Where she had fired into the floor the floor no longer existed. Denice could look straight down into the room beneath them, through a hole some half a meter wide.

In the room beneath a man lay sprawled flat on his back, looking up toward the ceiling, a laser rifle clutched in his right hand. She could not tell how badly injured he was, or if he was even conscious; but he was still alive, twitching and moaning and bleeding quite impressively.

Shattered pieces of the floor had cut Denice's legs in half a dozen places, and now the room sprinklers cut in, dousing the fire quickly, washing the blood down her thighs and calves.

Two weeks later, in Canberra, they did not expect to find anything.

Nonetheless they checked.

Denice started at the south end of the hall, carrying a small device that spat deep radar pulses at the walls, looking for odd signatures in the walls-hollow places, spots with unusual density. She ignored the PKF Elite, as the Elite ignored her. Ichabod started up at the north end around the speaker's platform, and worked south.

They met in the middle of the hall about an hour later, an hour before Ripper was due to come down to speak, and sat down together facing one another across the center aisle.

"The balcony area gets closed off?"

The bearded black features bobbed up and down. "Yeah. That shouldn't be a problem. I think we tell hotel security we're taking him down the south maglevs, and then use the north maglevs. We bring him in through the east door. That gives us the smaller part of the lobby to walk through; he won't be exposed to the street for as long as if we go through the main lobby."

Denice nodded. "Works for me."

"Okay. I think we have about ten minutes free. We need to talk."

"I know."

"How are you today?"

Denice looked straight at him. "Could be better, could be worse. I woke up last Tuesday morning feeling-" Denice paused."Bad. Aching. I'm not sure why. That was five days ago, and it's lingered.

Today I am, largely, clear and centered. How are you?"

"I'm having problems."

Denice nodded, waited.

Martin sighed. "Personal. You know Terry and I broke up."

"Shawmac? I knew you were seeing him."

Ichabod Martin said, "Things have not been good between us for a long time. Half a year, maybe. But we're both stubborn men and neither of us wanted to give up. Past couple of months-you know you tear each other up toward the end, so that it's easier to let go?"

"Is that how it's done?"

Ichabod shrugged. "Different strokes, I suppose. So anyway, last night we talked for about an hour and decided not to see one another again."

"I am sorry."

"I don't mention it for the sympathy. But I'm not focused. I'm not going to be focused, not today. I talked to John and Bruce already. I haven't mentioned it to Councilor Ripper, and I'm not going to."

"I'll cover your back where I can."

"Appreciate it." Denice waited for what she knew was coming. Martin took a deep breath and said, "How long have you been sleeping with the Councilor?"

"About three months." Denice paused. "I thought you knew, until what happened in Portugal. The way you behaved afterward-that was when I realized you didn't."

Martin shook his head. "No. Perhaps I should have, but I sometimes don't see things other people might.

The Councilor's always had his personal bodyguard stay in the room with him while he slept; but the Councilor's real straight, and his bodyguards in the past have always been men. When you started with us I worried about this, but I thought the Councilor was smart enough to refrain." He paused. "This disturbs me a lot. It's unprofessional behavior on your part, I don't think I have to tell you that."

"You don't. I know it."

Martin nodded, accepting it. "I'm more upset with him. Employers shouldn't sleep with their employees.

It's bad policy. That he chose to-well, I'm going to speak to him about it. I've been dropping things lately-so have you-and it's left the Councilor tense enough that I've been reluctant to broach this subject with him. But I think I'm going to have to. He should have told me; it's relevant to my job. If he wishes to sleep with you, fine, but you need to cease working for him as a bodyguard."

A flicker of real anger touched Denice. "I don't think you're qualified to make that judgment."

"The Councilorwill make the judgment, of course. Fortunately it's not my call. But I don't think you can be objective when the man you're protecting is also the man you're sleeping with. Do you?"

"I don't know."

"I don't think so. And I'm going to tell him so when this trip is done."

The anger faded. Denice said, "Thank you for the warning."

"You're welcome. Back upstairs?"

"Yeah."

On the way up, Denice said, "I hope things work out for you."

Ichabod nodded slowly. "I hope the same for you. The Councilor is a very complex man."

"Trust me. I know."

The speech went well. Denice barely listened to it; she stood at the east entrance, next to the young PKF Elite, and watched the crowd.

A small point immediately between her eyes, about a centimeter in, throbbed as though a white-hot iron spike had been driven in there.

She ignored it and watched the crowd burn.

The flames started at their fingertips, bright crawling sheaths of blue. They lit up like neonlaser, made tracings of the nerve networks within the individuals she watched. The glowing blue strengthened as it flowed up toward their skulls, where it blossomed into something improbably reminiscent of the halo of a saint.

She did not hear the speech end, barely noticed Ripper when he pa.s.sed by her on the way out of the hall. The genuine anger in his voice when he snapped,"Wake up, " on his way by penetrated. She started after him, but he was already fifteen paces ahead of her, out in the east lobby.

If anyone had been waiting for him, Ripper would have died.

Up in the hotel room he exploded. "d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, Daimara, you shouldn't bedropping things like this. I know you're better than this. In the last two months I haven't been able to depend on you, I haven't been able to depend on Ichabod, and I cannottravel without both of you! If I can't travel, I can't get elected.

If I travel without complete faith in both of you-and right now I don't have that-I can't get up in front of a crowd without wondering if I'm going to have my f.u.c.king head blown off by some freaking Johnny Reb wannabe before I'm done speaking, and that tends to detract ever so slightly from my effectiveness as a speaker."

Denice nodded. "I know. It's just-" She made a helpless gesture. "Idon't know. There's something wrong and I'm not sure what it is."

Ripper looked directly at her. "Is it us?"

"No." Her voice softened. "No. I love you, Dougla.s.s. You know that."

"That's not what I'm asking. Is your relationship with me making it impossible for you to do your job?"

Denice shook her head. "No."

"What, then?"

"I don'tknow. I think maybe I'm worried about my friend Jimmy."

Ripper blinked. "What?"

"My friend Jimmy Ramirez," Denice said reluctantly. "I think Jimmy is getting involved with the Johnny Rebs. I'm not sure what to do about it."

Ripper started to sit down on the bed, thought better of it, and dropped down on the sofa near the window. He sat rubbing his temples. "Okay. Let's do a deal. I need you in j.a.pan. I need Ichabod in j.a.pan, and I'm going to talk to him separately." He ceased rubbing his temples, looked up at Denice.

"For you, let's do this. When we get back to New York we'll pull all of the Oversite Committee reports, everything in the database. If we're missing anything at all on the Reb buildup, no matter how trivial, we'll requisition it. We'll find out to what extent, if any, your friend is involved in the Rebs. If he's involved we'll file a Notice of Research under his name and put him on the payroll. When the PKF finally does crack them open-whenever the h.e.l.l that ends up being," Ripper muttered, slightly distracted, "he'll have been protected from the effects of his stupidity. Fair enough?"

"Okay. Fair enough."

Ripper simply looked at her without expression. "Are you going to be on top of things for the rest of this trip?"

"I'll do my best, Dougla.s.s."

He nodded wearily. "Okay. Get dressed, we're having dinner with Randall Cristofer and President Greenwood in an hour, and Cristofer's going to want to negotiate at dinner. Aside from the fact that Cristofer owns him I don't know much about Greenwood, but Cristofer himself is a shark and I need to be able to concentrate on him, andnothing else."

Denice thought back over the personnel briefing she'd been given for Australia. "Randall Cristofer's one of the primary sources of funds for Australia, isn't he?"

Ripper snorted. "Heis my Australian organization, the whole d.a.m.n thing. I have nothing else to speak of on this whole slithy d.a.m.n continent. At one point I approached a local politician about working with me, just for redundancy; Cristofer found out, got in touch with the man, and told him that if he moved forward with me he'd end up like Harold Holt."

"Say again?"

"Shark food. Relatively famous incident in Aussie politics; one of their Prime Ministers, back when they were a part of the old British Commonwealth, went swimming one day and sharks ate him."

Denice smiled, tentatively. "I see."

Ripper nodded. "Cristofer wasn't joking. Are we done?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"It's all right. Get Ichabod. I need to talk to him too, and it might as well be now."

Denice worked through the briefing materials for j.a.pan on the semiballistic. j.a.pan was a swing vote; Ripper and Sanford Mtumka, Ripper's only real opposition, were running neck and neck in j.a.panese polls. Like Mexico and PanAfrica, and unlike most other countries in the Unification, j.a.pan was a winner-take-all-country; a win of one percent in the general j.a.panese election translated into a one hundred percent win of j.a.panese electoral votes.

Denice wondered, briefly, who had written the briefing: They are in many ways a schizophrenic people. They have a long tradition of militarism, stretching back to the conflict between the Imperial court at Kyoto and the provincial warlords, nearly a thousand years ago. The warlords won that conflict, and set the pattern for an entrenched j.a.panese militarism that lasted until the end of World War II in 1945, when the United States of America dropped a pair of thermonuclear warheads on the j.a.panese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

During the Unification War, j.a.pan, along with much of Asia except China, chose to fight. In some ways they were not damaged so badly as the United States-they did not suffer the city-to-city fighting that was the hallmark of the Unification conquest of the United States-and in some ways they suffered worse: in the summer of '18 the Peace Keeping Force exploded fourteen thermonuclear warheads over j.a.panese territory.

Nearly six decades later this is a trauma from which the j.a.panese have never truly recovered.

Many Americans think that New York City was bombed by the Unification; this is largely untrue.

Tactical thermonuclear warheadswereused, during both the Unification and the Troubles; but the yields were quite low. j.a.pan was struck with multimegaton warheads: that j.a.pan is the only country in history to have had thermonuclear weapons used upon it -not once b.u.t.twice-has left them with a deep aversion to violence.

Today, the j.a.panese remain a significantly racist people. This is a relevant factor: Ripper, as a Caucasian American, a citizen of the country that once defeated j.a.pan in war,' is accorded a significantly greater degree of respect than is, for example, Sanford Mtumka, a black man.

Zhao Pen has an insignificant percentage of the j.a.panese vote, and is not expected to get more under any likely scenario.

Australia was bad; j.a.pan was worse.

There were no a.s.sa.s.sination attempts in j.a.pan. A pair of Red Army ideologs were arrested by the PKF on general suspicion in the week before Ripper's arrival, but nothing came of it. Nonetheless there were holes in security, gaps in preparedness, and Ripper noticed them. His relationship with Denice and Ichabod alike degenerated to business pure and simple.

Australia had been a two-day affair; in j.a.pan Ripper gave fourteen different speeches over the course of four days. His agenda was tight; under the best of circ.u.mstances it would have been a rigorous schedule.

They arrived in j.a.pan on Tuesday, the fifth of May. That Tuesday was the lightest day on Ripper's schedule, with only two speeches scheduled. There were four on Wednesday, five on Thursday, and three on Friday. By Wednesday Denice had reached the point where she did not speak to Dougla.s.s unless spoken to, or unless there was some business communication that needed to take place.

Wednesday night she slept sitting up on the sofa in their hotel room, gun on the sofa next to her, while Ripper snored alone in the bed. Thursday Ripper's temper was frayed even further; he awoke in a foul mood that did not improve, except before crowds, as the day wore on.

Thursday Ripper spoke twice in Tokyo, once at a rally, once to a group of fund-raisers, and spoke once each in the cities of Yokohama, Kyoto, and Kobe.

It happened again in Kyoto.

She stood immediately behind Ripper, handgun holstered beneath her coat, scanning the crowd, and suddenly the headache was back and the crowd was naked, skinless, a glowing collection of blue nerve nets; and in the depth of the crowd, where the people were packed most closely, a Flame arose, dancing gold with a cold black center, a column of light that rose up out of the crowd and fountained up into the sky.

She blinked and it was gone, and did not come back.

By the time Ripper's last speech, in the city of Kobe, was done, it was nearly 10:00 em. and all of them, including Denice, were exhausted. Ripper fell asleep in the limousine on the way back to their Tokyo hotel. Bruce and John sat together up front; Denice, crowded in the backseat with both Ripper and Ichabod's bearish hulk, found it nearly impossible to relax.

Ripper's skin touched hers, and his dreams, restless and unhappy, were barely perceptible to her, jittering at the edge of her thoughts. Normally she found his thoughts-gentle and disciplined and generally kind-pleasant. But his dreams that night were anything but pleasant.

Denice moved slightly away from Ripper, to break the contact with his skin-was aware of Ichabod noticing it-closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

They returned to Capitol City early Sat.u.r.day morning, two hours before dawn. Denice saw Ripper safely to the edge of Capitol City. She had the limo stop, said curtly, "Good night," and walked south the four kilometers to Robert Dazai Yo's dojo.

Patrolling PKF stopped her twice, requested her handheld and a retinal check. She endured it patiently and politely-they were checking att.i.tude as much as ident.i.ty-and continued on when the checks were complete.

It neared dawn when she reached the dojo, walked upstairs to Robert's quarters, and let herself in.

Robert sat where she had expected to find him, waiting for the sun in the center of the mat. Earlier in the night, she knew, he would have worked out; stretched, done weight work and speed training; perhaps, though this was something new to the last decade of his life, he might have danced.

In the last hour before dawn, he sat and meditated.

She took her running shoes off and joined him.

He did not speak while the sun rose, while light flooded in through the high eastern windows, lit the dojo in bright true sunlight. He breathed slowly, and Denice let her breathing match his, felt the tension of the trip draining away from her. She faced Robert, and he faced the sun; the light struck her back and shoulders, and she sat in the warmth and let the tight knots of her muscles relax.