Xenos was closely examining a door to an office. "No innocents today," he mumbled. "Dentist's office." He tried the k.n.o.b, studied the door frame, then stepped back. A deep breath, then he kicked the door open with a crashing splintering of wood.

And somewhere deep inside, a siren screamed to life.

"All exits locked down and covered by closed circuit; elevators shut down. Floors three through bas.e.m.e.nt are clear. We're starting up now."

Canvas nodded as he listened to another report coming in on a radio. "Damage?"

The guard shook his head and bit his lips. "Too f.u.c.king much," he said in shocked tones. But the look on his employer's face quickly snapped him back to order.

"Five in the room including two of the players, but I think the Kraut got out clean." He took a deep breath. "Three in the corridor, two more in the stairwell."

"Personnel?"

"We're down to five not counting you and me and a medic." The man seemed to drift. "I mean, I'd heard stories, you know? But I never thought that, I mean, Jesus!"

"Hey!"

"Sorry, boss."

Canvas put his arm around the nervous man. "Pull the men back. I need those bodies out of there before the coppers show, right?"

The man seemed to regain himself. "No chance of that. No one could've heard the shots, and we shut down the building's telephone trunks as soon as it happened."

Just then an alarm from one of the upper floors broke through the otherwise silent darkness.

"h.e.l.lo, Jerry." Canvas smiled up at the darkened building. "Get those bodies out through the garage now! We've got maybe five minutes." The man raced into the building.

Canvas changed the frequency on his radio, then pressed the call key for ten seconds. Finally, shaking his head, he spoke into the microphone.

"Point taken, Jerry." His voice echoed through the building's emergency intercom. "But this is just starting, right? Game on and all that." He swallowed hard, forcing all anxiety out of his voice. "No authorities, or the lady's children are done for. You know me, you know what I mean, right? He released the b.u.t.ton."

"Hey," Colin? Xenos's voice sounded tinny and far away over the intercom's relay.

"Yeah?"

"Let it go, man."

Canvas looked long and hard at the upper floors of the building before answering. Even longer and deeper into the heart of the man on the other end of the radio.

"'Fraid I can't. You take the money, you hook the fish.'"

A long, fanged silence.

"I understand," Xenos said flatly.

Canvas sighed, turned away, and started toward a waiting car. In the distance red flashing lights and squealing sirens could be heard.

"How'd you know they wouldn't kill them?" Valerie looked shocked as Xenos hurriedly cleaned himself up in the dentist's office.

"Leverage," he mumbled. "With you in their control, your kids were almost worthless and therefore expendable. With you loose"-he pulled a sweater he'd found in a desk drawer over his head-"the kids are all they have to keep you quiet; under control."

Valerie helped him adjust his clothes. "But what now? If I go to the FBI or anyone..."

"He will kill them. Guaranteed."

"So what do we do now?"

He threw some bandages and disinfectant into a canvas bag and headed out. "We leave."

"How? We can't talk to the cops, and the others are probably waiting right outside for us!"

Xenos took a deep breath, then turned to her. "Well, we just have... uh, we've gotta..."

Valerie barely caught him as he toppled over. His weight knocked her over and they collapsed to the floor.

"Swell."

The sniper scope's crosshairs moved steadily back and forth over the parking garage's mesh doors. Its infrared sighting mechanism casting the gate and the street around it in an eerie pale orange.

"Nothing," the sniper said as he continued to monitor the area. "Maybe they're gonna try another way."

Canvas just shook his head. "This is how they'll come."

"How do you know?"

The big man smiled spasmodically. "It's how I would do it."

As a child, they'd called it "shaft surfing." Valerie could still remember her mother's frightened expression the few times her only daughter had been caught doing it. She also remembered two neighborhood boys who had been crushed to death or electrocuted while crouching in the slippery darkness, waiting to "catch a ride." But she'd always been unafraid, and if the boys could do it, well, she had to do it better.

The elevator doors opened easily, the way she'd remembered they did. And the car itself was just two flights below, maybe twenty feet. The trick now was the timing.

Made all the more complicated by the half-conscious man beside her.

"Hey! You ready for this?"

Xenos nodded, saving his strength for the next few minutes.

The two of them sat on the threshold of the elevator, their feet dangling in the shaft. Valerie leaned forward watching the car below them. After several minutes, it began to move up.

"Okay. Here we go. When you feel it hit your feet, just lean forward quickly and let it take your weight."

"I know."

Valerie held her breath as she saw the car start upward again. She'd been the 103rd Street Champion for an entire summer. Twenty-six cars ridden consecutively over one summer vacation.

"Here it comes. Wait. Wait. Wai ...Now," she whispered as she leaned forward and half fell onto the top of the elevator. All the while praying that Xenos was conscious enough to do it right.

"Hey, Sarge. You hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"A thump. I heard a thump."

The Bristol police sergeant shook his head. "I didn't hear nothing. Now get ready. La.r.s.en, Washington, you go left. D'Amico, you're with me on the right."

The elevator bell rang, and the doors opened on an empty floor.

Three hours later-after a perfunctory police investigation of a break-in at a dentist's office, amid the morning crush of arriving office workers-a limping man heavily leaning on a smaller woman casually walked out the front door of the office building and hailed a cab.

Six.

Xi Lin Huan was a patient man, born of a patient people. A man of dedication, national loyalty, and pure-state-endorsed-vision. For forty years he had waited his turn, stood in lines, accepted his lot as his due at that moment. Forty years from private soldier in the border skirmishes with Burma to commanding officer of the Long-Range Study Organization of the People's Liberation Army.

At sixty-three, he was arguably one of the most powerful men in the People's Republic of China.

From his office deep beneath the Forbidden City he oversaw the most delicate, the most daring intelligence operations in the world. Plans that stretched across decades and shifting alliances.

Operations begun by men long dead; who died happily knowing that their work would one day bear fruit.

There were-in fact-seven such operations in place across the globe. Intricate intelligence warfares that were designed to leave the PRC the sole remaining superpower in a post-Cold War world.

And the one on his mind as he took his usual late night walk among the brightly lit gardens of the former Imperial Palace was code-named Apple Blossom.

Xi was followed by his aides as he strolled along the green paths. One by one, following a gesture or a nod, they would come forward, give their morning reports, receive orders, then fall back into the pack. None of the others ever close enough to hear a carelessly loud word or read the lips of the general.

Xi had spent nine years as a member of the pack, understood their nervousness and ambition-the problems they brought to him might have begun before they were born-but he still gave them little comfort or help. None had been offered him, and his country had none offered to it in the last half century. And if these younger men behind him were to carry on the work he stewarded, they must learn to be as hard as he.

He stopped by a small flower bush, kneeled down, and began a meticulous examination of the leaves. A moment later one of the packlings stepped forward, bowed, then stood beside him.

"Sir."

"Proceed," Xi said as he turned the leaves in his callused hands.

"The, uh, German reports that there has been an incident." The young officer stiffened. An incident-LRSO shorthand for a major disaster. And many a messenger had suffered for delivering such a message.

"Continue," the old general said as he brushed some aphids off the flower.

"Sir. It has been reported that Yu and Xue have been lost."

The insects seemed to be coming from a colony in the dirt between two flower bushes. As he listened, Xi pulled out a pencil and began probing in the dirt.

"There were additional fatalities and a possible compromising of operational integrity."

The pencil traced a small trough in the dirt, which Xi spit into several times. As he expected, the tiny bugs began to swarm out of their nest along the path. Xi watched in fascination as they divided into forward scouts, flanking columns, and a main body that held back as the others moved into the trough or along its sides.

"Responsibility?" he asked distractedly.

"Primarily Congresswoman Alvarez, with a.s.sistance from Indigo One."

"Continue."

The young man almost hesitated. It was so short a moment, virtually unnoticed, but it spoke volumes to the man watching the insects prepare for battle.

And it guaranteed that the man's promotion had been put back for at least five years.

Xi had little tolerance for men afraid to act and accept the consequences of their actions.

"Sir," the man continued, "Canvas has confirmed that Indigo One is, as suspected, Gerald Michael Goldman, a former special a.s.signment officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency's Operations Directorate. The American Registry reports that SAO Goldman was killed in an automobile accident ten years ago. We are, uh, pursuing the discrepancy."

Xi pulled out a small pocketknife, barely p.r.i.c.king his finger and allowing several drops of blood to fall into the path of the miniature army. Then he took out several wooden matchsticks, rolled them in the smeared blood on his finger, and dropped them in as well.

"Status?" he asked as the insects paused in obvious caution, then, forced forward by the smell of fresh death, moved over the unlit matches.

"Alvarez and Goldman are still at large," the aide said too quickly. "The reports on the traitor Pei's interrogation are still unavailable. But Canvas believes that Apple Blossom has not been wholly compromised as yet; that full containment will be restored within seventy-two hours." He stiffened as he awaited instructions.

"How is it that an SAO has remained unknown to Registry, to us, for ten years?" Xi's voice was a bare shadow as he leaned close to the insects as all elements came together over the b.l.o.o.d.y pile.

"Canvas reports that Goldman has been using the name Xenos Filotimo. Most probably living in an isolated part of the Mediterranean. What the Americans call a shelved a.s.set."

"Who chooses now to make his return to the living. I'm not fond of the coincidence."

"No, sir."

"Inform Canvas he is to reestablish control of the situation and eliminate both Goldman and Alvarez at his first opportunity." Xi lit a match, held it for long moments as it burned close to his fingertips, then lightly dropped it into the milling, losing-interest insects. The matches beneath exploded into an orange sulfurous blaze, immolating the insects in its midst; drawing the remainder into the flame and death.

Sighing, he stood, dusted his trousers, and headed deeper into the gardens.

"I wonder if they've gotten to the lilies? After twenty feet he stopped, seemed to look up at the stars, even deeper into the instincts that he so trusted."

"Xenos Filotimo." The light breeze brought his words back to the aides. "Stranger of Unbending Honor."

He turned back to his aides. "Full crisis management corps a.s.sembly in fifteen minutes, please."

The aides sprinted off to set the almost unprecedented orders in motion.

Xi slowly followed them, regretting that he would have to put off further inspection of the gardens. But there was something in that name-in its entry into the already thirty-one-year-old Apple Blossom plan at this moment, in this way-that reeked of chaos.

And, to a man like Xi, chaos was unimaginably bad.

The phone was answered on the third ring. "Paradise Cafe."

"I want to place an order for delivery."