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  The ganglion of Talos's network had a specific pattern of behaviors outside of its recorded design specs—what Jane Rowland called "excess personality." During a universal dropout and reacquisition of external servers, the Talos library would likely suffer a "momentary lapse of confidence," as Jane had described it, and—like an infant looking around to see where Momma was—it might open a point of entry for a technician to check up on all systems.

  This point of entry would be brief, but it would require neither an identifier nor a password other than the original programmer's—which was known to Spider/Argus but not to anyone at Talos.

  That password was "Nick72TuringHorta."

  The original programmers had created and then concealed such portals, perhaps to allow them to make last-second upgrades and improve their chances of getting the rich Talos contract. Or perhaps because they did not trust Talos any more than the Bureau did.

  The blip would be brief and the system would easily recover, so no technician would come calling, but Fouad would be there, ready and equipped with a new way to steal and export data.

  He sipped from the melting ice and waited.

  Chapter Six

  Spider/Argus

  Tyson's Corner, Virginia

  Jane pressed ENTER.

  The ripple began to run its course. For the next ten seconds, Talos servers would try to access their familiar gateways, and fail.

  She sipped her white tea and noted with satisfaction that Nabokov now had an opening—a receptive command node in the Talos infranet, awaiting instructions from a local programmer.

  Jane could not get information out of that portal—no one she knew of could breach the Talos firewalls from outside—but if Nabokov was in place, for the next five minutes, the campus servers just might become an open book for him.

  The infranet returned a simple bit acknowledgment it was being inspected.

  Technician on duty.

  Then a little gong went off—a simple oriental chang.

  Jane sat upright.

  That spooky presence again, in a place it definitely did not belong. She swiftly drew a number in the air, then a slash, initiating her visual dialer.

  "Give it a miss," she murmured. "Don't go in."

  The Spider/Argus call center connected her to Alicia Kunsler in Quantico.

  Kunsler picked up on the first droning buzz. "Hey, Jane. He's in?"

  "He's in, but here's a hash query search—a patch on the portal. He may be tagged. Something else strange—an analog signal has been laid over the feed, available through the firewall—which would be doubly peculiar, but not really, because it isn't coming from Texas. It's coming from a source I can't trace."

  It's coming from that watcher who always knows where I am and what I'm doing.

  "Analog? Who in hell sends analog?"

  Jane looked over the diagnostics and pathways. Names popped up, hypotheticals:

  San Luis Obispo.

  San Francisco.

  Corpus Christi.

  Pendleton Reserve.

  "Could be random garbage from a discontinued coastal junction," she said. "A ghost from a TV show or something. It's just odd it popped up now. I don't like it. I think they've made him."

  "Recommendations?"

  "Yank him, whether he's got what he came for or not."

  "Shit. You know there's no way I can reach him. Can you?"

  "No," Jane said.

  "Then he takes the risk."

  Kunsler hung up.

  Jane's machines automatically extracted the analog signal, cleaned it up, and played it through her earpiece.

  It sounded like a young boy weeping.

  Her hands went cold. She cradled the tea mug for warmth.

  When she suddenly felt she was about to get dizzy, she let out her breath with a low, agonized whoosh.

  Chapter Seven

  Talos Campus

  Fouad leaned back in the chair.

  He had carefully planned his masking search—downloading updates to Yemeni academic and literary e-journals, accessing slow, ancient university servers half a world away.

  He had been watching the friendly, scampering images of network busyness flow around him. The incongruity of manic cartoon characters in full battle gear was not lost on him.

  The images flickered and froze.

  A black rectangle appeared, seeming to hover about a foot from his face. A simple green cursor blinked on its upper left side.

  Fouad reached into his shirt pocket and removed the four-pronged connector in its plastic packet. To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a thumbtack.

  He stripped off the plastic and shoved the tiny prongs under the cap into his forearm. Then he clamped a digital sensor to the plug, raised his arm to eye level, returned his attention to the screen, and keyed in the six-number technician identifier.

  Almost immediately, without knowing whether he was in or not, he ran his true thirty-line search code, memorized months ago under Jane's tutelage.

  The figures began to scamper again. They sped up—and then the records he sought floated into view in ranked folios.

  The folios opened and pages began to flip. He caught a few frames as they flew past—financial records for accounts in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China; transactions with federal employees in Virginia; payments to anonymous vendors in Idaho, California, Iran, Iraq, the new state of Arabia Deserta.

  Then, lists of Web news organizations and other media, accompanied by figures that seemed to represent the amount of corporate debt owed to offshore institutions.

  Fouad could get only a general impression of all the corporate and international connections: banks, holding companies, big investors—many of whom worked for the oil cartels—and several chairmen and CEOs of the International Financial Protection Organization, organized a few years ago to oversee the distribution of the huge U.S. debt.

  More lists followed: heads of state and government ministers from the Middle East, Singapore, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Beijing; lobbyists, lawyers, and licensed foreign representatives working for China and Russia.

  They comprised just a few of the hundred or more names that had apparently received a direct invitation from Axel Price himself.

  Three retired generals, an admiral, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve were also invited.

  Joining them would be political agents from nearly every nation that used Talos services or held American debt. Conspicuously absent was Israel—which seemed more than odd, given Talos's many past contracts there.

  A line of question marks was followed by the designation: "HR undecideds." Fouad could not pause the flow; HR might refer to the House of Representatives, members of congress.

  Many of the modern masters of world finance, politicians, world leaders, and even a few prominent military figures were about to come together at Price's call, a gathering of eagles and moles—and weasels.

  But where and when?

  Fouad tried to pick out the location and date, and then realized he already knew.

  Price was sponsoring a big gathering in Lion City in two weeks. Ostensibly he would be showing off the Talos Campus and hawking his wares: reviewing cadres of mercenaries, along with spectacular displays of new security and military equipment in which Price had made substantial investments.

  Something else flick-paged by—a cluster of references to MSARC. Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control. The central MSARC computers were supposedly buried deep inside mountains in Switzerland.

  All part of the new world economic order.

  The acronym seemed to him reminiscent of Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the working strategy of the decades-long nuclear stalemate during the Cold War.

  Perhaps it was meant to be. Just as the split-second decision whether to launch nuclear weapons was once regarded as too important to hand over to mere humans, the challenges of international finance were now too fast, too big, and far too complicated to entrust to flesh-and-blood ma
nagers.

  The tipping point for another, even deeper decline might occur in hundredths of a second.

  More flickering pages, then multiple references to "Jones," either a man or a network possibly linked to MSARC.

  All throughout, like obsessive-compulsive little fruit flies, buzzed sections of text from a rambling treatise by Price himself about "fiat" currency and its strategic disadvantages.

  Fiat currency—currency defined by a government rather than backed by physical assets—was a pejorative among believers in the gold standard.

  The area around his spiky interface began to grow warm. Terabytes of data were now flooding from the open Talos servers into Fouad's arm.

  Too long a connection might actually sear a blood vessel, but this was important.

  Axel Price was not the man Fouad would ever visualize at the center of a high-powered conference on international finance. He was not trusted in Europe. His connections to Israel had long since grown stale, mirroring the return of a general disenchantment with Jews inside the extreme American right.

  Any connection between Price and MSARC would be very interesting in some circles.

  The button was causing pain.

  The dataflow abruptly ended with a cartoon grunt face—a Talos security guard in full armor and regalia raising night-vision gogs, spinning his assault rifle, and winking.

  Done!

  The black square of the maintenance window closed.

  Records of Fouad's access instantly vanished.

  All the data—the reason for his entire mission—now suffused through his blood, downloaded at the source of the plug into thousands of microscopic data stores, amalgams of protein and silicon called prochines. The prochines would spend the next hour exchanging data with their blood-borne fellows, performing a kind of bio-backup, until millions of copies spread throughout his body.

  Security at Talos was comprehensive and superb, but so far, nobody knew about prochines, nor, had they known, would they have been able to detect them without drawing and analyzing enough blood to kill him.

  Fouad needed to get this information out of Lion City quickly. Given the conditions of constant surveillance and the county-wide blanket of sensor chips, and given that his contract did not allow for vacations or travel outside of the campus, the original plan had been for him to be informed of a family emergency within the next few weeks—the timing to be widely separated from this intrusion, in the unlikely event it were ever detected.

  But the conference was scheduled to begin in fourteen days. He needed to communicate with his handlers immediately.

  And there was only one way he might succeed at doing that, undetected—something almost as antiquated as carrier pigeons, of which he had none.

  Fouad left the cage, which locked its door behind him with a confident, steely chunk.

  Chapter Eight

  Dubai

  The hours passed. The dust storm blew over and the color outside the window blinds went golden, then dark.

  Nathaniel Trace flew in and out of a hypnogogic fantasy . . . Trees and roads all around, wind in his hair, and then a chingaling in one ear, like chimes, pretty but not at all soothing.

  His phone telling him he had a call.

  Interrupting the lazy flow.

  He scrunched his lids tight, then opened them wide.

  Dark in the room.

  Dark outside.

  Tree patterns painted on dark walls, windows, furniture. He pushed back against the visuals. He had taken the sedative hours ago. It hadn't knocked him out—not completely.

  Now the chemistry was conflicting with whatever else was happening in his body. He was starting to feel really bad. Afraid, and not excited about it. The fear was real. The evil was here, right beside him, right here on the bed, a dark, writhing tangle of tree limbs—he could feel them scrape and poke but he couldn't see them, not now.

  The room lights came up to dim gold in response to his movement. He rolled over and stared at the empty, creased sheets. Bunched pillows filled with leering ghost faces.

  The blinds were drawn. Airplane warning lights on skyscrapers blinked red between the cracks in the blinds.

  Chimes again.

  He grabbed the phone, an expensive EPR unit. His fingerprint confirmed him and the phone completed the connection. "Yeah," he croaked. "It's me. I think."

  The screen demanded another answer code. He fumbled with the keypad projected from the phone's base onto the gray sheets.

  Concealed number, but he knew the voice—slightly husked, soft and deep. Despite his discomfort, he sat up in bed and cleared his throat.

  This was the boss of the Turing Seven—director of Mind Design and the genius behind Jones. They called him the Quiet Man. His real name was Chan Herbert, but they rarely used it.

  Nathaniel had met him in person three times back in La Jolla, California. He was reclusive and cautious to a fault—hence the EPR phones, which could always detect someone unauthorized listening in.

  "Where are you?" the Quiet Man asked. "Still in Dubai?"

  "Yes sir. Way up in the sky. The Ziggurat."

  "You sound drunk."

  "I'm trying to get some sleep."

  The Quiet Man produced a short, guttural hm. "Anybody from Talos call in the last twelve hours? Anybody asking about your health?" He sounded anxious. He did not much like people and rarely betrayed emotion.

  "No." Nathaniel tried to keep a drowsy mirth out of his voice.

  "Have you heard from Nick?"

  "We've closed up shop. I think he's back in Texas."

  "He called. He was weeping. Are you sure you're okay?"

  "I feel great. Better than great."

  "Don't bullshit me."

  "A little loopy, that's all. Decompression from months of work."

  Tell him: I think I'm taking control of my body, all the automatic bits. It sounds crazy but sometimes it feels wonderful. Sometimes . . .

  "Nathaniel . . . "

  "No, really."

  "Talos knows where you are?"

  "Probably," Nathaniel admitted, combing his ginger brush of hair with his fingers. "I'm off the clock and off the rez, but they know my habits."

  He laid a hand over the bulge of his stomach. Too much luxury. Good food at the Galaxy Club—served by lovely Indonesian and Thai beauties.

  Maybe I'll straighten out my morals.

  Lose weight fast.

  "Jones says something bad is heading our way. He's tied into both Talos's and MSARC's secure nets, but he won't tell me what's up until he's sure. That damned truth function—your work, if I remember correctly. I'm ordering everyone back to California."

  "What's the hurry?" Nathaniel asked, stretching.

  "Pay attention, Nathaniel. Since you're feeling strange—"

  "What makes you say that?"

  "—And Nick is feeling strange, it's probably something to do with Mariposa."

  "Well, we did what we were told. What if it's not bad, but good?"

  A pause. Then, with a real edge, "Do you have any idea how deep this is? How important the seven of you are—and how complicit? Price made us wealthy men. If he even suspects we can't be trusted, we're dead men. Get out now. Come to LA and call in secure when you arrive."

  The connection was cut at the source.

  Nathaniel fell back on the bed, tingling throughout his body.

  Back to base camp. Back to LA.

  He should start packing. He tried with all his might to lift his arms.

  Nothing.

  "I can't," he said to the wall.

  A delayed effect. It might last seconds, minutes—or hours. He stared at the long shadows on the ceiling. Started to giggle, then stopped.

  "What the hell have you done, you idiot?"

  How much control did he really have of his formerly autonomous functions? Getting his blood moving faster, for example—as if he were running and not lying down.

  Flushing the last of those sedatives through his liver. They sh
ould be down to minimum concentrations by now, anyway.

  Could he actually control his liver?

  He lay still for a while.

  One of the shadows moved.

  Someone was in his room.

  He swiveled his eyes until his vision went muzzy.

  A short, robed silhouette stood in the lighted doorway. A woman's voice murmured, "Excuse me. For morning house cleaning, inshallah—on time, sir? . . . Sir?"

  She would probably call for assistance if he didn't answer—the Ziggurat emergency medical team, best in Dubai.

  His jaw wouldn't move.

  "Are you awake?"

  "I'm fine," he finally croaked between clenched teeth. "Just the flu. Leave me alone. Get out."

  The silhouette faded into all the other shadows.

  The door closed. Maybe he had imagined it, like the trees in his bed. Maybe it had never been there.

  Then: a steady inner voice. The same voice he had created soon after the slaughter in Arabia Deserta as a kind of psychic baseline—in remembrance of his former broken self.

  Time to get moving, Mr. Trace. They have a lot of influence here. Very long fingers.

  He had not heard from that voice in months.

  He had presumed Mariposa had killed it off.

  If, as the Quiet Man supposes, they want to find you, if they need to find you . . . This is the place. The desert across the water is wide and the sands are deep. They can do whatever they want here and no one would ever know.

  His body jerked and then convulsed. He bounced himself off the bed, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the nightstand.

  Slowly twitching on the cold wood floor, he regained control. Finally he could move again, but his fingers felt numb. He got up on wobbly legs and stumbled into the bathroom, into the walk-in shower, where he stared groggily at the water selection nobs.

  He chose desalinated, hot—hotter than hell.

  Treading on art glass tiles set in the fish mosaic floor, he tolerated the scalding water until he just had to scream—then jumped out and toweled himself down.