate radio contact with you,” Ahmad said. “If all goes well, you will be across the LoC and make your rendezvous with half the morning to spare. Should you be forced to leave the pass on either side, the mules have sufficient food, water, and ammunition on them to last many days. And we have amply stocked caves along the way you can quarter in for many more if the situation were to demand it.”

Yousaf was silent. The president’s forces, he thought. How aptly put. It was only their potential deployments that were of concern to him. For if all did indeed go as he’d planned, there would be no need to cram into some deep stone cranny and hide away like a scurrying rat. Not once his column reached the border, at any rate.

Ahmad tapped him on the shoulder now and nodded back in the direction of the hut they had left moments earlier.

“Our Bakarwal hosts have prepared some jerked lamb for us, and put fresh, spiced coffee up to brew over their flame,” he said. “Given the immoderate cost of their hospitality, you might wish to join me in partaking of it in the time that remains before you leave.”

Yousaf looked at him, smiled, and nodded.

“Yes, Ahmad,” he said, as they started toward the barn’s door of bound saplings. “That is truly something I would enjoy.”

“If you’re moving from a one-bedroom apartment, I usually recommend either the ten-foot truck or that cargo van over where your friend’s waiting in his car,” said the man at the U-Haul reservation counter. He nodded toward the wide office window behind Earl to indicate the rental vehicles out in his lot. “Which one’s best depends on your needs.”

Earl stood looking at him across the counter. “How’s that?”

“Basic rate’s the same for both — twenty bucks a day, seventy free miles, though added mileage is a few cents higher with the truck,” said the U-Haul rep. “If you’ve got large pieces of furniture, it gives you a little more space. Van’s new, comfortable, handles nice and smooth. But company policy’s that it’s only available for local moves — that’s defined as the tristate area, and no out-of-town dropoffs. You’d have to return it to me at this center within forty-eight hours.”

Earl glanced over his shoulder at the van parked near Zaheer’s Mercury. Then he turned back to the U-Haul rep, took his cigarettes from his coat pocket, and flashed them above the counter.

“Okay with you that I smoke while I give it some mind?” he said.

The rep shrugged, a stubble-cheeked, potbellied man in his fifties wearing a green-and-black buffalo-plaid hunting shirt and oversized work dungarees.

“Doesn’t bother me, and only brings out the summons books across the Hudson,” he said, his hand appearing from under the counter with an ashtray.

Earl tapped a cigarette from the pack, lit it with his Bic, and took a drag.

“That van ought to be fine,” he said. “Got enough room, and I don’t expect to be running up too many of those plusmiles before I’m back to you.”

The U-Haul man eyed him a minute, scratched his unshaven chin.

“Maine,” he said. “Bet anything it’s what I hear.”

Earl plucked the cigarette from his mouth, held it between his thumb and forefingers.

“Ayuh,” he said. A smile traced his lips. “Must be the accent, hey?”

The rep nodded.

“My sister’s lived there since she got married — husband’s ex-navy, used to be stationed at that base in Brunswick, bought a home and farm-equipment business a ways inland when he got out of the service,” he said. “Whereabouts in the state you from?”

Earl pondered that, smoking. Whereabouts? It was a question easier asked than answered. There had been Aroostook, so near the Canadian border the geese flying by overhead would cuss you out in French when you shot at them, and then get the Royal Mounties on your ass for doing it without a license. There had been the bunch of years he’d worked at that poultry-processing plant in Belfast, renting a dump of an apartment on Union Street down the hill near the harbor, where the white trash tenants upstairs would pool their food stamps every Friday to pick up a few six-packs of cheap beer at the grocer’s, start drinking after supper so they’d be bombed out of their skulls by midnight, good and lubed for the fistfights you could always expect to break out between them, and that would often as not spill out onto the road — especially on those hot summer nights when they’d get irritable, peel off their shirts, and wail on each other so hard he could hear the sound of flesh being pounded like raw slabs of beef through his open window. Brother on brother, father on son, husbands on their cheating women’s boyfriends, they’d have all kinds of drunken grudge matches going on till the local cops came to dampen the entertainment.

Earl looked at the U-Haul man in silence, squinting through the cigarette smoke streaming from his nose and mouth. Where did he consider himself from? Aroostook with its cranberry bogs and dead things? Belfast with its bloody chicken guts, and feathers blowing in the streets? Or Thomaston state penitentiary, maybe twenty, thirty miles farther south? A dark and comfortless abode of guilt and wretchedness, that was what the lawmakers who’d ordered it built in the 1820s had wanted for its inmates on the charter they drew up, and they’d absolutely gotten their wish. Three-foot-thick granite walls, nine-by-four max security cells with layers of stone covering them top and bottom, the yard a deep limestone pit quarried out by prison laborers. All that rock, its weight could grind the soul out of a man in no time, and Earl guessed he’d have hung himself long before his dime-and-a-half stretch there was done if not for having kept busy with his wall art. He also guessed it had gone more toward making him what he was than anything or anywhere else he could think about.

The state pen, see ya when I see ya—ayuh, ayuh.

“Come from a spot on the coast called Thomaston,” he said now. “Quiet. Big white Yankee houses, churches, trees, and the quarry on old Limestone Hill. A town where you’d think time was standing still if it wasn’t for the change of seasons.”

The U-Haul man scratched his stubble again.

“Sounds like the kind of place somebody would have a hard time leaving… but then my brother-in-law tells me it’s tough earning a decent wage up there.” He slid a clipboard with an attached pen in front of Earl. “Anyway, here’s the rental application. You want to show me a charge card and your driver’s license while you’re making it out, I can go right ahead and give you the keys to the van.”

Earl took his wallet out of an inner coat pocket, removed the two pieces of ID he’d obtained from Hasul, and passed them over the counter. He didn’t know or care whether Hasul and his people had stolen someone else’s identity, replacing the original photo on the driver’s license with his own, or if they’d somehow had a forgery made to order. The important thing was that the license number and Visa account for a strawman who happened to look exactly like him were both valid, and that the credit line on the plastic was around twenty thou.

Earl was filling out the requested information — his newly acquired name of Gerald Donovan, his bogus address and phone number, this and that — when it occurred to him there might be a thing or two Hasul hadn’t provided that he could pick out of the U-Haul man’s brain.

“Me ’n my friend had to circle around a bit trying to find your lot, noticed all those chemical tanks behind the plant across the intersection,” he said in an offhandedly conversational tone. “You know which factory I mean?”

The U-Haul rep nodded.

“That’d be Raja.”

“Hmm?”

“Raja Petrochemicals,” the rep said. “It’s a fuel refinery… Indian outfit, you’re wondering about its funny handle.”

“Indian like Sioux and Apache?”

“Indian like an order of tandoori chicken and curried rice to go.” The U-Haul man’s whiskered face hung a frown. “What they’ve got in the tanks isn’t anything you’d want on a takeout menu, I can tell you that.”

Earl glanced up from the application form.

“You don’t seem any too thrilled about having them for neighbors.”

“Won’t argue it, Mr. Donovan,” the rep said, reading the name on the driver’s license he’d been handed. “Not with a few hundred thousand pressure pounds of HF stored out there in those tanks you saw driving past the plant.”

Earl put on a mildly inquisitive look.

“HF?” he said. “What’s that?”

“Hydrofluoric acid,” said the U-Haul man. His frown had deepened. “If you were from right around here, or read the same newspaper story I did a while ago, I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

Earl waited for more.

“Stuff’s what they use to make high-octane gasoline, and it’s toxic as hell,” the U-Haul rep said. “Stays a gas when it’s sealed in those tanks, but they ever get ruptured, let it out into the air, it would condense into clouds, even rain, that can eat through glass and concrete. And if you don’t think that sounds bad enough, there’s something about HF that makes human skin absorb it real easy. Soaks right up through the pores into the bone, eats away everything in between. Say it gets inside your eyes, nose, mouth… or you breathe it… I don’t want to be gross, but it’d turn a person’s insides to slush.”

Earl’s writing hand had dawdled over the rental application. “I can see how you wouldn’t forget that article,” he said.

The rep nodded.

“And I haven’t told you the half of it,” he said. “According to what I read, a couple, three years back, dozens of families had to be evacuated from some town in Texas because of a refinery fire that let HF out into the air. Also right around then, Russia had to resettle a few thousand people because it’d been leaking from a government factory… and add those situations together, the amount of HF I’m talking about doesn’t come to a fraction of what’s in Raja’s tanks.”

Lifting his cigarette from its ashtray rest, Earl sucked in a chestful of smoke.

“I expect there’d be some serious precautions against anything happening to the tanks,” he said on his exhale.

“Should be, but aren’t,” the U-Haul man said. “After those psycho terrorists drew a bull’s eye around New York, Homeland Security pushed through a bunch of laws that said chemical companies had to beef up their safeguards. But it hardly bothers to enforce them — you know how it goes. Time passes. Everybody bitches about costs. The cops and feds get busy with other things. Elections come and politicians move on to talking about ‘the children’ and teachers and classroom sizes, like they really give a damn about anybody’s brats but their own. Meanwhile the chemical outfits hire shysters to find all kinds of loopholes and get their lobbyists in Washington to make sure they can relax and sit pretty. Couldn’t be gladder that nobody’s paying attention to them, since improvements cost money, and they’d rather gamble with people’s lives… and I mean millions in Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York just worrying about Raja Petro alone… than spend a nickel.”

Earl was shaking his head in feigned disbelief.

“Sounds damned unbelievable,” he said.

“It does, I know,” said the U-Haul man. “But how the newspaper reporter figured it, the amount of HF gas in Raja’s tanks is enough to kill off not one, two, or three, but four million people, depending on which direction the wind blows.”

Earl had continued to shake his head as he went on writing up his paperwork. He was thinking about what Hasul had said to him earlier on that day: I am the clock whose hand marks the hour. He was wondering, besides, whether that made him the finger that would push the button.

He pulled the ashtray closer, crushed out his cigarette, and returned the clipboard to the man behind the counter.

“Done, I guess,” he said. “Hope my questions didn’t spin your wheels overmuch.”

The U-Haul rep shrugged, scanning the application.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said enduringly. “I’m still alive and kicking, so why complain?”

Earl smiled.

“That’s the attitude,” he said. “All you can do’s control what you can, and let the rest work itself out.”

The U-Haul man nodded, glanced up from the completed rental form, and smiled back at him.

“Everything looks good, buddy,” he said. “Give me a minute to process this, and I’ll bring you the keys to the van.”

“I don’t think we should try to do too much,” Noriko Cousins said. “The simpler we keep things, the better they’re going to work out for us.”

She looked across her desk at Tom Ricci and Derek Glenn, thinking Ricci certainly did not look like he had the slightest intention of making things complicated. If his silence was to be taken as evidence, he’d shown little or no interest in a single word she’d uttered about the Case of the Vanishing Husband — which, practically speaking, had now expanded to include hubby’s vanished playmate, both for Sword and the New York and Nassau County police departments, since it seemed reasonable to assume that finding out what happened to her would be a big step toward solving the mystery of his status, be it fair or foul.

Noriko had been hoping that she was on the money about Ricci’s apparent indifference, which might, just might, translate into a sign that he’d stay well out of her way, and possibly be westward bound before too long, adios, hombre. The read she’d gotten on Glenn, by comparison, hadn’t left her as encouraged that he’d be easy to shake off. There had been too many probing questions and attentive comments from him during this afternoon’s let’s-get-introduced-andup-to-snuff session. Also way too much direct eye contact, though Noriko had been around the block often enough to tell some of that was because he happened to find her attractive, and had maybe picked up on a mutuality — using a term she’d recently found in her New York Times crossword puzzle dictionary — that she had been struggling to nip in the bud. In both principle and practice, Noriko was opposed to mixing business with pleasure. Very often.

Now Glenn looked at her from where he stood leaning against a file cabinet, his broad arms folded over his chest, wearing a gray wool sportcoat, light blue turtleneck, and gray pleated trousers.

“When you say ‘simple,’ I’m guessing you really mean separate,” he said. “Or am I wrong about that?”

Noriko looked at him a moment and flashed a smile that he returned at once and in full, beaming it across her office, the nice, even whiteness of his teeth an appealing contrast to the equally nice and even brownness of his skin.

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, and wondered what the hell kind of bud-nipping she meant to accomplish by swapping smiley faces with Glenn. “Whatever attention I’ve been paying to Armbright Industries, and the Kiran Group in particular, is fairly routine corporate intel. Sullivan is a woman asking for help, and the boss wanting to give it as a personal favor. I see no reason to wrap them together.”

“Except when you consider he’s a top salesman for a division that’s maybe exporting restricted technology to foreign countries, something that would involve the kind of shady people who can do worlds of bad.”

Noriko shrugged her shoulders.

“You won’t get an argument from me,” she said. “All I want is to make sure we don’t get our paths twisted when they really should be kept clean and distinct from each other. Separate. Minus conjecture, that’s how they are so far. And that’s how we should work them unless they naturally connect.”

Glenn stood with a thoughtful expression on his face. In a chair he’d pulled up into the opposite corner of the office, Ricci maintained the virtually unbroken silence he’d brought on arrival, his hands meshed on his lap, his left foot balanced over his right knee.

“You talk to any of the cops that are looking for Sullivan yet?” Glenn said after a minute.

Noriko shook her head.

“The detective in charge is named Ruiz,” she said. “I don’t know him, but I have an open line to Bill Harrison, which means I can be put on to him easily enough.”

Glenn raised his eyebrows.

“The Bill Harrison?” he said. “As in the ex — police commissioner?”

“Right.”

“Impressive,” Glenn said. “I read that bio he wrote after the terrorist hit. Lost his wife when it went down, almost his daughter, too, and still managed to carry this town on his shoulders while the Washington politicos were hiding out in silos somewhere under the Great North American Prairie.”

Noriko nodded.

“Bill’s a good guy and a friend,” she said.

“What white people call a positive role model for us black people,” he said.

Noriko looked at Glenn, catching his droll tone, noticing the smile that had reappeared on his face.

“A friend,” she repeated with a shrug.

His smile grew larger and brighter.

Noriko willed herself to look away from it and cleared her throat.

“So,” Glenn said. “I figure we should start by spending some time with Ruiz.”

“That’s what I had in mind.”

“We play straight with him far as Sullivan’s concerned, tell him how the whole thing came to our attention, see if he wants to share and share alike.”

“Right,” Noriko said. “My guess is he’ll be more than helpful.”

“After Harrison gives him a ring.”

“Right,” Noriko said again. “I just want to make sure that any inklings we have about Kiran are kept out of the conversation.”

“Separate and distinct.”

Noriko nodded.

“It’s almost five o’clock, a little late in the day to start making arrangements,” she said. “I’ll get on the phone first thing in the morning. Shoot for a meeting with Ruiz as soon as possible.”

At the opposite corner of the room, Ricci leaned forward in his chair and planted both feet on the floor.

“Your crew been keeping up an onsite surveillance of Kiran?” he said, lensing her with his pale blue eyes. “I mean, at its main headquarters in the Catskill mountains.”

Noriko looked at him, her lips pressed together. The sudden end to his silence had surprised her, as had the change of subject that came with it.

“There was an intelligence summary in the files I e-mailed to SanJo,” she said. “We do what’s legal. And viable.”

“And I’m asking if that includes staking a continuous post there at night,” Ricci said.

Noriko sat without breaking eye contact with him.

“My practice has been to use frequent spotters,” she said, then.

“But nothing steady.”

“No,” Noriko said. And paused. “Look, you’re curious about the unusual amount of activity at Kiran after regular business hours. We’ve been, too. And not just since yesterday, or last week. But the fact that the company’s president and head of research suffers from XP, a condition that makes him critically allergic to sunlight, might be all there is to it.”

“Might,” Ricci said. “Or might not.”

There was another silence. Noriko shifted behind her desk.

“What happened to our staying focused on Sullivan?” she said “To not letting ourselves get sidetracked? Or weren’t we as clear about that as I thought?”

Ricci shrugged.

“I just asked some questions,” he said. “Didn’t tell you to push anybody or anything to the side.”

Glenn looked over at him from against the file cabinet, cleared his throat.

“Maybe we’ve talked enough for now,” he said. “I figure you and me could use a chance to settle into our hotel rooms, rest up for tomorrow.”

Ricci sat there for a moment, his gaze moving from Glenn to Noriko and back to Glenn.

“I’d rather walk around a while first,” he said, shrugging again. “Catch you later.”

And then he stood up, turned toward the door, and went out.

Noriko watched the door shut behind him, turned to Glenn.

“He always like this?” she said.

“Mostly, yeah,” Glenn said. “Except when he’s worse.”

She pursed her lips and exhaled with a low whistling sound.

“It must’ve been a long, long flight for you.”

Glenn looked at her.

“The food was super-duper,” he said. “Drinks, too.”

Noriko studied him quietly, tipped her head toward the coatrack, and pushed her chair back from behind her desk.

“You feel up to another round or two?” she said.

Glenn grinned, winked at her.

“I can only promise to try my best,” he said.

Yousaf stood out behind the Bakarwal hut in the tarpaulin-covered ditch that passed for a latrine here, thinking the cold was so intense his prick was liable to freeze and break off in his hand before he finished his piss. But the need to relieve himself was only one of the reasons he’d excused himself from Ahmad. There had been a notion of sending out a radio call to those who awaited him on the mule trail, both to warn them about Ahmad’s advance scouts and signal his departure from the nomadic camp… an idea over which Yousaf was grateful his good sense had prevailed. Though he had deceived Khalid and the rest of his men about a great many things as they’d rolled toward the Chikar roadblock, the concerns he’d expressed about intercepts had been truthful — and they had not yet left his mind. Not at all, in fact. Even in these remote regions, it was best to be on guard against eavesdroppers.

Zipping his trousers now, Yousaf started back toward the hut and his soon-to-be guides over the mountains. He had come too far now to let fear exert any pull over his decisions. Dragonfly would soon make him a wealthy man, and that prospect alone ought to steer him away from a recurrence of foolish impulses.

His customers knew the dangers of this highland frontier better than he and would not need any warning to be on the alert.

Tom Ricci peered through the viewfinder of his digital camera, crouching amid the pines and leafless oaks of a forested ridge above the Kiran Group’s company grounds. The req slip Grand Prix GTX he’d pulled out of Sword-Manhattan’s downtown garage had been left some thirty or forty yards behind him in the night, at the side of an unmarked country road that ran parallel to the western edge of the grounds for several hundred yards before turning north toward an eventual dead end. Designated Rainer Lane on his map, its dark, wooded sameness was interrupted only by a long-forsaken drive climbing steeply uphill from the road’s right shoulder.

Ricci had thought it an opportune spot to leave the car. The isolated drive would be easy to find when he returned, and the two separate passes he’d already made around Kiran suggested there would be a good overlook directly across the lane through the trees.

As he’d eased to a halt off the road, Ricci had noticed that a ten- to fifteen-foot-high barrier of fencing and razor coil had been erected at the foot of the drive. His headlights offered glimpses of chewed, rotted out blacktop where its sheeting of snow and ice gapped open, revealing a reflective no-admittance sign on the gate. And just beyond it, another, much older, sign. A large, weathered wooden rectangle on sagging double posts, its hand-painted lettering was chipped, peeled, and faded — but still legible. The top line said: HOTEL IMPERIAL, A FUTURISTIC RESORT. Beneath it in smaller characters were the words: DAY CARE, FILTERED POOL, AIR-CONDITIONED ROOMS, CELEBRITY NIGHTCLUB. Hanging separately from its bottom on a pair of rusted eyehole hooks, a much more slender wood banner announced: BUDDY GROOM, MASTER OF CEREMONIES, BACK AGAIN FOR THE 1969 VACATION SEASON!

Ricci had stared at the sign and wondered. Nineteen sixty-nine, Summer of Love. If that had been Hotel Imperial’s last hurrah, maybe one factor in its demise had been Buddy Groom and his Celebrity Nightclub acts getting the show stolen out from under them by the Woodstock festival a handful of miles away.

Cutting the ignition, Ricci reached over to the passenger seat for the gear bag containing his flashlight, camera, and binoculars, got out, and crossed the road. He’d gone less than twenty yards into the trees before finding an advantageous hump of mountainside from which to look down on the Kiran Group’s corporate development.

That was a little over an hour ago.

He had been on the look ever since.

It was now a quarter past eleven according to the virtual dial on his WristLink wearable. Everything cold, quiet, and pitch black around him under the barren treetops. Considerably brighter below him, where Kiran’s groomed and level grounds were circled by high-output stadium lights on steel frame towers that dispersed an almost glareless white radiance over the entire site.

Ricci kept his eye to the camera, a fourth-generation night-vision with microelectromechanical sensors that brought its intensifier tube and ocular lens into rapid focus wherever he pointed and zoomed. He’d prepared to be out a while, dressing in a black leather cruiser jacket, thermal fabric vest, and full-finger shooter’s gloves, pulling a night camo heat-exchanger balaclava over his head as he left the car. Its mouth port would help retain the heat and vapor normally lost through his exhalations, recycling them into the frigid air he breathed in to keep his internal body temperature raised.

He clicked the shutter-release button, added a fresh telescopic image of the U-Haul van parked outside Kiran’s service gate to the snapshots he’d already taken. There were pictures of the van itself. Pictures of the three business-suited men he’d seen repeatedly appear from the gate and roll dollies of mid-sized packing cartons out to the van’s cargo section. And pictures of the tall man in the car coat — it was black leather, like Ricci’s own — who had stayed close to the van throughout their comings and goings. Blond, fair-skinned, wiry, all arms and legs, he had alternated between sitting in the driver’s seat and pacing around the van in the cold, chain-smoking as he watched them climb aboard with their boxes and then emerge at different intervals to wheel what were presumably the same boxes, collapsed and emptied, back through the gate.

The operation had triggered Ricci’s curiosity. He wasn’t clear on what he’d expected to see here tonight. What he was seeing. But instinct told him none of it was meant to be seen… and his repeated gut checks had just strengthened that feeling. The rental van accounted for many of his questions. The activity to and from the van. And the tall man. Maybe especially him.

Ricci had read the intelligence workups on Hasul Benazir, learned all about his genetic condition and habitual night hours. He’d also gotten a related short from an outside source. Information Noriko Cousins either didn’t know or was intent on holding back from him. He had no idea which it was. No idea if she might be the only one at UpLink, and by extension Sword, who was keeping secrets. Whatever the score, he found it hard to be that concerned about it. Not with a secret or two of his own tucked away in his pocket.

He steadied the camera on the tall man, clicked again. Couldn’t get too many photos of him. It was a safe guess that the others were Kiran personnel. Coatless, wearing uniform dark suits, they carried swipe cards that gave access to the service gate, a motor operated rolldown that would automatically close behind them after each of their trips in and out of the building. Their distinctive South Asian features had made Ricci remember something in the Kiran files about a core group of veteran employees — executives, advisors, and techs, or so it described them — that Benazir had brought over from Pakistan on H1Bs: specialized work visas.

Tall Man was another story. The obvious outside man. And an impatient one waiting near the conspicuous U-Haul parked in a secondary parking area around the corner from the building’s main entrance. The only other vehicles, a small fleet of Mercedes sedans Ricci figured for company cars used by the dark-suits, were in the regular employee parking lot in front of the entrance.

No, Ricci thought, the van didn’t fit any more than Tall Man. Even granting Benazir’s late schedule, its presence was very suspect. A business like Kiran would ship in freight trucks, not cheap daily or weekly rental vans. But why else would it be here? Somebody in the building choosing this time of night to clean out his desk, maybe cart his old files or office equipment off to a warehouse? A ridiculous thought. Crazier to imagine corporate professionals wheeling those things out in handcarts when they could hire other people to do the lugging for them. No explanation came close to making sense — unless it involved a transport of goods that was meant to be covered up. But what would be the point in unpacking those boxes while they were still aboard the van? Before they had gone anywhere?

Now Ricci watched the three dark-suits jump from the rear of the van again, and raised an eyebrow. This time instead of returning directly to the service entrance, they locked the cargo section from the outside with a key, and then went over to where Tall Man stood by its driver’s door.

It seemed their loading was finished.

Ricci pulled back on the zoom for a wide angle shot of the bunch and took his picture, a vision of himself with the Boston police department briefly and inexplicably coming into his head. Five years ago, Detective First-Grade Tom Ricci would have found a way to stomach the whole checklist of authorizations needed for a surveillance warrant. Persuaded his bosses to give him their go-aheads. Met the legal threshold that would support reasonable cause. Filled out endless forms and case reports in duplicate and triplicate, while wishing he could have stood before the court and explained that he’d learned to trust his eye and follow its lead when it started paying close attention to somebody… the way it was paying attention to Tall Man and friends tonight.

Five years since the BPD, Ricci thought. Five years since one of the same judges he might have asked for legal approvals had been bought by a millionaire whose son he’d nailed for murder. Five years since the kid had walked out of jail on a courtroom fix, and Ricci had walked away from a badge tarnished by bogus charges that he’d mishandled evidence.

There were scars that healed with time and experience, and scars that only got thicker.

Ricci had ceased to want or need anyone’s nod of approval. For anything.

He lowered his camera, switched to the binocs strapped around his neck — these also Gen-4 NVs — and watched the four men outside the U-Haul. The dark-suits appeared to be giving Tall Man instructions, one in particular doing most of the talking as Tall Man listened, nodded his stalky neck, and every so often said something in response. After a little while their huddle broke up — Tall Man hopping into the driver’s side of the van, two of the dark-suits turning to reenter the service gate, the third going back around to the rear of the van and tugging at the handles of the cargo doors, apparently checking that they were securely locked before he joined the others.

Ricci considered his next move. The approach to Kiran’s parking area extended up the mountain from the same local route he’d taken coming here off Interstate 87. It was the only nearby juncture with the highway, with nothing branching from it for many miles but Rainer Lane and a couple of other dead-end stretches. Which meant the U-Haul driver would have to return to that route no matter where he might be headed afterward.

If he scrambled, Ricci thought there was a better than fair chance of catching the van’s tail.

A few minutes later he was doubling back along Rainer Lane in the Grand Prix. Glancing down the slope to his right, he spotted the U-Haul through frequent gaps in the trees, already out of the parking area and coasting toward the opposite end of the approach.

He tightened his fingers around the steering wheel and put on some speed.

It was a looping quarter-mile descent to the lane’s intersection with the county road. Ricci angled onto it, pushing the accelerator as he bore northeast, the direction he’d seen the van take after his last glimpse of its progress.

And then he saw its taillights ahead of him in the darkness. He estimated the van’s lead at ten car lengths and eased off his gas pedal, wanting to stay close, but not so close he risked being picked up by its driver. With only a smattering of other vehicles on the road — he counted three besides his car and the van, all in his rearview — Ricci could afford to give the van some space and still keep it in sight.

Ricci followed it past the entry ramp to the southbound interstate that would have taken him back to New York City, heading farther upstate into the mountains. There were patches of woods, agricultural farms on modest plots of winter-bare earth, darkened and locked-up convenience stores that must have closed for the night hours earlier. Then a commercial railyard and crossing, and what appeared to be town lights beyond.

The U-Haul bounced over the tracks, Ricci trailing it by a steady distance. He crossed the tracks, discovered the lights were actually from a small service area — a Texaco gas station on his side of the road, a McDonald’s just past it, another filling station on the other side of the road farther ahead. Opposite the fast-food restaurant was a Super 8 Motel posting special discount rates for truckers and rail workers.

Ricci saw the van hook left into the Super 8’s parking lot; he reached the service area and turned right to enter the Mc-Donald’s lot, positioning the car so its driver’s side faced the motel.

Ricci doused his headlamps, then looked sideways out his window. The motel was two stories of rooms in an elongated L-shaped structure set back from a turnaround spacious enough to accommodate large vehicles. He saw a tractor trailer in front making ample use of that space, a couple of six-wheel flatbeds, a single automobile. Tall Man had pulled the van straight up to the deck of the farthest ground-floor unit from the check-in office and gotten out. He took a step toward the office, paused, reached into his coat pocket for something.

Then a passing car momentarily blocked Ricci’s line of sight on its way toward the second filling station, where it swung up to a self-service pump and stopped. He studied it only long enough to confirm that it was one of the three vehicles he’d observed behind him on the country route… and to watch its driver, a man in a mackinaw and baseball cap, get out and unhook the gas nozzle. After that, Ricci returned his full attention to the Super 8’s turnaround.

In Tall Man’s hands now were his cigarettes and disposable lighter — answering the minor question of what he’d reached for in his pocket. He shook a cigarette out of the pack, put it in his mouth, put away the pack, and flicked the lighter. Ricci saw a spark, but no flame. Tall Man hunched against the wind by the van, cupped a palm over the head of the lighter, tried again to get his smoke going. It still didn’t fire up. After a minute he ditched the exhausted lighter with an obviously annoyed shake of his head.

Ricci watched him stride across the motel’s guest lot into the office, the unlit cigarette poking from his mouth, his frustration explained by a prominent no-smoking sign on the office window.

Less than ten minutes later, he walked back along the deck to his corner room and let himself through its door with a key-card.

Ricci sat for a long while, on the look again. It was about the time of night when his thoughts would start getting away from him lately, turn all sorts of wrong corners, but it helped to be concentrating on the action, to be mentally outside himself, and he was hoping he’d be okay without needing anything else to keep his head straight. He saw the driver who’d been gassing up at the pump return to his car — it was a late-model Buick, similar to his requisition — make a K-turn out of the station, drive across into the McDonald’s parking lot, exit the car, and head into the restaurant. He saw the lights go on behind Tall Man’s drawn curtains, and after fifteen minutes or so saw them go off — bedtime. Chances were the U-Haul didn’t have a theft alarm, and Ricci visualized himself breaking into it in the darkness of the lot, getting into the cargo section with his digital camera… a notion he might have seriously entertained if the van hadn’t been parked right outside Tall Man’s window, where the chances were too great he’d see or hear something.

Ricci leaned forward, meshed his hands over the steering column. Even as he’d dismissed the one idea as wishful thinking, another had taken shape for him. There was something to what Noriko Cousins had said about not trying to do too much, though in a different sense than she’d meant it. If he couldn’t find out what the dark-suits had loaded into the van, maybe he could still learn something about any personal freight Tall Man might be carrying with him.

He let another few minutes pass, keeping an eye out for anybody in the motel lot, or on its ground floor decks, or on its upper-level terraces. Watching for anybody who might be looking out the office window, or any sign of movement anywhere around or in front of the place. When none came up, he got a small brown-paper evidence bag out of his glove box and crossed the road.

The faint neon gleam of the motel sign at the lot’s entrance was enough to reveal the shape of Tall Man’s ditched lighter — a plastic Bic — on the ground near the left front tire of the U-Haul.

Ricci waited a second, alert. No doors opened. No lights came on. Nothing happened to surprise him.

He crouched, picked up the lighter, and dropped it into the bag. He folded the top of the bag over once, a second time, peeled off the adhesive label, and stuck it on over the double fold to seal it. Then he put the envelope in his coat pocket and quickly backtracked to the fast-food joint’s parking lot.

Ricci noticed that the guy in the baseball cap and mackinaw had returned to his Buick and seemed to be dozing, leaning against the headrest with his eyes shut, his seat semi-reclined. Instead of going over to his own car, he strode over to where the guy was parked across the lot and rapped his knuckles on the Buick’s roof to get his attention.

The guy opened his eyes, sat up straight, looked out his window. Ricci put on a smile, gestured toward his own car, made a winding gesture in the air, and he lowered it.

“Something I can do for you?” the guy said, shifting around behind the wheel to face him.

Ricci nodded, and as he did, moved slightly closer to the driver’s door and shot a right jab through the open window, getting most of his arm and shoulder into it, connecting hard with the side of his chin. The driver grunted with pain and surprise as his head snapped back, his hand going up to his face.

“You’re out of your goddamned mind,” he said.

“Rather be that than the one who got made,” Ricci said, and held out his palm. “Come on, show me your tag.”

The driver sat there massaging his chin.

“Up yours,” he said.

Ricci had kept his hand out.

“Your tag,” he said. “Either show it to me, or I can run a check on you. But I have to go to the trouble, you better believe I’ll have you busted down.”

The guy looked at Ricci a second, frowning. Then he dropped his hand from his chin, got a cardholder out of his mackinaw, and passed it out the window.

Ricci flipped it open, studied the UpLink Security ID card inside, read the name below its holographic Sword insignia.

“Bennett,” he said, repeating it aloud. “Cousins put you on me, or you pick me up on stakeout over at Kiran?”

The op stared out the window.

“You’re so smart, California, figure it out,” he said.

Ricci looked at him in silence.

“Atta boy,” he said. “Wouldn’t want a demerit on the report card.”

“Yeah, well, screw you, too.”

Ricci’s smile was cutting.

“Here’s one you can answer,” he said. “That van… it going to stay in sight?”

“What do you think?”

“I meant after your shift ends.”

“I know what the hell you meant.”

Ricci looked at him another moment, reached into his pocket for the sealed evidence bag, handed it through the window with the cardholder.

“I want what’s in the bag tested for prints right away… I’m talking first thing in the morning,” he said. “You ever try tailing me again, you might want to be smarter yourself, use a car I won’t have seen in the same req lot where I got mine.”

Bennett looked at him, flexed his jaw.

“Thanks for the advice, hump,” he said.

Ricci pulled into a public rest stop shortly before reaching the large barrier toll plaza between I-87 and the southbound Garden State Parkway to Manhattan.

In the empty parking area outside the visitor’s building, he got his palmtop out of a utility pocket in his tac vest and typed out a brief e-mail, addressing it to a Yahoo mobile account: O.W.K.Ready to meet tomorrow. Where and when — preference?R.

He sat for perhaps ten minutes afterward, staring at the computer screen, considering whether to hit SEND or DELETE on his keyboard.

Curtain number one, curtain number two, he thought. You bet your life.

Finally, his choice made, Ricci brought up the computer’s WiFi interface and zipped off his message.

He could almost feel the lion’s breath as he did.

Malisse’s elevator was dangerously out of control.

At first everything had seemed normal. He’d stepped inside alone, pushed the button for the tenth floor, and leaned back against the rear of the car as it rose. To his surprise, it had stopped on the third without opening either its inner or outer doors. When he’d pushed the DOOR OPEN button to get them to retract, his car had plunged down the shaft so sharply his stomach had lurched into his throat, jolted to a halt midway between the first and second floors, then reversed itself and shot up to the fifth. Again the doors had stayed shut, trapping Malisse behind them. Again he pushed ten on the number pad, repeatedly jabbing the button with his finger until his car had seemed to resume normal operation, its indicator lights telling him he’d begun to move up the shaft. Six, seven, eight, nine, and coming level with ten….

Then another sudden jolt and the elevator overshot his desired floor as if on high-powered thrusters, its hoist cables screaming, sides rattling, its decorative interior panels and mirrors shuddering and crashing down around him.

Malisse had been thrown about, on the verge of panic. How fast was he moving? Twenty meters per second? Thirty? Struggling to keep his feet under him, convinced the stress of rapid acceleration would break the car apart at any moment, tear it from its cables to send it freefalling down to the bottom of the shaft, he’d staggered toward the control panel and flipped the bright red EMERGENCY STOP switch.

An alarm bell kicked in at a deafening volume, but still the car kept ascending with rocket speed. On the verge of panic, Malisse wondered if he was a certain goner. What good would it do for someone to hear the racket if the elevator didn’t brake? If the alarm merely rang and rang and rang as it soared up, up, up, past the building’s highest story, staying in one piece only long enough to hit the roof?

Malisse grabbed the handrail, bracing for the inevitable collision, his ears filled with the clangorous, useless noise of the alarm bell—

And then he awoke to the ringing of the bedside phone in his room at the Mayfair Hotel.

Tossing free of his blankets, Malisse yanked off the black satin sleep mask he’d worn to foil the eternal and unspeakably intrusive lights of Manhattan. A moment later he glanced at his alarm clock, blinked twice as he groped for the receiver.

It was two forty-five A.M.

What boor, he thought, would call at this mad hour?

He jammed the phone against his ear.

“Who?” he demanded angrily.

“Duncan,” said the voice at the other end. “You sound kind of winded, Delano. I didn’t take you from any nocturnal diversions, did I?”

“Only my blissful dreams,” Malisse said. He took a calming breath. “Are you aware of the time?”

“Vaguely,” Duncan said. “We cardholders in the black-bag union keep odd schedules, and I hope you don’t expect any apologies. Fact is, you ought to be appreciative.”

Malisse sat up, shoved his pillows against the headboard, settled back onto them.

“I assume you’re about to tell me why,” he said at once.

“You wide awake?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Duncan said. “Because I’d hate for you to claim that I didn’t remind you about our meeting tomorrow. Or later this morning, I should say. Seven o’clock, Park Plaza, our usual table near those chess players.”

Malisse’s pique had melted away into eager curiosity.

“I don’t recall our having made the appointment,” he said, taking up the tease.

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe we didn’t have one before, come to think,” Duncan said. “Anyway, D, I’ve been to a tailor shop that had the coat you ordered in stock. They did while-you-wait alterations after all… though it took a cart full of my personal chips, and had me in the waiting room until maybe five minutes ago.”

Malisse straightened, drew an excited breath.

“Duncan, I truly do appreciate this,” he said.

“Enough to treat me to breakfast?”

“Ja, ja… certainly!”

The FBI man chuckled at the other end of the line.

“I know you’re sincere when you stutter in Flemish,” he said. “Seven on the nose, Delano. And expect me to eat hearty.”

SEVEN

At a little past eight o’clock in the morning, Ricci left his hotel room, took the elevator downstairs, and, as he went past the restaurant’s lobby entrance, saw Derek Glenn stepping out with a cup of takeout coffee.

Ricci would have walked on toward the street if their paths hadn’t crossed.

They stopped in front of each other, exchanged glances.

“Am I early, or you late?” Glenn said with a wooden smile.

Ricci shrugged.

“I want to check on some things downtown,” he said. He continued to eye Glenn flatly. “Those are the same clothes you had on when I left there yesterday.”

Glenn’s expression grew more awkward.

“If you’re so bothered by it, I’ll just hurry on up to my room and change,” he said. “Meet you at HQ in a while.” And abruptly turned toward the elevators.

When Ricci got to her office, Noriko Cousins was at her desk behind her computer. She pulled her head up from an open file folder and waved him through the door.

“I’ve heard you had a busy night,” she said, sounding anything but pleased.

Ricci went to the corner chair and sat without hanging his coat.

“Wasn’t the only one,” he said.

She gave him a look. “Am I supposed to guess the meaning of that?”

“We’re talking work, it means your frequent spotter at Kiran better learn to be more careful. If I could pick him up, so could the guy in the van,” Ricci said. He shrugged. “There’s some other meaning of ‘busy’ you want to discuss, I’m all ears.”

Noriko was quiet a moment.

“I got your advance billing,” she said. “The tough-guy attitude. The lone wolf bit. But I hadn’t heard what a truly pathetic human being you are.”

Ricci’s smile slashed at her.

“Guess we’ll stick to talking work,” he said.

Noriko had kept looking steadily into his eyes, and she still didn’t flinch.

“I don’t care how you operate in San Jose, or what you’ve gotten away with under people’s noses out there,” she said. “But this is my city, and I’ve got no long leashes for anybody. Heading out on a surveillance last night wasn’t something you should have done without authorization. It wasn’t something you had any right doing in secret… and just so there’s no confusion, my problem isn’t with you getting your neck hacked open without anybody having a clue what’s happened. The important thing is that you could have put our whole investigation in jeopardy.”

Ricci stared back across the desk, shrugged his shoulders. “I was worried about keeping secrets from you, I’d have gotten myself a Hertz rental car instead of ticketing that one out of the req lot, where I knew you’d make sure somebody would notice.” He shrugged again and gestured toward the file folder that had remained spread open in front of her. “What’s important is if those printouts mean your boy Bennett got any results off the cigarette lighter.”

Noriko looked at him.

“Your partner called to say he’d be here any minute,” she said. “I want him in on this, too.”

It was, in fact, almost five minutes of chilly silence before Glenn arrived at her office. He moved past Ricci with a nod, tossed his coat up on a hook, and stepped toward Noriko’s desk.

“Good morning,” he said to her, smiling.

“Getting there,” she said, and flashed him a quick little smile of her own.

Glenn settled into a chair, waited.

“Time for us to share and share alike,” Noriko said. She gave him a revelatory look, then shifted her gaze to Ricci. “Starting with what you saw last night out at Kiran, and then afterward.”

Even as an expression of surprise began spreading over Glenn’s features, Ricci told of his observation of the plant, the loading and apparent unpacking of boxes aboard the U-Haul van, the dark-suits who’d done it, and the Tall Man. Then he went through his tailing the van to the trucker’s motel, his recovery of the tossed lighter in the motel lot, and his passing it on to Bennett for examination… recounting all of it in a precise but dispassionate near-monotone.

“That’s what I saw,” he said finally. He looked straight at Noriko. “The rest’s with you.”

There was no hesitation in her nod.

“We lifted quite a batch of prints off the lighter, ran them through IAFIS courtesy of the access we’re permitted by the Feds,” she said, using the acronym for the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification database. “Every one of them belongs to a man named John Earl Fletcher… or John Earl, as he prefers to be called.”

“What kind of rap sheet’s he got?” Glenn said.

“A long and bad one,” Noriko said. She scanned a sheet in her folder. “It starts almost twenty years ago with a string of misdemeanors and minor felonies in Maine. Possession of illegal substances, drunk driving, public nuisance, that sort of thing. There’re several juvie arrests and probations, a conviction for snatching a wallet at knifepoint. Then he does six months in county jail for assault and battery. A year later, he’s slapped with a charge of third-degree murder… a sheriff’s deputy. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in the Maine state penitentiary.”

“That sounds kind of light for a cop killing,” Glenn said

“I thought so, too,” Noriko said. “Went ahead and cross-referenced the IAFIS information with other clearanced databases, found that it was ruled accidental… the details in the system are sketchy, but it seems they had a personal background of some sort. Knew each other from high school, the way they do in small towns. Earl was driving a truck for a local fuel company. He and the cop are involved in some kind of shouting match over a routine traffic summons, stupid affair. One thing leads to another, and soon they’re in a fistfight. The cop falls, hits his head, doesn’t get up. And Earl goes into the system for a major stretch, where he becomes a man.”

“Gets uglier as they get older.”

“Doesn’t it always,” Noriko said. “When we next catch up with Earl, after his release, he’s changed scenes to Newark, New Jersey, and been arrested in connection with a RICO probe. There’s a charge of interstate travel in aid of racketeering… and worse, multiple charges of murder-for-hire. But a couple of key witnesses change their testimony prior to trial, and the case against him is dropped.”

Glenn snorted. “Oh, what luck,” he said with an ironic smile.

Noriko shrugged, glanced down at her folder.

“There’s nothing else as far as what I’ve dredged out of the computers. John Earl Fletcher — a.k.a. John Earl — seems to exit stage left until he shows up at Kiran with a U-Haul.”

Ricci had sat in his corner of the office without reacting to what she said, or apparently having done anything but lean back and stare into space. Now he moved his eyes to Noriko and kept them on her.

“Your lookouts ever see that van at the plant before?” he said.

“No,” she said. “Last night was a first.”

“And it’s still at the motel.”

She nodded. “The minute Earl leaves his room, I’ll know about it.”

“So we’ve got a guy who gets mobbed-up doing hard time, a pro hitter and dirty carrier, moving stuff for Kiran when the lights are off, then parking a mile away like he’s in no kind of hurry to go anywhere with it. That make sense?”

Glenn scratched behind his ear.

“Not much,” he said. “Unless maybe he’s waiting.”

Ricci turned to him.

“Waiting for what?”

Glenn shrugged.

“Somebody to meet or contact him, something to happen, no way for us to know,” he said.

Silence. Noriko slowly closed the file folder she’d been holding and flipped it onto her desk.

“I’ve seen something this morning besides the law-enforcement material,” she said. “An e-mail from Lenny Reisenberg.”

Both men looked at her.

“The shipping manager who got us mixed up in the Sullivan case?” Glenn said.

Noriko gave him a nod.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “What might be relevant here is that Lenny’s started to dig into some of Kiran’s shipping records, and a standout he’s already figured worth passing on is that a lot of the dual-use laser components Kiran’s been sending abroad in increased quantities — parts I’ve been wondering about for a while — have been freighted to an offshore distribution outfit in Singapore. That same company has major offices in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo.” A pause, a shrug. “None of it necessarily tells us anything’s fishy, since those countries are considered our diplomatic partners, but—”

“Those places are also major route-throughs for lots of neighborhood bad guys,” Glenn said.

She nodded again, and they all sat without speaking for a minute. Then Ricci sat forward in his chair, shifting his eyes from one to the other.

“We damn well better find out what’s in that moving van,” he said.

John Earl got out of the shower in his motel room, dried himself off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stood half naked and still mostly wet in front of the full-length mirror on the door. He touched the tattoo of the fire-engine-red Mack truck on his neck, thinking of the dream he’d had the night before. In that dream — more of a nightmare, truth be known — he was back in Thomaston, back in his prison cell, and working on the much larger version of the truck he’d painted on its wall over several years, after finally convincing the screws to look the other way… though he knew he hadn’t been the only con at Thomaston they’d let amuse himself with arts and crafts, ’long as he was quiet and did as he was told.

It had been quite a scenic picture that developed behind those bars over to the right of his cot, starting with a variation of the fuel delivery truck he’d driven for Hastings Energy before his row with that son-of-a-bitch deputy in Belfast had sent him down, and then growing little by little around the truck — a long black sweep of roadway beneath the heavyweight’s wheels, rolling green hills into forever, and, overhead, the wide blue sky with its bright round sun and cotton-puff clouds. Earl would work on that painting for hours every night till just before lights-out was called. He had always loved trucks. Step-frame trailers, cab-overs, tankers like the Hastings Energy rig. And all those nights he was in that cell working on his painting of the truck, or staring at it in the semidarkness after he’d turned in, Earl would imagine he was riding along in its cab with his windows rolled down, the roar of the wind in his ears blending together with the growl of its monster Detroit diesel engine and the loud chop of rock and roll guitars blaring from the radio.

Yeah, Earl thought, he would imagine himself in that big Mack truck, would dream about it when he fell asleep. All he’d need to do was close his eyes, and he’d be riding fast and free along some unmarked country road, the Mack redder and shinier than a fire engine, taking him anywhere but where he was, taking him nowhere he’d ever be found, carrying him away from that miserable old house of rock and steel as mile after mile of open, empty countryside spooled out behind him.

Earl frowned, once again remembering last night’s dream. Then he went from the mirror to get his clothes from where he’d tossed them on the bedside chair. In that dream, everything had been changed — turned inside out — and he’d been in his prison cell asking one of the guards for paint and getting turned down, begging for paint so he could work on his picture of the truck and getting turned town, getting laughed at, unable to see the screw’s face because it was hidden behind a dark mask like the kind you’d figure might belong on a spacesuit… which Earl now realized was a visored helmet exactly like the one Hasul Benazir had worn over his head while telling him about today’s goddamned job. The insane fucking mission that was supposed to net him a mint, and that he knew would really get him killed if he went ahead with it as planned — the meat eaten clean off his bones, his lungs dripping from his asshole, melted into chunky soup by the same poisoned air that would take out millions upon millions of other unsuspecting dupes.

Earl put on his underwear, socks, jeans, and sweater, fetched his boots from where he’d left them by the door, and sat on the edge of the bed to get his feet into them, jerking their tops up over his ankles.

He didn’t care about the millions. Not a whit. If all those people didn’t make it into the next dawn, Earl would shed about as many tears for them as had been cried for him throughout his entire life… which came to a grand total of none.

They could fend for themselves, the same way he’d always looked out for himself.

The way he would keep looking out for himself today, tonight, tomorrow, and on into all the tomorrows they might or might not live to see.

“Good to see you again… Mr. Friedman, that right?”

Malisse stood facing Jeffreys in the entrance lobby of the DDC building on West 47th Street, a black vinyl garment bag folded over his left arm, a hard-shell briefcase in his opposite hand.

“Right, indeed,” he said. “You have a knack for remembering names.”

“Don’t know ’bout that, unless you count bein’ able to match the ones in this here book with people’s faces.” The security guard tapped the guest register on his podium with a finger and flashed the exaggerated grin of a silent screen performer. “Norman Green called to leave word you’d be comin’ by early this morning.”

“Called?”

“He’s runnin’ a bit behind, but you can sign in an’ go right on upstairs to wait for him,” Jeffreys said. He leaned forward with a pen, a shaded look on his face. “Got yourself ’least half an hour, Hoffman’s sayin’ his prayers,” he said in a hushed voice. Then, in a still lower whisper that seemed to slip out unintended: “Hope the Lord has mercy on the sinner lookin’ for repentance.”

Malisse grunted, took the pen, and signed the guest book in the column beside his hand-printed alias.

“If God were obliging enough to ask my opinion, I would advise him to save his concern for the just, and piss an ocean down on the rest,” he said, turning toward the elevator.

Urban Jewelers on West 47th Street was a thirty-year-old, family-run storefront business that sold mediocre but affordable jewelry to the targeted walk-in consumer. The shop’s seemingly unimaginative name did, in fact, possess a certain double meaning that was not lacking in cleverness, since the bland reference to its location at the heart of metropolitan New York—urban—was also a shortened version of the surname belonging to its founder and principle owner, one Constantin Urbaniak, a Georgian Jew who had come to New York at the head of a half-million-strong wave of ambitious arrivals when, under tremendous internal and international pressure, the former Soviet Union relaxed its emigration policies toward persecuted minorities in the early 1970s.

While Constantin still oversaw the store’s general affairs — with a close eye on tax-time bookkeeping — he had for the past seven years left its daily management to his daughter and son-in-law, a hardworking and borderline honest couple, who, when they gypped their customers at all, preferred exaggeration and embellishment to outright deceit, following examples they’d learned growing up with a steady diet of American television, on which multibillion-dollar corporations sold sneakers as schoolyard status, soft drinks as adolescent sex appeal, and expensive cars as adult success with flashy primetime advertising spots.

Constantin Urbaniak had never done any such straddling of the line. Not when he’d stood behind the shop’s display counters from morning till night, and especially not these days. In his opinion, honesty, or relative honesty, was for the uninspired, men like his daughter’s dull but diligent lug of a husband. An artisan by disposition, and a forger by heritage — his beloved uncle on the maternal side was the famed World War II counterfeiter Solomon Smolianoff — Constantin had always felt his true calling to be creator rather than seller. And in the back room of Constantin’s office space on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, a space whose front room housed Urban Jewelry’s mail-order and Internet sales operation — the pet project of his eldest son, Mikail, who had earned a doctorate in business from Johns Hopkins University — his view of himself as a virtuoso of the sham was a conceit indulged with exacting, tirelessly unscrupulous dedication.

Among forgers of antique jewelry, Urbaniak strove to be the best of the very best.

Avram Hoffman had followed a loud trail of whispers (as if there were any such thing as quiet whispers in the trade) to Constantin many months ago, bringing with him a genuine Japanese pink pearl and a handful of brilliant-cut diamonds, and requesting the fabrication of a gold Edwardian hatpin on which to mount them and exponentially increase their already fair value.

Gathering from the frequency of his return visits, Urbaniak’s work had not disappointed. Indeed, the difficulty of Hoffman’s commissions had graduated by broad, bold leaps, as had his confidence that the hand of Urbaniak would render them to perfection… and there could have been no greater testament to this than the challenge he’d presented upon entering the office moments before.

The question before Urbaniak this time around — underscored by the photographs Hoffman had laid out for him — was whether Hoffman truly had what he’d claimed to have in his possession. With it, Urbaniak knew he could fashion Hoffman something memorable, a classic piece of work. Without it he could give him nothing.

“I must ask again about the sapphire, if you don’t mind,” he said, looking at Hoffman across his desk. “A twelve-point-eight-carat cabochon of first quality is noteworthy. An oval of that size from the old mines of Kashmir would be fabulous. A sensational rarity…”

“And why shouldn’t a broker who is the son and nephew of brokers attain the fabulous and sensational?” Hoffman said. “Or don’t you believe even the man in the middle can exceed his origins?”

Urbaniak shook his head, a bit confused over his snappish tone.

“Don’t forget, you are talking to one who has done just that,” he said. “In the USSR, I was a factory worker. Here, a shopkeeper for many years.” He paused. “No insult was implied, and none should be taken. I only want to be sure we understand each other before moving ahead.”

“Then consider yourself assured, though I don’t see any reason it should matter to you.”

Urbaniak shrugged.

“We can start with pride,” he said. “You know my policy, Avram. I am not a peddler of glorified costume jewelry. Of crap. What leaves my workshop must be faithful to the past work that inspires it in all but age.”

Hoffman was quiet a moment, his lips tight, his face suddenly flushing above the line of his beard.

“Avram, are you all right?”

“Yes,” Avram said, sounding short of breath. “Fine.”

“You’re positive? I can get you a glass of water…”

Avram waved him off, inhaled, exhaled.

“Never mind,” he said. “The stone I’m providing will be a bona fide Kashmir. With certifications.”

Urbaniak had noticed the flush spreading to Avram’s neck and forehead in little red blotches, but given his touchiness thought it be best to refrain from further comment. He instead considered his words in silence, inspecting the pictures of the sapphire ring spread out on his desk.

“If that’s what it is,” he said at length, “that’s what it is.”

“Will you be able to design a setting based on my photos?”

Urbaniak looked at him.

“I’ve been an admirer of Raymond Yard jewelry for a very long time and would be eager for the opportunity to”—he paused to choose the appropriate phrase—“adapt one of his pieces. Yard was among the greatest ever, an artist without peer among his contemporaries of the Deco period… and, speaking of men who are able to exceed humble beginnings, the son of a rail worker who became friend and advisor to the wealthy. His salon’s clientele was a who’s who of old-money society, and of the New York elite in particular. The Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Beekmans and Astors… and of course the Rockefellers.” Another pause. “It was for John D. Rockefeller Junior that he arranged the purchase of what may be the world’s most famous sapphire from the Nizam of Hyderabad. A sixty-six carat stone that once shone atop the ring in these photos you’ve brought me, and it would later be remounted onto brooches by both Rockefeller’s first and second wives — and after Yard died, set into an inferior ring at the fancy of a son of Raymond Yard’s colleague, the gem dealer Esmerian. When it finally passed into the anonymity of a private collection several years ago, I believe the blue commanded a record auction price of three million dollars.”

Avram had opened the collar button of his shirt under his necktie and taken more deep breaths.

“In excess of that sum,” he said. “Constantin, let me ask you something now. Suppose another stone was included in Rockefeller’s acquisition from the Indian Maharajah. Much smaller than the first — just under thirteen carats — but from the same source, and of comparable excellence. Then suppose Rockefeller had asked Yard to set it in a platinum ring for a woman other than his wife. A very young, very beautiful ingenue of the Broadway stage who kept her relationship with him discreet, and in her commendable discretion never revealed the identity of the gentleman who gifted the ring to her, or left documentation of its provenance… though it was styled after these photographs I’ve copied and brought you from a Christie’s auction catalogue, and did bear the engraved letter ‘Y’ that was Yard’s signature.” Avram sat forward in his chair. “Do you follow me so far?”

Urbaniak met his gaze with interest, nodded.

“You present an engrossing history.”

“I’ve been working hard to get the details right,” Hoffman said with a conspiratorial glance.

Urbaniak gave another nod. Perhaps working too hard for his own well-being, he mused. Hoffman’s breathing and color had gradually returned to normal, but he still looked tired and overwound.

“Jumping ahead,” Hoffman went on now, “let us say this actress married after Rockefeller’s death, keeping her intimate friendship with him secret throughout her lifetime, bequeathing the ring to her own legitimate heirs. That it passed from child to grandchild, grandchild to great-grandchild, and so forth. And that it eventually fell to a beneficiary of some current social prominence who wishes to sell it without opening dusty boxes of scandal, and has engaged a broker like myself to do that while leaving the ring’s owner unnamed.” He regarded Urbaniak across the table. “My question to you, a supreme craftsman, is this: would the ring’s unique qualities be enough to satisfy a prospective buyer, and whoever he or she may hire to appraise it, that it is an authentic Raymond Yard?”

Urbaniak was unhesitating in his answer.

“The accomplishment of an expert hand always will be recognized by an expert eye,” he said. “And, with or without documents, command a suitable price from lovers of beautiful finery.”

Hoffman remained silent for a minute. Then he nodded and settled back in his chair, finally seeming to relax a little.

“Constantin,” he said, “I’m going to propose that you make me something beautiful and fine.”

Moments after leaving Urbaniak’s office, Avram stood on the corner of 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, trying not to draw attention from passersby, feeling more than a bit embarrassed by his weakness as he leaned against the metal stanchion of a streetlight and caught his breath.

It had been so close up there with the jeweler, he thought. So airless. The seeming lack of oxygen had stuffed his head, made his chest feel as if it were bound tight with leather straps.

Avram swooped down mouthful after mouthful of cold air, and soon enough thought he felt better — certainly well enough to finish the rest of his business.

He reached into his coat for his cell phone and sent the brief e-mail stored in its memory to Lathrop, then lifted the briefcase he’d set down on the pavement between his feet.

Now he only needed to hurry over to the bank while waiting for his callback.

“You’re sure you don’t want to head up to see Ruiz with us?” Derek Glenn asked Ricci. He raised his shoulders against an explosive gust of wind. “Whatever might be rotten at Kiran, we can’t forget we came here to find Patrick Sullivan.”

Ricci was silent. Along with Glenn and Noriko Cousins, he was standing on Hudson Street outside Sword headquarters, only minutes after the detective had phoned to arrange their appointment.

“Didn’t know we were joined at the hip,” he said. “There are some other things I want to check out.”

Noriko looked at him from under the brim of her leopard Carnaby.

“Things?” she said.

Ricci nodded.

“Like the apartment building where Sullivan’s girlfriend lived, and whatever’s around it, and wherever she might’ve passed before she disappeared,” he said. “Things like that, and maybe more.”

Noriko kept studying his face.

“Do what you want,” she said. “But if you have any intention of snowing me, I promise you’ll rue the day.”

Ricci shrugged.

“You want to put another truant officer on my back, make sure I don’t do anything out of school, go ahead,” he said. “I were you, I’d worry about getting those added snoopmobiles we talked about over to that motel — and doing it before your man there falls asleep at the wheel.”

A moment passed. Noriko looked at Ricci, started to give him an answer, realized she had nothing much more to say, and scratched whatever might have been on its way to her lips.

Raising her arm into the air instead, she stepped past him to hail a taxi at the curb.

Malisse stood looking in the window of the Nat Sherman tobacconist’s shop across from the library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, one eye on a charming and doubtless exorbitantly high-priced beveled glass and cocobolo rosewood humidor in which he could envision his prized Dominican Davidoff cigars resting in conditions ideal for their robustly delectable preservation. On some other day his fancy might have flared at the sight of it on display, ignited a rhapsodic gleam in his captive eye, propelled him beyond any thoughts of frugality toward a bacchanalian splurge at the store’s sales counter.

Yes, Malisse thought, on another day his abiding passion for the exquisite might have led him to spend without restraint, while today his fidelity to his obligations — reinforced by his deep-seated contempt for the greedy and corrupt — obliged him to earn old Lembock’s advance with due diligence, and to be guided by the eye he had not turned toward the smoke shop’s window display but kept owlishly watching the display of the phone-sized global positioning receiver in his right hand… a device he had dubbed the Duncan in tribute to his good friend for having furnished it. For an hour and more now Malisse had followed the blip on its electronic street map layout that was Avram Hoffman, shadowing him on foot from the quaint lampposts marking the diamond and jewelry district to the great mullioned tower of the Empire State Building over a half mile downtown, where he had then tracked Hoffman to the 93rd-floor office of one Urban Gem Sales on an elevator that thankfully had been in smooth control on liftoff, descent, and between floors — unlike last night’s haywire elevator of his id.

Having drifted past the door to the office for a look, Malisse had returned to the landmark building’s lobby, waited for Hoffman amid its continuous percolation of office workers and sightseers, and, upon Hoffman’s reappearance from the elevator bank some forty minutes later, resumed his tagalong foot pursuit, getting no closer than a half block behind him even in the thickest crowds, and dropping no more than five blocks behind when he felt at the slightest risk of being noticed. This allowed Malisse to remain safely out of sight, yet well within range of the GPS signal boosters he’d slipped under the lining of Hoffman’s briefcase in the coatroom of the Diamond Dealer Club’s synagogue.

After he’d left the building — immediately afterward, in fact — Hoffman had paused at its near corner within eyeshot of Malisse and briefly appeared to stand against a lamppost for support, bracing himself with a hand as if he’d suffered a spell of weakness or dizziness. He had seemed to recover within moments, even to use his cellular before continuing on his way, but Malisse had committed this to his mental notepad, as he did with all observations relating to his cases. One never knew what grain of information might turn out to be important in the long run… though he supposed Hoffman, a very busy fellow, also must be a very tired fellow indeed. The clip of his perambulations this morning already had Malisse’s joints aching with fatigue.

Hoffman’s rapid footwork over the hard pavement had quickly resumed, leading Malisse back uptown, his Duncan in hand. Past the stone lions guarding the library entrance he had tracked his man, and then onto 42nd Street, where he had lagged behind Hoffman as he turned into the door of what Malisse’s subsequent walk-by had disclosed was a Chase Manhattan bank.

And there inside that bank Hoffman was still, presumably conducting transactions that might be all or none of Malisse’s affair.

Malisse sighed and gave the handsome humidor in the window another longing glance.

Perhaps when his work was completed, he would return here to inquire about its cost.

In the meantime, he would do what he did best, which was wait, watch, and weigh what he saw of Hoffman’s activities.

Like Ahab on his determined pursuit, Delano Malisse was resting for the rush.

Avram had no sooner been ushered from the vault by a security guard when his cellular rang.

He pulled it out of his coat pocket, flipped it open, and moved to an unoccupied counter space on the main banking floor, keeping firm hold of his briefcase with one hand. Heavy as it had just gotten, he was not about to rest it anywhere out of his grasp.

“How’s my timing, Avram?” Lathrop said in his ear.

“It’s what I’ve come to expect.” Unusually thirsty for the past few minutes, Avram ran his tongue over his lips, but it was without moisture. “I have what’s called for, and now only need know where I am called.”

“Twenty-sixth and Broadway, over by the flower market,” Lathrop said.

“That far downtown—?”

“You’ll see a place with plastic containers of spray-painted branches in front. Universal Florists.”

Avram sighed. He looked around for a water cooler, didn’t see one, and decided he might have to stop for a drink on the way to his destination

“The dance exhausts me,” he said, expelling another breath.

“Don’t bellyache,” Lathrop said. “I’ll do you a favor and try to keep it short today.”

Having left his motel room to get some breakfast, John Earl was emerging from the McDonald’s across the road with an order of scrambled eggs and hash browns to go when he noticed the guy parked in the fast-food joint’s customer lot.

Earl had no clear idea what it was about the guy that raised his suspicions. There was nothing funny about the car he was in, a new-ish Pontiac or Buick — Earl couldn’t tell the difference at a glance, and didn’t want to look too hard and call attention to himself. Nothing funny about how the driver looked, which was like anybody with a head, a face, two shoulders, and a winter parka. And nothing funny about what the driver was up to, namely sipping coffee through the lid of a paper cup.

Off the top, there wasn’t a reason in the world Earl figured he ought to pay him a second thought.

Still, he wasn’t the sort to ignore his intuition. He’d spent almost half his life in the pen with a bunch of psycho hardcases for housemates, men who’d be as apt to kill as cornhole him the minute he let his guard down… and spent just about all the rest of his life doing things that would put him right back inside with them if he wasn’t careful. He’d been hunter and hunted, sometimes both at the same time, and you didn’t fare too well at either end of the chase without having high-frequency reception on your shit antennas.

Earl strode past the car toward the crosswalk to the motel court, not once glancing straightaway in its direction.

Probably it wasn’t anything he needed to be on the sharp about, but careful were as careful did, as somebody or other had told him once upon a year in Maine, and he didn’t know of any words in the world with a truer ring. Careful had kept him rolling easy for a while now—ayuh, ayuh—and the occasional ditch, bump, and roadblock aside, he’d done okay avoiding the kind of blowout that could set you skidding out of your lane into a total loss.

Walking by the U-Haul, key-card in hand, Earl had already decided he was going to play it safe.

The minute he returned to his room, he’d give Zaheer a buzz at Kiran and tell him to be sure to bring along reinforcements when he showed up.

To Avram’s abounding surprise, Lathrop had been truthful about wanting to shorten their dance. And while he did not believe Lathrop ever did anything as a favor to anyone, he would nevertheless regard the accelerated pace of their final round a parting courtesy.

In keeping with its desirable spirit of brevity, Avram hustled toward the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on Sixth Avenue and 23rd from the flower market a few blocks north, another false sign-in name committed to memory (Mr. Landon), and another room number (twenty-seven) attached to it in his head. He was running early, or at least felt as though he was, since Lathrop never gave a precise time of arrival for himself. But perhaps that had more to do with his own state of exhilaration… an emotional peak that had for the moment lifted him past weariness, anxiety, and fatigue.

Soon enough — within half an hour, Avram expected — he would pay Lathrop for his entire lot of stones with the cash extracted from his safe-deposit box at Chase. And then he would be on his way. Urbaniak would set the large Kashmir in his Raymond Yard homage. Katari, charmed by blue fire, would be eagerly waiting to purchase it. And he, Avram…

For him there would be freedom, emancipation, liberation. Were there any better words to describe what he was gaining? Was it blasphemous to think of Lathrop’s stones as his own gift of p’solet, holy chips of immense value bringing him a transcendence he had only ever fantasized about having in a material world?

Avram saw the hotel midway down the block ahead of him and stepped it up. Ah, fuzzgrenade.com, softgel.net, or whatever that guitarist’s name had been, Avram thought. Ah, yes, what his splendid music meant. Someday in the near future Avram would look the kid up on the Internet, find him aboard the shuttle, drop him a huge money bonus, and look him in the eye without a shred of envy, but rather a bond shared only by those who let themselves become unbonded, who—

The pain in Avram’s chest took him all at once. Seized him around the heart like a crushing vice. He stopped on the sidewalk, his briefcase dropping from his numb left hand to the sidewalk, his hands going to a throat that had suddenly locked tight against his efforts to draw breath.

Then the city spun around him and he was on his back looking into the cold blue winter sky without air, a jetliner flying high overhead, people’s faces looking down at him, one man’s closer than the rest. The man was shouting something to them about an ambulance… about calling an ambulance…

Avram grabbed his wrist, or thought he did, he wasn’t sure, his confusion was too great. He was becoming distanced from himself, Avram and not Avram, two-dimensional, almost without substance, whatever sliver was left of him pressed between constrictive walls of pain.

He tried to remember something, couldn’t, and tried to ask the man whose face had come so close to his own whether he might know the answer.

But then the face was wiped away. In Avram’s eyes the blue sky above it momentarily turned a burning, searing red, then sheeted over with a bright blank flash of white.

And in the end, there was nothing but darkness.

At the northeast corner of Sixth and 23rd, waiting for his light to turn green so he could cross to the west side of the avenue, Malisse saw his quarry crumple to the pavement almost a full block up ahead.

His face a mask of dismay, he glanced over his shoulder at an approaching onslaught of headlamps, bumpers, and grilles, took a shaved moment to time his lunge, and then dashed forward across the stream of uptown traffic with a prayer to wing-footed Mercury… ignoring the Roman god’s alternate reputation as a guiding messenger of thieves.

Horns blared, tires skidded, profanities slapped against his ears.

“Gratuitous!” a young woman shouted from the curb behind him, offended by a bus driver’s particularly vile oath. But Malisse was already three-quarters of the way to the other side and feeling appreciative.

He took the corner with a bound and continued to race toward the fallen Hoffman, around whom a small crowd of pedestrians had begun to gather. Then he was pushing through them, scooping them aside with both arms to kneel over the broker’s prostrate form.

Malisse saw the blue-tinged lips and fingertips and livid cheeks, heard the tortured wheezing for breath, and immediately thought heart attack.

“Ambulance!” he shouted, looking around at the confusion frozen onlookers. “Someone here call an ambulance!”

And then Hoffman’s cyanotic fingers grabbed hold of his wrist, pulling, pulling him down.

Malisse saw his lips move, heard nothing but the surrounding barrage of street noises, leaned close, close, closer.

“My father’s name?” Hoffman rattled. His eyes widened, their pupils enormous. “My… father’s name?”

Malisse looked down at him with a sudden pang of sorrow, wishing he could answer Hoffman’s question as the eyes rolled back in their sockets and the hand slid limply from his arm.

Then he heard the sirens… and knowing he had done what he could as a man, remembered that he was also an investigator and glanced around for the dropped briefcase.

Unnoticed in the confusion, it lay on the ground almost against his ankle.

Malisse grabbed its handle and got to his feet. Would anyone know it wasn’t his?

A look from a man in the crowd told him at least one among them did.

Malisse met his gaze for just an instant. Dark-haired, wearing a long, cloaklike outback coat, he prompted a sudden jolt of recognition… and Malisse thought he saw a similar awareness in the pair of eyes that had become locked with his own. Where else besides this place had Malisse seen him? Where and when had they seen each other?

The man was gone, vanished into the growing crowd, before he could begin to remember.

And then, aware he too must move quickly, Malisse turned and hurried off down the street with the briefcase.

Ted Bristow swore under his breath, trying to figure out what to do about the long Ford trailer truck — the words OAK LEDGE TRANSPORT written on its side, for whatever it was worth — that had jockeyed into the Super 8’s parking court about four minutes earlier, stopping lengthwise across his line of sight with its engine rumbling, completely blocking his view of the U-Haul and motel room he was supposed to keep under constant watch.

It would be way too easy for the man with the van to mark him as a spotter if he shifted his car around the McDonald’s lot and shot for an angle that would let him see behind the truck. Easier yet to mark him if he actually got out of the car and started nosing around. Which Bristow supposed left him caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

He didn’t like it one bit, and Noriko Cousins would like it a whole lot less. Because anything could happen while he was stuck blind… any damned thing at all.

A frown wrinkled Bristow’s forehead. He’d been on lookout in the parking lot for about three hours when Earl came across the road to buy himself breakfast, passing Bristow’s Grand Prix once as he’d approached the restaurant’s entrance, and then again as he’d carried his bagged Egg Mc-Something back to the motel room.

At the time Bristow hadn’t thought he’d been made, but you never knew for an absolute certainty. Almost three years with Sword, a six-spot with the FBI prior to that, he had plenty of experience with surveillance gigs. The thing was, your evil counterparts often as not had comparable experience from their side of a stakeout, and the smart and competent ones wouldn’t let on for an instant that they’d had their suspicions alerted.

In fact, Bristow thought, the really competent ones might just roll a truck up in front of their opposite numbers as convenient cover when they were going to pull a move. There were front and back exits to the motel court, and right now he couldn’t see either of them.

Bristow’s frown deepened. What the hell was he supposed to do here? The support cars he’d been expecting from Manhattan were stuck in a typical weekday morning logjam on the George Washington Bridge, and, guessing from their last radioed status report, he’d be lucky to see them pull up inside an hour, or realistically ninety minutes. Obviously, he couldn’t wait that long for an assist. Couldn’t wait period without taking some kind of action. But any action he took could blow an operation that had gained whole new degrees of urgency literally overnight, and he wasn’t about to make any impulsive decisions on that score… which brought his hurried thought process on the matter all the way back to square one. Or did it?

Bristow lifted his third coffee of the morning to his lips and hesitated before sipping. Its loathsomeness aside, there might be another reason to put it down. He couldn’t dance rings around the truck without becoming a spectacle. But he could step out for another cup, make a relatively inconspicuous attempt at updating the status of the man with the van on his way to and from the McDonald’s. If that wideass truck still presented a complete obstruction to him, so be it. It beat doing nothing.

Bristow lowered the coffee cup to the floor of the car, got out, turned toward the restaurant, and was about to take a kind of wide, ambling path toward its entrance when the longhauler’s engine suddenly throbbed into gear behind him.

Bristow froze mid-step. Five minutes that truck had sat there in the motel court. Nobody exiting to make a pitstop at the restaurant. And now it was simply leaving.

In his considered opinion that stunk to the fucking moon.

Casting off subtlety, Bristow whipped his head around, looked across the road as the truck began angling out of the lot—

And knew he’d been beat.

The U-Haul van was already gone.

They had arranged to meet at the south side of Washington Square Park on one of the benches facing the large dry fountain area and the arch, and that was where Tom Ricci sat watching him approach from between the wind-stripped trees to his right. There weren’t many people around on this cold January morning, just small, scattered groups of college kids from New York University, and some pigeons and squirrels looking for handout crumbs.

He waited as the man in the outback coat settled onto the bench at his side, then half turned his head toward him and waited some more in silence.

“Ricci,” the man said. “Suppose it was nicer weather last time we got together in the park.”

Ricci looked at him fully.

“You’ve got my name,” he said. “Give me one I can call you.”

The man sat there a moment with his lips slightly parted, his head canted to the side.

“Lathrop,” he said after a moment.

“That a first or last?”

“Yeah.”

Ricci saw a smile touch his lips.

“I’m not in the mood to play games,” he said. “Why the hell did you bring me here?”

“I told you in my e-mail to San Jose.”

“You told me you had something about one of our competitors had to do with laser research. Some information we might want for ourselves.”

“Thought I used the word plans instead of information,” the man said. “And wrote East Coast competitor.”

“Which one?”

“Is this for you or for UpLink?”

Ricci looked at him again.

“Which one?” he repeated.

A brief hesitation. Then a shrug.

“Kiran.”

Ricci nodded.

“Okay, Lathrop,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“You don’t really think that comes free, do you?”

“I think I need to know more about what you’re selling before I worry about value.”

Silence. Two squirrels with jet-black fur skittered down a tree trunk to the waterless fountain, one chasing the other. The first squirrel gained a slight lead, perched on its lip a second with its tail twitching as if to bait its pursuer, then leaped off along a flagstone path and up another tree as their capering resumed.

“This is the only place in the city they have black squirrels,” Lathrop said. “Always thought they hibernated in winter, but that was before I got to New York.”

Ricci’s eyes shifted back to Lathrop from where they had watched the squirrels climb in excited contest.

“Maybe things are different here,” he said.

“Or maybe I didn’t know as much as I figured I did about squirrels.”

Ricci smiled a little, waited.

Lathrop sat back with his hands in his pockets.

“I move around a lot,” he said. “Been doing that for a while now. Get a little bit going, make what I can of it, move again once the going looks to be heading toward the rocks.” He paused. “Always does sooner or later, you know.”

Ricci considered that.

“This later?” he said.

Lathrop faced him, dark eyes meeting his pale blue ones.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened to me about half an hour ago,” he said. “Lost an important briefcase.”

“This later?”

Lathrop breathed, exhaled.

“Zero hour,” he said. “Time to move or crash.”

Another pause. Ricci held Lathrop’s gaze.

“I need more,” he said.

“You’re getting to where it costs.”

“We can take care of that part between us,” Ricci said. “Come on. Talk about the part I need right now.”

Lathrop sat there for a very long moment, then finally nodded.

“There’s a weapon,” he began. “A serious weapon.”

Ricci phoned Glenn on his cellular from a coffee shop bubbling with students on West 4th Street, opposite the broad stone steps of NYU’s Tisch Hall.

“Ricci,” Glenn said, his semi-distracted voice that of someone glancing at a caller ID display. “I was just gonna contact you.”

“You out of the cop’s office yet?” Ricci paused, absorbing Glenn’s words. “Hold it, contact me about what?”

“Something’s gone down upstate,” Glenn said. Speaking quickly now. “Earl shook our guy at the motel before his support could get there.”

Ricci took a snatch of breath.

“Shook him in the U-Haul?”

“Yeah, looks like some kind of setup,” Glenn said. “Noriko got word over the phone and cut the meeting with Ruiz short—”

“You give him anything on Earl or Kiran?”

“No, not yet. We didn’t know how much to share, wanted to figure out what to do next—”

“Never mind figuring,” Ricci said. “Just hurry up and meet me at headquarters.”

“Wait a minute, I—”

“Headquarters, both of you,” Ricci interrupted. “Soon as you can.”

Then he pressed the END button on his touchpad, reached into his coat for his Palm computer, and set it on the table in front of him.

It took Ricci just minutes to read the van’s license-plate number off the digital photo he’d uploaded to his Palmtop, obtain a U-Haul nationwide 800 hotline from directory assistance, and, under the pretext that he was a renter who might have left his wallet inside the van, feed a customer service operator its plate number so she could search for the location where it had been picked up.

“The information’s right here on my screen, sir,” she said. “It’s an affiliate in Trenton, New Jersey.”

“You have directions from Manhattan?”

“I’m sorry, no, but there is an address, and a direct exchange—”

“Let me have it.”

The operator did, and Ricci called an instant after he hung up on her.

Three rings later, a man’s voice: “Hullo, Turnpike U-Haul.”

“I’m bringing a van back to you,” Ricci said. And again read off the plate number. “Want to confirm you’re the same center that leased it.”

The guy paused a second at the other end.

“You Mr. Donovan?” he said, sounding confused.

Ricci thought.

“A friend of his,” he said. “Why?”

“Well, I explained to him that it only comes and goes from our center for two days max,” the U-Haul rep said. His bewilderment seemed to deepen. “Also, he just had one driver listed on his application. Means nobody but Mr. Donovan should be getting behind the van’s wheel, let alone retur—”

“He can’t make it,” Ricci broke in. “Got to be me or nobody.”

“Look, something happens to you on the road, I’m screwed insurance-wise—”

“I told you my friend isn’t around,” Ricci said. “Now you want the damn thing back or not?”

The guy paused a beat, issued a resigned sigh

“You the same fella who drove Donovan over yesterday?”

“No, how come?”

“Because I’m trying to save you some time,” he said. “He — your pal who isn’t around, that is — mentioned that they went past the Raja Petrochemical plant coming here, saw those big acid gas storage tanks out back… which tells me they must’ve got lost off the Turnpike ramp, driven out of their way trying to find my lot.”

Ricci’s hand tightened on the phone.

“You better tell me how to get to you,” he said.

Earl had driven the U-Haul down I-87 almost to where it ran into the toll plaza when he passed a sign that said one of those public rest stops was coming up on his left.

It would be a gem of a place to give Zaheer — who hadn’t spoken a word from over in the passenger seat since they split the Super 8—his hard jolt of reality.

He rolled on for a quarter mile, saw the entrance to the stop, and grooved the van toward the access lane.

Zaheer looked at him, suddenly seemed to remember he had a tongue that worked.

“Where are you going?”

“Gentleman’s room.” Earl nodded at the visitors’ building that had come into view. “We’ve got a long stretch of road ahead to our exit.”

Zaheer’s expression was incredulous.

“You’ve lost your senses,” he said. “It was you who feared that a watch had been placed on the motel. We cannot pull over now.”

Earl shrugged. That was almost a joke, Zaheer calling him screwy. Here was somebody who was heading off to die as some kind of martyr, looking for paradise on the other side of a cloud that would turn everyone for hundreds of miles around into a popped, runny blister. Somebody who had to damn well know those biohazard suits they’d been given wouldn’t offer squat for protection when the laser cannon in back zapped Raja’s HF tanks… that nothing would be able to shield them, not at ground zero.

A real fucking hoot, all right, his fellow road warrior Zaheer. He really believed the payment he’d brought from Hasul would be worth something in the world beyond.

“There was a watch, we beat it,” Earl said now. “And far as stopping, that’s Mother Nature’s call, not mine.”

Before Zaheer could issue another squeak of protest, Earl swung into the deserted parking area outside the redbrick visitors’ house and cut the van’s motor, leaving the keys in the ignition.

“You waiting out here?” he said.

Zaheer gave a curt, silent nod of displeasure.

Shrugging, Earl climbed out of the van, entered the unoccupied visitors’ station, and pushed through the men’s room door.

In a locked toilet stall, he took a minute or two to urinate — no sense making himself a liar—and then zipped up and transferred his Sig-Sauer compact nine-mil from its peekaboo holster under his pant leg to his coat pocket, where he’d keep his hand comfortably around its grip and be able to bring it out fast and easy the minute he got back to the van.

Leaving the bathroom, Earl realized the only thing he hadn’t remembered to do was flush after himself… but then you couldn’t cover everything when you were in a hurry.

As Earl exited the visitors’ station, hands in his coat pockets, Zaheer sat with the fingers of his right hand wrapped around the butt of a Zastava Model 70, the Russian police pistol tucked in the space between the U-Haul’s passenger seat and door. He did not trust the kaffir for an instant, and would be prepared should he attempt any betrayal. Should no such attempt be made, Zaheer would simply release his hold on the little pocket automatic and continue with the mission as planned.

Either way, he was satisfied he’d covered every possibility.

Now Earl approached the van, took one hand out of his coat, reached out to open the driver’s door.

“Now that was a blessed relief,” he said the moment it swung wide.

Zaheer saw the gun appear in Earl’s other hand at the same instant, faster than he would have anticipated.

He brought up his Zastava without hesitation, pulling the trigger even as Earl fired his weapon, both barrels crashing and spitting their loads.

His face contorted, Earl staggered backward, clutched his chest, and went tumbling into the brown grass in front of the building.

Zaheer dropped his gun onto his seat with a grimace, then, fiery pain spreading up the left side of his abdomen. He must hurry now to carry out what fate had designed for him.

Shoving himself into the driver’s seat, he simultaneously keyed the ignition and slammed the door shut. Then he footed the accelerator, tearing out of the visitors’ stop and back onto the Thruway as quickly as he could manage.

The motorcycles darted onto the Jersey Turnpike from the I-95 turnoff, an even half dozen of them weaving through heavy four-wheeled traffic as it eked southward from the bottlenecked George Washington Bridge. Lightweight, nimble, slender, and speedy, they were virtually the same bikes UpLink had designed for the Defense Department to equip the 75th Rangers for rapid deployment and attack, providing maneuverability where there was no real room to maneuver.

Ricci bent over the handlebars of his cycle, his eyes scouring the road from behind the visor of his molded speed helmet, looking for any sign of the U-Haul’s orange-and-blue markings. Astride the cycle to his right in a narrow channel between lanes of trucks and cars, Derek Glenn was doing the same, as were the four other Sword ops in black biker jackets who had buzzed hornetlike from the Soho req lot.

“You see anything?” Glenn said into his wireless hands-free.

“No,” Ricci said. He shot around a station wagon plastered with old, sun-bleached New Jersey Nets bumper stickers: RIDE THE A-TRAIN TO THE RIM! KENYON MARTIN — NEVER SATISFIED! “Not a goddamned thing.”

They rode on, juicing their engines, dodging and shimmying between the other vehicles on the ’pike. Factory complexes ranged to the left and right of dented metal safety rails, speed blurring their boxy geometries at the corners of the riders’ vision. They didn’t know if the van was out front or behind them, though behind would be far better, meaning they would probably beat it to the chemical plant. Out front meant they needed to make up a lead, and an undetermined one. The van could be a mile ahead or five, and they wouldn’t know until they saw it. The van could be parked outside those tanks filled with hydrofluoric acid, seconds away from puncturing them with a high-intensity laser beam at a distance of fifty or a hundred yards. It could be an eye-blink, a heartbeat, from ending any conjecture about its whereabouts, unleashing a noxious windborne cloud that would envelop every man, woman, and child in every vehicle on the road, snuffing their lives out like a corrosive fist reaching from the arm of the Grim Reaper himself.

Ricci came up on an SUV’s rear windshield, slid sideways. Slipped behind the wide rump of a Greyhound passenger bus, cut sharply around it. He heard a rubber-on-blacktop screech, didn’t look back, glad whatever accident was gumming things up at the bridge had seemingly preoccupied the smokies and local cops, unable to worry too much about them anyway. Instead he raced on hard, gripping his bars, the soles of his boots pressed against his footpegs—

Then Glenn in the hands-free again. “Ricci, hey… look!”

Ricci glanced over at him, saw him gesturing, a high forward sweep of his right arm.

He followed its movement as he bumped over a pothole, saw the orange and blue. A van? He thought so. It was maybe an eighth of a mile off, small in his vision, too small for Ricci to positively verify it was the van. But it was close to the exit that led to Raja Petro, and he didn’t imagine for an instant that was coincidence.

Ricci opened his throttle and charged ahead, thinking he would at least have a chance to take his stab.

Weak from loss of blood, his shirt red and tacky where Earl’s bullet had penetrated just above his waist, Zaheer leaned over the steering wheel as he neared the turnpike exit, crawling along, moving through the dense metro-area traffic at a snail’s pace. He had put the full thrust of his will into reaching his objective, tunneled his concentration toward the normally automatic act of driving, and he could see that he was almost there, almost…

Then a sound behind him. Getting louder. At first its significance didn’t register. Zaheer knew he was dying from the gunshot wound, and just as the glorious task that lay ahead had summoned whatever was left of his fleshly powers, he had summoned what remained of his inner life force to answer the call. Everything outside had been pushed from his thoughts as extraneous, a waste of precious strength. But perhaps he had been wrong.

Perhaps…

There had been the one in the car at the motel.

The one Earl had thought might be a watcher.

Zaheer listened again. Or rather focused on what he could not do anything but hear. That sound. No… sounds. The combined drone of rapidly accelerating engines. Revving fast in slow traffic. How could the two be reconciled?

Zaheer pulled his mind from the tunnel around it long enough to grasp what was happening, looked into his sideview mirror, and saw the motorcycles swarming up from behind.

The curve of the exit ramp within eyeshot, Zaheer slapped his hand on the wheel, blasting the cars ahead of him with his horn.

He was determined to reach the exit ramp before the infidels could overtake him.

Three-quarters of an hour late for her sales-clerk job at the Rariton Mall’s Fashion Bee, a job she’d landed just a week ago in the tightest of employment markets, Johanna Hearns was already about to come apart behind the wheel over being stuck in traffic, pound the dash and scream like a madwoman in a fit of frustration, when the idiotic driver of the U-Haul behind her started in with his horn, signaling he wanted to get off at the exit a car or two up ahead of her.

Johanna shook her head, spewing a string of epithets that would have astonished her husband with their inventiveness — and he thought he knew them all, hardy-fucking-har. What did Chief Dirty Ballsucker in the van think? That he was the only one in a hurry? That she was deliberately holding him up because she liked sitting bumper-to-bumper breathing in the smell of exhaust fumes and Jersey swamp air? Or that maybe she just couldn’t get enough of Imus in the Morning on her car radio? And while she was making with the relevant questions, here was another: that honking nut job aside, where the fuck were the cops when you needed them?

Johanna did some Lamaze to keep her cool, a holdover from courses she’d taken when her youngest was born. Mr. U-Haul was in such a rush to get to charming Trenton, she’d get her own flashers going, hope somebody in the left lane was decent enough to hang back so she could shift into it, and let him go on his merry way.

Stay cool, stay cool, Johanna thought, and slapped on her signal.

She only hoped the van driver choked on his next meal.

“That’s our van,” Ricci said over the radio channel linking his bike team. “I see the plate number.”

“Son of a bitch.” This over the radio from Cole, one of the ops behind Ricci. “He’s riding his horn to the ramp, getting those people up ahead to move.”

Ricci zigzagged between lanes.

“Squeeze him,” he said, and shot forward.

The last of the vehicles in front of him finally out of his way, Zaheer had almost reached the exit ramp when the attack bikes began to catch up. He checked his side-views, saw several of them closing in on both sides from the rear, the two in the lead nearly at his flanks.

Gunning his engine, he took a jarring turn onto the 25 mph ramp at double the permitted speed.

Gaining, gaining, gaining.

Ricci fisted a surge of gas into his cycle’s engine, took the exit ramp between the left side of the U-Haul and the concrete barrier to his left, roping along on the narrow shoulder.

He pulled even with the driver’s window, was able to snatch a glance inside.

The dark-suit at the wheel looked back at him — and in his brief distraction started slewing from side to side on the ramp.

Ricci dropped back an instant before the van’s flank would have run him into the barricade, saw Glenn do the same as the U-Haul veered to the right. Too close behind Glenn, one of the other riders lost control of his bike and took a vaulting jump over the barricade. The cycle flipped over sideways, hurling its rider from his banana seat to whatever was below the ramp.

Ricci heard his screaming begin over the wireless, heard it peak, then heard it abruptly stop.

“God almighty.” Glenn’s shocked voice in his ear now. “God almighty.”

“Cole,” Ricci said. “You hear me?”

“Yeah. That was Margolis. Shit, I think he—”

“Don’t think, just pull off and stay with him. The rest of you follow me.”

Ricci’s temples pounded. For a millisecond he was back in Earthglow, Nichols dying in his arms, turned into a sack of blood by the Wildcat. Ricci had felt something turn inside him. Grinding like a great stone wheel. I’m here with you, he’d told the kid. Be easy.

A millisecond.

It never ended.

Ricci saw the van pulling off the ramp ahead of him, and followed.

Grappling with the steering wheel at the bottom of the ramp, trying to keep it from wrenching out of his hands, Zaheer suddenly tasted blood. Coppery blood in his mouth, coming up from deep inside his body. There was a moment of greater weakness, his consciousness fading to gray.

Then he remembered the mission, the glory, and summoned himself again.

Al-hamdu lillahi, he mouthed silently. Repeatedly. Al-hamdu lillahi.

Feeling God guide his hand, Zaheer swung off the ramp, and as his eyes cleared, realized he’d turned the wrong way onto the boulevard into which it fed and was shooting into oncoming traffic.

The bikes were pouring off the exit ramp behind the van when it took its wide, erratic swing against the rush of traffic, then suddenly went screeching around in a U-turn.

Ricci heard a cacophonous outburst of horns as the stream of cars and trucks skidded and parted, saw two cars sideswipe while unsuccessfully veering to avoid a collision. There were screeches, a sickening crash, and then the van looped back in the right direction, roaring toward Ricci and the others, forcing them to scatter out of its way as it plunged ahead through two red lights and then barreled down a side street.

Zaheer recalled the turns he’d made before, recognized the factories and corporate signs.

With the motorcycles behind him still, Zaheer pushed his foot against the accelerator, believing he would now have an advantage… if only an advantage of a few minutes. He had taken this route before — would the same be true for them?

A handful of minutes, yes. All he would need was minutes to hold them off. Minutes, and he could trigger the Dragonfly cannon.

Zaheer barreled down a street to his left, then took a right, a second right, another left, and at last saw Raja’s employee lot ahead. The evil droning song of the motorcycles had briefly grown fainter at his rear as he’d left the turnpike, but he could hear it growing louder again, and knew he would have no chance to reach the intersection with the abandoned gas station.

It did not matter.

Allah would give him what he needed.

As he sped up to the parking area’s entrance, he swung the U-Haul in past the factory workers’ cars to the chain-link fence dividing the outdoor lot from the HF storage area.

And then they were there before him, the tank clusters with their serpentine pipelines.

Zaheer spun the van around in a full circle, backed up to the fence, slammed his brakes.

Through his windshield, he could see the motorbikes turning into the lot. A single uniformed security guard jogged toward him from the factory to his right — fat, unsuspecting, that one posed the least threat of all.

Shifting the van into PARK, Zaheer started to reach for the Zastava pistol he’d stored in the glove box, but then changed his mind, choosing instead the MP5K submachine gun under his seat.

“Yo, mister!” the guard yelled, trotting up to the driver’s side of the van. “That’s a restricted area, can’t you read the signs?”

Able to hear him shouting through his window, Zaheer noticed he did not have a hand anywhere near his gun.

Fat. Complacent. They would not learn their lessons.

The guard had heard the buzzing of the cycles now. He turned his head briefly toward the parking area’s entrance, saw the motorcycles, looked back at Zaheer again.

“What the hell?” he said. “What the hell is this?”

Zaheer had no time to waste lowering his window — the cycles were approaching. He raised the MP5 and fired two three-round bursts directly through it into the guard’s face, wiping him from his sight.

Then, heedless of the shattered window glass that had blown over him in slivery piles, he slung the submachine gun over his shoulder, clambered back into the cargo section, threw himself on his stomach, and turned the cannon’s turretlike beam director toward the tanks.

Cutting across the lot in a straight line, the bikes broke formation as they reached the front of the stopped van, Ricci and Glenn swooping to the left, the two other remaining Sword ops taking its right flank.

Ricci hooked his bike around toward the rear section and had time enough to see that the cargo hatch was already raised, opened from within, before fans of gunfire began pouring out of it. He wrenched his handlebars, tailing away from the van to avoid the volleys, but one of the ops on its other side was slower by a hair to react. Bullets cut into him and he went into a tailspin, spilling from his seat as his attack cycle crashed into the divider fence.

Enough, Ricci thought. No more.

He halted the bike at the side of the van, booted down its kickstand, and lunged off his seat, crouching low, pulling his variable-velocity snubnose automatic from under his leather jacket, switching the weapon to its lethal setting. Beside him, another motorbike also braked to a stop.

“Glenn?”

“Yeah.”

“Count of three, we get around back, open fire.”

“With you.”

“One, two—”

“Ricci.”

“What?”

“Check it out.”

“Check wha—”

“Look.” Pointing.

Ricci looked. And realized what Glenn had been trying to get him to notice.

The firing from the rear of the van had stopped, and a submachine gun… an MP5, Ricci thought… lay on the ground behind its back bumper, its black grip glistening wet with blood.

Ricci turned to Glenn, made eye contact with him through his visor, nodded in silent communication.

Slowly, guardedly, their weapons at the ready, they edged along the side of the van with their backs flat against it, then hooked around to the open cargo section.

The driver lay sprawled over what looked like a small cannon turret on a mount the size of a small valise. He was face down on his belly, a pool of crimson underneath him, crimson all over the turret, all over the hand hanging limply from the open bay door. Mounted inside the cargo section were three readout and control panels, their flatscreen displays blank.

Ricci looked at Glenn.

Glenn looked at Ricci.

“Done,” Glenn said.

And they both lowered their weapons to their sides.

EIGHT

“Guess it ain’t too tough to figure why I’m here,” John Earl said, trying hard to stay on his feet a little longer.

Hasul Benazir looked at Earl from behind his desk at the Kiran office.

“Our deal,” he said.

Earl nodded.

“Our deal,” he affirmed. “Fifty grand up front, fifty on completion—”

“Succeed or fail,” Benazir said.

Earl nodded again, hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat. As always the office was silent around him except for the sounds of pumped and filtered water in the octopus tank in the wall.

He waited. Hard, hard as hell, keeping his feet under him… though it didn’t help that Zaheer’s bullet was still floating around in the red muck between his ribs, probably just about to give his heart a last cold kiss.

Hush baby, you hush.

Yeah, Earl thought, the old fire-engine-red truck he’d driven for so long would be ditching off the highway of life any time now. He had stuffed the hole in his chest with fistfuls of gauze more than once, wrapped himself around with fresh bandage tape before showing up at the office, but all that had done was soak up the blood under his shirt and coat — well, the coat, anyway — and keep it from gushing out of him like water from a bathtub spout.

Now Benazir rose, came around the desk, stood in front of Earl.

“The money will be yours without condition,” he said. “I would, however, wish to know how you managed to escape what has just begun to trickle its way into the news. Those men on motorcycles…” Benazir shrugged, let the sentence trail. “How?” he said.

Earl remained very still. If he took even a single step forward, backward, or sideways, he figured it would leave him flat on the floor. Of course, it wasn’t his feet he had to be able to move.

“Well,” he said, and pulled his Sig nine from his pocket, “it went kind of like this.”

Benazir’s face barely showed any reaction. After a few seconds he blinked slowly, let his eyes stay shut for another span of seconds, and released a long breath as he opened them.

“You never did think you’d have to pay up the balance, did you?” Earl said. “Never thought I’d be around to ask for it.”

Hasul shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I never did.”

Earl looked at him with his gun between them, tightened his lips to hold back a cough. No sense messing the carpet with what would come out of him.

He motioned toward the aquarium with the pistol.

“Gonna give you a choice, Hasul,” he said. “You can let your poisonous friend Legs give you a tickle or you can deal with my friend Siggy here. Either way, it ought to be quick.”

Benazir remained nearly expressionless, staring at him with his dark brown eyes.

At length he nodded, strode toward the tank, removed the wood-veneer feeder panel from the wall above it, and set it down on the floor.

“I believe I knew,” he said softly, and turned his head to look at Earl as he rolled up his shirt sleeve.

Earl grunted.

“Kinda believe you did, too,” he said. He raised the gun a notch higher, his finger around its trigger. “Now go on, Hasul. Say hi to Legs for me… and I promise, I’ll see you by-and-by.”

Hasul stared at him another moment, gave him a nod, and then turned and slipped his hand into the aquarium.

Darting from its habitat cave, the octopus was quick to wrap its venomous tentacles around him.

The vid-conference between Megan Breen in San Jose and Noriko Cousins and Tom Ricci in New York took place almost immediately after the federal agents left Noriko’s office.

It was no coincidence that their visit to Sword-Manhattan, and the reasons for it, were the main subjects of discussion.

“It boggles me that you let this happen,” Megan was telling Noriko. “A threat of the magnitude you uncovered… how could you not immediately report it to the authorities? The list of protocols you violated is so long, I can only begin to list them from memory. NYPD, the FBI, Homeland Security — all of them should have been informed.” She paused, shook her head. “This was a Code Red national-security emergency. Millions could have died—”

“But they didn’t die, and the reason they didn’t is because we didn’t wait to move,” Noriko said. Her lips tightened. “All it cost was the lives of two of my men.”

Megan looked at her from across the country.

“I’m not questioning the actions you took,” she said. “It’s the notifications you should have — and could have — made when they were taken.”

Noriko stared at the video screen from her chair at the conference table, glanced over at Ricci, glanced back at the screen. Started to say something, then stopped. And then stared at the screen some more.

“I had reasons that I can’t share,” she said simply.

Megan looked at her.

“Reasons,” she repeated.

Noriko gave a nod.

“Reasons,” Megan repeated a second time, incredulous. “Noriko, listen to what I’m saying—”

“She can hear you,” Ricci said abruptly. “You want to put this on somebody, put it on me.”

Megan shook her head.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“My source gave me his tip on the condition that we handle everything ourselves,” Ricci said. “He wanted time to get himself out of the city before it went into lockdown, and I told him he could have it. Better that than have him leave without talking.”

There was a prolonged silence. Megan inhaled, exhaled.

“This mysterious source you’ve mentioned… you could have told him whatever you wanted for his information,” she said. “Do you really think letting him have things his way was worth putting UpLink under fire? Our reputation, our contacts… were they worth jeopardizing for him?”

Ricci looked at her with his icy blue eyes and merely shrugged.

“No,” he said. “They were for my promise.”

“Yes, sir, may I help you?” the salesman said from behind his counter.

Malisse nodded.

“The cocobolo rosewood humidor,” he said. “The one in your window, with the beveled glass lid…”

“I know which you mean,” said the salesman, looking sharply down his nose at Malisse. “It is a one-of-a-kind.”

Malisse tugged at his earlobe.

“I see,” he said. “Well, I’d noticed it earlier, and was wondering about its price”

The salesman looked at him, and quoted a dollar amount with what appeared to be delighted scorn.

Malisse tried not to choke on the exorbitant figure. With his flight back to Antwerp booked for the morning, he had returned to the tobacconist’s on a whim… and a foolish whim it had been to think he could afford the cigar case.

Indeed, Malisse thought, he was probably undeserving of it. Certainly undeserving. He had failed to determine anything conclusive about the sapphires. He had not learned whether they were authentic or fakes. He knew nothing more than before about their origins, or the identity of the scoundrel in the outback coat who had doubtless been set to meet the late, unfortunate Hoffman before his fall. He had done nothing, nothing of consequence in New York City but sample its sweets and return a briefcase full of money to Hoffman the middleman’s bereaved widow.

Yes, Rance Lembock would offer to pay him despite his disappointment. And no, Malisse would accept nothing but expense money from the old survivor of genocide. How could he presume to justify the purchase of the humidor to himself?

“Ah, sir… if you don’t mind?”

Malisse looked at the salesman, plucked from his reverie.

“Don’t mind what?” he said.

“I have other customers waiting,” the salesman said with a wave toward some presumably invisible person at a counter where Malisse had thought himself standing alone. “So unless there’s something more—”

Malisse snapped up his hand, a finger pointing skyward.

“Yes, my friend,” he said. “Yes there is! Bring me the humidor, a carton of Davidoffs to fill it… and have the whole package gift wrapped quickly, as I have a plane awaiting to carry me away from this cold city.”

The salesman’s eyebrows arched. His scorn transformed to surprise, he turned to bring the valuable goods.

Malisse watched him, guiltless about the decision that had struck him like a bolt out of the blue.

Sometimes, he thought, a man must not be rewarded only for success.

Sometimes just trying one’s best was worth a gift.

The seven dead bodies had been lined one beside the other on their backs, naked, stripped of their dog tags, their Indian army uniforms buried deep under the snow elsewhere on the mountainside.

Siphoned of emotion, Yousaf looked down at them. It was too late to second guess himself, yet he knew his decision not to radio out a message to his buyers had in all probability cost them their lives… and crushed his hopes of ending this night as a very rich man. While the border patrol uniforms the men had worn — and identification they’d carried — had gotten them past the Indians on the other side of the Line of Command, it had not stopped them from being ambushed by Ahmad’s scouts here on the mountain pass.

Cold and pale under the moonlight, they might have looked like their own ghosts had it not been for the single, red, seeping bullet hole Yousaf could see in the middle of each man’s forehead.

As far as he knew, bloodless spirits did not bear the marks of a gunpoint execution.

He turned toward one of the LeT scouts that had led him to the bodies, trying to maintain his presence of mind. “Tell me again when these whoresons were caught.”

The scout looked at him.

“Two hours ago,” he said, and gestured toward a nearby rock overhang. “We spotted them earlier. Came up the other side of the mountain and took them.”

“And you say it appears they had been waiting here for some time?”

“There are signs, yes.”

Silence. Several paces away, just out of earshot, a Bakarwal guide waited near his mule, holding the beast’s rope in his hand as it snorted steam into the icy night air.

Yousaf glanced over at him and thought a moment. The prospect of wealth might be lost to him, at least for now. But there was still more of the game to play, another deception he must turn to assure the scout’s suspicion did not instead turn his way.

“The nomads,” he said in a lowered voice. “It can only be that they betrayed us. Conspired with these troops so we’d be caught before making our rendezvous across the border.”

The scout continued to eye him.

“That might be easy for me to believe,” he said. “India’s government and military generals would pay a high price for the Dragonfly cannon.”

Yousaf nodded.

“Enough of a fortune to satiate even a Bakarwal’s greedy soul,” he said. “My intelligence is that only two complete units have been produced. That the other remains with our brothers in Americ—”

Yousaf became aware of someone stealing up behind him far too late to avoid the arm that had suddenly locked around his throat — and the cold press of a blade across it.

A harsh voice in his ear: “Judge no one else’s soul. Not when it was you who sent one of your own operatives to his death in the wastes between here and Chikar.”

Yousaf tried to shake his head in denial, felt the knife press more tightly against his throat, and stopped.

The scout in front of him, meanwhile, had taken several long steps forward.

“Did you think Ahmad would not have you watched from the beginning, little pig?” he said. “That he would not have eyes among the men in your convoy? A voice to inform him that you’d started across the mountains with another? Or can it be you’ve already forgotten your good companion Khalid?”

Yousaf swallowed silently and the steel edge of the blade met his Adam’s apple.

“Cast blame wherever you will, it was you who arranged for your mule train to encounter these troops… if actual troops they are,” the scout said to him, bringing his face close. “I suspect them to be something else. Khalistani fighters disguised as soldiers. Or Nagas. Or Punjabi rebels.” The scout’s face came still closer. “Brothers sometimes compete most fiercely, do they not? And there has been much competition for the weapon among our professed brethren in India.”

Yousaf swallowed again. The blade broke skin.

“Let me speak to Ahmad,” he grated in desperation. “I can prove you’re wrong—”

“Ahmad,” the scout repeated. A mocking grin had spread across his face. “Tell me, little pig… how can you be sure that my men and I are loyal to Ahmad? That we do not have our own buyers for the cannon? What makes you so certain of its destination — its intended targets — in a world of constant uncertainty?”

Yousaf looked at him, his mouth forming a circular grimace of surprise.

It had suddenly dawned on him that he had no answers. No answers to any of the scout’s questions. No answers to his own. No answers to anything at all.

Nothing, indeed, to take from the world but uncertainty as the scout looked past him at whoever had come up from behind, and made a slicing gesture with his hand, and the knife sliced deeply, deeply into his throat.