"Sure, I remember him."

"You ever see anymore of him?"

"Not since college," Peggy said. She shook her head, a sly smile working its way into her expression. "Now there was an odd duck if ever there was one."

"Odd duck?" Teri said. She had never heard anyone refer to Childs as an odd duck before. In fact, she couldn't recall having ever heard anyone speak ill of him at all. This was going to be interesting. "How so?"

"Oh, you know, him the good doctor and all."

"I'm sorry. What am I missing?"

"Genesis?"

Times had been different back then. And they had been young. And what they had put in their bodies hadn't mattered much as long as it swept them away for awhile and eventually brought them back again. Some, like Mark Bascom, didn't even care if it brought them back. He died of a heroine overdose in '71, and Teri had always thought that his death had been the death of the group. Things had never seemed quite as carefree or spontaneous after that.

Genesis, though ... Teri had forgotten about that stuff. It was something they were into for about six months during her senior year. Like LSD, it came in a convenient little sugar cube and sent you out into new, uncharted territory every time you took it. She had tried it three, maybe four times altogether, and had quit after that because it always seemed to leave her with a headache that hung on longer than the trip itself.

"Yeah?" Teri said, still not making the connection.

"Where do you think it came from?"

"From you."

"Where do you think I got it?"

"Childs?" Teri asked. It was almost too incredible to believe. They were talking about the man who had been her doctor for most of her adult life, the man who had given vaccinations to her son, who had set Michael's arm after he broke it playing racquetball, who had done the biopsy on the lump under her left breast and had assured her repeatedly that it was benign. Sweet Jesus, what was she hearing?

"I went by the clinic every Friday afternoon," Peggy said flatly. Her smile was gone now, and her bright blue eyes seemed as if they had faded a bit. She stared past Teri, out the window into the countryside. "He'd give me enough to pass around for a week or so, no charge. Said he'd rather have us using something he knew was safe than something off the street."

"You never told anyone?"

"It was the only reason you guys let me hang around," Peggy said. "If I would have told you, you would have gone to him yourselves. You wouldn't have needed me then."

It stung to hear that, though Teri knew it was true. They would have gone to Childs directly, and Peggy would have quietly faded into the woodwork, and no one would have missed her one way or the other. She would have become the remnant of a bad trip, a memory better forgotten.

Peggy said something about how lucky they were to have made it through those times alive, but Teri didn't hear the words. She only heard the sound of Peggy's voice. It was a sound that she knew she'd probably never hear again, even as she was leaving and they were both saying how nice it had been to see each other and wouldn't it be nice to stay in touch from now on.

Teri thanked her again, and made her way down the walkway, through the white picket fence and out to her car. When she looked back, the front door had closed. Peggy had disappeared back inside, out of the sun and away from the past. It was a place that Teri thought she wouldn't mind being herself. Sometimes, maybe most times, the past was best left in the past.

[76].

The Garden Restaurant, which was a quaint, family-owned place, sat on the south side of town, just off the river. The cobblestoned patio, beneath a canopy of vines and flowers, overlooked a huge bend where the Sacramento River lazily flowed past, almost without making a sound. Sunlight seeped through the canopy, casting a warm, amiable blanket over the area.

D.C. folded back the front page of the Chronicle Sporting Green, and folded the paper again to make it more manageable. The Warriors had lost. Nothing new there. That had become one of the few things he knew he could count on these days. Everything else seemed to be playing against the odds.

He took a sip of water, and glanced across the river at a small, private boat dock where high water had drawn a line half-a-dozen steps above the surface. It wasn't unusual to find him here in the early afternoon, after the lunch crowd had thinned and the din of conversation had settled. Beyond the fact that Cecelia had been difficult this morning and he could hardly wait to get out of the house. The Garden provided one of his few respites when he was here in Northern California.

He had married Cecelia in 1972, when they had still been living in the Bay Area. She had been his first love, he supposed, though love was probably the wrong word. D.C. had never married for love. There were five wives in five different states, and he had never married any of them for love. Instead, he had married because it was part of the charade, another form of false identification, like a fake passport or a phony driver's license. Only these were his assumed families.

D.C. looked up from the newspaper and watched a familiar face cross the patio in his direction. The man's name was Jonathan Webster, and though D.C. had not been expecting him, he was not surprised to see him here. Washington had a way of keeping tabs on you even when you thought you had long been lost in the bureaucracy.

"And to what do I owe the pleasure?" D.C. asked, setting aside the newspaper.

The man pulled out a chair and sat across the table from him, his thoughts masked behind a pair of Eagle aviator sunglasses. "Just a friendly visit between associates."

"Your visits are rarely friendly, Webster."

The waiter arrived with lunch a burger and fries, set in a bed of lettuce, parsley, and two dill pickle halves. D.C. rotated the plate, sat up, and reached for his napkin.

"May I get anything for you, sir?"

Webster shook his head and waved the man away. He had always been a man of few words. Tightly wound, with an undercurrent that rarely erupted, he had mellowed over the years, if one could believe that. In his mid-sixties, the years had been good to him. A little gray in the temple. Maybe four or five extra pounds, but no more. He had always been a presence, and the years hadn't changed that.

"Not hungry?" D.C. asked.

"I caught a late breakfast."

"Eating on the run, that's not good for your system, you know."

"I'll try to squeeze in some fries and a burger a little later." The man glanced across the river at the distant horizon, searching for something more than the local sights. D.C. had dealt with him on two previous occasions, both under similar circumstances because someone in Washington had suddenly grown uneasy.

"I hear things are getting a little sticky," Webster said.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"Doesn't matter. I heard it."

"Well, you heard wrong."

"Did I?" Webster raised his eyebrows, knowing what they both knew that he had heard things exactly the way they were, that things had become sticky. For awhile, maybe even dangerously sticky. "You've been with this one a long time, haven't you?"

"Let's not go down Memory Lane, all right, Web? What are you doing here?"

"You're making people nervous. When people get nervous, they call me."

"There's nothing to be nervous about. It's under control."

Webster grinned, part amusement, part warning. "Look, I don't want to quibble with you, my friend. I don't have the energy or the interest. Six months from now, they're going to throw a little dinner for me, tell me something stupid like how strange it'll be at the office on Monday when I'm not there, and set me free. Me and the misses, we're going to do a little traveling. Maybe Europe. Maybe the Caribbean. Wherever the muse sends us. The good life, you know? It's long overdue, and I don't want to jeopardize it. You understand me?"

"What are they nervous about?"

"What are they always nervous about? Exposure."

D.C. took a bite of his hamburger, washed it down with some beer, then sat back in his chair and tried to look behind the sunglasses of the man sitting across from him. The operation, code named Karma, had been initiated in a joint effort between the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency during the late Sixties, early Seventies. Primarily a research project, things had grown considerably more complicated since then.

"The boy's aging," D.C. said bluntly.

"When did this start?"

"Just recently."

"How fast?"

"We aren't sure yet. Maybe ten or twenty times normal."

Webster nodded, and looked past him, lost in a moment of consideration. "Not exactly what we had in mind is it?"

"Not exactly."

"Maybe I better have a drink after all." He ordered a beer and downed it in three or four tosses. It was the first time D.C. had seen the man take a drink and it left little doubt in his mind that alcohol was this man's beverage of choice. He dropped the mug to the table with a loud knock, and looked across at D.C. "So ... what now?"

D.C. stared back him a moment, then said, "Gee, I don't know. You think we oughta flip a coin? Heads we tank the whole thing so some ass-wipe in Washington can sleep a little better? Tails we hang in a little longer and see what happens?"

"It's not that cut and dry."

"Never is."

"I wish it were, but it's really not."

"Hey, that's why you get the big bucks, Web. You understand all the nuances, all the ins-and-outs." D.C. leaned forward, fighting the urge to grab the man by the lapels and shake him until his marbles finally fell into place. Didn't he get it? Didn't he grasp any of this? The boy was turning into an old man. "Look, all I need is-"

D.C.'s pager went off. It sent a vibration rippling across his side that very nearly brought him out of his seat. He would have thought he'd be used to it by now. He turned it off, checked the number, and pushed back his chair. "Got a call I better take."

"Then by all means take it."

"Give me a couple of minutes."

"No rush. I've got all afternoon."

On his way inside, he heard Webster call the waiter over and order another beer. Now, two beers for most drinking men didn't amount to much, but he hated to think what it might set loose in this one. It was something to keep an eye on, D.C. silently told himself. Maybe even what a man might refer to as a tell.

He took a bit of delight in that knowledge as he went out to the phones and back again. And as he sat down he immediately noted that except for some suds at the bottom of the mug, Webster's second beer was already history.

"Anything important?" Webster asked.

D.C. shook his head, and lied. The page had come from Mitch. He had called to say that the Knight woman hadn't done much of anything the past day or two. She was still hanging around the ex-cop's place. He had wanted to know if he needed to continue watching her. To which D.C. had answered with an emphatic yes. "Just a friend wondering if we could get together tonight for dinner."

Webster nodded lazily. "If I call back to Washington and convince them to continue to support this Karma thing a while longer, I'm going to need some assurances from you."

"Like what?"

"For one, that you'll manage to keep a handle on this thing. The boy is back under our control, correct?"

"Yes."

"And what about his mother?"

"She's staying with a friend."

"She hasn't gone to the police?"

"No."

"You keeping an eye on her?"

"Twenty-four hours a day."

Absently, Webster spun the mug in one hand, stirring the suds at the bottom. "And how long until we have something concrete on this aging thing?"

"You know I can't give you anything definite on that."

"Well, what are we talking about? A couple of weeks? A couple of months?"

"Months," D.C. said. He spooned some ice cubes out of his water glass, popped them into his mouth, and began to chew. "Maybe longer."

"I can tell you one thing right now you don't have any longer than a couple of months. If I can't offer up something concrete by then, they aren't going to give a damn what you or I think about Karma's potential. They're going to shut it down and walk away and be grateful their backsides didn't get singed. That'll be the end of it. Right then and there. You got it?"

"Hard not to."

[77].

Aaron was in a hurry. He came out of the building, both hands tucked into his pockets, and took the steps as if he were Gregory Hines in a Broadway musical. It was lunch hour, only he'd gotten himself caught up in a database search and now he had less than twenty-five minutes left.

"Aaron!"

He glanced over his shoulder, hoping it hadn't been his name he had heard. But no such luck. Walt was crossing the commons, hurrying to catch up with him. Aaron tried to wave him off. "Hey, man, not now. I've only got half a lunch hour."

"Mind if I walk with you?"

"Are you gonna talk?"

"I was thinking about it."

"Then try to keep it to a minimum, will you? This is supposed to be my down time. I just want to get a bite to eat and maybe pick up a newspaper."

"Things that bad in the dungeon?"

"Hey, to you, it's Criminal Identification."

Walt grinned. They crossed the street at the light, cut around an elderly woman who was walking hand-in-hand with a little girl of maybe five or six, and followed the sidewalk up Reed Street. They were heading to the French Deli, another two blocks up. It was always Aaron's first choice when he was pressed for time.

"So?" Walt said.

"So what?"

"So you come up with anything yet?"

"Your guy's name is Mitchell Wolfe. He's a freelancer, mostly for the CIA. I don't know where he came from. I don't know what kind of background he's got. But I'll bet you a pastrami sandwich that he's got himself a horde of phony I.D.'s, including a couple of passports under different names. You're tangling with a pro, Walt. You damn well better be careful."