Best he put them to work to be sure they didn't miss anything. He reached for the com again.

When he went on-line, Plekhanov still used old-style helmet and gloves, even though the newer systems didn't need either. These days, holoproj imagery could englobe a viewer's field of vision with a simple eyeband no wider than a pencil, and the reader software behind a computer's holocam could pick up finger-jive command language and translate it as accurately as even the best gloves. But he liked the gloves, was used to them. Just as most keyboarding was now Dvorak pattern instead of Qwerty, another system he hadn't switched over to. He didn't care what anybody said. Forty-five years of muscle memory just didn't go away and allow itself to be replaced by something else simply because the new method was more efficient.

He waved the web to life and said, "Olympic Peninsula Trail."

The VR gear took over, producing an image of a temperate rain forest, a narrow path bounded on the sides by tall Douglas fir, thick ferns and patches of a.s.sorted fungi--mushrooms, toadstools and the like. Early July afternoon sunshine slanted down through the dense canopy of evergreens and alder trees, and painted the forest with slats of light and dark. Insects buzzed, birds chirped; a pleasant warmth, not overly hot here in the shade, suffused the woods.

Plekhanov was dressed in sensible hiking clothes: a khaki shirt and shorts, knee-length polyprop socks, waffle-stomper trail boots. He also wore an Irish rain hat. He carried a stout walking staff his own height, and a small day pack containing a rain poncho, a water bottle, a plastic bag of trail mix, a compa.s.s, a flashlight, matches, a basic first-aid kit, a Swiss Army knife and an emergency cell phone/ GPS unit. Though he planned to keep to the trail, it was always better to be prepared than not.

In his day pack, he also had the sealed packet he was to deliver.

He walked along the edge of a stream, listening to the cold and clear water burbling over smooth stones. Here and there, he saw small fish in quieter pools. He enjoyed the scent of fir, the feel of the humus-padded earth under his hiking boots, the empty trail, devoid of other humans.

After walking briskly for a time, he stopped and had a drink of water. While he was resting, he examined his watch. The device was a match to the one he had carried for more than fifteen years, a Russian a.n.a.log-mechanical pocket watch. It was a Molnija, big, heavy, mostly steel, with an eighteen-jewel movement. This model had the hammer and sickle and star on the back and an inset of the Kremlin on the hinged front, and was a commemorative model celebrating the Russian victories in the 1941-1945 war. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, cash-poor Russia had sold everything that wasn't nailed down to anybody with the money to buy it, and such watches had gone for ridiculously small amounts. If you could find a non-digital timepiece this well made and st.u.r.dy in the West--and you could not--it would have easily cost ten times as much as he had paid for this one.

He thumbed the b.u.t.ton, and the hinged cover popped open. He looked at the Roman numerals. Almost time for his meeting at the big rock on the coast. He snapped the cover closed. He needed to hurry. At the rock--a ma.s.sive chunk of weather-beaten stone near the juncture of the Pacific Ocean and the Straits of Juan de Fuca at Cape Foul-weather--Plekhanov would deliver his packet to a courier. The courier would take the package by fishing boat--in this scenario, at least--to a certain fat man who had access to certain systems, and the fat man would, in exchange for the packet of valuables--in this case, binary "jewels" he could sell--cause to be put into effect a small series of electronic "s...o...b..a.l.l.s." By the time these reached their destinations, some of them would be no larger, just like b.a.l.l.s of hard ice, but some would be veritable avalanches. Whatever was needed.

A small animal darted across the path in front of Plekhanov--a rabbit or perhaps a racc.o.o.n?--and there was a commotion in the ferns as the creature pa.s.sed through. The man smiled. This was one of his favorite trips. He much enjoyed the counterpoint to the reality. Walking along a wooded trail was as far removed from computers and nets as the moon was from the Earth. No small irony here.

Naturally, such musings turned his attention to technology, and the uses to which he had been putting it of late. Most of it had been in VR or sublinks. Not all, of course. Sometimes the real world needed real actions.

The physical destruction of the CIA/Net Force post in Germany had been one such action, crude, but necessary. Too much electronic tampering with programmers as adept as the best of Net Force's hackers would send up a warning flag. A bomb, on the other hand, could come from any wild-eyed radical. There had to be some alternation. The kind of software and viral attacks he was about to launch on systems in several of the Commonwealth of Independent States, in the Baltics, even on a Korean or j.a.panese system or two, just to keep people guessing--well, those would be of a different nature.

There were going to be hundreds of programmers and systems engineers cursing and sweating soon, and much chaos to rectify. When chaos came, his talents were going to be in great demand. And who better to fix things than the man who knew exactly how they had been broken?

The trail wound to the left, then the right, and broke out of the forest into a sandy area dotted here and there with sedge gra.s.ses or stunted ground cover. Surf pounded on the rocky sh.o.r.e only a kilometer or so away. He saw the fishing boat anch.o.r.ed well offsh.o.r.e, and a high-bowed dory motoring from the larger vessel toward the sh.o.r.e. Come to see him, to collect what he carried, then to do his bidding. The weather was going gray, fog rolling in, and it was also growing chilly. Appropriate for this scenario.

Here was VR power, the ability to create such visions, but VR power was but a small part of his talents.

He laughed aloud. It was good to be in control. And it was going to get better, very soon.

Tuesday, September 14th, 11:15 a.m. New York City Ray Genaloni put the phone's receiver down gently. "Excuse me, but isn't this supposed to be a secure line?" He did not raise his voice. He might have been asking about the weather. He pointed at the flashing red diode on the little electronic tap-detector connected to the telephone's base. "That doesn't look particularly secure secure to me." to me."

Luigi Sampson, his enforcer, as well as the Vice President in charge of Security for Genaloni Industries--the more or less legal side of the operation--shrugged. "The feds. They got stuff we can't get commercially."

Genaloni ground his teeth together. He mentally counted, slowly.

One . . . two . . . three . . .

He had been working to control his temper for most of his forty years, and he was a little better at it than he used to be.

. . . four . . . five . . . six . . .

Twenty years ago, when Little Frankie Dobbs had given him a similar shrug for something that had p.i.s.sed Ray off, he had beaten Little Frankie's head in with a Louisville Slugger. Killed the idiot, ruined a nine-hundred-dollar suit with blood spatter, and had to beg his father for forgiveness because Little Frankie was almost a made guy and the son of an old friend besides.

. . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten.

"All right," Ray said, feeling a little more in control, even if his anger was still hot and churning in his belly. As long as it didn't show, that was the thing. He had come a long way since Little Frankie. He wasn't going to fly off the handle and start doing stupid stuff, not now. He had a degree in business from Harvard. He was the CEO of a major company, not to mention head of the Family and all those those businesses. Take it easy, find out what's going on. businesses. Take it easy, find out what's going on.

He looked at Sampson, who sat on the couch across the desk from him. "All right, Lou. Who is behind this?" He waved at the phone.

"It's coming out of the FBI's Net Force," Sampson said.

Genaloni adjusted the Windsor knot on his two-hundred-dollar silk tie. Calm. That was the way. Calm. "Net Force? That's computer stuff. We aren't into that in any major way."

Sampson shook his head. "Somebody knocked off their head guy in D.C. last week. They're looking at us for it."

"Did we do it and somebody forgot to tell me?"

"We didn't do it, Boss."

"Then why, pray tell, are they looking at us for it?"

"Somebody wants them to think it's us. Whoever cooled the FBI guy used the same MO as our Ice Team."

"Why would somebody want the feds to think we killed one of them? Never mind, I know the answer to that. So the question is, who who is trying to put this one on us?" is trying to put this one on us?"

Genaloni leaned back in the ma.s.sage chair, a four-thousand-buck unit full of motors and top-of-the-line electronics under a carefully distressed brown leather cover. The chair hummed and sensors measured and weighed and adjusted springs and cushions to support the small of his back. He'd injured his back on a dare when he'd been fourteen, jumping sixty feet off a dock into the East River. That had been stupid two times: one, for the jump; two, for the polluted water. He was lucky he hadn't gotten hepat.i.tis while he'd been thrashing around in that c.r.a.ppy water, almost drowning from the pain. And his back had been giving him trouble on and off ever since.

"I don't know, Ray. We've got our people looking, but no leads yet."

"All right. Keep at it. Find out who is trying to give us grief. Let me know as soon as you get it. And since I can't trust my own phones, get a message to the Selkie. Put him on standby."

Sampson said, "We can handle this in-house, Ray. I got people."

"Humor me, Lou. You know, me being the boss and all?"

Sampson nodded. "Right."

After Sampson had left, Ray touched a control on the chair and allowed the motors to rumble and ma.s.sage his aching back. He didn't need this kind of problem. The legit enterprises now brought in more money than the graybiz. There were some corporate takeovers and a couple of merger possibilities in the works, and he did not want the feds breathing down his neck while those were in flux. Whoever was doing this had made a mistake, a bad mistake. One more generation and his family would be respectable, as legitimate as any other family whose fortunes had begun with bandit ancestors somewhere back in history. His grandkids would rub shoulders with Kennedys, Rockerfellers, Mitsubishis--no hint of scandal or illegality. The ends justified the means. Respectability was worth it, even if you had to kill a bunch of people standing between you and it to get there.

Tuesday, September 14th, 8:15 a.m. San Francisco Mikhayl Ruzhyo stood on a street corner in Chinatown, looking at a storefront with live white ducks penned in the window. It was as interesting as anything he'd seen in this city, the ducks. He had ridden on the famous cable cars, and they were, in his opinion, much overrated. He had viewed the Coit Tower in the distance. Gone to Fisherman's Wharf and eaten fried shrimp. He had seen the famous bar where women with a fondness for filling their b.r.e.a.s.t.s with bathtub sealer had danced naked. Too, he had watched many h.o.m.os.e.xual couples walk past on the streets, holding hands and doing things that would have gotten them arrested back home.

And now he watched ducks, destined to be somebody's dinner, waddle back and forth in the window of a Chinese grocery. Such an exciting life.

He smiled to himself. He was no Country Ivan, come to a big city for the first time. He was a man of the world. He had spent time in Moscow, Paris, Rome, Tel Aviv, New York, Washington, D.C. But none of those places were home. Where he wished more than anything to be was at his small farm on the outskirts of Grozny. What he wanted to do was arise at dawn, go outside on a frigid winter morning with h.o.a.r frost thick on the ground and split wood for the stove, using his muscles like a man should. He wanted to be feeding the goats and chickens and geese, milking the cow, then warming his hands by the fire as Anna fried eggs in fragrant goose grease for his breakfast. . . .

He turned away from the placid fowls, which knew not what fate awaited them. Anna was five years gone, taken by the cancer that had eaten her life all too quickly. At least she had not died in pain. He'd had enough contacts to provide her with medicine for that. But no cure had been possible, even with the best doctors in the country on call. Plekhanov had seen to the doctors. Ruzhyo would always be in the Russian's debt for his help during Anna's final days.

What he wanted was impossible. The farm was still there, his brother working it, but Anna was not, and so it meant nothing to him anymore. Nothing.

He started to walk, paying only as much attention as needed to potential threats as the Chinese locals and tourists moved past him, ogling the displays in various shops. Here a place where imported bra.s.s was peddled, there a store specializing in stereo music players and small computers, over there a place that sold shoes.

When Anna died, nothing had been left to him. After a dark, bleak time he could hardly remember, Plekhanov had reminded him of his old desire to see his country prosper. And Plekhanov had offered him a way to help achieve that, by doing what he already knew how to do best: mokrie dela mokrie dela--the wetwork. Before Anna's illness, he had put that away, retired, but afterward? What did it matter? One place was as good as another. If a thing pleased Plekhanov, that was sufficient reason to do it.

No, he could not go back to the life he had lived before. Never again.

The communications device Plekhanov had provided him buzzed on his belt. Ruzhyo looked around, sharpening his perceptions, alert for anybody taking notice of him. If he was being watched, he could not detect it. There was no reason for anybody in this city to watch him, even to know he existed, but one did not survive in this business for very long by being less than careful. Plekhanov wished for him to survive, so he did what was needed to do so.

He pulled the com unit from his belt. Only three people should have this number: Plekhanov, Winters the American, and Grigory the Snake.

"Yes?"

"There is another job," Plekhanov said.

Ruzhyo nodded at the speaker, even though there was no visual link. "I understand," he said.

"I shall contact you later to supply the details."

"I am ready."

Plekhanov disconnected the link. Ruzhyo clipped the com unit back to his belt, adjusting it slightly. He was used to the weight of a gun on that hip, and even a small gun was much heavier than the little communications device, but he carried no gun now. This was not Chechnya nor Russia, where he had official standing. Here, you normally did not carry weapons, unless you were police or some sort of governmental agent, especially in this city. Guns were banned here. They had a statue in a park somewhere, made of metal from melted guns. Besides, he was not a man who felt naked without a pistol on his belt. He knew a dozen ways to kill somebody using his hands, or a stick, or other available materials. He was well trained in such things. Yes, he would obtain a gun when it was needed, but unless he was working, no.

In a land of sheep, even a toothless wolf is king.

Another job. Fine. He was ready. He was always ready.

The secure line bleeped, and Mora Sullivan smiled as she waved her hand over the phone to activate it. The unit was wireless, shielded, and its transmissions and receptions encoded. The signal was routed and rerouted a dozen times. Each new call took different pathways in a random pattern through the net and comsats and back, so that tracing the unit to her location would be impossible. And her outgoing vox signal was scrambled--without a coded receiver, the binary code could not be translated. The speed, pitch, tone and cadence of her speech were electronically altered by her computer, so that on the other end of the connection, she sounded male, with a deep Midwestern American TV announcer's voice. The effect on a listener was that of a powerful middle-age man who had perhaps smoked or drunk too much at one time. The vox-scrambler was good enough so there was no hint of electronic trickery in the sound it produced, and it would fool the most sophisticated voxprint reader attempting to match it to her own. Not that it would ever come to that.

"Yes?"

"You know who this is?"

It was Luigi Sampson, Genaloni's enforcer. "I know who this is," she said.

"Would you be available to perform a service for us in the near future?"

"I can make myself available."

"Good. If you would stand by for the next week or so, we will pay your customary advance against the service fee."

The Selkie smiled. Her standby advance was twenty-five thousand dollars per day, whether she did a job or not. A hundred and seventy-five thousand just to be available for a week in case somebody decided upon a target was not a bad bit of change. Her fee for a job itself varied according to the complexity and danger involved; a quarter of a million was her starting price. If the client came up with a target, she would deduct the standby from the total payment. She wasn't greedy. And Genaloni was one of her best customers, worth two million to her last year. Another six or eight months and she would be able to retire, to leave the game. She had almost enough put away to do so now, pushing ten million, which had always been her goal. With that much, she could spend a million a year in earned interest and never have to touch the princ.i.p.al. And there she would be, not yet thirty, wealthy, able to go anywhere she pleased, to do anything she wanted. n.o.body would have a clue who she had been in her previous life; n.o.body would ever suspect the pet.i.te red-haired Irishwoman, daughter of an IRA man who didn't have two nickels to rub together when he died, of being the Selkie, the highest-paid freelance a.s.sa.s.sin on the planet. Besides her current ident.i.ty, she had paper and electronic trails already laid for her new life, so that should her background and wealth ever be questioned, they would easily pa.s.s inspection.

Her father's early lessons with a gun or knife or bomb had certainly paid off. Of course, he probably wouldn't be pleased at some of the people she'd worked for since he'd died, but his cause was not hers. Once the British decided to leave Ireland to its own sorrows, that whole long-running mess had ceased to have any meaning, even though the players refused to just quit and leave it at that. Something that established just didn't go away, even if its reason for being did.

Her mother, bless her, had been a hardheaded Scot, and had taught her children, all seven of them, to value a shilling.

Sullivan smiled again. That was where she had come up with her nom de morte, nom de morte, from her mother. The old stories her mother had told her children late at night, when the telly was on the blink and the radio unable to pick up anything, were full of changelings and curses and magic. The Selkies were the seal-folk, full of the from her mother. The old stories her mother had told her children late at night, when the telly was on the blink and the radio unable to pick up anything, were full of changelings and curses and magic. The Selkies were the seal-folk, full of the were, were, able to shape-shift from men to seals and back again. She had always liked that image, of appearing to be one thing while really being another. able to shape-shift from men to seals and back again. She had always liked that image, of appearing to be one thing while really being another.

n.o.body knew who she was. She had never met a client face-to-face, save once, and that client was no longer among the living. She was a faceless a.s.sa.s.sin, one that most people thought a man, and the best there was at it, too.

Of that her father would have been proud, she was sure. And, it seemed, she was about to go out on the hunt again.

Thursday, September 16th, 6:15 a.m. Washington, D.C.

One of the reasons Alex Michaels liked the condo in which he lived was the size of the attached garage. It was a two-car unit, and there was plenty of room for his hobby, which had been, for the last month, a thirteen-year-old Plymouth Prowler. It had replaced a '77 MG Midget that he'd spent a year and half rebuilding. He'd enjoyed that, gotten a nice profit for it, but the little English car couldn't hold a candle to the Prowler for looks.

Designed by the legendary Tom Gale for Chrysler as a concept car in the early nineties, the Prowler finally saw production four years later. It was essentially a slicked-up hot rod, a rear-wheel-drive, two-seat convertible roadster, painted a brilliant deep rich color known as Prowler purple. Since it wasn't old enough to be a cla.s.sic, it had all the bells and whistles of a street car--air bags, power disc brakes, power steering and even a power rear window--but what it really was was a big kid's toy. It also had a manual transmission, smaller tires on the front than on the rear, exposed front wheels with just hints of fenders and a tachometer mounted on the steering column.

He'd been too young for the glory days of hot-rodding in the late forties and early fifties, days portrayed in rebel movies old before he was born in 1970. But his grandfather had told him stories. Told him tales about the Eisenhower years when he'd owned a primer-gray '32 Ford he'd souped up and taken to drag-race a quarter mile Sunday mornings in the summers on the cracked concrete runways of a shut-down airport. He'd filled Michael's mind's eye with chopped and channeled Chevys and Mercurys and Dodges that sometimes wore twenty hand-rubbed coats of candy-apple-red metalflake paint, with hubcaps called spinners or moons or fake wires. Showed him the stacks of old hot-rod magazines that had gone dry and yellow with time, but whose fading pictures still revealed the cars. He had smiled happily as he'd told a young Alex Michaels about impromptu races in the middle of town at every stoplight on any given Friday night, and of drive-in malt shops and rock and roll music blasting from AM radios, when gasoline had cost twenty cents a gallon for ethyl and n.o.body who was anybody walked anywhere when they could drive.

Some kids grew up wanting to be cowboys in the Old West of the 1870's. Michaels had wanted to be James Dean in the post-World War II 1950's. . . .

He smiled as he rubbed creamy-gray degreaser into his palms, then over the rest of his hands. The stuff had that sharp, perfumed stink that reminded him of Grandaddy Michaels, who had started to teach him how to work on cars when he'd been fourteen.

You could have eaten off the floor in the old man's shop, so clean had it been, with its big red rolling-chest of Crafts-man and Snap-On tools always at the ready. The old man could strip an engine, drop a transmission, break down a rear end, and when he was done there was never a trace of oil or grit left on the concrete floor of the workshop. He'd been an artist.

He hadn't lived long enough to see the Prowler. A heart attack had dropped him at seventy, but Michaels was sure his grandfather would have approved of the latest project, with a few reservations. Yeah, it wasn't as frill-free as the old man would have liked--he hadn't held much with air bags or power anything--but it was mostly an a.n.a.log machine in a digital world, and it sure looked like one of the old hot rods. Drove nice, too, though Michaels hadn't gotten a chance to do much of that yet. Several parts of the engine were on the workbench, including the electronic fuel-injection unit, which was much in need of work or outright replacement. The last guy who'd owned the car had apparently tried to fix it on his own, and just as apparently, had not known which end of a screwdriver was which.

Michaels wiped much of the grime from his hands on a red shop rag, tossing the cloth into a steel rag bin when he was done. His grandfather had been a bug about spontaneous combustion, though the idea of a hand-cleaner rag bursting into flame seemed far-fetched to Michaels. The rest of the grease should come off just fine in the shower.

The doorbell rang. Hmm. Must be his driver. He was early; he wasn't supposed to show up for another half hour. The a.s.sa.s.sination protocols were still in effect--for another few days, anyhow--so one of the guards posted out front would have intercepted anybody who didn't have clearance to approach his house.

Michaels reached for the intercom. "Larry?"

"Not that I noticed," a woman's voice said.

"Toni?"

"Yep."> "Come around to the garage, I'll let you in." He hit the control for the electric gate lock that allowed access into his yard, then tapped the garage-door opener as Toni rounded the corner.

"Wow. So this is the new car?"

He grinned. "This is the beast."

She stepped into the garage, and put one hand on the right rear fender. "It looks great."

"I'd offer to take you for a ride, but she's not on-line at the moment." He waved at the part on the workbench.

"Fuel injectors clogged?" she said.

That surprised him. It must have shown in his face.

Before he could say anything, she shrugged. "I grew up with a house full of brothers. Cars were big status symbols in our neighborhood. The boys always had one beater or another up on jacks, trying to keep it running. I picked up a little bit about them on the way. This a V-Eight?"