The GPS register stuck on the same position data."

Thomas frowned. "I don't think so, but you have an interesting point. It looks like it was set up so that, if the discrepancy was noted, they could cry computer glitch, either caught and fixed, or an intermittent that went away.

"I want a detailed review of the officers and crew, especially any Nat-Al associations or sympathies. Look for previous postings where they might have served together. Also, if we are, in fact, looking at an entire crew of rogue INS, I don't think it could've happened without someone in or above BuPers having put this particular crew together."

"Ugly," said Jazz. He was eating some pad Thai noodles but stopped with the chopsticks halfway to his mouth and put them back down. "Suddenly, I'm not hungry anymore. How widespread do you think this is?"

Thomas shrugged. "It would be nice if they'd concentrated all their bad eggs in one basket. Maybe somebody high up, then the rest of their active corrupt men on the ship." He sighed. "That would be nice."

Master Chief Bernstein snorted and kept eating.

Jazz poked at his noodles. "But you don't think so, do you?"

"I can hope. I think it must be pretty widespread and it may extend outside the service. We all know about Congressman Smithers."

Willie Smithers was a National Alliance candidate, elected on the Isolationistanti-immigration ticket. Thomas thought Smithers's speeches would sound familiar to audiences in 1935 Berlin. He was a very public figure, but there were many seemingly moderate Republicans whose campaigns benefited from National Alliance money.

Thomas sighed again. "But Sycorax was definitely near the Louisiana shore last night, when Patricia Beenan and I were attacked. So, the four rogue INS who tried to kill us were almost certainly not from the Sycorax."

Terkel raised a hand. "Are you sure about where they were? We've just shown we can't necessarily trust the data."

"Positive. They towed an oceangoing shrimper with engine trouble into Baton Rouge." Thomas switched to the kal pat, picking tiny shrimp from the rice.

"In three days, Sycorax supervises the detainee transfer at the Abattoir and stays the night. Wherever their crew drinks, whether it's the NCO club on Isabel Island or civilian joints in New Galveston, I want our men there, buying drinks and listening.

Maybe even bemoaning the 'browning of America.' " He glanced at Jazz.

Jazz nodded back, his black face impassive. "Damn niggers and chinks and spics. What's going to happen to all my real estate investments if this goes on?"

Thomas smiled slightly and shook his head. "We also need to keep an eye on Sycorax. Do you think we dare plant a man aboard?"

Jazz made a face. "If you're right about the extent of this thing, I wouldn't give much for their life expectancy. I doubt he'd pull another AWOL, but man overboard is a real possibility."

Terkel, helping himself to some kal pat, said, "We can monitor their radio traffic and take fixes. Maybe we should shadow them at sea."

Jazz shook his head. "Sycorax is the one with all the surveillance equipment. You can shadow them, but they're going to know you're there."

Seaman Guterson, straightening the containers, looked across the room and caught Thomas's eye.

Thomas shrugged. "I know, Mr. Guterson. But that's not really an option."

Jazz looked up. "What's not an option?"

Thomas looked around, gathering their attention. "It doesn't leave this room, okay?"

Bernstein swallowed a mouthful of noodles. "What doesn't leave this room?"

"Your word, gentlemen," Thomas said, glaring.

They assented.Thomas wondered if he was betraying Patricia's confidence. He hoped not.

"Patricia Beenan spent thirty-six hours with her submersible tied to the bottom of the Sycorax while Sycorax raced all over the gulf. And they never knew she was there.

It's how she got back to the Strand."

Jazz's mouth dropped open. "Whoa. So if anybody could shadow the Sycorax, it's her."

Thomas shook his head. "Absolutely not. She's not even in the service, much less in our unit."

"Maybe she could lease us the submarine?" Terkel said.

"Why do we want to shadow them?" Jazz asked, "Don't you think they'll tread the straight and narrow for a while, after this?"

Thomas sat frozen for a moment. Finally he said, "It depends on why they did it."

Thomas got Guterson to drive him into town in the motor-pool Humvee. BBINS was on the outer rim, reclaimed land built on the former Galena Park Subdivision.

The Humvee left the base and drove through Clinton Park, more reclaimed land, new buildings built on the dredged debris of old structures. It always surprised him when they crossed the dike, for old Houston was down, sixty feet or so, as if in a shallow caldera, an ancient volcanic basin.

Loop 610 still existed, though it was raised well above its former altitude.

Guterson got on it, heading southwest, and immediately hit bumper-to-bumper traffic, creeping around the rim road.

Ah, Houston. Even before the flood, Thomas could remember creeping around the loop. They edged past Interstate 45, which cut northwest through town but was reduced to an avenue on the outer side of the dike, a brief feeder into the reclaimed land jutting sporadically out into the brown water. Thomas saw the old Herman Barnett Stadium, its upper half sticking out of the new ground, its bottom half drowned-though now in rubble.

A mile past I-45 the traffic started moving again, and they passed the Astrodome before Guterson took the Stella Link exit. The access road dropped down into the shadow of the dike before steering them north to merge with the boulevard.

Here, if one didn't look behind, one could imagine the Deluge never happened.

The cottonwood trees shaded frame houses and green lawns, recalling a different time.

But then one would pass a cross street and see new apartment towers rising hundreds of feet into the air.

They tried the mall first, the new one that straddled Highway 59 and rose eightlevels into the air. There was a Houston police department volunteer auxiliary at each entrance, checking citizen ID, and the way they smiled at Thomas's INS uniform made him shudder.

"Good morning. Go right in."

Thomas didn't want to know, but he couldn't help himself. "What's with the ID check? Do you have a fugitive in the area?"

The auxiliary cop, a young man with an incipient potbelly, said, "Oh, no sir.

We're paid by the mall. It keeps the riffraff out."

"Riffraff?"

"Wetbacks," said the officer. "Refugees-you know, the spics."

He looked at the man's badge: Warshofski. "And how long have your people been in America, Officer Warshofski?"

"Huh? Forever, of course."

Thomas raised his eyebrows. "Oh, I didn't realize that Warshofski was an Indian name."

"Hell, no. It's American-it's a Texan name."

Ignorance that powerful was hard to argue with. Becket left the mall without entering.

Instead, Guterson took him to a little shopping district in West University Place.

The shoppers' ethnic backgrounds weren't as mixed as they'd be back on the Strand, but there were some Hispanics and blacks and Asians. A few stores lost Thomas's business by displaying signs stating Spanish Definitely Not Spoken Here.

Ditto for the stores endorsing National Alliance Party candidates.

He felt more comfortable here than at the mall until he entered an antiquities store endorsing a New Tolerance Party candidate and three customers scurried out the door.

Dammit I should've dressed in mufti.

The store owner glared at him and said, "No hablo ingle."

"No hay problema." Becket said. "Espanol es perfecto."

The man looked slightly less hostile, but only slightly. "Quiza' una tienda diferente seria mejor pa' uste."

But I like this store. Thomas tilted his head. The man's tendency to drop the endings of his words was very Cuban. "De que parte de Cuba es usted?"

The man's eyes widened. "La Isla de lo' Pino'.""Ahhhhh." Becket shook his head sadly. "Inundada hace tiempo. Lo siento haber asustado a sus clientes." He dropped the Spanish. "I didn't mean to."

The man shrugged and smiled sheepishly. "Okay, I guess I do speak English."

Thomas smiled back. "That's a relief. I don't speak any Spanish. I'm looking for a gift para mi amiga."

The man cleared his throat. "For someone with no Spanish, you fake it very well."

They found the bomb, midmorning, in the engine room of the Open Lotus.

Thomas and Jazz walked over as soon as the explosive ordnance disposal team had cleared out.

The interior of the Open Lotus still smelled of the sea, and a string of temporary power cable brought light to its lifeless interior.

"It was shoved here, beneath the mounting flange of the starboard diesel,"

Barbara Mendez explained. "The timer and detonator were in the spare-parts storage." She pointed at a locker far across the compartment.

Thomas scratched his head. "What? It wasn't attached to the plastique?"

"No. It's been smashed, too, the batteries removed. The EOD team leader said that it had been thoroughly disarmed even before the salt water got into it. We found some new cable ties cut by the main cooling pipe. If the bomb had been there, it would've opened the ship's interior to the sea and sunk it within thirty minutes."

Thomas nodded. "This is where you found McIntyre."

"Right. The door was dogged shut with pry bars from outside. There were fresh paint scrapes on the inside that seem to indicate that he'd dogged it shut from inside, but later, he must've tried to open the door again."

Thomas swallowed. "Like when the sea began pouring in."

"Right. He drowned, like those poor bastards in the hold. But first, it seems, he disabled the engines." She pointed out cracks in the engine heads and pointed at an eight-pound sledgehammer lying against the wall.

Jazz slapped his hands together. "You know, I'd wondered why they didn't sink her in deeper water. She was bound to be found here, but I suspect McIntyre threw a sabot in the works. I bet they intercepted her inshore and were moving her offshore to deeper water when McIntyre interfered."

Thomas looked around the room. "Hmm. But why not tow her on out? So he locked himself in here and disarmed their scuttling charge, but they locked him in from without, so what was their hurry?"Thomas pulled himself up on the port diesel engine and looked up, examining the overhead vents. There were four large Belfor vents into the engine room, and standing on the engine, he could just reach the grillwork. He pulled the grill down, revealing a twelve-inch pipe, too small for a man to exit. But more than large enough to let the sea in when the boat sank.

He walked down the length of the diesel to the next grill.

"Ah." He eased the grill open carefully, holding his hand up to block the passage.

There were two objects above, and he managed to get them out without dropping them.

"Look," he said. The first item was a standard INS handheld VHF radio. Its power switch was on high and the selector had been pushed over to the automated SOS setting. The aerial had been extended up inside the vent. Beads of water fogged the inside of the LCD panel.

Investigator Mendez took the radio and Jazz steadied Thomas as he jumped down. Thomas landed lightly on the deck plates.

"What's that?" Jazz asked.

The second object was a bundle, about six inches across and eight long, wrapped in cloth, an engine-room rag by the looks of it. "Let's open it upstairs,"

Thomas said.

Jazz licked his lips and said, "Are you sure you shouldn't let EOD look at it?"

Thomas pursed his lips. "I don't think so. It's been soaking in seawater for four days and why would there be a second bomb? I think McIntyre hid it in there."

"And the radio?" Mendez said.

"Aye. That's why they had to sink her when they did. They couldn't jam the signal all the way out into the deep gulf. The jamming would be as noticeable as the SOS. So they sank her immediately, to get the radio underwater. Even if it kept broadcasting, as little as fifteen feet of water would've blocked the signal."

They took the bundle up to the deck and over to the forensics worktable. The dry-dock walls rose high enough to block the deck from idle eyes ashore.

Thomas unwrapped it slowly. Inside, tied together by a piece of string were U.S.

passports, Texas driver's licenses, and U.S. Social Security cards, more than could be conveniently counted. The driver's licenses, being laminated, were intact, but the ink on the Social Security cards had run.

"I knew we needed a document man," Thomas said. He began counting the driver's licenses, dividing them by gender into two piles "Thirty in all." He counted the shorter pile, the women. "Twelve women. That makes eighteen men-the exact number of adults in the hold, right?"Jazz nodded. "Right. Think they're genuine?"

Thomas peered closely at the holographic seals embedded in the plastic. "They look good, but I doubt it. I think those in the hold were illegals headed for the U.S., and they'd already bought good ID's." He carefully opened one of the passports. It was a joint passport, a young Hispanic woman with two small children. He shuddered.

"There's a chief warrant officer in the Houston field office named Patterson. He recently worked on a case involving really good faked ID."