"Then they did what? Built their own?"

Bug said, "Sure, the schematics were in Hecate's safe."

Rudy smiled. "Hecate had them? No one else?"

"No..." began Bug, but he slowed to a stop, then carefully said, "Not that we know of."

"Let me ask this, then," said Rudy. "If you, Bug, had those blueprints or schematics or whatever they're called for computers and you knew about MindReader, could you build a computer that approximates what MindReader does?"

"Hecate and Paris couldn't do that. They were geneticists and-"

"I'm not asking about them. I asked if you could do it."

"Me? Well, sure, I could do it, but-"

"Ah," said Rudy.

"Wait," said Bug, "what's 'ah' supposed to mean?"

"It means that if you could do it," I said, "then someone on your level could do it."

"They'd have to have some access to MindReader. At least some basic understanding of the software written after Pangaea was created."

Rudy nodded. So did Church. And me.

"But there's no one else I know of who could do it. Even Yoda and Nikki couldn't do it."

"I'm not asking about them," said Rudy. There was another pregnant pause, then Rudy glanced at each person at the table. "We are absolutely certain Artemisia Bliss is dead, yes?"

Hu started to laugh, but Church raised a hand.

"I believe you visited the crime scene," said Church. "You saw the body."

"Her body was identified from dental plates and DNA," added Circe. "There's no doubt that it was Artemisia Bliss in that cell."

Hu and Bug gave emphatic nods.

Rudy smiled. "No doubt at all?"

"Where are you going with this, doctor?" demanded Auntie.

That's when I got it, and I slapped my hand down on the table so hard everyone except Church jumped. "Christ on a stick!"

"Joe," said Rudy quickly, "what's wrong?"

"I'm a G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot is what's wrong." Hu began to smile but I pointed a finger at him. "And you're every bit as stupid as I am. As we all are. s.h.i.t, Rudy's absolutely right and this is staring us in the face. I mean ... we even said it but threw it away."

"Captain," said Church, "skip the dramatics. What are we all missing?"

"Burn to shine," I said. "It's right there."

"What is?"

"This is Artemisia Bliss."

"Um," said Hu, "I'm pretty sure we already covered that, Einstein. She'd make a great suspect if she wasn't ashes in a box."

"No," said Church, leaning forward, "hear him out. I think I know where he's going with this, and I'm afraid I agree."

Everyone looked from him to me. Rudy nodded encouragement.

"Okay," I said, "we all put it on the table. Artemisia was smarter than almost everyone, right? Smart and devious. She was on Auntie's s.h.i.t list because she tried to hack MindReader. She got fired and arrested because she copied and sold a lot of the information we've been trying to keep the bad guys from using. She was bagged, tagged, and the judge hit her with max penalties. She was going to jail and she'd never get out. She was done."

"And somebody killed her," said Hu again, leaning on it so Captain Shortbus could understand the concept. But I shook my head.

"Somebody killed someone."

"No," said Circe, "Joe, you're forgetting that Jerry Spencer collected DNA from her corpse and it was an exact match to hers on file. It was her."

I gave another shake. "Jerry pulled DNA from a corpse and it matched DNA on file."

"What?"

"Step back for a second and look at this from a distance. Think about how to do this and let's pretend we're all actually smart for a minute." I said this last part while looking directly at Hu.

Church was already nodding. Rudy and Circe were a step behind him. Hu had to already be there, but he so did not want me to have figured this out.

It was Bug who put it into words.

"The DNA we matched it to was not physical DNA. We matched the samples Jerry collected against data stored in the system."

"Right," I said. "Data stored in the system. We only have the computer's word that it's actually Bliss's."

"No," said Hu, shaking his head, "you're talking about MindReader."

"Right," I told him. "I'm talking about a computer. Computers are basically storage devices. You can put anything in there you want. And Artemisia Bliss is one of the most brilliant computer experts who ever lived, as you're so fond of telling. f.u.c.k, man, you hired her. You want to sit there and tell me that she isn't smart enough to have faked the data in MindReader?"

Hu cleared his throat. "Well ... she, um, wrote the code for the bio-data retrieval software."

Rudy said, "Oy."

"But the pa.s.swords were all changed after her arrest," insisted Aunt Sallie.

"Sure," said Circe, "but I'm sure you didn't go in and change every line of code she ever wrote. Or all of the millions of lines of code she supervised. Joe's right, she could have built her own false evidence right into the code. Hidden it so that it popped up whenever any data was entered for a comparison with hers."

"That would suggest she knew she would be arrested," said Rudy. "And that her own death was planned."

"It could have been planned," I said, "or it could have been one of a dozen contingency plans she built into the system because she knows the system. Maybe there are other things that would have come up if something else had happened to her. They could be lurking in the system right now."

Bug began hammering at some keys. There was a bing-bong as he received an almost instantaneous reply. "Oh, s.h.i.tb.a.l.l.s. I just sent a second set of DNA to the system for comparison to hers, and it came up as a positive."

"Which DNA?" Hu asked reluctantly.

"Yours," said Bug weakly. "And ... mine. And Circe's. All three came up as a match to Artemisia's. There was no way we could have known it, but any DNA comparison request that involves Artemisia is going to come up positive."

"Dios mio," breathed Rudy very softly.

"Artemisia Bliss is alive," said Hu, just as quietly.

"Worse than that," said Church. "Artemisia Bliss is Mother Night. And that changes everything."

Chapter Seventy-four.

Office of the Vice President The White House Washington, D.C.

Monday, September 1, 5:58 a.m.

"Do we have an estimate on the number of people on the C train?" asked Vice President William Collins.

Boo Radley opened a blue leather notebook and consulted the top page. "The area is still sealed pending biohazard cleanup, but based on the hour and averages for holiday traffic we're putting the number at around two hundred."

That slapped Collins in the face hard enough to align all of his attention. "Two hundred?"

He fumbled for his coffee cup, found it empty, stared into it, set the cup down.

"K-keep me posted," he said, tripping over the words.

"Yes, sir," said Radley. He lingered for a moment. "Will the president address the nation?"

Collins shook his head. "It's too early for that. We don't know enough."

In truth he didn't know what the president would do. His relationship with his two-term running mate had steadily deteriorated to the point where they only ever spoke when it was absolutely politically necessary. Their dislike of each other was an open secret, and was often the substance of jokes by Leno, Fallon, Colbert, and Stewart. No one in the press or the talk show circuit knew the reason for the animosity, and neither Collins nor the president would respond to questions about it. There wasn't much left to this second term anyway, and soon Collins would be out and would no longer have to endure the disdain-publically or privately-from his boss.

The truth of the schism between the two men ran deeper than the fact that Collins had lost to the president during the primaries and always felt that his vice presidency was a bone thrown to him. And a way for the president to keep his party rival close at hand. The real core of the trouble between them was their view of how best to serve the country. Not run it-serve it. The president was an idealist who kept trying to solve problems. Collins didn't like him any more than he'd liked the two previous presidents. All three of them cared too much about party politics and brinksmanship. Collins saw things from a different perspective, from what he believed to be a big-picture angle that allowed him to see what America really needed. It needed to be strong again. As strong as it was right after World War II ended. A position of power it tasted only once more, when Reagan was in. When the American military was so scary strong that the mere threat of it put the cracks in the Berlin Wall and toppled the Soviet state. That couldn't be accomplished with either the liberals or conservatives trying to c.o.c.k-block each other. And it couldn't happen if American corporations kept taking a s.h.i.t on their own soil. Thirty years of poor management-political and corporate-had empowered North Korea and Iran and turned China into the most frightening superpower since ...

Well, since the United States dropped the bombs on j.a.pan.

What really p.i.s.sed Collins off was that this was a problem that could be fixed. The balance of power could be shifted where it was supposed to be with so little effort. The primary obstruction wasn't even the war in Congress over who had the bigger d.i.c.k. It was a lack of courage. A lack of real b.a.l.l.s.

It was a lack of the American spirit that built this f.u.c.king country.

He shook his head.

His mood was further soured by the body-count estimates. Two hundred dead?

Mother Night had promised him there would be a lot more than that.

And then, as if in response to his angry thoughts, his cell buzzed to indicate a text message. He glanced at it and saw that it was a message from her.

MORE TO COME.

THE GAME IS FAR FROM OVER.

It was signed with the letter A.

He sat back in his leather chair and considered the message and its implications. The fact that Mother Night was going to see this through all the way to the end was comforting. Gratifying. The fact that she took the time to tell him was encouraging.

So why had she sent a letter filled with anthrax to him?

He sank into a brooding stillness, teeth grinding, fists clenched on his desktop.

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing?" he growled quietly.

Chapter Seventy-five.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Monday, September 1, 5:59 a.m.

Once it was said, once it was out there, it made sense. A twisted kind of sense.

Artemisia Bliss was Mother Night.

Too many of our puzzle pieces now fit, but the picture they made was like something out of Salvador Dali. Or maybe Hieronymus Bosch.

"This is nuts," said Hu, still not buying it. "Artie was corrupt, sure, and maybe she made some questionable choices-"

"'Questionable'?" echoed Aunt Sallie.

"-but we're talking about Mother Night here. Artie never physically hurt anyone. Mother Night has killed hundreds. That person is either totally deranged or she's outright evil. Where's the evidence of that kind of evolution?"

"There are foundations of it," said Rudy, "but I would need time to work up a profile and-"

Suddenly the big screen on the wall split and Nikki Bloomberg filled the second window. She was a tiny, mousy young woman with enormous eyes and slightly bucked teeth. She was twenty-six but looked like a gawky twelve. "Sorry to interrupt," she said quickly, "but you have to hear this."

"Go ahead," said Church.

"When Rasheen brought us the cameras Joe's guys pulled off the wall, I found that there were two kinds of transmitters inside. Two separate signals. One was the satellite feed that went out to the press, and that one had the fake soundtrack of people begging for mercy. The other one, though, was sent via a different satellite to a rerouting system that bounced it all over the globe. The thing is, that second video stream had an additional track, too, but it was a separate video track. A digitally imposed data crawl."