To the average citizen, it would never be available with all of the features that Oslett's model offered.

It plugged into the cigarette lighter like other cellulars, however, unlike others, it was operable virtually anywhere in the world, not solely within the state or service area in which it was issued.

Like the SATU electronic map, the phone incorporated a direct satellite up link. It could directly access at least ninety percent of the communications satellites currently in orbit, bypassing their land-based control stations, override security-exclusion programs, and connect with any telephone the user wished, leaving absolutely no record that the call had been made. The violated phone company would never issue a bill for Oslett's call to New York because they would never know that it had been placed using their system.

He spoke freely to his New York contact about what he had found at the rest stop, with no fear that he would be overheard by anyone, because his phone also included a scrambling device that he activated with a simple switch. A matching scrambler on the home office phone rendered his report intelligible again upon receipt, but to anyone who might intercept the signal between Oklahoma and the Big Apple, Oslett's words would sound like gibberish.

New York was concerned about the murdered retirees only to the extent that there might be a way for the Oklahoma authorities to link their killing to Alfie or to the Network, which was the name they used among themselves to describe their organization. "You didn't leave the shoes there?" New York asked.

"Of course not," Oslett said, offended at the suggestion of incompetence.

"All of the electronics in the heel-"

"I have the shoes here."

"That's right-out-of-the-lab stuff. Any knowledgeable person who sees it, he's going to go ape-shit and maybe"

"I have the shoes," Oslett said tightly.

"Good. Okay, then let them find the bodies and bang their heads against the wall trying to solve it. None of our business. Somebody else can haul away the garbage."

"Exactly."

"I'll be back to you soon."

"I'm counting on it," Oslett said.

After disconnecting, while he waited for a response from the home office, he was filled with uneasiness at the prospect of passing more than a hundred black and empty miles with no company but himself and Clocker. Fortunately, he was prepared with noisy and involving entertainment. From the floor behind the driver's seat, he retrieved a Game Boy and slipped the headset over his ears. Soon he was happily distracted from the unnerving rural landscape by the challenges of a rapidly paced computer game.

Suburban lights speckled the night when Oslett next looked up from the miniature screen in response to a tap on the shoulder from Clocker. On the floor between his feet, the cellular phone was ringing.

The New York contact sounded as somber as if he had just come from his own mother's funeral. "How soon can you get to the airport in Oklahoma City?"

Oslett relayed the question to Clocker.

Clocker's impassive face didn't change expressions as he said, "Half an hour, forty minutes-assuming the fabric of reality doesn't warp between here and there."

Oslett relayed to New York only the estimated traveling time and left out the science fiction.

"Get there quick as you can," New York said. "You're going to California."

"Where in California?"

"John Wayne Airport, Orange County."

"You have a lead on Alfie?"

"We don't know what the fuck we've got."

"Please don't make your answers so darn technical," Oslett said.

"You're losing me."

"When you get to the airport in Oklahoma City, find a news stand. Buy the latest issue of People magazine. Look on pages sixty six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. Then you'll know as much as we do."

"Is this a joke?"

"We just found out about it."

"About what?" Oslett asked. "Look, I don't care about the latest scandal in the British royal family or what diet Julia Roberts follows to keep her figure."

"Pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, and sixty-eight. When you've seen it, call me. Looks as if we might be standing hip-deep in gasoline, and someone just struck a match."

New York disconnected before Oslett could respond.

"We're going to California," he told Clocker.

"Why?"

"People magazine thinks we'll like the place," he said, deciding to give the big man a taste of his own cryptic dialogue.

"We probably will," Clocker replied, as if what Oslett had said made perfect sense to him.

As they drove through the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Oslett was relieved to find himself surrounded by signs of civilization-though he would have blown his brains out rather than live there. Even at its busiest hour, Oklahoma City didn't assault all five senses the way Manhattan did. He didn't merely thrive on sensory overload, he found it almost as essential to life as food and water, and more important than sex.

Seattle had been better than Oklahoma City, although it still hadn't measured up to Manhattan. Really, it had far too much sky for a city, too little crowding. The streets were so comparatively quiet, and the people seemed so inexplicably* relaxed. You would think they didn't know that they, like everyone else, would die sooner or later.

He and Clocker had been waiting at Seattle International at two o'clock yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when Alfie had been scheduled to arrive on a flight from Kansas City, Missouri. The 747 touched down eighteen minutes late, and Alfie wasn't on it.

In the nearly fourteen months that Oslett had been handling Alfie, which was the entire time that Alfie had been in service, nothing like that had ever happened. Alfie faithfully showed up where he was supposed to, traveled wherever he was sent, performed whatever task was assigned to him, and was as punctual as a Japanese train conductor.

Until yesterday.

They had not panicked right away. It was possible that a snafu perhaps a traffic accident-had delayed Alfie on his way to the air port, causing him to miss his flight.

Of course, the moment he went off schedule, a "cellar command," implanted in his deep subconscious, should have been activated, compelling him to call a number in Philadelphia to report his change of plans. But that was the trouble with a cellar command, sometimes it was so deeply buried in the subject's mind that the trigger didn't work and it stayed buried.

While Oslett and Clocker waited at the airport in Seattle to see if their boy would show up on a later flight, a Network contact in Kansas City drove to the motel where Alfie had been staying to check it out.

The concern was that their boy might have dumped his entire conditioning and training, much the way that information could be lost when a computer hard disk crashed, in which case the poor geek would still be sitting in his room, in a catatonic condition.

But he hadn't been at the motel.

He had not been on the next Kansas City/Seattle flight, either.

Aboard a private Learjet belonging to a Network affiliate, Oslett and Clocker flew out of Seattle. By the time they arrived in Kansas City on Sunday night, Alfie's abandoned rental car had been found in a residential neighborhood in Topeka, an hour or so west. They could no longer avoid facing the truth. They had a bad boy on their hands.

Alfie was renegade.

Of course, it was impossible for Alfie to become a renegade.

Catatonic, yes. A.W.O.L, no. Everyone intimately involved with the program was convinced of that. They were as confident as the crew of the Titanic prior to the kiss of the iceberg.

Because it monitored the police communications in Kansas City, as elsewhere, the Network knew that Alfie had killed his two assigned targets in their sleep sometime in the hour between Saturday midnight and one o'clock Sunday morning. Up to that point, he had been right on schedule.

Thereafter, they could not account for his whereabouts. They had to assume that he'd snapped and gone on the run as early as one A.M.

Sunday, Central Standard Time, which meant that in three hours he would have been renegade for two full days.

Could he have driven all the way to California in forty-eight hours?

Oslett wondered as Clocker turned into the approach road to the Oklahoma City airport.

They believed Alfie was in a car because a Honda had been stolen off a residential street not far from where the rental car had been abandoned.

Kansas City to Los Angeles was seventeen or eighteen hundred miles. He could have driven that far in a lot less than forty-eight hours, assuming he had been single-minded about it and hadn't slept. Alfie could go three or four days without sleep. And he was as single minded as a politician pursuing a crooked dollar.

Sunday night, Oslett and Clocker had gone to Topeka to examine the abandoned rental car. They had hoped to turn up a lead on their wayward assassin.

Because Alfie was smart enough not to use the fake credit cards with which they had supplied him-and by which he could be tracked-and because he had all of the skills needed to make a splendid success of armed robbery, they used Network contacts to access and review computerized files of the Topeka Police Department. They discovered that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at approximately four o'clock Sunday morning, the clerk had been shot once in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene, it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm Parabellum pistol.

The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store, multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.

And at that point they had lost him for too long.

From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Any where.

Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.

But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.

Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.

Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe.

By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn't scream was because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well scream at the moon.

In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of People magazine.

Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA-NOW CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth Star Trek novelization.

Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.

IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.

The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds.

Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.

The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be happy to dress up in Agatha Christie's old clothes if it would sell his books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal, Martin Stillwater's Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products, a free action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in "Day-Glo" red, start your collection today and, at the same time, let our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.

Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn't see why the article had put the New York contact's blood pressure in the stroke-risk zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be "Mr. Tedium." If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it wouldn't need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore the crap out of you.

Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them especially novelists-had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had some thing to contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium.

As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You didn't have to put up with that in the movies.

Movies never took you inside characters' minds. Even if movies could show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon, anyway, for God's sake? Books were just too intimate. It didn't matter what people thought, only what they did. Action and speed. Here on the brink of a new high-tech century, there were only two watchwords, action and speed.

He turned to the third page of the article and saw another picture of Martin Stillwater.

"Holy shit."

In this second photograph, the writer was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. The quality of light was strange, since it seemed to come mainly from a stained-glass lamp behind and to one side of him, but he looked entirely different from the blazing-eyed zombie on the previous pages.

Clocker was sitting on the other end of the bench, like a huge trained bear dressed in human clothes and patiently waiting for the circus orchestra to strike up his theme music. He was engrossed in the first chapter of the Star Trek novelization Spock Gets the Clap or whatever the hell it was called.

Holding out the magazine so Clocker could see the photo, Oslett said, "Look at this."

After taking the time to finish the paragraph he was reading, Clocker glanced at People. "That's Alfie."

"No, it isn't."

Gnawing on his wad of Juicy Fruit, Clocker said, "Sure looks like him.

"Something's very wrong here."

"Looks exactly like him."

"The kiss of the iceberg," Oslett said ominously.

Frowning, Clocker said, "Huh?"

In the comfortable cabin of the twelve-passenger private jet, which was warmly and tastefully decorated in soft camel-brown suede and contrasting crackle-finish leather with accents in forest green, Clocker sat toward the front and read The Alien Proctology Menace or what ever the damned paperback was titled. Oslett sat toward the middle of the plane.

As they were still ascending out of Oklahoma City, he phoned his contact in New York. "Okay, I've seen People."

"Like a kick in the face, isn't it?" New York said.

"What's going on here?"

"We don't know yet."

"You think the resemblance is just a coincidence?"

"No. Jesus, they're like identical twins."

"Why am I going to California-to get a look at this writer jerk?"