'I'd like to send some flowers to one of your guests,' she said. 'Robert Salmon.' The florist gave her a card to sign, and she scribbled, 'Best wishes for your bar mitzvah. Florence.'

Swan had guessed Bob would sign in under his own name, If he were the sort to have a fake ID or two, she would have known about it. As it turned out, she didn't have long to sit, in the lobby before a bellhop went past carrying the ma.s.sive bouquet.

Swan quietly got up and followed the bellhop into the elevator. She watched from the vending machine niche down the hallway as someone answered the door. 'I'm afraid these aren't for us,' said a voice in an English accent.

Swan made her way down into the bas.e.m.e.nt, where she found the bridging box for the whole hotel. A couple of cleaners gave her an odd look, but she just went on as though they weren't there, and they left her to whatever she was doing.

Which was attaching a DNR to the Doctor and company's phone line. The Dial Number Recorder would print out every number they called.

Early that evening, the Doctor plucked a fob watch from the inside pocket of his jacket. 'It's time,' he said, getting up from the Apple II and stretching. 'I've got to call the Eridani and arrange our delivery.' Bob, who'd had nothing to do all afternoon except watch the idiot box, eagerly leapt onto the abandoned machine.

Swan watched the Doctor leave, by himself, with a cardboard box tucked under his arm. He never noticed her, sitting at a gla.s.s table in the cafe area, downing an extra caffeine pill with her second coffee.

Swan could have followed him. Maybe she could even have got the device off him I can easily see her as a mugger, vibrating with stimulants and cold anger, wielding one of the j.a.panese knives I'd seen in her kitchen. But instead, she decided to borrow the power of the law.

Swan went back to the bas.e.m.e.nt and looked at the little roll of tape in the DNR. It had registered a single number.

Swan clipped her linesman's test set to an outgoing line and called up a C/NA operator. Then she called the police.

The three of us almost walked into Swan as we caked the elevator. We were on our way to dinner. She was just stepping out of the other elevator, on her way back from the bas.e.m.e.nt.

We stared at her: Bob and Peri and me, looking guilty as h.e.l.l with our mouths hanging open. Swan looking guilty in her own way, her face forming a protective blank mask.

I expected a sarcastic remark, the sort of thing pa.s.sed in the hallways in high school, a little flourish of superiority. She had found us again. She had proved her electronic omniscience and caught us with our computational trousers down. At the least she could have given us a knowing smile before floating out of the building.

Nothing. Just that blank stare. The personality she had shown in cybers.p.a.ce stopped there.

'Come on,' I muttered to my partners in crime. We backed into the elevator, its doors still yawning open as though in surprise. They slid shut, cutting off Swan's empty glance.

'The Doctor,' said Peri, as the lift slid silently upwards.

'Do you think Swan knows where he's going?'

'She's not following him, that's for sure,' said Bob.

'She found us again. Maybe she found out where he's headed, too. That could mean the Eridani are in big trouble.'

'We'll call them,' said Bob.

'But what if Swan is listening in!'

'What difference is it gonna make?' Bob leaned his forehead against the elevator's mirrored wall, looking squashed. 'Man, she knows everything. It doesn't matter what we do. She knows it all.'

60.

One.

' Hola? Hola? ' '

'Luis? It's Sarah.'

'Sarah! I have some wonderful news for you.'

'Don't tell me just now. I need an eyeball, en seguida en seguida.'

'No problem. Let's go to the park, like spies. I'll be carrying a red rose.'

'How about the Mall? Lots of people around.'

'OK, opposite the Smithsonian Castle. I'll bet my news is bigger than yours.'

'I'll see you there in an hour, if the traffic is merciful.'

Luis Perez was ten years older than Swan, a greying Mexican who had met her on the conference calls when he first emigrated to California. They had hung out together on the phone system for years, never meeting in the flesh until this moved to DC to be closer to his relatives.

Luis worked in a library in Adams Morgan. For him, computers and phones were still just a hobby, while they'd become a career for Swan. He still used his phreaking skills to place free long-distance calls to his garrulous abuela abuela in Puebla. But these days his main interest was collecting. His flat rivalled Swan's own home museum of things electronic. in Puebla. But these days his main interest was collecting. His flat rivalled Swan's own home museum of things electronic.

Litis was waiting for her on the well-trodden gra.s.s of the Mall, wrapped tight in a grey wool coat, a single baby rose clutched in a gloved hand. The National Mall is a two-and-a-half-mile line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol, with the Washington Monument sticking out of the middle like a stray nuke. Half a million people line the Mall each year for the Fourth of July fireworks.

DC is low, with long lines of sight, boxy cla.s.sical architecture mixed with weird sixties curves. Driving around in it you go from pompous to funky, wealth to poverty, business to tourism. The whole thing is very slowly sinking into the swamp plain it was built on.

Luis gave Swan a mock bow and handed her the flower.

She looked at it. 'I gotta talk to you about that thing I got in western Maryland that time,' she said Luis looked at her in surprise. 'I also want to talk to you about "western Maryland".'

'Well, I hope you're having more luck than I am. I've got a bunch of smarta.s.ses on my tail who ripped me off. I've just set the police on them.'

Luis was getting more surprised by the moment. 'The police?' he said, looking around.

'I told them it was a sculpture. Worth a fortune. If they can't get it back I might just strangle the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with my bare hands. They're good, Luis, really good for a change.

We've been playing cat and mouse for days and I'm not sure whether I'm the cat or the mouse.'

'What can I do?'

Swan looked at him. 'I didn't call you to ask for help. I wanted to warn you. They might come looking for you.'

Luis nodded. The great Sarah Swan never asked for help; she only made bargains, collected favours. He put a gloved hand on her arm. 'Yes, I have been having more luck than you,' he said. 'Come with me. Come and see.'

Two months previously, Swan and Luis had driven together in his little red van to a farm in Allegany County. The family was auctioning their equipment, their land already sold. Luis and Swan walked past a small crowd examining the tractors and trucks that would be up on the block later that afternoon. The genuine auction was a cover for a rather less ordinary sale taking place in one of the farm's big sheds.

There were a dozen people there, sitting on folding chairs they had brought with them. Luis spread his big jacket on a bale of hay and he and Swan sat down side by side.

She recognised some of the faces. Swan had only a rough idea of who the other buyers were, a mix of collectors, incognito scientists, conspiracy theorists, and spies. These little auctions were held on an irregular schedule, always masked by some other big sale: last time it had been an office building selling off its desks and filing cabinets. Swan and Luis had sold one or two items over the years, but usually, they were here to buy.

The lots were presented by a soft-voiced young man in a dark suit who mostly looked at the ground; he always made her think of attendants at a funeral, their insistent solemnity.

The resemblance would have been better if it hadn't been for his punk hair, a wave of metallic red that sparkled with golden highlights. Despite her not inconsiderable efforts, Swan had never managed to find out exactly who he was.

Today's selection was fairly typical. Plenty of circuit boards with suspicious pedigrees. A box of floppy disks that bore the label of a major researcher bidding was fierce for that lot. More disks and some printouts of stuff downloaded from milnet. Part of what looked like the controls of a helicopter, labelled in Cyrillic script. Some of it had been brought by the bidders, but mostly it had filtered down through a grapevine of thieves and collectors. The auctioneer set a starting-price for each. He had a reputation for scrupulous fairness when it came to estimating the values of his wares.

The young man always saved the most eccentric items until last, like a sort of dessert course. They often included odd little inventions, specially modified computers, and things the auctioneer admitted he could not identify. People ventured the last of their mad money on cheap gewgaws which might turn out to be anything from an amusing toy to a genuine innovation.

Swan rarely bought anything at the auctions; she and Luis joked that she was waiting for the pearl of great price. He was mostly interested in antique technology; the little gems of early computing that sometimes surfaced at these sales made it well worth his while to attend. That day he bought a RAMAC 305, gloating over the primordial hard drive while the spies battled for the military stuff.

'Our last item, ladies and gentlemen,' announced the auctioneer. He wore contact lenses that made his eyes appear an unnaturally bright blue. 'Two objects of extraterrestrial origin.'

A little polite laughter as he displayed the two gadgets.

They looked nothing like the serious machinery he had been selling all afternoon. They looked like gift shop baubles, or kid's toys.

'I would like to start the bidding at five thousand dollars,'

said the soft-voiced man.

That stopped the chuckling. The bidders glanced shyly at one another. What did the auctioneer know about those gizmos that they didn't?

Swan put up her hand for the first time that day 'Five thou,' she said loudly. The other bidders looked everywhere but at her.

'Five five,' said someone, halfheartedly.

'Six thou,' said Swan. Luis was grinning and nodding at her. There was nothing he loved better than a surprise, some mystery machine he could pull apart at home and decipher.

'Um, six one?' said the other buyer, but Swan knew she had it.

'Six five,' she said firmly.

Silence. 'Going, going, gone,' murmured the auctioneer 'Dutch?' said Luis.

'Of course,' said Swan.

They were each wearing a money belt tucked under their jackets. Luis had a thirty-eight special in his pocket as well, 'just to balance the weight of the money,' he always said.

They counted hundred dollar bills into a manila envelope and handed it over to the auctioneer, who pa.s.sed back a box containing their purchases without ever looking them in the eye.

That night, they flipped for who got what in the parking lot of a Denny's.

Luis's apartment always smelled of cinnamon, coffee, ozone, and chistbutuales. The spare bedroom where he kept his collection was tidy and clean to the point of sterility, but the rest of the flat was always in need of vacuuming and polishing. Swan found the smell comforting, the smell of a place that's lived in. Her own house smelled of paint and empty rooms.

They hung up their coats and this went to the kitchen to boil up some strong Mexican coffee to warm them. The cardboard box they had brought home from the auction all those months ago was sitting on the living room table.

Swan opened the box, gingerly. The device Luis had chosen was still inside, nestled in layers of blue crepe paper.

Its dark green-blue surface was covered in lighter tracings that looked like a cross between printed circuits and Tolkien's Elvish writing. It was bigger than her fist, maybe six inches long, a round shape pointed a little at one end.

And it was broken. When Swan had last seen It, it was a heavy handful. She had a.s.sumed it was nothing more than a decoration, like one of those polished crystals you could get, with some artist's idea of circuits etched into the surface: an artsy gift for the computer lover. She had been more than happy to leave it in Luis's hands and take the much more intriguing multicoloured device for herself.

Now the object had cracked into three large pieces. Instead of a single weighty lump, all that was left were those three chunks, maybe a quarter of an inch thick; the centre was hollow. Swan picked up one of the pieces. It was tough, smooth on the outside except for the lines of etching, crinkled and wrinkled inside. The inner texture made her think of the whorls and soft complexities of a brain.

Luis grinned at her from the kitchen doorway as she looked up at him. 'Your Easter egg hatched,' she said.

He raised his eyebrows, enjoying her surprise. 'More about that later' he said, putting down a cup of rich coffee in front of het 'Tell me about these smarta.s.ses who are making your life difficult.'

'They read my email. They read my frigging email email, man,'

she said. Swan took a long drag on the coffee, seemingly not bothered that it was seething hot. 'They broke into my work machine and they kicked me out while they were doing it.'

Luis was the only person in the world she would ever admit something like that to. He listened quietly as she outlined the Doctor's antics, how he had taken away the device from under her nose, how she had followed Bob. 'They know stuff about western Maryland that we don't: she said. 'I have worked and worked on the device, and I've got no idea of how it works or what it's supposed to do. I've pestered collectors all over the country. All I've found out is that there are supposed to be three more of those devices. Five components making up a single machine. She pushed the heels of her palms against her eyes. 'I think the Doctor is working for the original owners. They want their c.r.a.p back.' Luis shrugged with his face. 'Don't gimme that!' said Swan. 'We paid good money for those items. It's us against them. And we're gonna be the ones who win' She slammed both palms down on the table. In the dim light her pupils looked like a pair of black marbles.

' Calmate! Calmate! ' said Luis. 'Think it over. They have given themselves away to you. You'll be able to learn from them where the other parts of this strange machine are. And in the meantime, we still have one of its components. A good one: ' said Luis. 'Think it over. They have given themselves away to you. You'll be able to learn from them where the other parts of this strange machine are. And in the meantime, we still have one of its components. A good one: 'Luis,' she said, looking down into the box, 'what the h.e.l.l was inside this thing?'

With a conspiratorial wink, he got up and crooked a finger to her. Swan put the box down on the table and followed him.

Luis put his finger to his lips. Very carefully, he turned the k.n.o.b of the bathroom door. Swan craned her neck, trying to see around him. Luis trod softly into the-cramped bathroom and, very slowly and gently, began to pull back the shower curtain.

The first thing Swan saw were the gadgets lined up on the rim of the tub. There was one of those plastic trays across the tub, piled with half-disa.s.sembled radios, Walkmen, circuit boards, Tandy hobby kits. There was more stuff in the dry tub.

It took her a long moment to see, really see, what was sitting in the bath along with all that junk. Her first thought was that Luis had fished a mermaid out of the half-frozen Potomac.

The thing in the tub was shaped roughly like the letter 'Y'.

It had long, raised scales, or perhaps short, stiff feathers. What Swan had taken for its tail seemed to actually be its head: a long cylinder rearing up above the other two limbs. Each of those held several pieces of an autopsied television set, as well as a couple of screwdrivers and some lengths of wire. Swan couldn't see how it was hanging onto so many things at once

she couldn't see hands, or fingers. Perhaps the scale-feathers did the gripping?

It didn't have a face. There was a truncated beak the colour of mahogany that looked as if it had been pushed into the flesh behind the dirty yellow feather-scales. She couldn't see eyes, ears, a nose, anything but the dull beak.