"OK, let's pretend all that. Now I'll tell you: what's on that postcard is the financials for a Disney Parks buyout of your friends'

entire operation here. DiaBolical, the ride, all of it."

Suzanne had been expecting a lot of things, but this wasn't one of them. It was loopy. Daffy. Not just weird, but inconceivable. As though he'd said, "I sent you our plans to carve your portrait on the moon's surface with a green laser." But she was a pro. She kept her face still and neutral, and calmly swallowed her cappuccino.

"I see."

"And there are -- there are people at Disney who feel like this idea is so dangerous that it doesn't even warrant discussion. That it should be suppressed."

Guignol cleared his throat. "That's the consensus," he said.

"And normally, I'd say, hey, sure, the consensus. That's great. But I'll tell you, I drew up these numbers because I was curious, I'm a curious guy. I like to think laterally, try stuff that might seem silly at first. See where it goes. I've had pretty good instincts."

Guignol and Suzanne snorted at the same time.

"And an imperfect record," Sammy said. Suzanne didn't want to like him, but there was something forthright about him that she couldn't help warming to. There was no subtlety or scheming in this guy. Whatever he wanted, you could see it right on his face. Maybe he was a psycho, but he wasn't a sneak.

"So I ran these numbers for my own amus.e.m.e.nt, to see what they would look like. a.s.sume that your boys want, say, 30 times gross annual revenue for a buyout. Say that this settles our lawsuit -- not theirs, just ours, so we don't have to pay for the trademark suit to go forward. a.s.sume that they generate one DiaBolical-scale idea every six months --" Suzanne found herself nodding along, especially at this last one. "Well, you make those a.s.sumptions and you know what comes out of it?"

Suzanne let the numbers dance behind her own eyelids. She'd followed all the relevant financials closely for years, so closely that they were as familiar as her monthly take-home and mortgage payments had been, back when she had a straight job and a straight life.

"Well, you'd make Lester and Perry *very* wealthy," she said. "After they vested out, they'd be able to live off the interest alone."

Sammy nodded judiciously. His sidekick looked alarmed. "Yup. And for us?"

"Well, a.s.suming your last quarterly statement was accurate --"

"We were a little conservative," Sammy said. The other man nodded reflexively.

*You were very conservative,* she thought. *DiaB's making you a fortune and you didn't want to advertise that to the compet.i.tion.*

"a.s.suming that, well, you guys earn back your investment in, what, 18 months?"

"I figure a year. But 18 months would be good."

"If you vest the guys out over three years, that means --"

"100 percent ROI, plus or minus 200 percent," Sammy said. "For less money than we'll end up spending on our end of the lawsuit."

Guignol was goggling at them both. Sammy drank his Thai iced-tea, slurping noisily. He signalled for another one.

"And you sent me these financials on a postcard?"

"There was some question about whether they'd be erased before I could show them to anyone, and I knew there was no way I'd be given the chance to re-create them independently. It seemed prudent to have a backup copy."

"A backup copy in my hands?"

"Well, at least I knew you wouldn't give it up without a fight." Sammy shrugged and offered her a sunny smile.

"We'd better go rescue that postcard from the basket before Lester develops a domestic instinct and takes out the trash, then," Suzanne said, pushing away from the table. Shayna brought the bill and Sammy paid it, overtipping by a factor of ten, which endeared him further to Suzanne. She couldn't abide rich people who stiffed on the tip.

Suzanne walked them through the shantytown, watching their reactions closely. She liked to take new people here. She'd witnessed its birth and growth, then gone away during its adolescence, and now she got to enjoy its maturity. Crowds of kids ran screeching and playing through the streets, adults nodded at them from their windows, wires and plumbing and antennas crowded the skies above them. The walls shimmered with murals and graffiti and mosaics.

Sammy treated it like he had his theme park, seeming to take in every detail with a connoisseur's eye; Guignol was more nervous, clearly feeling unsafe amid the cheerful lawlessness. They came upon Francis and a gang of his kids, building bicycles out of stiffened fabric and strong monofilament recycled from packing crates.

"Ms Church," Francis said gravely. He'd given up drinking, maybe for good, and he was clear-eyed and charming in his engineer's coveralls. The kids -- boys *and* girls, Suzanne noted approvingly -- continued to work over the bikes, but they were clearly watching what Francis was up to.

"Francis, please meet Sammy and his colleague, Herve. They're here for a story I'm working on. Gentlemen, Francis is the closest thing we have to a mayor around here."

Francis shook hands all around, but Sammy's attention was riveted on the bicycles.

Francis picked one up with two fingers and handed it to him. "Like it?

We got the design from a shop in Liberia, but we made our own local improvements. The trick is getting the stiffener to stay liquid long enough to get the fabric stretched out in the right proportion."

Sammy took the frame from him and spun it in one hand like a baton. "And the wheels?"

"Mostly we do solids, which stay in true longer. We use the carbon stiffener on a pre-cut round of canvas or denim, then fit a standard tire. They go out of true after a while. You just apply some solvent to them and they go soft again and you re-true them with a compa.s.s and a pair of tailor's shears, then re-stiffen them. You get maybe five years of hard riding out of a wheel that way."

Sammy's eyes were round as saucers. He took one of the proffered wheels and spun it between opposing fingertips. Then, grinning, he picked up another wheel and the bike-frame and began to *juggle* them, one-two-three, hoop-la! Francis looked amused, rather than p.i.s.sed -- giving up drink had softened his temper. His kids stopped working and laughed. Sammy laughed too. He transferred the wheels to his left hand, then tossed the frame high the air, spun around and caught it and then handed it all back to Francis. The kids clapped and he took a bow.

"I didn't know you had it in you," Guignol said, patting him on the shoulder.

Sammy, sweating and grinning like a fool, said, "Yeah, it's not something I get a lot of chances to do around the office. But did you see that? It was light enough to juggle! I mean, how exciting is all this?" He swept his arm around his head. "Between the sewage and the manufacturing and all these kids --" He broke off. "What do you do about education, Suzanne?"

"Lots of kids bus into the local schools, or ride. But lots more home-school these days. We don't get a very high caliber of public school around here."

"Might that have something to do with all the residents who don't pay property tax?" Guignol said pointedly.

Suzanne nodded. "I'm sure it does," she said. "But it has more to do with the overall quality of public education in this state. 47th in the nation for funding."

They were at her and Lester's place now. She led them through the front door and picked up the trash-can next to the little table where she sorted the mail after picking it up from her PO box at a little strip mall down the road.

There was the postcard. She handed it silently to Sammy, who held it for a moment, then reluctantly pa.s.sed it to Guignol. "You'd better hang on to it," he said, and she sensed that there was something bigger going on there.

"Now we go see Lester," Suzanne said.

He was behind the building in his little workshop, hacking DiaBolical. There were five different DiaBs running around him, chugging and humming. The smell of goop and fuser and heat filled the room, and an air-conditioner like a jet-engine labored to keep things cool. Still, it was a few degrees warmer inside than out.

"Lester," Suzanne shouted over the air-conditioner din, "we have visitors."

Lester straightened up from his keyboard and wiped his palms and turned to face them. He knew who they were based on his earlier conversation with Suzanne, but he also clearly recognized Sammy.

"You!" he said. "You work for Disney?"

Sammy blushed and looked away.

Lester turned to Suzanne. "This guy used to come up, what, twice, three times a week."

Sammy nodded and mumbled something. Lester reached out and snapped off the AC, filling the room with eerie silence and stifling heat. "What was that?"