"Security, housekeeping. Maybe a couple other workaholics like Crandall. He was the only one who kept really late hours."

"Could I see the security video for that night?"

"It shows him leaving some time before midnight."

"Could I see it anyway?"

"I'll have a copy-" Gavin stopped as he saw me shaking my head. "Fine. I'll have the original sent to you."

"I'd also like access to the lab."

"Mr. Donner, your pedestrian little threats may have earned you a primer on genetics, but you'll need more than that to get into my company's restricted areas."

"Maybe I'll ask Ms. Struldbrug."

"She'll tell you the same thing."

I smiled. "Could Crandall have left Necropolis?"

"Impossible."

"Can't have monsters roaming the countryside," I muttered. It came out thin-edged.

Gavin leaned forward, his manner intense. "Remember retroviruses? They can infect the normal population beyond the Blister. Do you think we created the Blasted Heath because we have a glut of real estate? And have you considered the possibility that this virus could mutate again? Become airborne? Or something that kills DNA instead of reanimates it?"

"Then why hasn't the rest of the world remained infected? Why hasn't the Shift expanded in all this time?"

Pure contempt radiated at me. "Only because of our Herculean efforts at containment. Every single infected person on the face of the planet is here. But one reeb gets out, just one-or a norm carrier, for that matter-and the rest of the world can kiss normalcy goodbye. Maybe forever."

Gavin laid his palms on the table, as if to calm himself. "Until this thing is licked, quarantine is the only choice."

"Easy for you to say," I murmured.

"No, it's not, Mr. Donner. After all, I, too, am here. Perhaps for the rest of my life." Gavin stood. "It's been a pleasure."

Yeah, right. I stood, nodded to the man, and turned to go.

"Oh, and Mr. Donner. 'Video' went the way of the dinosaurs four decades ago. You might want to remember that the next time you try to hold an intelligent conversation."

14.

DONNER.

I exited the building into the kaleidoscope night, my head a muddle. Even in reruns the conversation made little sense.

Telomeres. DNA. Aging. Missing scientists.

And a lot of liars.

If Nicole Struldbrug was to be believed about the breakthrough, Crandall had been about to be put into the history books alongside Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk. Anyone working at that level didn't willingly give it all up to disappear.

I turned down 23rd Street, tightening the belt on my coat. A couple of cross-dressing Marilyn Monroes passed me, looking for a subway grate. It was past nine. Traffic had thinned to a trickle of cabs and odd-shift workers, mostly waiters.

If another corporation or country had tumbled to the enormity of what Crandall was about to perfect, they'd definitely make a play for him. Maybe legit, maybe not. I was left with too broad a playing field, too many options: Crandall had gone into hiding, for reasons unknown. Crandall was now working for a rival corporation or government, willingly or not. Crandall had been killed to prevent him from finishing his work. And let's not ignore good, old-fashioned motives like jealousy. It could be as simple as a jilted girlfriend with a trash compactor.

Or an employer. Nicole, the lady incapable of an unrehearsed gesture. The lady who thought a well-timed kiss would turn any man into putty.

But why sabotage your own company?

That led to the most uncomfortable possibility, the one I hated to face: that I was chosen precisely because this case would be out of my league. If Nicole was behind Crandall's disappearance and was just putting on a good show as the frantic employer, then a reeb detective, freshly alive and disoriented in his new environment, would be the perfect choice.

I could almost feel the tension lightening the lines in my face. "Stress accelerates the youthing process." One of Maggie's favorite refrains. I thrust my hands deep into my coat pockets, wondering what would turn up next to make the case even murkier.

I didn't have long to wait.

The Silver Wraith Rolls that had been tailing me since I exited the building made its move. It jumped the curb, overrunning the safety strips in spark-filled screeches of superheated air. I feinted left, my coattails snapping. The driver didn't disappoint me. He wrenched the wheel right to keep me in his bull's eye. I pivoted the other way. He tried to re-correct his trajectory, but a car has a lot more inertia than a person. The Wraith shot past me, smashing through a newspaper kiosk. Had it been the primary assault instead of a decoy, I would've made it home in time for tea. But while I was busy congratulating myself for being so clever, a second team boiled out of the shadows of a storefront entrance less than five feet behind me.

I felt the cold tap of a neuralizer against my skull and suddenly my synapses and limbs were jerking firecrackers. Hands grabbed me as I collapsed. The Wraith retraced its maglev scorch marks back to us.

"Get him inside!" The driver, weasel-faced in a sloped hat, scurried around to throw open the rear door. "Hurry!"

A car was definitely a place I did not want to go. Once inside, my options would flatline. So I quit fighting and sagged, letting them have my full poundage. My kidnappers were forced rock back for a second in order to thrust my dead weight forward again. In that moment, they lost both their momentum and the initiative. I dug my heels in and threw myself violently in reverse, rotating in a ducking movement. The men stumbled and cried out as their hands twisted. It was let go or have their wrists broken. Fingers flew open in pain.

I threw a double-tap to their kidneys and planted the heel of my palm into each face. One man went down immediately. The other staggered jelly-legged on the pavement. I moved to finish him, but saw something out of the corner of my eye that stopped me dead.

The driver was resting what looked like a Thompson submachine gun across the roof of the Wraith. "Uh-uh," he said, grinning. "No more of that."

Crammed between the bruisers, I waited. The one I'd dropped to the pavement had a broken nose. It wasn't the first time. The man ignored the blood on his face, opting instead to bake me with glowering eyes.

The car hummed out into the evening traffic. In the front seat, a shadow with big shoulders lit a cigarette.

"I thought smoking was against the law," I said.

"So's kidnapping." The shadow turned and exhaled the smoke into my face. More melodrama.

"Trying to stunt my youth?"

"Something like that."

The thugs grinned darkly. At first I'd hoped they were muscle-for-hire types with detective's licenses-the kind of lowbrows that called themselves fly dicks. But now they were looking more like hoods.

The man shifted and I got my first good look. Close-cropped hair going to gray. Still fit in his fifties. I would've said a military background, but the wrinkled collar and gravy stain on the tie said no. The face was lined and hard as titanium. Not a face you bargained with.

"What do I call you, kidnapper?"

"Armitage," was the gravel-voiced reply.

Sounded real. There were two reasons he'd give me his real moniker. It was either going to stay friendly or they were planning to kill me.

My bookends frisked me. They did it rough, enjoying it. When I objected to a hand on my crotch I got an elbow in the face. The neuralizer effects whirled through my brain. Jelly Legs found the Times article. Broken Nose found the piece. They were handed to Armitage.

"Tsk, tsk. Reebs aren't allowed to carry weapons."

I tried Nicole's tack. "It's a .25 caliber. Wouldn't wipe the mustard off your face."

They burst into laughter. ".25 caliber?" The driver cackled. "Man, you're slow, even for a stiff."

Armitage aimed the weapon out the window. The muzzle flashed. A passing trash can became a molten heap of aluminum, just like that. I gaped.

"Try 25 terrahertz." He handed the gun back to me. I examined it, stunned.

"Seven round chamber," explained Armitage.

"Rounds? Rounds of what?" I racked the slide and ejected the shell. A lozenge dropped into my hand, containing some kind of churning amber fire inside.

"Plasma," the man said. "Ionized from a photonic hydrogen cell in the core."

It looked like an antique. I squeezed the casing of the "bullet" and felt my fingers tingle. I was so far out of my element that I wanted to scream. A dead sotto capo I could handle. Guns that fired plasma bullets... "I really need to study that dickenjane," I murmured.

"Instead of chasing after missing geneticists?"

So that was it. Thanks, Bart. This gig has put me on every dance card in town.

"You keep tabs on all reebs this close?" I asked. "Or just ones that used to be cops?"

"You always answer a question with a question?"

I smiled. "Does that bother you?"

Armitage grunted, maybe in amusement, maybe irritation. "The only reebs I tail are ones who stick their noses where they don't belong."

I groaned. "Priceless! 'Stick their noses where they don't belong.' It's like I died and went to B-movie purgatory. 'They Cliche By Night.' I suppose you're gonna tell me to never show my face in town again or I'll wind up sleeping with the fishes in a pair of cement overshoes, right?"

"Just tell me what you got on Crandall, smartass."

"If I don't?"

Armitage's crags reassembled into a grin. "The cement's in the trunk."

15.

GIORDI.

Giordi Lyatsky downed the shot in a single gulp. He scowled at the saggy-titted waitress for another.

He'd been counting on the booze to lift his spirits, but he'd slipped into a grumpy rehash of his life instead. Every fucked-up thing that had ever happened to him rose as a specter.

Starting with how he got here. Talk about bad luck. When the Shift had hit, he'd been nineteen and living in Brooklyn for only a few weeks, sleeping on the floor of his buddy Vitali's Little Odessa apartment. Vitali was a former cellmate from the Novoulyanovsk high security labor camp. They'd been released together and decided there was less risk-and less hard time-boosting cars in the West. So they'd crossed into the U.S. disguised as fertilizer, then spent their days on the boardwalk, drinking, whoring and planning their next score.

Then came the Dark Eighteen. Giordi was trapped here, probably forever. Unbelievable. He'd come from the Ukraine looking for the fabled American freedom and ended up in a gulag more inescapable than anything Stalin could have ever dreamed up.

Fuck it. No use crying over spoiled borscht.

Now, forty years later, he'd made a nice little rep for himself among the Brighton Beach mafiya. Okay, he was a little fish, but he had juice on the street. Nobody screwed with him. Things weren't any better back in the EU anyway. He'd heard stories about cannibalism. And with the thick roll of bills in his pocket, he'd finally started to feel like maybe Necropolis wasn't so bad after all.

Lately, though, things had gotten tough. The NPD and Surazal were brutal. Their raids on his smuggling had gotten devastatingly effective. Giordi had lost three shipments in the past couple months alone, and he was feeling the heat from upstairs. His bosses had no idea how difficult it was to get contraband into this godforsaken place. The forged documents, the Blister-point payoffs, the search inhibitor fields. It'd be easier to fly to the moon. But all they wanted were results, and results were getting more and more difficult to deliver.

He knew the organizatsya's method of firing disappointing employees. A week ago, he'd started sleeping with a loaded trey-eight under his pillow.

Today, he'd lost another cargo container to the police. Fourteen thousand pairs of sneakers, gone. It was a disaster. So right now all he wanted to do was sit at his table in this Coney Island Avenue bar, drink Stoli, nibble at a fried pirozhki, and forget everything. Because tomorrow, he was going to have to report the loss, and he dreaded it to his marrow.

When he noticed the woman staring at him from the bar, he assumed it was a mistake. Maybe she'd mistaken him for somebody she knew. But she kept staring, direct enough to dispel that theory.

It couldn't be his looks. He was a bulldog, squat and pug-nosed. His head was shaved and he had the usual proliferation of prison tats-no ladies man. He got snatch on a regular basis, but it was through fear and respect of his position, not charm. Or usually, he thought morosely, through payment.

But she kept staring at him. She was blatant. And pretty. Small, dark hair, big headlights. She was packed into some kind of expensive skin-tight dress, with a leather jacket over top. A designer jacket, he noticed. That was out of place. He'd heard about rich chickadees who cruised dives like this, looking for rough trade. Maybe this was one of them.

A minute later she came over with her drink. "Join you?" she said simply.

He grunted and swept a calloused hand to the other chair. She settled in next to him, smiling with moist plum lips. He realized that she was no older than fifteen. A reeb. Jackpot! There was nothing better than forty years of expertise crammed into a fresh teen body.

"You're Russian?" she asked, twirling her swizzle stick.

"Ukrainian," he replied. "Giordi."

"Loretta," she said, and offered her hand. He took it. She slipped her other palm over his, rubbing his coarse skin. It was like touching an oak tree. "Worker's hands." There was a glint of excitement in her eyes. He didn't know how to reply, so he simply shrugged again. She released him, and he downed his vodka.

"This place stinks," she said.