Solstice

CHAPTER 20 Michael's Call

Michael Lieberman came to, wondering where he was and what was making the noise. He jerked upright, felt his head wallow around as if it were about to fall off his shoulders, and reached for the light. Over on the other side of the bedroom the computer monitor was flashing, and a sound like an old Bell telephone was coming out of the speaker.

He dragged on a pair of jeans, walked over, and punched the keyboard. 'I think you got the wrong number. It's the middle of the night here.'

'No,' Helen Wagner answered, in an unemotional East Coast voice. 'You're Michael Lieberman. There's no mistake. I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour. Irwin gave me your address. We have to talk.'

'We?'

'My name is Helen Wagner. I'm acting head of S&T — that's Science and Technology — for the CIA in Langley. I don't expect that to mean much to you.'

Lieberman glanced away from the screen, shook his head as if that might help to clear it. The woman was familiar from somewhere.

'Professor Lieberman. I have bad news for you. I'm sorry. There has been an incident at Lone Wolf.'

He wanted to throw up. He wanted to pick up this piece of plastic and glass and hurl it onto the floor. 'An incident?'

'We had no idea they were capable of inflicting this kind of damage. It looks as if they hacked their way into the internal network somehow and wound up the internal power generator way beyond its limits. We got a minor explosion and a major fire. Sara will be okay. I'll give you the number for the hospital. She was the only one there when they hit it. Maybe they thought it would be unmanned. It was just bad luck.'

'This isn't true,' he said. 'You people lie all the time.'

Helen Wagner blinked back at him. The CIA didn't really look like this, he thought. The CIA looked like Ellis Bevan, all coldness and deceit. 'I wish I was lying. A few hours before this they blew up a SWAT team that we hoped was tracking them, and there we are talking real explosives. People are dead. They seem to be able to pick and choose between the technology they use. So far they've killed the President and a couple of hundred people with Sundog, wiped out some agents on the ground with Semtex, and managed to screw up one of only three working control units for Sundog with some kind of computer attack. It makes you wonder what's next.'

'Washington?' Lieberman asked blankly.

'We had a major telecom blackout and something like an intense magnetic storm just after noon. It was some kind of directed beam from Sundog. More disruption than real damage. My guess is that they are working to understand what they've got hold of, and conserving it too. It wasn't meant to handle the kind of energy they must have had to throw at it to bring down Air Force One. If they want to save it for the zenith unscathed, and that seems to be their aim, they need to be sparing when they use it'

Lieberman shook his head. This was all too much. 'What the hell are you talking about? Sara's hurt?'

She looked at him and said softly, 'I'm sorry. Too much at one time. I'm not good at this. You were still pretty close. I didn't know that.'

'Yeah. Close.' He looked at her as if to say: What do you expect?

'Sara was trapped for a while in the debris after the power plant went up. You should call the hospital and find out more. I'll give you the number.'

Lieberman nodded. People getting sick. People getting hurt. These were things he never handled well. 'Why are you telling me this? Why not Bevan? He's one of your goons, isn't he?'

She smiled, and it looked genuine. 'Professor Lieberman — '

'Drop the professor part. It makes me feel uncomfortable.'

'Michael,' she said tentatively, 'this is a very fluid situation. None of us was prepared for this. And we're not in control, not one little bit. We don't run the timing. They do. It's a little… unusual for us. At least for Operations here. I'm a scientist. Like you. I don't really get mixed up in those things.'

'What do you really want?' he asked.

'I wanted to break bad news to you.'

'Yeah. And nothing more? Please. My head hurts.'

'And ask for your help,' she said. 'Bevan said you planned to ship out in the morning. I want to talk you out of that. It's important you stay on board. We need to cover every option there is for taking Sundog out of their hands. You could help a lot there.'

Lieberman wished he could shake from his head this image of Sara lying in a hospital bed. 'I have to go back home. I should be near Sara.'

'Michael,' the woman said, 'her husband is with her.'

'Oh. Right.'

'And she'll be fine. Don't take my word for it. Call her. It's important you stay part of the team.'

'Important for who?'

'All of us. This is an international issue now, Michael. It's gone beyond the murder of the President and his staff.'

'Not my fight, Miss Wagner.'

'Helen. Please.'

'You've got all these people. In Washington. All over the world. They can fix it.'

'I wish you were right,' she said quietly. 'We're doing our best but we still need you. You designed what makes this thing work, Michael.'

'Thanks. I really appreciate being reminded of that.'

'It's a fact. I know you would never have done it had you realized what they really wanted it for. But isn't that a little academic now? And we do need your input on the sunspot cycle. They're bound to wait until the absolute zenith until they start to have their fun. And I need to know when that will be because the force they have in their hands is incalculable. When will it peak? When can we expect them to throw the big switch? Will it be midday UTC or what?'

Lieberman was aware that these thoughts had been running subconsciously through his own head too. The entire game might come to hang upon them. 'These things walk hand in hand, the solstice and the planetary alignment. It's like bringing a camera into focus using a couple of different lenses. Bennett's right about that, I'm sure. Last time I looked, you got the sunspot zenith coming around forty-five minutes after noon UTC

Helen Wagner sighed. 'Which is about as bad as you could get. The power of the storm will be at its peak.'

'You're making a lot of assumptions. That Charley really means this thing. That she has the wherewithal to do it. And that we'd all be sitting here with nothing happening even without Sundog, and of that I'm not sure at all.'

'Not really,' Helen Wagner said, no expression on her face. 'We don't need to make that many assumptions any more. Like I said, things have changed while you were sleeping. She's made that side of things a little clearer.'

'Don't tell me about it. I don't want to know.'

She looked at him. Lieberman felt himself being scrutinized. 'Why are you like this? A bright guy. So detached.'

'Because I'm tired. And sick of being told lies all the time.'

She shook her head. 'It's not that.'

'I don't do shrink stuff at two in the morning. Sorry. Is this conversation over? I have to pack.'

'We need you.'

'No, you don't. You need people like Bevan. They're trained for this sort of stuff.'

'We need your expertise. More than that, maybe, we need your insight into Charley Pascal. I have plenty of people here who'll walk around waving guns in the air. Operations has a few of them lying dead in the street in San Francisco right now. But something tells me that's not going to help us here. We need to understand this woman. What she wants. Why she got involved with the Children. And you know her, Michael.'

'Knew. A very long time ago. And this is crazy. It isn't like her. Not the Charley I knew.'

Helen Wagner shrugged. 'People change, Michael.'

'Not that much. Not deep down.' She looked sad, he thought, resigned.

'I have to show you this,' Helen Wagner said. 'It isn't a pretty sight. But you need to look. You need to help me understand.'

'I'm out of here.'

'This is bad, Michael. This could be everyone's worst nightmare. We thought we could keep this under wraps as much as possible, keep a lid on people's fears. But you're right, Charley's smart. After hitting Lone Wolf she put up a site on the Web. It's got her stated aims — sufficiently hazy so that we can't second-guess the detail — and some other stuff too. I believe you when you say she wasn't like this when you knew her. But something shifted inside her. She's sick, physically, and I think in some way she relates what is happening in her head to what is happening in the universe. People no longer matter to her. And she wants to hurt us, all of us, in a way we'll never forget. She thinks that she can somehow send a wake-up call to the human race.'

Lieberman shook his head. 'That's not the Charley I knew.'

'Take a look at this. We downloaded our own copy. The real thing is getting so many hits on the Web you'd never get through. There's something else too. We had someone inside. Charley found out. She E-mailed us a little extra, a picture of the body. If you're feeling up to it, click on the image. If you need more proof, that is. I won't nag. But you have to ask yourself this: Can you really stay apart from what's happening? If you do that, will you ever forgive yourself?'

'I told you,' he said, 'I'm out of here.'

A Web page came on the monitor. Brightly coloured text and background, the words Children of Gaia in red, and beneath a simple message: Prepare.

Lieberman shook his head and said, 'You people…' He clicked on the enclosed image she had sent straightaway and thought: She knew that was what would happen all along, she planned it just like that.

Half an hour later, a vodka in his shaking hand, Lieberman called the hospital in California on the videophone. Sara Wong had a bandage around her forehead, a big livid bruise showing up on her right cheek, and what looked like the makings of a serious black eye above it.

'Hey. I leave you alone for a little while and see what happens? Hell, Sara. What do I say?'

'You ask how I am.'

'I can see that from looking. Does it hurt? Can I do something?'

'No.' It was the look again, as if this were somehow his fault.

'I wish I was there.'

'Why? It's not so bad. Talk a little, Michael. I'm tired. I was about to go to sleep.'

'Right. So I'm out of this place. This whole job was just some kind of cover for a spook thing and I'm through. I can maybe get a plane to Madrid, be back home in a day or so.'

'Oh, Michael…' Yeah, he thought, he got the message.

'They spoke to you, huh? The Wagner woman.' Sara winced (and this was the pain he was giving her, not the physical side of things, he knew that).

'Of course they spoke to me. Someone attacked the goddamn facility, it looks like it's been firebombed. What do you expect?'

'Don't believe what they tell you. Don't believe a thing.'

'Really.' Her face looked tired, a little sour now too.

'No. You recognize that woman's name? She was in Time the other week. The spook appointments page or something. She's Pieter Wagner's kid, the guy the men in black hounded to death way back when. I just double-checked on the Net. Can you believe that?'

'I remember that story. Maybe she thought it was a good job. Maybe she thought that, if they got better people in there, mistakes like the one that screwed up her father wouldn't happen.'

'Yeah.' Always thinking the best of people. Sara all over.

'Is that so hard to believe, Michael?'

'For me it is.'

'Then that's your cross. Christ, it's nearly fifteen years since you walked out of that project like someone had stolen your very life. Don't you ever get over things?'

'She told you to say that.'

'So what? There's something bad happening in the world right now. You have to trust someone and it might as well be them because just now I can't think of anyone else. Either that or you just hide in a deep, black hole somewhere and wait for it to go away. Is that what you want?'

Lieberman drained the vodka glass, poured himself another.

"That's going to help, Michael. Why don't you just take the whole damn bottle, let it give you some comfort down there in your hole, with all those demons. Just let someone else take the responsibility for getting on with the job.'

'You don't mean that, Sara. I want to be home. I want to see you.'

'Christ.' Her voice got louder. It made him sweat in the lonely, airless bedroom, the sound of the Mediterranean washing in from the window.

'Michael. I don't want you here. Not because they told me to say that. Not because they asked me to persuade you to help them. It's simpler than that. I have a new life now. I have a husband. And I don't want you here.'

'Right.' The same old ritual, a few thousand miles apart.

'Believe me,' she said, eyes closing. Dog-tired, he thought, she wasn't faking that, or anything else either if he were to be honest with himself. 'Believe that, Michael, if you believe nothing else at all.'

CHAPTER 21 Precautions

Helen Wagner left the S&T block and headed for the old building and Levine's office. Larry Wolfit, Belinda's deputy, now hers, was by her side, a tall, slender man, dressed in a checked shirt and jeans, brought straight back from a few days' vacation by the crisis. He was a few years older than she, quiet, thoughtful, not given to hasty decisions. When the news of Belinda's death broke, Helen's first thought was that they would make Wolfit acting head until a permanent appointee was found. If he was disappointed by their eventual choice, it didn't show. When she considered it more carefully, she guessed it was predictable he didn't get the job. Wolfit was too introspective for the likes of Levine, maybe, and — she didn't enjoy the thought — too smart as well.

'We haven't had the conversation, Larry.'

He gave her a wry smile and strode out across the road. Wolfit had been somewhere in Yellowstone when they tracked him down, working on a wildlife renewal project that seemed to occupy most of his spare time. He was still wearing his mountain boots. It gave him an odd, rural air in Langley's neatly manicured environment. The office had nicknamed him Wolfit the Wolf Man, and it seemed so inappropriate. He looked like a college professor on a hike, tall and thin, with wispy fair hair that was falling fast. He could have swept aside what was left to hide the baldness, she guessed, but that was the kind of personal touch that probably never occurred to him.

'No need,' he said gently. 'I wasn't looking for the job.'

'All the same-'

'Really,' and he gave her a fixed stare. 'And besides, to be honest I've been thinking about quitting anyway. Not that now's the time. This work I've been doing, it's getting a sight more interesting than I ever expected.'

She knew, in a loose fashion, what the work was; everyone in S&T did. Larry Wolfit was involved in some scheme to reintroduce wolves into parts of the Rockies where they'd been chased out by man. It was an unusual hobby for an S&T employee, she thought, and she couldn't help but envy his energy and his commitment.

'We can talk about this later,' she said. 'Interesting hobbies don't necessarily make interesting careers, Larry.'

He smiled and, for a moment, she thought Wolfit was humouring her. 'I wouldn't describe it as a hobby. We're starting to learn things there that are pretty amazing. I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to some large-scale wolf reintroduction schemes pretty much everywhere before long.'

'I guess we need to manage things better.'

'No,' he answered swiftly. 'We have to unmanage them. That's the big lesson. We just go back to something like the status quo, then get the hell out of there.'

She watched the big shape of the main block loom up out of the darkness. 'Speaking of wolves…'

Wolfit grinned. 'Please. If they could speak, they'd be offended. Wolves are highly social, team-oriented animals, with a strong sense of what we would call duty and loyalty. They wouldn't flourish here at all. Which is one more reason why I'm thinking of going.'

And that would be a loss, she thought, one she would try to avoid. They needed people with Wolfit's qualities: intelligence and the ability to think outside the box. She'd copied everything they had on Sundog to him for his arrival and he was already up to speed on the situation. His insight was, she knew, going to be vital.

The night was hot and airless. It made her catch her breath as they walked purposefully across the quadrant. The sky was clear, bright with stars, pregnant with some power Helen Wagner could only guess at. She had been racing to catch up on the subject of solar energy these past few hours and felt she had a reasonable brief under the circumstances. But there were so many holes in the subject, so many unfilled doubts, even for someone like Lieberman, who seemed to know it by heart. With the best will in the world, they had to guess their way through this one.

Lights burned throughout the Langley complex but they were alone on the walk. These spaces between the component parts of the Agency could be huge, she thought. They turned into the old block, walked to Levine's first-floor office, entered, saw the acting director waiting there, Barnside next to him, and she wondered how Belinda would have handled this. Only one way: directly. This was, in some sense she did not understand, some kind of struggle, between her and this static, slow-moving traditionalism that Levine and Barnside personified. The difference was generational. Both men failed to realize that the ecosystem around them was changing, the threats were different, and the old, simple, forthright solutions didn't apply any more.

She led Larry Wolfit into Levine's office, breathed in the smoke from his cigarettes, saw them seated at the table, watching her, uncomfortable, almost sullen. Then she sat down, looked at their faces, and said, 'How the hell did they get to know about that poor kid? Where did that come from?'

Barnside sighed, a long low moan, reached for a can of Coke on the table, took a swig. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his face looked lined, older. 'Jesus, Helen. Do you have to be so predictable? No one said Ops was a safe ticket. We're not pushing keyboards. This was a field operation. Everyone knows the risks.'

'Great. Now that that little speech is out of the way, can I have an answer? How the hell did they find out?'

'She'd been out of touch with us for months,' Barnside said, shrugging his big shoulders. 'Something went wrong. The most likely explanation is that they tumbled to her some time ago and waited for the right moment. Maybe she was a bad choice. I wouldn't deny that. The point about these people is that they are from outside. We never put them through much formal training. That's what gives them their value — they don't wear the uniform.'

Helen Wagner took a deep breath and knew that what Barnside said made sense. That didn't stop it from bugging her.

'We got an inquest running on the girl,' Levine said. 'Nothing more to know about that at the moment. Let's talk about some broader issues. These Gaia crazies have got all this equipment in the sky. Like some kind of death ray from outer space, the way these Sundog people talk about it. Why did they do all this hacking to get into the Lone Wolf unit?'

She nodded. 'It's an interesting question. They want to disable the dome — that's the unit that was developed to house the Sundog antennae and control equipment. We know Sundog can disrupt telecommunications and produce some pretty nasty physical side effects. It's got lots of gears. They could have thrown at Lone Wolf what they threw at us.' Helen was thinking on her feet. It didn't come naturally.

'So why didn't they do that?' Barnside asked.

Wolfit looked up from the papers. 'I spent a couple of hours going through the records of what happened during the Sundog trials. The reason the thing got abandoned was that it was so damn hard to control. It had all manner of attack media in there — laser, microwave, particle beam. You could create anything from a sea of white noise to a radio or network blackout. Even real damage on the ground — fire, high magnetic and radiation fields. What they threw at us was something designed to flex a muscle or two, I guess, and it happened to coincide with a peak in the sunspot cycle. Maybe that was lucky. I wouldn't want to rely on it for taking something out entirely, and clearly they wanted to do that with Lone Wolf.'

Helen nodded. 'I agree. We didn't know how to control Sundog with any degree of accuracy and my guess is Charley doesn't either. And this just gets all the more unreliable as we swing up to the zenith. Even without the satellite we could expect some pretty visible effects on the earth in any case. If they can tap into that, then they probably could hope to bring a dome down, but not quite yet, not with any certainty anyway.'

'Makes sense,' Levine said. 'So. Why did they do it?'

'It may have been just a demonstration of their strength,' Helen responded. 'They threatened some signs that would persuade people to prepare when they put up the Web site. Maybe that was a sign. There's no way of knowing. They haven't even claimed responsibility yet.'

'Or?' Levine asked.

Helen grimaced. 'Or it's the start of an all-out war to remove our capability to talk to Sundog in any form. The Children clearly have their own facility somewhere. It would take money to build a replica of a dome, but the equipment is available on the open market and Charley sure knows how. I've got the FBI tracking through contractors to see who's been buying the right sort of installation. They want to take us through the zenith using their own dome, but they have to live with the possibility that we might regain control of the network. If they take out our three control centres, that's impossible. In fact…'

She turned to the monitor and keyed in the La Finca address. After a few moments, Bevan's face came on screen. 'Is Irwin there?'

'A moment.' She waited.

'Hi,' Irwin Schulz said, looking exhausted.

'We need to understand more. Let's say the Children somehow manage to take out the two remaining domes. Then they program the satellite to do its worst through whatever installation they have and destroy that. Is there any way we can get back on it?'

Schulz licked his lips and said, 'Not from the ground.'

'What if we start building a dome right now?' Levine asked. 'As a precaution?'

'No time, sir,' Schulz answered. 'It takes a month or more to bed these systems in.'

Levine stared at Barnside. 'Put some heavy-duty security teams on site in Kyoto and La Finca. And scour everything there, make sure there are no little surprises waiting for us already.'

'Irwin,' Helen asked, 'you think it takes a month to get one of these things working? That's after you get all the equipment.'

'Oh yeah. It's a real pain.'

Levine looked at her. 'Well?'

'Charley Pascal basically had a blueprint for an entire dome in her head, is that right, Irwin?'

'Sure. She designed most of it.'

'So if she wants to do this quickly, surely it makes sense to copy everything right down to the last nut and bolt?'

'The telecom equipment's heavy-duty but standard.'

'Maybe they built a dome too,' she said. 'Is that a possibility? Maybe they got the same kind of design just to make it easier. Could they do that, Irwin?'

'I guess so. If you found the contractors.'

Levine stared at her, cast a sideways glance at Barnside. 'Good work. We pass that over to the Bureau. There can't be that many people who can build one of those things.'

'Irwin,' she added. 'Mail me the plans for the dome, and the names of the contractors you used.'

'Sure.'

'So what are we getting from your guys, Dave?' Levine asked.

Barnside shrugged. 'You got the list. The President tied our hands a lot, you know. Insisting that this really was a Bureau job.'

'Yeah. I heard. But no one knows for sure they're inside the US.'

'I think,' said Helen, 'we have to assume that's a probability. We have no evidence that there is a foreign government in play here, and they surely would need that level of assistance to try to produce a dome abroad.'

'And here you just go buy it from the catalogue. Wonderful,' Levine grumbled. 'It doesn't mean we sit on our hands and watch this game go by. The priority's clear. We have to take every step to ensure nothing happens to the two remaining domes. Talk to the military, the politicals. See if we can get air exclusion zones, whatever, put around these things. And sweep every last inch of them.'

Barnside shook his head at Levine. 'We're not going to get an easy ride over any air exclusion requests. The President is taking this through the UN Security Council right now, they're in permanent session. He's not having an easy ride.'

'So we're the bad guys,' Levine grunted. 'Again. What's new? Pile everything you've got into those places. I do not want a repeat of Lone Wolf. Understood?'

They nodded. Levine gave her a baleful glance. 'I got a gut feeling Operations isn't going to get us out of this one, Wagner. The best they can do is keep the fire damped down. What about S&T?'

'We have things to work on. The possibility of the dome. Also the appearance of the Web site. That has to use some conventional network and IP addressing system. There are ways of cloaking your location, but we have people looking at it.'

Wolfit shook his head. 'I don't want to hold out unrealistic hopes, sir. These people know what they're doing. The idea they might leave a loophole that lets us find them through the Net has got to be a touch fanciful'

'Yeah,' Levine said. 'But no one's perfect. You give us somewhere to search. It's a start. I got to see the National Security Council now. I got more briefings on the go than minutes in the day. Dave, you take the FBI liaison meeting in the morning. Communicate anything of moment in it to Wagner straightaway. You hear?'

'Sir.' Barnside nodded.

Levine watched her, and she couldn't work out what he was thinking. 'You think this Shuttle idea has got some mileage?' he asked in the end. 'It's a hell of a risk.'

She didn't try to hide her doubts. 'We can probably get the thing up there in one piece. The problem is what we do then. Unless Lieberman can come up with something, it's pointless. We won't get anywhere near it.'

'Twist his arm,' Barnside said.

She thought about the deep, intelligent face she'd seen on the monitor. 'I don't think it works like that. He has to find his way there on his own.'

'Scientists,' Levine complained. 'Worse than working with goddamn movie stars. Barnside's right. Twist his arm. Do whatever you can. Then try to get some sleep tonight, the pair of you. It may be the last we get for some time.'

CHAPTER 22 Nature, Rising

She watched the needle go into her arm, closed her eyes, let her head go back, and sighed. Joe Katayama looked into her face, checked the dilation of her pupils, then felt her pulse. The morphine dose kept getting stronger all the time. It had to be watched carefully. And there were times too when he had to say no. They needed her in full control. She understood the system better than anyone. Outside, in the control room, they had enough pure programming skill to run a small corporation. But Charley had the vision, and the breadth of knowledge too. She could turn her hand to hexadecimal one moment, and offer an expert interpretation of the data coming through the feed on the sunspot cycle the next. They couldn't function properly without her.

She opened her eyes and understood the way he was looking at her. There'd been a time when the slow, warm comfort of sex had helped, but that was behind her now.

'Joe,' she said, and reached forward, stroked the tanned, muscular strength of his forearm. 'No more.'

She wore a white shift and lay on the large white bed, soaked in sweat from the heat that seemed to issue in waves from the white painted walls of the farmhouse. She had slept quickly, a deep, narcoleptic sleep, after Tina's death. When she awoke, she found Joe had curled up beside her and lay like a tight, foetal ball, looking so much younger, no cares, no fear in this place his sleeping being had found. She had watched his body, the way his chest moved slowly with each long, patient breath, and wondered at the space between them. Joe Katayama was ever-present in her life, she relied upon him for so many things, personal and physical, but practical too. Yet in some way she still felt he was a stranger.

Awake now, he was his old self, watchful, waiting, always ready to obey. He didn't seem disappointed by her refusal. 'Whatever you say. You feel worse? Is there less feeling?'

'It's partly that. But things move on, Joe. From now on I think we begin to leave the body behind. We start to get closer to the Mother. When we make love… it's like being back in the Garden, like Adam and Eve. But they were children, Joe. We're growing, changing. We need to focus on that.'

'You're right,' he said flatly, and slipped off the bed, pulled on his jeans, began to dress. Charley shrugged on the loose clothes that were still lying at the edge of the bed, let him carry her to the wheelchair, comb her hair, then push the chair to the bathroom.

Afterwards, she asked, 'How are they feeling?'

Joe Katayama thought about the others. They were, effectively, in his care now. Charley's ability to control them through anything but the force of her will was slipping. This didn't worry him. They were loyal, faithful. Or, to put it differently, they didn't think much beyond the confines of the farmhouse. All they saw of the outside world was what appeared on the monitors in the room, and these images were so distant, so intangible. Reality began and ended at the door of Yasgur's Farm. This was their great strength. He shrugged. 'They'll be fine. It shocked some people. Billy Jo. Anthony. The weaker ones.'

She smiled. 'You have to get rid of that way of thinking, Joe. Those days are over. It's not their fault they're shocked. We're all shocked. We all weep for Tina. And ourselves. But more than anything we weep for the earth. We're nothing next to her.'

'I know,' he said. 'I kind of told them that. Besides…' He hesitated.

'Besides what?'

'Where could anyone go? We're here. We're safe. If anyone tried to leave until it's time, I'd know.'

'You always think in terms of force,' she said, and wondered whether he resented the comment. 'It's not necessary any more, Joe. They won't do anything we don't tell them.'

'Maybe not.'

'It won't happen. They couldn't do it. And okay, if you like, you won't let it happen.'

She pushed on the rails of the wheelchair. Joe opened the door into the control room. It had a low, active buzz about it, people hovering over computer monitors, watching newscasts, printing out papers, posting them on the whitewashed walls. There were fans scattered throughout the room, setting up a perpetual hum of motion, a flow of thin air that scattered papers, made your sweat feel cold on your brow. Maybe it was like this in a war, he thought.

The constant movement stopped as she entered. The family gathered around her. She smiled at each of them, taking care to look into their eyes, seeing there a mix of emotions, fear and uncertainty, without doubt, but loyalty and commitment too. On her signal, they stopped work, came and gathered around her wheelchair, silent, waiting.

'Tina would have betrayed us,' she said. 'She was placed here by those who wish to kill us. We had no choice. And it was finished quickly. Now we have to focus on why we were put here, why we were given this chance.'

No one spoke.

'Gunther?' Charley said. 'I thought someone might wake me. I gather Lone Wolf went according to plan.'

'Sure.' Gunther had shoulder-length hair and a soft, formless face. He spoke with a marked German accent. 'We didn't want to disturb you unnecessarily. The dome's out, Charley. Here, we got running copy from the news wires.' He passed her some paper off the printer. She scanned through the words, smiling, then stopped when they mentioned the casualty.

'Charley?' one of the women asked. 'You okay?'

'Sure. Someone was hurt?'

'Yeah,' Gunther said. 'I read that. Some woman who worked there.'

'I knew her. You see? This thing can take from us all. We all have our price to pay. It's what we must sacrifice for all these centuries of waste. Do any of you doubt that now? Can't you feel this motion inside you?'

She closed her eyes and rocked slowly, backward and forward in her chair, to some unheard rhythm, her stricken body moving with such conviction a couple of them in the room started to copy the motion.

'What do you feel, Charley?' Joe asked, watching them, not her.

'I feel the sun and the moon and the stars. I feel the earth stirring. I feel nature on the rise. Humanity in its proper sphere.' She stopped suddenly, opened her eyes, stared at them, incredulous. 'Don't you feel it too?'

'Sure,' said Joe.

'I feel it,' Gunther said. 'Whenever you're around, I feel it, Charley. So strong. Moving.'

'Me too,' someone else echoed.

'It's only natural,' Charley said, 'you should have doubts. We're fighting a war now. We're fighting for the Mother. It scares us. And soon we'll begin to leave this place, wait for what comes next. This is only the beginning. The fire and the chaos wipe this slate clean. Afterwards we need voices that can be heard, when the TV and the newspapers aren't there to spread their lies. When people discover they can look into their hearts again and find what's there.'

'We've got to go anyway,' Joe said, looking at them. 'They'll find us, one way or another. We have to separate. For good.'

'But…' Billy Jo stood by one of the screens, mouth half-open, looking lost, Charley thought. 'What do we do, Charley? What happens afterwards?'

'We get a second chance. The earth, Gaia, gives us that. Don't expect miracles, Billy Jo. They'll get their TV sets back, probably sooner than you might think. They'll bring in their newspapers and their police. But all that doesn't matter. We're going to open a hole in the sky, one so big that people will be able to see what we see. After that nothing will be the same again.'

She held out her arms. They came to her, touched her flesh, her clothes, covered her in kisses. When they were done, when they stood back to look at her, she was soaked in tears. Joe Katayama nodded across the room at Gunther.

'Make the call,' he said.

CHAPTER 23 The Golden Dome

George Soames looked at the dome in the midday light and felt, as always, a sense of pride. Like the two other Sundog domes, this was a perfect geodesic, a 'Buckyball, named after Buckminster Fuller, who had conceived the idea of the perfect geometrical dome. It sat on the northeast edge of Kyoto, on a low hill of bamboo and scrub, ringed by a ten-foot-high security fence, accessible through a single narrow guarded road.

As local director of Sundog, Soames had supervised its construction down to the last detail. The telecom equipment the project required was expensive and delicate, though not particularly rare — most parts could be bought 'academic retail' for those who had the money and the sources. And Buckminster Fuller's geodesic was ideal to contain the dishes safely and securely, out of sight from prying eyes. Thanks to the advanced lightweight material of the dome, it gave sufficient radiation cover to keep the prefecture happy when it came to safety regulations too.

The unique structure seemed custom-made for the project. Nothing could match its strength and efficiency. The dome was cheaper to cool and heat than a conventional building. And the greatest part of all for Soames, who loved Kyoto dearly, regarded himself as half-Japanese after twenty years in the city, was the colour. The fabric had to be treated to contain the radiation created by the operating equipment inside. This wash of protection left it a mature burnished gold, not quite the same tone as the Golden Pavilion a few miles away, but close enough to let him rename his baby the Golden Dome.

Soames admired the scene in the morning's radiant light. It was hard to remind himself that there was a job to be done here. With a sigh he flipped open the screen on the satellite videophone and looked at Irwin Schulz's tired face.

'Hell, Irwin. There's nothing wrong here. We checked it a dozen times. I've had the embassy spooks go over it, every last inch. We've cut the Net connection, just like you asked. The dome works, and everything inside it.'

'You got the hardware people in too? To check you really are logged off?'

'Yes. How many times do I need to look at this plug to see whether it's wired or not?'

'I'm not doing this for fun, George. How many people have you got there?'

'Me and about ten from the embassy, the five permanent security staff, and a bunch of people from the local police station. And frankly this is starting to make me feel a little embarrassed. Can I go home now? I can see why we need all this activity but it makes me feel uneasy. You know as well as I do we're just a mirror. We don't have all that big stuff you guys have to deal with at La Finca and Lone Wolf.'

Schulz's face disappeared, to be replaced by someone Soames only knew as 'the new guy'.

'In case you forgot, Soames, these people just took out the Lone Wolf dome in a way that just shouldn't have been possible, damn lucky someone didn't get killed too,' Bevan spat down the line. 'You'd be doing us all a favour if you took this a little more seriously.'

'Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on,' Soames answered. 'I'm taking this deadly seriously. It's just that there's nothing more we can do here. And that's not my opinion, it comes from your guys who've done the rounds.

There are no devices here. No signs anything's been tampered with. And the perimeter's secure.'

He watched the shirtsleeved security men walking the length of the wire, checking every inch again. 'What the hell else are we supposed to do? This is Kyoto, not California. We have a lower jerk count, in case you didn't know. And you just keep making this assumption that, because these crazies hit Lone Wolf, they're bound to hit us next.'

Schulz's face reappeared. 'It's not an assumption, George. It's a precaution.'

'You think these people are capable of taking out all three domes? One by one? What they got out there? An army or something?'

It was Bevan again, and he looked mad. 'We don't know.'

'Well, son, I don't think I'm going to be finding out any answers for you here. We got this baby wrapped up tight. No one comes in, no one goes out without one of your nice embassy people looks them up and down.'

'George?'

Soames couldn't help staring at the dome. It looked so beautiful in the bright sunlight. He was around the back of the thing, by the smaller, secondary door. 'I hear you, Irwin. Is that creep done with me now? Those people always give me the heebie-jeebies. Yeah, I know. They're a necessary evil.'

'People are getting hurt,' Schulz said. 'Treat this seriously. Take care.'

'Sure,' he said, his mind wandering. 'I keep telling you, Irwin, this is Japan. We never imported that stuff here.' He stared at the outer skin and frowned.

'George?'

'Wait a goddamn minute, Irwin. You guys getting air miles for these calls or something?'

Damn contractors, George Soames swore to himself. Every week they were supposed to come and clean the dome. Top to bottom, make sure the exterior was spotless, make sure every last rip in the fabric got mended. And here he was, one day after the visit, looking at the biggest blemish he'd ever seen in the dome skin since it was completed.

'I'll kill those guys,' Soames muttered, then walked the six feet that stood between him and the dome fabric and looked again.

'Irwin?' Soames asked.

'What is it?'

'This fancy videophone of yours good enough to let you see a decent picture of something?'

'What?'

'If I knew that I wouldn't be asking the question. Something stuck to the fabric'

'Jesus,' the voice from the videophone shrieked, 'get the hell out of there. Leave this to security. They get paid for it.'

'Don't piss your pants. This thing's no bigger than a matchbox. Maybe it's just part of the gear from something inside that got tacked onto the fabric'

'Call the goddamn security guys!'

Soames looked around. 'Typical. Can't see a damn one of them right now. Tell you what. This thing's up at about six feet or so. Too high for me to try to take it off, but if I hold up your fancy phone here maybe you can get a good look at it.'

Soames stretched his five-foot-three frame to the maximum and tried to point the lens of the phone at the object on the skin. Then, to make sure it didn't penetrate the skin in some way, he opened the small secondary door with his smart card, pushed it open, and walked inside the bright, gleaming interior of the dome, looked at the skin from there. It was unmarked. Soames was beginning to feel pretty mad. With a grunt, he walked back out into the sun, leaving the door open, and called Schulz.

'You see it? As far as I can make out it just looks like a plastic box, it doesn't go through or anything. Something shiny on the side. Like I said. No bigger than a matchbox. Beats me. Where the hell are those security guys?'

Back at La Finca, Ellis Bevan stared at the dark object on the screen and shook his head. 'Means nothing to me. Why doesn't that moron do what we keep telling him to and get someone to look at it?'

'You don't know George,' Schulz muttered. 'He sort of loves that thing.'

'Well?' Soames bellowed. 'I'm waiting.'

'Hell, George, we don't know,' Schulz replied. 'Will you just walk around and find those guys, please? We could be wasting precious ti — ' The videophone went quiet.

'Irwin?' George Soames beamed. 'I knew you'd come up with something. You're thinking. I can hear it from here.'

'How well can you see the front?'

Soames stretched on tiptoe. 'Pretty well.'

'Looks to me like there's some kind of shiny plastic panel there? Just like the kind you get on the front of a TV remote?'

Soames grinned. 'You got it. Someone stuck a TV remote on the side of my dome. I'll disembowel the bastard when I catch hold of him.'

'Let's think about this,' Schulz said slowly, feeling hot, trying to sort through the possibilities. 'Did you put any alarm systems in recently? Some surveillance points?'

'What? We got permanent security supplied by the embassy. Cameras every fifteen feet or so along the perimeter wire. What the hell would we need a burglar alarm for?'

Schulz closed his eyes, squeezed hard, then glared at Ellis Bevan. 'You have any clue what this is? Why anyone would use a simple infrared device on the exterior of a building?'

Bevan shook his head. 'Not a one.'

'George,' Schulz said slowly. 'Just walk away from that damn thing, find the security people, and leave it to them. Okay?'

'Bull,' George Soames answered, and stuffed the videophone into the pocket of his neatly pressed blue shirt. 'No bastard goes around sticking bugs on my dome.'

He jumped up once, then twice, and finally got his hands on the thing. The little black box came away easily from the skin of the dome and sat in his hand. He turned it over. There was a little clasp for a battery compartment, held fast with a single Phillips screw. He swore mildly, then walked back inside the dome and picked up a screwdriver from a bench just inside the door. He worked on the cover, flipped it, opened the back, and looked at two shiny new AAs sitting in a row.

'Would you believe it?' he said into the big empty space, then took the videophone out of his pocket again. 'Hey, Irwin. Take a look at this thing. It is a goddamn TV remote. Now, who the hell has been messing with my dome? That's what I want to know.'

Irwin Schulz stared at the picture on the screen, thought about the two batteries and the infrared eye on the front, then said, 'Okay. What you do is you take out the batteries. Then you pick that thing up and throw it as far as you can and start running in the other direction. You understand me, you get — '

'What?' George Soames's face came back at them, wrinkled with a puzzled frown. 'You hear that noise outside? Sounded like a mosquito farting or something. Damn if that makes sense. No civilian traffic around here for miles.'

He felt cold in the constant midday sun. The whine kept getting louder. He looked through the open doorway. It was coming from the sky. There was a tiny black dot there.

'Where the hell did those security guys get to? Never there when you need 'em. When I get back to the emba — '

'George?' Schulz's voice asked, a tinny sound coming from the phone.

Soames didn't reply. He just stared up through the open door at the bright blue sky. Coming straight down at him was something that was moving so quickly it was hard to focus on the shape. 'Damn me if it isn't some toy plane,' he said to no one in particular, clutching the little plastic box all the more tightly in his hand.

'Get out of there!' Schulz yelled.

Then the picture made a lurch and all Schulz could see on the monitor was tumbling scenery: grass, the bright fabric of the dome, what looked like the red and white wings of a model aeroplane. There was the sound of something breaking, George yelling in pain, what might have been an explosion, then a hissing noise that went on and on.

Schulz watched the monitor, his heart in his mouth, trying to stab at the keys on the workstation, calling for help. He'd just got through to Langley when George Soames's face rolled in front of the camera. It was distorted now, the skin a livid red, eyes bright, bloodshot, and terrified. His tongue protruded between his swelling lips like a fat red lump of tortured flesh. In one swift, convulsive movement, Soames vomited on the ground repeatedly. And then was still.

CHAPTER 24 Return Call

Somewhere over the other side of the world, he guessed, an incoming message icon was flashing on a screen. This was a crazy way to communicate. He'd no idea where he was calling, what was at the other end. Then Helen Wagner answered. Michael Lieberman looked at her calm, tired face and felt some kind of decision being made for him.

'Hey, I thought I might be waking you up. Returning the favour.'

She smiled. 'Not exactly. I had half an hour on the sofa in the office. We have more than a hundred people working on this outside the door, and that's just S&T. How's Sara?' Lieberman blinked. 'She's fine. Resolute, you might say.' 'And the bad news. You heard about Kyoto?' 'Yeah, I got it from Irwin. He's really cut up, knew the guy there. So that's two down, one to go. What the hell happened?'

She winced. The small movement made him realize how effortlessly attractive Helen Wagner was, and he couldn't help but wonder how this must have hindered her career in the Agency. 'They planted some kind of homing bug on the dome. We don't know how. Then they used a toy airplane loaded with VX nerve agent.'

'That's the stuff Saddam was fond of, right?' Wagner gave him a look that was only a touch short of condescension. 'We all have VX, Michael. It's not rocket science. They wanted to penetrate the dome and make it unusable so they had some minor explosive charge in the plane. As it turned out they didn't need it. The local director had the door open anyway and the damn thing went straight inside. He took a direct hit, which has to be one of the worst ways to die. They knew what they were doing. This is a persistent, highly localized nerve agent. It's going to take up to sixteen weeks to clear away the residue from the vicinity, and we won't be able to work efficiently in the dome for a good four to five days.'

'What about breathing apparatus?'

Wagner did give him a condescending look then. 'You think we could run this operation wearing space suits? Do you want to try that right now in your control room?'

'Sorry. I'm dumb in these matters.'

Wagner favoured him with half a smile. 'Think yourself lucky. It's the best way to be.'

'Hell of a weapon for a bunch of ecoterrorists to use.'

'Perhaps…' The thought had occurred to her. 'I don't know. Maybe they were trying to make a point. The cult that attacked the Tokyo subway had much the same view, you may recall. Except they used Sarin, which is around one-twentieth the strength of VX and nowhere near as persistent. They were trying to get their hands on anthrax and the Ebola virus too.'

Lieberman shook his head. 'This is one scary world you inhabit.'

'Same world as yours.'

'Really. If you don't mind my saying, you people didn't do much of a job protecting Kyoto. Are you going to do any better here?'

She looked nervous. 'We're still trying to get our heads around this one. The President said something that really struck me. This is all outside the loop, outside anything we've prepared for. As much outside as having aliens land, except we have at least some contingency plans for that.'

'Really?' he asked, half-agog.

'Of course. It would be irresponsible not to. But the President's point was that these people are as foreign, as incomprehensible to us as aliens. And they're of our own race, of our own making. You want to know the really scary thing? I know how they feel. In some ways I sympathize. We are making a mess of the planet. We are out of control. And…' She went silent.

'And what?' he asked.

'We're all distanced from one another. It doesn't matter to them that they can cause real harm, real hurt. Somehow it's all just a game. No, not a game, they're deadly serious. It's all apart. We've replaced real communities with virtual ones, and some piece of humanity disappeared in the process. I'm thirty-five and single and you know what I do when I happen to have some chunk of free time you might call leisure? Read a Web page about mountain climbing. Instead of damn well going out there and doing it.'

'So this is the insight part of the conversation, huh?'

She laughed. 'Oh dear. Did that sound deliberate? It wasn't. Really.'

She found herself enjoying this conversation, tired as she felt. There was something insidiously likeable about this man.

'Okay,' he continued. 'So let's think about Charley. You know who these people are?'

She shook her head. 'I wish.'

'Let me tell you. Just ordinary people. People like us. They're bright. They're educated. They probably come from nice middle-class parents who gave them everything they ever wanted. A good education, a nice car, the works. They've got no real gripes with society. No one took over their country. No one oppressed them. They have no political philosophy they think can change the world for the better. So why do they do it?'

Helen Wagner closed her eyes and knew exactly what he was going to say.

'Because they have no lives, none to speak of,' he continued. 'And we've all been like that, from the sixties on, searching for something we thought had been promised us. Then usually getting older, getting responsibilities thrown at us so often we forget we ever dreamed things could be different. Except these kids had this new world, of PCs, of the Internet, come up and open its arms, welcome them in, and say: Hey, this can be home. This can provide anything you want. People who agree with you. People who hate you. People who say they love you. Even virtual sex — whatever that might be — if you want it. And suddenly they were a part of this unreal thing. Learning Linux when they should have been sitting watching a baseball game. Hacking Web sites instead of dating. Thinking theirs was the reality and ours was the illusion. And it's such a waste. Because they're wrong. No clever stuff here. They just took a blind turning and it's eating up their lives.'

She watched him fall into silence on the screen and wondered, "Was that Charley?'

'Oh yeah. And more. You want the gory details?' 'Only if you think they're relevant. And then only if you want to.'

He watched the light growing outside the window. One more day to the zenith. And somewhere, maybe inside him, was some key they could use to reach Charley.

'When the scales fell off my eyes over that damn satellite I went a little crazy,' he said, not looking at the screen. 'Charley and I were just colleagues until then. Really. Then that big bombshell struck and I just felt stupid and used and mad. I wanted out. She wanted in. And the crazy thing was that when we both fought like that, we wound up, one way or another, having an affair too. Professionally we went in two different directions. I chased anything that was the opposite of solar satellite design I could find. She picked up her security badge and went in to finish off the job. The new job. This lasted six months.'

He picked up the glass of water on the desk and drank. It was warm and tasted dusty.

'Did that bother you?'

He gazed at her picture on the screen. This woman didn't mind asking the big ones. 'No. Nothing bothered me. I just didn't care after I left the project. Charley did, for sure, and that puzzled me. I couldn't see why she was hanging on. Me, I just let the dice fall wherever they rolled.'

She watched his pale, still outline on the screen. 'And now you'd like to run away again?'

'We'll come to that. The important thing you need to know is that Charley is the one person I met in all my life you attach the word "genius" to. When we met, she knew more about just about everything — solar physics, astronomy, even electrical engineering — than anyone I ever encountered. And she had such insight into things. She could visualize a problem, not just see it as some algorithm waiting to be fixed. I became the person who tried to put a few boundaries around the places she was going to. Not easy. That woman would take on anything, work all the hours she had to see it through.'

She waited; he was struggling for the words.

'You have to remember,' he went on, 'Charley had all this intellectual capacity and it was packed inside this person who looked like an airhead, who looked like she ought to be posing for the front of some fashion magazine. That made it really tough for her to get taken seriously. The funny thing was it made it tough for her to date too. Poor kid got the worst of both possible worlds. People looked down on her work because they thought she was a bimbo. And out in the real world, where real people live, they just looked at this model-type woman and thought: Hey, let's leave this to the rich kids 'cause I can't afford that kind of dinner date.'

'She has some sense of separation. They all have. Do you think she was in love with you? For a while maybe?'

'No. Not at all. But maybe, looking back, I represented some kind of chance of normality for her. Bizarre as that seems. Being close to genius you're close to madness too. Maybe after that it all just went downhill, she retreated into herself, the work. And one day got hooked up with the cult, and the computer thing really took over. Maybe, and this does bother me, she just thought of this all along, and that was why she kept on working for them even when they came out into the light and said: Surprise! I keep trying to think what drives her now. And I just don't know.'

He stared back from the screen, serious, dark eyes peering at her. 'Does that help?'

She shrugged. 'I'll run it past our specialists here. I'm really grateful.'

'Say what you mean.'

'My God, I am a lousy liar, aren't I?' She smiled and stared at her notes. 'We can't reach her. She's beyond that. She's smart and she's absolutely determined in what she's trying to do. There's no room here for negotiation, talking her into some other path, because we don't have anything she wants. Either we take back Sundog or they're going to do what they say. It's as if we're some kind of beta version of what they believe the planet should be. They think they can throw away a lot of the code in the hope that whatever comes back in its place has to be better than anything that preceded it. Which seems a pretty shaky premise to me, by the way.'

He nodded. 'That was my feeling too. Charley came from all that European tradition, you know. She went to the Sorbonne. She knows what the prerequisites of revolution are.'

'Chaos. A word I'm getting to hear a lot.'

'It's a nice, pat, easy way out of things.'

'And there's no damn point in wasting any time contemplating it either,' she said. 'So you've looked at the new solar data?'

'Yeah.'

'How bad is it?'

‘“Bad" is a subjective word.'

'Not right now,' she said quickly. 'We don't have time for semantics. Maybe I didn't make myself clear, but we've got the makings of a world in crisis out there. This is filtering through to everything, the financial markets, the information infrastructure, everything. This has the potential for real natural disaster, if it deserves the word "natural". And one on a global scale we've never witnessed before.'

Lieberman peered quizzically at her. 'You're sure about that last point? No. Don't answer. Okay. The forecast is terrible. The way things look I expect that anyone with a piece of coloured glass will be able to see a lot of activity with the naked eye by midday today. After that, it gets hazy. It's easy to predict the trend, hard to say whether we get there slowly or in one big rush. The trend is that there will be some spot-merging, and that will produce one giant beauty. The biggest we've ever recorded, covering maybe half of the surface of the disc. Maybe more, when we get to zenith.'

'What does that mean for the strength of the emissions?'

'Not my field. You need to ask Bennett.'

'Come on.'

He shrugged. 'Take what you got in Langley and multiply it by ten, twenty, a hundred times. I don't know. And think what it is then, because I'm guessing it may be something different. There's all sorts of crap mixed up in this stuff. It could manifest itself as heat, radiation, high-level electromagnetic fields, pure plasma… hell, I don't know. It could be a heat wave that puts out the TV, it could be a firestorm that wipes out Manhattan. You tell me.'

'Jesus,' she sighed.

'And the truth is, I think we could be in trouble even without Charley and your little toy. This thing is so powerful, and the way we've been treating the atmosphere we're so vulnerable. Just out of interest, I looked up some of the times we've had some combination of spot cycle and syzygy to match it. That requires a lot of guesswork. But I'll tell you one thing. We did have something like this between 2600 and 2700 bc. Ring a bell?'

'I'm not a historian.'

'Me neither. I just remember it from some of my self-taught classes in atheism. That's thought to be the time of the biblical flood. Noah. The animals went in two by two. That kind of thing.'

'That's myth, surely, folklore.'

'Yeah. That's what I told myself too. The trouble is these old guys had learned to write by then. You don't just get the flood story in the Old Testament. It's in the Gilgamesh book as well. That's Sumerian. And there's hard evidence there was flooding in the region around that time. We also had some kind of conjunction around 1650 bc. That was the year the volcano erupted in Santorini, one of the largest eruptions in human times. It changed the face of the Mediterranean. The power structure. Everything.'

'I remember,' she said.

'And just one more. If you take things back too far, the dating gets a little ridiculous, of course. But we do have firm fossil evidence that whatever it was that brought the Cretaceous era to an end occurred at a time of intense sunspot activity. It's there in the rings of the cretaceous vegetation.'

'That was, what… sixty-five million years ago?' she said quietly.

'Yeah. Which is why I wouldn't rely on my computer alone. And, as I'm sure I don't need to remind you, the end of the Cretaceous marked the extinction of the dinosaurs too, in ways we still argue about. Suddenly. Instantly. Conventional wisdom is starting to say that it was a meteor impact that caused it, and the Yucatan Crater in Mexico is the proof. A ten-kilometre meteor, to be precise. And maybe that's right. Or maybe it was something pretty much like a meteor that the sun spat out, some big ball of plasma. I don't know. There aren't any dinosaurs left to ask.'

Helen Wagner caught her breath. 'You think Charley's made that calculation too?'.

'You bet. Hell, I'm amazed it's not all over the Web right now. And you can see how that knowledge would work on Charley too. It makes her feel part of something bigger. But it's disappointing in a way too. If we've really only had three major catastrophes through solar cycle and planetary syzygies over the last sixty-five million years, maybe we ought to come out of this one with little more than an extra suntan. If I can still hope to read Charley right these days, this data is saying to her that she probably needs to give the thing a little push if she wants to be sure the world really can start all over again. Maybe give the ants a chance this time. And don't kid yourself. She wants to do more than cause some stock market crash. She really does want to change things for good. This is cataclysm, nothing less.'

She was quiet. The office suddenly felt lonely and cold.

'There's a storm on the way,' he said, 'and it's coming whether we take back your little toy or not. Maybe it just scorches us a little. Maybe it passes us by altogether. And maybe we get the Yucatan all over again. I don't know. No one knows.'

'It's not my toy.'

'I know,' he said, shaking his head. 'I apologize. It belongs to all of us. We just got greedy. Thought we could tame that big golden ball of fire and make it run our TV sets for free.'

She looked at his face, half in shadow on the screen, and wondered at the amount of trust that seemed to exist between them. 'So do we have your pleasure for this event, Michael?'

'I guess, Helen,' he said, unsmiling.

'I'm glad about that.'

'Don't be. I mean, where the hell are you supposed to hide when the sun god comes to call?'

She nodded. Thought twice about this, and said, 'This is really useful. But I need more from you.'

'I haven't got any more.'

'But you have. We're working on every way we can to get Sundog back under our control from the ground. We've got any number of teams out there trying to track down Charley. I've got to cover every angle. We're putting up a Shuttle in a few hours. I need you to find us some way to take the power source away from that thing directly, in the sky if we have to.'

Lieberman couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'Wait a minute. That was the first thing I asked Irwin and he said there's no way we can go near this at all. He made it sound like you've got the Battlestar Galactica up there. If you try to shoot it down, it can intercept the missile. And take out whatever shot it in the first place.'

She nodded. 'That's true. It's one smart weapon. It could take out the Shuttle if Charley detected it on launch. Then there's an automatic defence system that will attack anything substantial that comes within a half a kilometre of it in space. That still leaves us room. If we can get into orbit and power down the Shuttle before the automatic system comes into play, we could get a couple of astronauts close to the thing. The trouble is, as far as I understand it, they can't touch it, and any weapons they might carry would be detected. And we have to find it. The damn thing is built out of polymer, like you see in stealth devices. We're not even exactly sure where it is right now, though with those huge wings you designed for it I think the Shuttle ought to be able to track it down.'

'Jesus, Helen. You're just sending these guys to their deaths.'

She sighed and Lieberman saw the sadness in her face. 'That's a possibility. They know it.'

'So why?'

'We need options. We calculate there's a ninety-second window after launch when the Shuttle could come under direct attack from the main weapon systems. If it escapes that and gets into orbit, it can edge in behind Sundog and give us a chance.'

'To do what?'

'That's what I need you to figure out. Imagine we do take the ship within half a kilometre of the satellite with all the systems down. And after that, we could place a couple of astronauts in extravehicular activity up to ten metres from the satellite without triggering any automatic self-defence systems.'

'Then what?'

She shook her head. 'Any weapon would be detected and, in all likelihood, immobilized immediately. No, we have to shut it down without touching it. That's the only possible solution and you have to know how, you designed that entire power system. I need you to clip those wings, Michael.'

He was genuinely affronted. 'Nothing else while I'm there? A cure for AIDS, maybe?'

'You don't mean it when you say that kind of thing.'

'How the hell do you know?'

Helen Wagner's eyes held him on the screen. 'You called, Michael. You care. And you can find the answer. You just tell me what you need to get there.'

CHAPTER 25 In the Air

Tim Clarke watched the lights of the city recede beneath the fast-rising helicopter and was glad to be gone. The mute, baffled reception he'd received from the Security Council was depressing. Perhaps they recognized the note of desperation in his voice.

He looked at the close circle of advisers around him. These were people he'd inherited from Rollinson, and when times got back to normal some would change. They knew that. But they were good, solid, dependable men — all men, he thought, something would have to be done about that — fine in a conventional crisis, lost a little in this one. Governments ran on rail lines, Clarke thought, mapping out the future on the basis that it was all predictable within limits. When something came along that wasn't in the contingency plan, suddenly it all fell to pieces.

'Those guys want some news from the Bureau, Dan,' Clarke said, looking at Fogerty seated opposite him. 'We can try to sweet-talk them into keeping calm right now, but you got the mood in there. They think this is our baby. They think we're the ones who got them into this, and we ought to be the ones who get them out. In their position I guess I'd feel much the same.'

'Sir.' Fogerty nodded. 'We're pushing every resource we've got into this. But I'm not going to lie to you. These people have no criminal records, no terrorist background. They're not the kind of folks we're likely to follow as a matter of course. If the Agency had kept that damn plant they had inside there, or levelled with us in the first place — '

'No time for range wars. Don't you people get it? This is a crisis with the clock running. Maybe this is just a storm that will blow over. But we've all seen some of the reports coming in from Wagner. The power these people have in their hands is, as far as I understand it, massive. The odds are that if we don't do something in the next twenty-nine hours or so Bill Rollinson's funeral will be the last thing on our minds. We've got to focus on stopping this thing happening, nothing else. Okay?'

He watched them nod at him and thought: They still don't get it. 'Dan, do you think Wagner's right when she says there's no negotiating with this woman?'

'Absolutely, sir. Our psychological profiling people back up everything she says. This woman is resolute. She's not looking to bargain. She sees herself, and the Children, as being part of some inevitable, natural process of rebirth. She's looking forward to this. Nothing's going to stand in her way.'

'And that stuff about what might happen even if we do get Sundog back?'

Bryan Jenkins, the White House scientific adviser, coughed and said, 'A lot of this is speculative, Mr President. There's no real way of knowing.'

Graeme Burnley winced. He didn't like stepping on other people's toes. 'Sir, we have clear indications that other governments are perceiving this as a major threat too, and have no better idea of how to tackle it. Why do you think we got such a relatively easy ride in there over the detail? They're just as much in the dark as we are.'

'That was easy?' Jenkins asked, incredulous.

'Maybe easier than we deserve,' Clarke said, staring at his hands.

The helicopter flew down the security corridor, out into the night, back toward Washington. The rhythmic pumping of the blades and the noise inside the cabin reminded Clarke of the Gulf, a decade before, though it seemed much less than that. There was a lot of time spent inside the bellies of these machines then, and it was easier: You had someone to fight, you had an objective. Now it was like punching shadows and wondering whether you might break your fist on your own face instead.

'What about the Shuttle?'

'We can launch, sir,' Jenkins said. 'If we knew what we could do if and when we find the damn thing. Sundog's probably at greater altitude than the Shuttle would normally operate. But we can overcome that. NASA had a high flight modification in the works and it's ready to roll.'

'You got volunteers to man it?'

'I could fill it five times over. NASA put it straight on the line how risky this thing was. It didn't stop anyone. We've picked the two best pilots we know and the guy with the most EVA experience.'

'Come again?'

'Extravehicular activity. Spacewalk, in plain language, Mr President. But we still need this Lieberman guy to figure out what these people could do up there. This thing is purpose-built to withstand all forms of attack.'

'You mean we can't get anywhere near it?' Burnley asked.

'It can detect other vehicular activity within a kilometre,' Jenkins explained. 'But if we kill all the main systems barring light telecom on the Shuttle, then drift it into the vicinity, we ought to get under the detection system. It's based on engine heat and electrical activity, nothing visual, thank God. The same goes for getting near the satellite through an EVA. We can probably put a guy real close to the thing, provided he isn't using anything it can pick up. Even a blowtorch would trigger a response, and by response I mean something major. The standard would be high-intensity laser, which would kill instantly and could take out the Shuttle too.'

'So what can we do?' the President asked.

'Turn off the power generation system. If this Lieberman guy can figure a way. He designed the thing and it's real clever stuff. If that's down, Sundog grinds to a halt in minutes. This thing just eats power. But we've no word on how you can do that without being able to dismantle part of the installation physically.'

Clarke thought about the queue of astronauts inside NASA waiting for the opportunity to dance around this deadly, poisoned ball of plastic and metal in the sky. 'It has to go. Even if we haven't figured out what to do with it. We have to cover every option.'

In two hours he would be going on live TV to announce the emergency measures: the suspension of all civil aviation flights and public ground transportation, the closure of all nonessential government buildings, and orders barring the opening of all but vital private sector offices in the major cities. All of these measures would run from noon indefinitely, although the idea in the broadcast was to emphasize that, if everything 'went according to plan', the restrictions would be lifted by late the following day. And most other heads of state were following the same line. Trying to balance caution with the need, the overriding need, to avoid an outbreak of panic.

'Dammit,' he said, 'I wish we could shut down the markets. And the Net too. We can keep a handle on the newspeople here. Make them act responsibly. But it's useless if someone can just turn on a PC, go to that damn Web site, and read it all for themselves. Plus all the other rubbish out there.'

Dave Barnside, hidden away in a corner at the back of the cabin, said, 'We've looked at it, Mr President, and it's just not possible. There's no practical way of pulling the wire on that thing. It's designed to be impregnable.'

'So are the markets,' Fogerty added softly. 'Who knows? Maybe she'll take them both down for us.'

'I don't think so, not the Net anyway, that's where these people live,' Clarke said, watching the lights on the ground move slowly beneath them. At night, the land was so anonymous. The Children could be anywhere. Even far beneath the helicopter, listening to the distant swirling of its rotor blades, running the show through some control installation hidden in the woods, all down some humble little piece of copper and maybe a dial-up connection with AT&T. 'From now on we run this from the Pentagon bunker. I want the White House cut down to essential staff. Move my family out, Graeme, take them somewhere secure. Until this thing is through, we stay in the Pentagon. I want no unnecessary air travel, no one out of the bunker unless they need to go.'

'Sir.'

'Don?' Millington, a brigadier general from the Army seconded to the National Security Council, nodded. 'Make damn sure they don't touch that last dome. Make that your top priority.'

'Absolutely, Mr President,' Millington replied, the braid on his uniform glittering in the darkness. 'We got clearance from the Spanish to join the air cover and they've agreed to a temporary exclusion zone now. No one gets in or out of there without our knowledge.'

Clarke looked at Barnside. 'Can they do what they did in Kyoto?'

The Agency man shook his head. 'We believe that's impossible, Mr President. We have the Spanish site wrapped up. In Kyoto they put some kind of infrared locator on the dome to get there. That sort of weapon's no use in mountains of the kind we're talking about here, even if they could get close enough, and they can't. Also, there's definitely no locator on the Spanish dome. We've fine-combed every last inch of it, and the surroundings.'

'Where the hell,' the President asked angrily, 'did they get that VX shit from anyway?'

Jenkins sighed. 'If you know chemistry, can get a line inside a fair-sized chemicals company, and have enough money to set up a small lab, it's not that difficult, sir. We've had people making Sarin in one room and LSD in the other. You can pick up the recipes like that off the Net.'

'Jesus…'

'I advise,' said Millington, 'that we put our air bases on alert for when we do track down these people. If we get a location at home, we can take them out very rapidly, shut this whole thing down.'

'Yeah?'

The cabin went quiet. They were descending. And there was something new inside Clarke's voice that gave them all pause for thought, something close to bitterness.

'You guys,' the President went on, 'you kill me sometimes. That really is all you want. A neat little name and address. And then off you go, sending in your people and your airplanes, bombs a-bombing, guns blazing — I got the details of that stuff in San Francisco, by the way, Barnside. Real clever. Are you thinking out of your dicks or something? You know something? I'm the dumb-assed moron you people used to send on these jobs. And I never asked why. Not once. I was as plain stupid as those suckers you got out in the field right now.'

Clarke could feel the heat in his face and he didn't mind who saw it. If they thought this outburst was unworthy of the President, he didn't care. This wasn't a time for niceties.

'It's a question of maximum response, Mr President,' Barnside replied. 'How else do you deal with these people?'

'Bullshit. You guys haven't got your head around what's going on here yet. None of you. Forget 'dealing with these people' for a moment and get back to the matter at hand. And that, unless I'm mistaken, is getting us all through the next few days as much in one piece as possible.'

'Sir,' Millington said, 'if we cauterize the source —'

'Aw, Jesus. Cauterize? Don't give me that crap. I know what you guys want. A carte blanche so you can walk out of here and do what the hell you like. Well, you aren't getting it. Understand? Sure, maybe the world is that simple. All you do is find these people, bomb the hell out of them, take out their dome, and we all go back to the way we were. But let me ask you this: What happens if we do that, then find out they have got some way of taking out the Spanish dome? What happens if we do that and discover they've locked that goddamn thing in the sky in some way that all your computer geniuses combined can't pry it open? What if they just turn out to be a lot smarter than we thought? Consider that. They know we can blow them to pieces if we track them down. Do you think they care? Of course not. If they did, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place.'

The cabin was silent. Dan Fogerty looked out the window and saw the illuminated shape of the White House far off in the distance.

'They've already thought this through,' Clarke said softly. 'Taking them out won't make any difference to what's going to happen. May be just what they want, for all we know.'

'So, Mr President,' Fogerty asked, smiling as he broke the silence, 'what do you want us to do?'

"Think a little. Find these people. Take them alive. Hand the keys to their installation back to Sundog, just in case they need them. And save your testosterone for your girlfriends. That too much to ask?'

Fogerty could see the dry grass of the White House lawn swirling under the downdraught of the helicopter blades, the line of cars waiting to greet them, rush them back to their various scattered offices throughout the area.

'Sir,' he said, and listened to the low murmur of confused approbation that followed.

CHAPTER 26 Probability

Geri Southern stood behind the counter of the blackjack table in the Bird of Paradise Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. She watched the distant Mirage volcano spit fire for what seemed the ninety-ninth time that night and wondered whether the short-cut croupier's uniform and the nasty fishnet tights just might leave permanent crease marks on her body. The tall, thin tourist on the other side of the table gave her a half-hearted grin. She stared back, with as artificial a smile as she could muster, and said, 'You want to play? Or you just here to look?'

This graveyard shift was not one she liked. All the drunks. All the losers, eking out their last remaining dollars. And then there was this emergency thing that got big-time on the news. It was all so complicated. The President dead and some black guy there in his place. Phone systems, television networks closing down. Like it was the end of the world. No one could decide whether this would be good for Vegas or bad. The airport was closing in a couple of hours, but most people seemed happy to book in a few more nights in the hotel, party some more, see how it all panned out. This was Vegas. Why worry?

'Thinking about it,' the man said, big mouth opening wide to show his teeth. He looked about thirty-five but something told her this was deceptive. Probably a good ten years younger, she thought, but he wasted it with a geek crewcut, a cheap khaki shirt, a thin, ugly face, and bad dentistry.

'You hot in here?' she asked.

He was sweating heavily. 'Yeah. Lousy air-conditioning.'

'Normally it's pretty good. It's just we got a real spell of desert weather right now, I guess.'

He was sucking on a free gin and tonic and there was a decent bulge in his money belt. Must have been playing somewhere, she thought. This wasn't a night to lose anybody. She smiled again, a little more genuine this time. 'If you play we can talk some.'

'Yeah. I know.'

He looked disturbed, nervous. 'I could teach you things,' he said.

'Really?' Had that been a yawn? She wasn't sure. She didn't care.

'Useful things in your kind of work. For example, what do you think the odds are of you dealing out the fifty-two cards in that deck as a perfect hand to four different people here — ace to king in all the suits?'

'This is blackjack, sir. You get two cards only. We try to keep things simple.'

'I know that,' he said, a mite testily. 'But just guess.'

'Oh.' She tossed her blonde hair back so he looked at it a little harder. 'I don't know… maybe, say, two times ten to the power of twenty-seven to one. Something like that.'

He grinned, twitched a little, puzzled. 'Pretty good. They teach you that stuff?'

She stared at the next table. A red-faced couple in matching satin shirts were starting to play heavily, sucking on long drinks, swaying on the plush seating. It must be something in her face, she thought. It just attracted the failures. 'Vegas is kind of an educational sort of place. You'd be amazed what you pick up. So you want to play?'

'Five cards from a fresh shuffled deck. What are the odds on getting sweet nothing there, you think? As a percentage this time.'

'I'm not getting paid for this, sir.'

He put a twenty on the table. 'Make like you won it off me. It doesn't matter.'

She thought about it. Took her hand off the little security button under the table. Then pulled the twenty over to her pile. 'A little over fifty per cent, so one in two hands is a bummer.'

'Hey! You got a feel for these things.' There was another bill in his hand. She smiled. Maybe this would be a good evening. 'Okay. That was easy. Now it gets tougher. A single pair.'

'From what? Five cards? Somewhere over forty per cent.'

'Good.' He nodded. 'Forty-two-point-two-six or so, if you want to be strict, but that's close enough.' The bill sailed over the table. 'Now for something harder.'

'Sure,' she said, wearying of this a mite. 'But if it's tough, does the money stay the same? It doesn't seem quite fair.'

A couple of people had stopped by the table now, sensing something odd was happening. As long as she logged this as winnings no one would mind. They had this on the camera anyway. Linda, the hatchet-faced security woman with the physique of a squat wrestler, had joined the crowd. Linda nodded tentatively, as if to say: A little further, see what happens.

The man took out a bunch of bills. She couldn't see how many. 'A straight. Five cards in a run, suit doesn't matter. Again, fresh pack. Same rules.'

'About a third.'

'Excuse me? I didn't quite make that out.'

'About a third of one per cent, three times in a thousand,' she said, more loudly this time.

'Good.' He threw the bunch of money across the table. 'You all hear that? We've gone from almost every other deal to three times in a thousand in a couple of quick steps, and you people are still not getting it.'

Linda the security woman stared directly at her, and Geri Southern knew what this meant: So he's some anti-gambling weirdo here to make a point. What the hell? He's throwing money at us.

'Okay,' he said, and opened up the money belt, poured a pile of bills on the table, let them lie there for a moment so the crowd could take it in. Geri Southern tried not to gasp. Just a glance told her the denominations. There was probably a good twenty thousand dollars looking at her right then.

'Now we go for the big one. And when I ask, I want you to think about this. Not just the answer, but what it means. A royal flush. How about that? Just a plain royal flush.'

'A hundredth of a percentage point,' she said.

'Aw Jesus!' he yelled, and she wasn't sure if he might not burst into tears. 'Is that the best you can do? You didn't even try to think.'

'I got it wrong?'

'Yeah.'

'Do I get another try?'

'Nope,' he said, scooping up the money. 'What kind of a dumb fucking question is that?' His voice went high and squeaky.' "Do I get another try?" Jesus, you people are unbelievable. How many tries do you think we get on this planet? You think we should've given Hitler another try?'

Linda the security woman was on the radio now. Pretty soon the weirdo would be back out on the Strip. And, Geri thought bitterly, what was left of his money would be with him. He scooped up the bills and walked quickly around to her side. 'Let me tell you…' He peered at her name tag. 'Ge-RI!'

'Sir…'

'Let me tell you the odds on a royal flush. One five thousandth of a percent! One turn-up every half a million deals. And you know what's really rich? You people know, in your guts, that's the truth. It's all so distant you don't even care. But sometimes these things do come up, oh yes. There's one coming up right now and you morons do nothing except sit back and play the goddamn slots.'

Geri looked beyond the crowd. A couple of security men were on the way. Not rushing. The guy didn't look dangerous, and it was good policy not to scare off the ordinary Joes. Besides, in a way it was amusing.

Then the man scooped up some of the money, thrust it down the front of her costume, looked at the big-denomination bills sticking out of her pretty cleavage, and said, 'You listen to me, Geri! You take that money and you get yourself in a car and you go drive out of here as fast and as far as you can. Because the biggest royal flush you're ever going to see in your life's on its way here and it's going to scorch and burn you all. All! You hear me?'

They were laughing, she saw. All of them. Even the security guys ambling over, thinking this was one good tale for the bar after work. The man stared at them, not believing it. 'You all run from here. You just go. All that stuff you saw on TV, that isn't even the half of it. I can't tell you more than once. I can't.'

He stared at the pile of dollars on the table, then threw it into the crowd.

'Holy shit,' Geri Southern said, as the area around her erupted. In a matter of seconds it was bedlam, people kicking and screaming, yelling obscenities, fighting for the bills. A fist flew out from somewhere, caught a big blowsy tourist on the jaw. Linda the security woman had someone in a neck hold. People were rolling, scrabbling on the carpet for the money.

The man just looked at her, then shoved some more bills into her hand. 'You think I'm crazy. But I'm not. Believe me. You got to go. There's a hard rain gonna fall around here, fall everywhere. Someone just rolled the dice up there in the sky, Geri, and what they got at the end of it is real bad news.'

'Mister…' she started to say, then fell silent. He didn't look crazy at all. He was crying, the tears rolling down in two continuous streams that stood like melting icicles on his pale, pockmarked cheeks. He put a finger to her lips. 'Just go,' he said, half-sobbing.

Two black-sleeved arms came from nowhere, jerked him backward, locked him in a hold. She could hear the sound of handcuffs getting slapped on. From somewhere there was the noise of the internal alarm. Cops, she guessed. Quite what you could charge the guy with was beyond her.

Linda the security woman came over, breathing hard. Geri Southern stared at her. She had a bad nosebleed and what looked like a formative black eye. 'Fucking weirdos. We're going to have to tag all this money, check it with the cops, honey. God knows where the jerk might have got it from.'

'He said to treat it like it was won at the table,' she said, half-hoping.

'I heard that. I know. Once the cops say it's okay, then it's clean. You get your cut.'

Geri felt her throat go a little dry, pulled the bills out from between her breasts, and said, 'He gave this to me. This wasn't won.'

Linda the security woman stared hard at her, the line of blood running down from her nose, over her beefy lips, into her open mouth. 'I'm going to pretend I didn't really hear that. You know where the money that goes across this table belongs. You don't really want to try and argue that one with the management, now, do you?'

Her head was swimming. He wasn't crazy. Not normal crazy, anyway.

'Take a break, Geri. Straighten up.'

'Yeah,' she said, and walked off to the staff quarters. It had the makings of a long night.

An hour later the man sat in the interview room in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's Southeast Area Command and stared at his hands. Mike Carney, the duty lieutenant, glowered at Sergeant Phyllis Simpson and said, 'You pulled me out of a budget meeting for this?'

Simpson swallowed hard and answered, 'Sir, we had those standing orders come through that said to look out for people making noises about this kind of thing.'

'Bad moon rising,' the man said. 'The world's coming to an end. You got a cigarette?'

'Sure. What's your name?' Carney asked, throwing a Marlboro across the table. 'Where did you get all this money?'

'My business.'

'Fine. You're free to go. Please don't cause any more disturbances in casinos. Some of these guys get upset by that kind of behaviour and deal with it directly themselves. Which can be a touch less caring than the service you get from us.'

The man puffed hard on the cigarette, not a normal smoker, Carney thought, he looked so uncomfortable with it. 'What?'

'You can go. Okay? We've no reason to hold you, and you've no reason to occupy our time.'

'Bullshit!'

Simpson tidied the money back into a big plastic evidence bag and pushed it over the table to him. 'This money is clean as far as we can tell. My advice would be to get it into a hotel safe-deposit box as soon as possible. Vegas is a nice, safe city in the main, but it's not a great idea to tempt people.'

He shook his head. 'Stupid, stupid bastards. Don't you understand me? Something's on the way here. Something awful.'

'Like what?' Carney asked.

'Take a look at the sky. Ask your people in Washington.'

'Right. It's this sun thing, huh? We had some more of you people earlier in the week. They said it was God and the end of the world. That right? Do we get Elvis too?'

'Not God,' the man said quietly. 'Not your kind of God anyway.'

'So,' Phyllis asked, 'how is the world going to end? I've always been a little curious about that one.'

'Fire,' the man said plaintively. 'Don't you know anything?'

Carney wished for one brief, sweet moment he'd lived in the days when you got to kick people from time to time. 'Okay. You're out of here — now.'

'No!' He was almost in tears again. 'You got to believe me!'

'Why?' the cop yelled. 'Why the fuck do I have to believe you any more than I have to believe all the other loons who wander in here because they've got nothing better to do?'

'Because it's true.'

'Hey,' Phyllis interrupted. 'Look at it from our point of view. You come in here. You won't give us your name. You won't do anything except sit there telling us the world's going to end. And you won't go. We can get you some help. We can call someone if you like.'

. 'Help?' He shook his head. 'You can help me? If you knew how dumb that idea was…'

Carney rapped softly on the table with his knuckles. 'Time's up, pal. We got better ways of occupying ourselves.'

'What's left of it.'

'Yeah. Anyway, the short of it is you're out of here. Now, do you want to walk? Or do you want to be carried? Your choice.'

'All I want is for you to listen.'

'Sorry,' Phyllis Simpson said, and touched his arm. He really was going to burst into tears, she thought. It might be best to get in the Samaritans.

'You go tell your people I know about Sundog,' the man said, head bowed. 'You tell them that and see if they want to speak to me.'

Phyllis took her hand off the man's arm and looked at Carney. Then she pushed over the closed folder in front of her and watched as he opened it and read the single sheet of paper there, with the Bureau seal on the top.

'This been in the papers? On the Net?' he asked her.

'No, sir.'

'Right.' He bent down, tried to get into the guy's line of vision, which seemed to be pitched directly at the tabletop. 'Hey. Cheer up. You just won something. You got my attention.'

'I have? You do surprise me. Tick-tock.'

'What?'

'Time just ticking away.'

'Right. So this Sundog thing. What do you mean by that?'

'Ask your bosses. They know.'

'It's a start, I guess,' Carney said, then pushed the piece of paper over the table. 'You can read that if you want. It's an alert from the FBI. Asks us to pick up people going around making unusual predictions of the end of the world — great request to us, I'm sure. We'd fill every cell we've got. And it gives us some clues as to what turns just your average Joe crazy into someone they'd like to speak with. That word 'Sundog' is one of them. Congratulations. You won. We got local Bureau guys here. I'll call, but if you want my opinion, they'll bring people in for this. It seems pretty important to them. So you probably just got yourself a couple of days in custody.'

The man stared at the piece of paper, blinking, and said, 'You got another cigarette?'

'No. Or rather, yes. But you're not having it. No point now, is there?'

'As a favour?'

Carney looked at the man. The room stank from his sweat. 'Jesus, I don't believe this,' he said, and threw another Marlboro over the desk, then watched the man's hands while he lit it. 'Make that call, Sergeant.'

He was almost choking on the cigarette. 'Why are you doing that?' Carney wanted to know. 'Hell, I don't think you even smoke.'

'Lot of things to fit in.'

'This being the end of the world and all that?'

'Sort of.'

'Sir,' Phyllis asked, 'who exactly do you want me to speak to?'

'Never mind. I'll do it. I need a break from this.'

'So,' the man said, half-choking on the cigarette, then stubbing it unfinished into a grubby tin ashtray, 'you really are going to call the FBI?'

'You heard, chum,' Carney replied.

'Good. Then that's me done. Some go early, she said. The best are always the first to go.'

Tears started to roll down his cheeks. Underneath the table, out of view, his hand was shaking as it came out of his jeans with a ball of silver foil.

'Who said that?' Phyllis asked.

'Nemesis,' he mumbled. 'Look it up in a book. She's the one who gets you for hubris, but I guess you dumb people think that's something you pick up in a Greek deli.'

Carney looked at Phyllis Simpson and shrugged his shoulders. 'I'm forgetting you said that, friend, I'm just saying to myself: This guy knew the magic word.'

The man put his hand back on the table, unrolled the silver foil, took a handful of pills out of it, popped them into his mouth, closed his eyes, and started to chew and swallow, chew and swallow. All so quickly that there was nothing they could do to stop him.

Phyllis Simpson watched him and started to curse herself. 'What's that?'

'Digoxin,' the man mumbled, his mouth full of white, mangled pills. 'You believe those Heaven's Gate guys used barbiturates? Now, they really were crazy.'

She darted a worried glance at Carney.

'Shit,' the cop said, got up, walked around the table, took the man by the neck, and yelled, 'Cough those fucking things up now.'

He started choking. Carney shoved his fingers down his gaping throat, waited to hear him gag, then screamed, pulled his hand out. 'Fucking bit me! Simpson. Get the paramedics in here. What did he call that stuff?'

'Digoxin,' she said, reaching for the phone.

He swung the guy around in the swivel chair, stared him in the eye, and said, 'Listen. Either you cough those things up now or I hold you upside down until you spit them out. Now, what's it going to be?'

The man wasn't crying any more. 'Fucking cops,' he said, his face going red, voice slurred, breathing laboured. 'Can't you even let a man die with dignity?'

'No,' Carney yelled, then picked him up under the arms, let him stand for a moment, and punched him hard in the stomach. The man creased over onto the table, gasping, coughing, retching. 'Spit those fuckers up. Where the hell are those paramedics, Simpson? They on coffee break or something?'

'Don't try to make him throw up. It's not the right thing to do. I did poisons in training. Digoxin is digitalis. We can't deal with this, Mike. He needs medical help.'

The man slumped back onto the table, groaning. Phyllis Simpson walked over, felt his forehead, looked into his eyes. 'Can you see okay?'

The man shook his head. A thin dribble of opaque yellow vomit trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He yelped, then farted. The room filled with an obnoxious smell.

'How much did you take? Come on, now. It's not too late.' Simpson tried to ignore the stink. He was shaking, and Phyllis had an idea it was halfway between an involuntary spasm and laughter.

'Enough,' the man said, then rolled out of the chair onto the floor, mouth open, starting to choke on the stream of puke that kept coming out from inside him. His eyes were popping out of his head. His body was going into convulsions.

'What they tell you about this?' Carney asked. 'In training?'

The man puked a real bellyful onto the floor. Shit stains ran down the seat of his pale chinos.

'You can pick these things up anywhere. They use them to strengthen the contractions of the heart. Too much and the system just goes haywire.' The convulsions were getting worse, she thought. She let go and he twitched a whole revolution across the floor, spraying bile everywhere.

'Is it bad?'

She looked at him. 'What do you think? From what I recall, they said that anyone who survived the first twenty-four hours would probably pull through.'

A noise was coming out of his mouth, not quite human. It sounded like an old door with rusty hinges, a low, slow exhalation of sound, dying away into nothing. Then he twitched, a sudden spasm that went the length of the body, pulled his hands up into a rigid, rabbit like pose underneath his chin, opened his mouth wide, face white and waxy, eyes popping, and went still.

Phyllis Simpson turned away and stared at the wall.

'Well,' said Carney's voice behind her, 'I think he just missed that one by — oh — twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes.'

The door opened with a bang and two paramedics walked in, beaming. 'Phyllis!' the first one said. 'And my favourite lieutenant. Now, you people been beating up on the good people of Vegas again or wha-'

They stared at the body on the floor and fell silent.

CHAPTER 27 Tactics

Michael Lieberman sat on the steps at the front of the mansion, watching a handful of soldiers mill around the helipad. From this distance, it was hard to see what kind of troops these were — American or Spanish. When you put people inside khaki and gave them a gun, they all looked much the same. On the flat parched grass of the clifftop two helicopters sat side by side, the rotors on the nearest turning slowly in a leisurely windup sequence. He winced. Aeroplanes he could handle. Helicopters, with their noise and constant vibration, always seemed somehow unnatural. These were his least favourite form of transportation.

Ellis Bevan came and stood by him. He was wearing a grey shirt and slacks of an identical colour. The best uniform he could muster, Lieberman thought. 'Where are they going?'

'The mountain,' Bevan said, his flat, expressionless face already soaked in sweat. The day had developed with some fierce, burning vengeance in its belly. This was the hottest yet. It was impossible to escape the ferocity of the sun anywhere, even in the close, damp, humid dark of the mansion. 'If anywhere is going to come under attack, it's there.'

He looked Bevan in the eye. 'You're sure?'

'Oh yes. That's where the dome is. And close by we have another control centre too. It duplicates what we have here to some extent, and handles all the telecom traffic with the satellite. They could reduce this place to rubble and we'd still be operational. If they are going to hit somewhere, it's on the peak.'

'Hope you're right this time.'

Bevan tut-tutted quietly to himself. It was a small, infuriating gesture and succeeded in making Lieberman feel immature. 'You're still mad at the way we lured you here?'

'I don't like being lied to.'

'If we'd told you the truth, would you have come?'

'No.'

'So you get my point? Also…' Bevan fell into silence, watched one of the helicopters manoeuvring into the sky.

'Also what?'

'You knew this woman. Maybe you had some involvement too. We couldn't rule that out.'

'Jesus,' he grunted. 'It's nice to have your trust, Ellis.'

'You're bad at seeing other people's points of view, Lieberman. It makes it hard for you to work alongside others.'

'Thanks for the analysis. I wish it was original. So, speaking of teamwork. These guys with the guns, they're answerable to you now? My, your empire grows and grows.'

'It's a security issue. Do you think I should leave this to Schulz?'

Lieberman laughed. It was a good answer. 'No, of course not. But this is a waste of time. Charley's too smart to start lobbing missiles or something at us.'

'You're probably right,' Bevan said, watching the helicopter disappear along the coastline, out over the iridescent blue sea. 'That doesn't mean we just sit here doing nothing. Speaking of which…'

'Yeah, yeah… I know. I was just taking a break from looking at those damn screens. When I designed that thing we used models and paper and stuff. Not so much in the way of computers. It all looks so different from what I remember.'

Bevan eyed him and nodded. It might even have been a gesture of sympathy. 'This idea of crippling Sundog through the Shuttle isn't going to happen, is it?'

He didn't like the note of pessimism in the man's voice. 'I'm working on it. You people have asked me to disarm some little scorpion you've invented, one that can bite me the moment it knows I'm there, and, guess what, I don't even get allowed to touch it. If it was easy, I wouldn't be here, now, would I?'

Bevan let his dead blue eyes wander over the desiccated corn fields. 'I wouldn't argue with that. We need all the hands we can get right now. And if it means anything, I'm glad you're one of them.'

'Thanks,' he said, and meant it.

'And one more thing. If people liked me here, I probably wouldn't be doing my job. Bear that in mind. You think we should get back to work now?'

Lieberman shrugged, got up, and followed Bevan into the big barn. The control room was only half-manned. Maybe the rest were up on the mountain. To his astonishment Annie Sinclair was seated at a terminal next to Irwin Schulz, who was almost beaming at her through his thick glasses.

'Annie?' Lieberman asked. 'Are they running the new Barbie CD-ROM on these things now or something?'

Her eyes flashed at him, wide open, astonished. Offended. 'I hate Barbie. How can you even say that?'

He threw up his hands. 'I believe you, I believe you. But what is this? Where's your mom? And why are you making out like a geek? Do you want to turn into Irwin or something?'

'Annie's no slouch at Unix,' Schulz said, his eyes not leaving the screen. 'Don't knock it. You never know when it might come in useful. More than a Barbie CD-ROM anyway.'

'So,' the girl asked, 'if I want to make it to super-user I need to have another password, one way or another?'

'Yeah. But that's enough for now.'

'Okay.' In a flash of keystrokes, she logged off the system, turned to them, and said very seriously, 'Mom's in the briefing room, Michael, waiting for you. I'm going to have some breakfast now, if you don't mind.'

He watched the little figure go out the door into the sunlight and shook his head. 'So what's wrong with the Barbie CD-ROM? Will someone tell me?'

'Context,' Schulz muttered. 'That's all. Annie has picked up a lot. She knows enough to log on, find files, even get onto the network. And you want her to talk Barbie?'

'Great, another geek in the making.'

'Bull. It's not that hard. Most kids can use a PC these days. What's the big deal?'

'I don't know. All I know is there is one.'

'Luddite,' Schulz said, half-laughing. Lieberman followed him into the briefing room, noting the presence of Bennett, Mo, and a couple of silent-looking types he guessed were pals of Bevan's.

'Michael,' Bennett said, smiling, 'we're so glad you changed your mind.'

'Yeah.'

Mo just looked at him. He didn't like the expression on her face. She seemed scared. He sat down and watched Bevan go to the whiteboard and scrawl the single word Security on it.

'We all know what's happened in Lone Wolf and Kyoto over the last twelve hours,' Bevan said. 'And you don't need a crystal ball to guess that the dome here is next on the list for these people. I want you to know that we will stop them. And I want you to understand what these security measures mean for you and the people on your teams. The Sundog people know each other. You haven't met Captain Suarez, who is our liaison officer from the Spanish military…'

One of the seated soldiers nodded at them. He was young, about thirty, Lieberman guessed, thin, with a slender dark moustache on a nice-looking tanned face.

'And John Capstick here is US military liaison for the duration.'

The other one smiled. Blond crewcut, bright sparkling eyes, a physique out of a football team. 'Lady,' Capstick said, smiling at Mo, 'gentlemen.'

'Between them,' Bevan continued, 'our two friends have upward of sixty armed men, mainly on the peak, which is where we perceive the principal threat to be. We have emergency orders which will allow all officers to arrest anyone they find in the restricted area, and shoot if they don't cooperate. And we have an air exclusion zone covering the entire western mountain line of the island. These crazies will not get through.'

'You bet,' Capstick said, grinning.

Lieberman felt faint at the man's optimism: He really did think this was one cushy number. 'So now we know how Charley won't try to wipe us out. Is someone going to tell me a few ways she will?'

'Michael,' Schulz said softly, 'we have to take these precautions. I know it's unlikely, but you have to see why we can't ignore them.'

'Sure. But you know she won't come at us like this. Why the hell would she need to when she's got your neat little magnifying glass in her hand?'

'True,' Bennett said. 'But we're taking precautions against that too.'

'She didn't use Sundog to take out Kyoto,' Bevan said. 'There's a lesson for us there.'

'Yeah. The lesson being that was then and this is now. Maybe she thought there wasn't enough solar activity to let her damage Kyoto when she wanted to hit it. But take a look at the latest projections. Pretty soon everyone will understand this is a global event. There's a whacking great beauty spot about to appear on the face of the sun. When she has that in her grasp, who knows what she can do?'

'Whatever it is,' Bennett said, 'it's predictable. We may not know what the precise mix of radiation will be, but we can protect against it. When this meeting is over we'll start to put a lead covering over the roof of the control block. That should make it safe for us.'

'Should?'

'Michael,' Schulz said, 'we don't say this is perfect, we're saying it's as good as we're going to get.'

'Right. So all we need is for me to figure some way to disarm Sundog, without even touching the damn thing. Or get the system back on-line and keep our computers running through this storm that Charley's helping along the way. That's all. These soldiers here — you're just putting those guys out there to fry.'

'We know the risks,' Capstick said.

'You do? Wow, well, that's more than I do. And what about you, Bennett? You're just about the world authority on this stuff. Do you know what these poor suckers are risking by standing out there under the sun like that? A lot more than some missile up the ass is my guess.'

'Michael…' It was Mo this time.

'Hear me out. I don't know if I can work some magic with the Shuttle. I do know we have to cover the basics. Mo, a systems analyst of all people should know what we need to do in this situation. We need to secure what we have. We need to know that something that gets knocked out can be replaced or revived one minute later. How the hell do you communicate with the control centre up there and the dome anyway?'

'Microwave,' Bevan said. 'And don't worry, we're putting in a landline.'

'It's a start. Now tell me. If she hit your network right now, how long would it take you to get the thing back up?'

Mo shrugged. 'Ninety minutes. Two hours.'

'Can you cut that? I mean, I'm no geek, but can't you just unhook one of those workstations, make it into some emergency system, and then leave it by the network with the cable unplugged so that it stays free of anything she sends our way?'

'Yes.' She nodded. 'It's not the normal way-'

'Let's do it,' Schulz said, grinning. 'That's a great suggestion. And I want that on the peak too. Ellis will sort out the transportation.'

Lieberman blinked. 'Excuse me? We have something in the air out there that brought down Air Force One and you people are thinking of flying civilians around in one of those damn jumped-up dragonflies? Are you insane?'

'We can't do it all from here,' Schulz said. 'We have people up there already but no one with high-level system administration knowledge. It's okay. If it's a problem I'll go.'

'No way,' Bevan said firmly. 'You're needed here. This won't be a problem. It's just fifteen minutes up there, fifteen back. You'll be okay.'

'So why aren't you doing it, then?' Lieberman asked.

'Dumb question. Because I don't know how. And because I'm needed here too.'

Mo Sinclair stared at the notepad in front of her. She was really scared, he thought, and this was about more than just personal risk. She was scared for them all. And all because he had to open his big mouth. 'It's all right,' she said. 'I'll do it.'

'Lieberman,' Bevan said. 'You weren't happy with the visuals on the workstations here. You didn't think they were that good.'

'Sign of age. I never bought this virtual reality thing.'

'Up on the mountain we've got a twentieth-scale model of Sundog. Perfect in every detail. You think that might help?'

'It might.' He got the point and it was nice of Bevan to make it. 'Maybe I ought to take a look at this elusive dome anyway.'

Schulz scribbled some notes on his pad and passed them over the table. 'Some ideas of my own, Michael. I wondered whether we couldn't hang a power cable down onto the solar cell system. Short it or something.'

He stared at the doodles on the page. He'd run through the same idea himself and rejected it as unworkable. 'I really need to get into those control circuits, Irwin.'

'Not possible.'

'How long do I have on this?'

'The latest we can schedule the Shuttle launch is for 1500 UTC. I need you to come up with something over the next three hours. We're arranging a video briefing with the crew anyway. If you have any ideas, we need them. Either way, the launch happens, but if there's any special equipment you want along, we need to know then.'

'The crew? Volunteers, huh?'

Schulz nodded. 'Apparently they're queuing up at Canaveral for the privilege.'

Lieberman stared at his hands.

'You'll have something to give them, Michael,' Schulz added. 'I just know that.'

CHAPTER 28 The Red Mountain

The pilot wasn't part of the military operation. He was, now that Lieberman thought about it, the same English guy who picked him up at the airport on the way in. Until you got close up and saw the wrinkles, he looked about twenty-five. No, correction, Lieberman thought, nineteen. He wore a T-shirt, faded jeans, and filthy trainers.

'You're all coming?' The pilot grinned. He had one of those odd estuarial accents that seemed, to Lieberman, to have become the Queen's English these last few years.

'You really know how to fly this thing?'

'No,' the pilot said. 'But I'm learning fast.'

Annie was crouched down by the machine, playing with something. It was a magnifying glass and she had it aimed right at something on the ground. A thin wisp of smoke was curling up toward her face.

'Hell, Annie,' Lieberman muttered. 'Burning bugs is wrong. Don't you know that?' He stuck the folder of papers he was carrying between the glass and the sun, watched the smoke disperse, and got an angry stare from down below.

"Wasn't a bug. Just some grass.'

'All the same, this place is like a tinderbox. The last thing we need is a fire.'

She glowered at him and mouthed the word B-O-R-I-N-G.

'Sorry. In spite of appearances, I am a grown-up.'

Annie looked at the pilot's right arm. It was thin but muscular, and a big blue tattoo sat on the skin. 'What's the tattoo?'

'Army helicopter corps. I used to ferry men in masks around Northern Ireland in the middle of the night, looking for other men in masks. Before I became a civilian, that is. You should hear my war stories sometime. They're good.'

'You look too young. What's your name?'

'Why, thank you. Bob Davis. What's yours?'

'Annie.'

Davis looked at Lieberman and Mo. 'Why don't you just stay here while we pop up the mountain, Annie? I mean, this isn't really a pleasure trip.'

'I've never been in a helicopter before.'

'Plenty of time for that later.'

'I've plenty of time for that now,' she said firmly.

'Right.'

'We stay together,' Mo said quietly.

Davis shrugged. 'Well, don't say I didn't try. Ladies in the back. Strap yourself in tightly. You, sir, are next to me. We'll have you up there in fifteen minutes flat, no problem. And today there is no sightseeing. I have my orders. We stay in the air for as short a time as possible. Okay?'

Lieberman hooked the videophone over his shoulder and wished Schulz hadn't been so insistent they carry it. The thing was like a small video camera on a leather sling and it was heavy. Then he climbed in, his heart sinking, and listened to the blades beginning to spin. Some rusty mechanism in his head was trying to shift gears.

'No need to be afraid of flying.' Davis grinned, looking at him. Lieberman tried to smile back. 'Now, crashing… that's a different matter,' the pilot continued. 'Crashing scares me shitless, to be frank.'

'Thank you, Bob,' Lieberman said, then turned round, blew a big kiss to Annie.

'What was that for?' she asked.

'Inspiration,' he said, and hit the mike. 'Irwin?' His stomach began to churn as the craft lifted off, seeming to struggle in the meagre, steaming air.

'You've got an idea,' said the voice in the headset. 'I can just tell.'

'Maybe. Now tell me. What if I don't cut off all the power. Only, say, eighty per cent or so. Would that be any good?'

'Fine by me. Once the thing is getting less than fifty per cent from the panels it goes to sleep for fifteen minutes. Then, if the power doesn't come back, it goes into suspend. When it's sleeping, it's still lethal — there's enough power there to bite you. When you reach suspend, the thing truly is harmless. We can climb all over, do whatever we like.'

'Sounds good.'

'So…?'

'So let me call you when I've looked at this model and given it some more thought.'

Lieberman turned to the pair in the back and shone a big grin on them. They looked mystified. The big broad sweep of the Mediterranean appeared to their right. The golden stone of La Finca and the dry, brown fields around it disappeared beneath them. The machine clawed its way into the meagre, hot air and even he had to be impressed by the majestic isolation that surrounded them. The mountains ran sheer to the sea on both sides of them, the tumbling rock too steep and arid for anything to live there except some gaunt scrub vegetation, the occasional wild goat, and, wheeling around close to the cliff edge, eyeing this distant mechanical bird, the odd soaring eagle. It was the same as they got higher. He kept expecting to see some corner revealed, some sign of human habitation brought into view by their fast-increasing altitude. None came. This line of primal rock was uninhabitable. Nothing but the wilder creatures of the earth could flourish on these bare sierra escarpments, and just to satisfy himself of the fact he wriggled until the phone was in front of him, pushed the on button, and looked at a blank screen.

The pilot laughed. 'Won't work here, mate. Blocked by the mountains. Unless you've got some line-of-sight chain — like they set up for the microwave back at the mansion — you're lucky to get a squeak out of anyone. Even air-traffic control until you get out of the top.'

'But I thought they said there were other aircraft around here,' Lieberman yelled. 'How the hell do you keep out of their way?'

' "F-16s active above and below you,"' Davis chanted in a bad American accent. 'Jesus, some of these people they've shipped in are dorks. Listen to me. They have short, stubby wings. And we've got rotors. We are different. Watch.' Without warning, the helicopter lurched upward and to the left, climbing at a dizzying pace toward the sheer rock face, now gleaming orange in the midday sun.

'No tricks,' yelled Lieberman. 'We got a kid on board.'

'Oh yeah,' Davis said, shot a glance at Annie, and saw how she was loving this. 'They said to come the fast way. And this is it.'

The craft skirted the flat, beetling face of the mountain, cut in close to the rock no more than ten feet away, then veered directly into the sierra, Lieberman thinking this really was the end, until the face opened out into a narrow, craggy col leading inland.

'Keep cool,' Davis said. 'I know this run like the back of my hand. If you look down, on the scar there, you can see some ruined shepherds' huts, maybe even a ruined house. Got to be a hundred years old at least. Some life they had then, eh?'

Lieberman stared down, saw the little piles of rock rushing beneath them, felt giddy trying to work out these different sensations of height. The rock escarpment could have been no more than fifty feet from the glass of the windshield. The long, dramatic descent behind, down to the deep blue waters of the sea, seemed to stretch forever, so far it would take years to fall into those crystal, limpid depths if this fragile mechanical apparatus dissolved around them.

'Hold tight,' Davis said, the words jerking them back from the window. Ahead was a flat rock face. It seemed impassable, and the helicopter was headed directly for it.

'Bob…' Lieberman said quietly.

'Shush,' the pilot answered, and ran the engine up several notches. They were moving forward quickly now, rising on a steady incline. And Lieberman knew, with everything that had stood for certainty in his life, they weren't going to make it. 'Bob!' he yelled, and wondered what you did when you found yourself in the air with a madman. You couldn't grab for the wheel in this flimsy hunk of metal. He hadn't the faintest idea how it came to stay in the air, let alone guide itself.

The craft was now less than thirty feet from the bare rock slope, and the distance was closing fast. Lieberman looked in the back and saw Mo and Annie silent there, eyes wide open, waiting, and tried to smile. Thinking to himself all the time: These Gaia people probably don't mind dying, not at all, and maybe don't mind taking someone with them.

Ten feet.

He looked at the pilot. No expression there. The ridge was coming up, and as they approached, above and to its right, he saw something new, something man-made, golden, and circular, emerging like an artificial planet cutting through the horizon.

Five.

You get too scared in these situations, Lieberman repeated inwardly. The dust was blowing up from the ground, billowing around them like a sandy cloud that stained the lower windows of the helicopter until, to his horror, it was impossible to see the rock below at all.

'Bob,' he said quietly, no other words alive in his head. Then, with all of them, he thought, rising in their seats to help the thing along the way, they were over. The helicopter cleared the ridge — how much to spare? He didn't even want to think — and he breathed deeply. Then, for the first time, he truly thought he was going to throw up.

The helicopter had almost come to a halt. They dangled over a sudden, blood-chilling drop of a good thousand feet down into a jumble of misshapen rock. To the right, towering above them, was the dome, like a giant honeyed golf ball attached to the landward side of the sierra peak.

'Almost there, folks,' Davis said quietly, and dropped the craft forward, tucked into the rock face, following the curving line of the bare cliff down toward a bluff that sat six hundred feet or so beneath the dome, large enough to accommodate what looked like a prefabricated white single-storey building and a small helipad. A scattering of tiny dark figures watched their approach, rifles in their hands.

'Welcome to Puig Roig,' the pilot said calmly. 'That's Mallorquin for the "red mountain". Now, we have some queer currents at this point, so just hold on, and don't be surprised if this isn't exactly the smoothest ride you've ever had in your life.'

With that, he twisted the helicopter around sideways and edged in a descending arc toward the helipad, curving it around at the last moment to land square in the centre of a big painted H. The dust was swirling around them as high as the doors. 'One minute. For the rotors,' he said. And stared at Lieberman, then at the pair in the back.

'Apologies,' he said. 'It's normally a touch more enjoyable than that. But they said to keep this as short as possible. So I came the way I normally use on my own.'

John Capstick was walking toward them, beaming. The pilot turned away, started to examine the landscape. Lieberman found it hard to look at anything but the dome, perched on the peak several hundred feet above them. By comparison the low, white command centre seemed puny.

'Beautiful day, beautiful day,' Capstick said, watching them get out of the helicopter. 'You'll be giving us a return time on that detail, of course.'

'We need two hours and forty-five minutes,' Lieberman replied.

'That's very precise.'

'Call me superstitious,' Lieberman replied, 'but I know when that big yellow thing in the sky is starting to get angry today, and I'd rather be on the ground down there when it does.'

'Good idea,' Capstick said. 'Noted. So what are you people here to do? And who the hell's looking after the kid?'

Annie glowered at him.

'She's with me,' Mo Sinclair said, not smiling. 'Check with Irwin if you like.'

'I will, I will.' Capstick smiled. 'Now, the pilot guy I know is staying with us until you folks want out again. So that leaves you.'

Lieberman couldn't take his eyes off the complex. 'Just the standard tour, a good look at the satellite mock-up and whatever it takes to get up to the dome. Plus I think we're supposed to have some video conference with a couple of spacemen. An economy lunchbox and a bottle of San Miguel will do.'

'No alcohol on site. I'll find someone from the admin team. This is all Greek to me.'

The pilot was smiling at Capstick with a knowing, impertinent expression.

'Can I help?' Capstick asked.

'You're happy with this, then?' the pilot said.

'You mean the security status?'

'Yeah.'

'I'm content. Yes.'

The pilot just looked at him. 'What's that on the hill over there? Those ruins?'

Capstick followed his line of sight. 'Old shepherd dwellings or something. Don't worry. We've checked them. We've checked every pile of stones you can see. They're all dead. No money in agriculture, huh?'

'I thought that. Until I took a closer look.'

'Really.'

'We're above the grass line here. What are the sheep supposed to eat? Rock?'

Capstick paused, thinking. 'They're old. Maybe they predate the climate change.'

Lieberman took an appreciative look at the pilot and said, 'Climate change doesn't happen that fast. How high are we?'

'Four and a half thousand feet.'

'You should think again,' Lieberman said.

'So. You two are the smart guys.' Capstick looked thoroughly pissed.

Lieberman shrugged.

'Maybe shepherds used to use machinery too,' the pilot said.

'What?'

'Take a look. There's rusted iron. And workings. At least I think that's what they are.'

'Workings?' Capstick nodded. 'I knew that.'

'Mines. The rock formation underneath the dome. If you want my opinion, someone's mined tin or something around here a long time ago. Probably mined this whole area. This ridge included.'

Capstick looked impassively at them. 'Interesting thought,' he said flatly.

CHAPTER 29 Canaveral

'You mind me saying something?'

Bill Ruffin, the commander of the Space Shuttle Arcadia, had a broad, friendly, intelligent face, short, spiky red hair, and a wry, seen-it-all grin that seemed to fill the entire screen.

'Nope,' Lieberman mumbled.

'Can we cut the awe stuff out, please? I expect it when we do the school visits and that. But not now.'

'Right.' Lieberman detected something close to a ripple of laughter from Mo next to him in the big control room on the mountain. 'It's just that — '

'Yeah, yeah,' Ruffin said amicably, waving a giant hand that bobbed up and down on the wall monitor. 'You always wanted to be an astronaut. Join the queue. Next you'll be asking me how we get to do a dump up there.'

'Commander…'

'Professor…'

'Look. I get airsick in elevators. Nothing would get me where you're going. But do you really know what you're in for?'

Ruffin reached down, pushed a button, and the two other members of the Shuttle crew came up in windows beside him. 'In case you forgot, my name is Bill Ruffin. Four missions, two as a commander.'

He pointed to a stoic-looking, thickset black guy with a shining bald head. 'This is David Sampson. Three missions too. Best Shuttle pilot we got on the planet right now, present company included. And this…'

The third was a woman, dressed like the rest of them in standard NASA ground uniform. She wore close-cropped blonde hair and had a thin, intense, impatient face that kept looking at you as if to say: And then? 'Mary Gallagher. Four missions. Just as many EVAs. Do we know what we're in for? I guess not. But… hell, Mary, you tell the guy.'

The woman leaned into the camera and said, 'Professor, we put this damn thing there. If anyone gets the right to turn the off switch, it's us. Okay?'

'Not to mention the fact,' Ruffin added, 'that we also happen to be the best-qualified people around for the job.'

'Agreed, agreed,' Lieberman said. 'Look, I know when I'm beaten. I just want you to understand this isn't exact science. I'm making this up as I go along, so if you people see some holes in it, then holler.'

The three heads nodded above their white uniforms and he knew that, at least, was going to happen.

'The problem,' Lieberman continued, 'is simple. We need to turn Sundog off without touching her, and that, I have to tell you, isn't easy. I assume, Irwin, you still hold to the view there is no way we can get back into the control system directly and do something from earth?'

'Not that I can see right now,' Schulz said on the link from La Finca. 'Charley has that tight in her hot little hand and isn't letting go.'

'In that case, we really have only one option. We need to turn off the sun. We need to starve Sundog of what makes her work, wait for her to run down first into sleep, then into shutdown. Then, if I understand the system right, you guys can get your tool belts out and go to work on her.'

Bill Ruffin smiled and said, 'Neat idea, Professor. How do you propose to do that? My information was that thing's burning brighter than ever right now.'

'Shades. You just get out your sewing kit and start making some shades.'

He'd stared at the model in the command centre for almost an hour trying to work it out beforehand, and still he couldn't spot a flaw in the idea. The part of Sundog he knew best, when he saw a physical representation of it, was almost exactly as he remembered. The satellite hung in space powered by four giant black solar panels on the sun-facing side, with most of the active gear pointed down toward earth. It looked like a huge metallic windmill slowly cartwheeling through the sky, and all you need do — all? — was work out the measure of the dance and move into two-step with it.

'Sundog runs off four solar wings, each a hundred metres long and twenty wide. Now, you people don't need to worry about how much energy that generates or what kind of technology sits in those wings. All you need to know is this: It's big and fast and it's optimized to suck out every last jumping joule out of whatever sunlight falls upon it. And the other side of that equation is that it has no latency. If, for some reason, the light fails — and Sundog was predicated on the idea that this couldn't happen, of course — this little beast assumes it's got big internal problems and starts to turn itself off. So what we do, is this…'

He pressed a button and the badly drawn graphic came up on the screen. 'Shades, four of them, a little oversized compared to the wings themselves, with a central hub so that they maintain the same ratio to each other as the wings. Your engineers can figure out the best way to pack all this into something you can get into the Shuttle. You need some kind of light-absorbing or — reflecting fabric and a means to erect all this in situ. I thought maybe some kind of gas system, like they use to inflate tents. Or poles, whatever.'

Ruffin looked at the image on the screen and said, 'I get the idea. This is just like erecting some big kind of cover for the wings, except that we put them back from the panels and cast them in darkness.'

'Precisely. So we get that in place, we manoeuvre it over the wings, we synchronize it with whatever movement there is — you can do that by hand. And we wait.'

'Won't kill all the light,' Mary Gallagher said. 'There's bound to be some ambient illumination getting around.'

Schulz chipped in, and Lieberman simply adored the enthusiasm in his voice. 'Doesn't matter. Like Michael said, this is a high-performance system. If it's getting anything less than fifty per cent of what it expects, it can't function properly, it goes straight into the sleep sequence. You can hold that frame a couple of metres off the wings themselves and it's still going to kill the thing. And quickly too. Maybe fifteen minutes to sleep. Another fifteen to shutdown.'

Ruffin looked at Lieberman. 'Surely the wings on the satellite can angle themselves. They're supposed to tune to the best source of light they can find. As soon as we move the shades in place, they'll just start shifting Sundog around trying to dodge it, and that could make things real awkward for us.'

'That's why you need the hub,' he said. 'If you tried to do this one shade at a time, that's precisely what would happen. You'd be chasing the thing all over the place, and the three other panels would continue to power it while it tries to improve the angle. Doing it my way, we assemble all four shades together out of sync with the wings, forty-five degrees around from their position. Then turn them into the blackout position all in one go when we're ready. Just like lining up a couple of kid's windmills. Sundog goes from perfect sun to near-total darkness in a second or so and there's nothing in her code that tells her this can be anything but some kind of system failure.'

'Smart.' Ruffin nodded. 'Shame you can't be there to watch it.'

'Yeah, thanks. Actually, I do want to watch it. Can you put cameras in or something?'

'We can relay from Arcadia,' David Sampson said. 'And I can put out a floatcam to sit alongside you and feed back live video. If that doesn't trigger something, of course.'

'No problem with radio or video,' Schulz confirmed. 'I just don't want you using any powered tools in the vicinity, and you're going to have to cut everything but the bare essentials on the Shuttle while you're close.'

'Interesting…' Sampson said.

Lieberman watched the three astronauts. Something was going on between them that they weren't about to share at large.

'How much time will that give you? Drifting in like that?' he asked.

'I need to work that out,' Sampson said. 'I can't match the exact trajectory of Sundog without using some power, of course, but if I come in slow I can get damn close. Provided we make sure we've got long lines out there to these two guys, we can reel them in nice and clean after maybe forty-five minutes or so, with some room to spare.'

'That's enough for us,' Ruffin said, and Mary Gallagher nodded in agreement by his side. 'Let's take this part as read and let the engineers get on with the details. Once we have the system shut down, where do we go from there?'

Schulz took over the graphics feed on the conference and zoomed in on the side of the satellite. 'There's an access panel here. We'll upload all of this so you have it with you, of course. You need an anti-torque driver to get in there, then a smart card and an access code. Once you're there, it's a simple shutdown sequence to take Sundog off-line altogether. And then we're done.'

Lieberman waited for someone to say it. 'Not quite,' he added, when the line stayed silent for longer than he could bear. 'There's one massive solar storm going on up there right now, Irwin. Ordinarily you wouldn't dream of launching a Shuttle into all that crap.'

'Our problem, Professor,' Ruffin said flatly. 'If worse comes to worst, we just burn some gas and move on over to the dark side. Nothing can touch us there.'

'Maybe that would be a good idea anyway, after you're done,' Schulz said.

'Yeah,' Ruffin agreed, and glanced at his watch. 'As soon as those guys have finished with their sewing, I want to be on our way. We've got a rough sector estimate for where that thing is up there, but it could take us a little while to find it, and when we do we have to come at it from the top, just so it doesn't get too grouchy. We need all the time we can get.'

'Good luck,' Lieberman said, and suddenly felt foolish.

'Hell, Professor.' Ruffin grinned. 'What's luck got to do with it?'

CHAPTER 30 In the Pentagon

The war room was up and running, and to Helen Wagner it felt deeply strange. This was a military location. They had senior representatives of the forces on tap, waiting silent and a little resentful in the wings. Tim Clarke was calling meetings when he felt like it, forcing the pace all along, taking a decisive control of the response. But the way the situation was shaping, it was the intelligence services and the team assembling around the Shuttle that seemed to be making the running.

Clarke, she guessed, knew this would happen, and picked the Pentagon bunker because it was neutral ground. There could be no range wars here. Your troops were too distant, sitting down the end of a video-conferencing line, to give you any comfort. There were safe areas, in Langley and at the Bureau, he could have chosen. But the Pentagon evened things out, and one of the side effects was that no one felt at home. Dave Barnside and Ben Levine sat side by side, looking gloomy. Dan Fogerty was opposite with a couple of Bureau people she didn't know. Lieberman was live from the peak, Schulz was on-line from La Finca. She sat next to Barnside, trying to feel part of that particular team.

Clarke looked at the faces around the table, nodded at her, and said, 'Situation report, Miss Wagner. Where are we with the Shuttle?'

'It looks optimistic, sir. We have a way to neutralize the satellite. Arcadia is in prelaunch sequence right now.'

Lieberman raised a finger on the screen and began speaking. 'Basically-'

'Spare me the details,' Clarke interrupted. 'I really don't have the time. How hot is it getting out there?'

'We're doing okay, Mr President,' Lieberman said. The latest hourly projection sat on the giant screen on the wall opposite the conference table. 'I think the levels are pretty steady right now and they'll stay like that for three hours or so.'

'Good. What's happening on the ground?' Clarke asked.

'Minor telecommunications disruption,' Graeme Burnley said. 'Nothing we can't handle. We're getting some criticism for overreacting, to be honest, Mr President.'

'Let them moan,' the President said. 'I'd rather overreact than underreact.'

'And this hiatus is temporary, right, Michael?' Helen asked the image on the wall.

He nodded. 'You bet. After this quiet period, my guess is that the spots will start to grow and join again and the effects of the storm will be correspondingly greater.'

'Bigger than anything we've had before?' Burnley asked.

'I'm an astronomer, not a fortune-teller. There's no way of knowing that. It's obvious that the radiation level is linked to the state of the sunspot activity, but it's not a straight-line relationship.'

'Guess, mister,' Clarke said. 'This isn't an academic exercise.'

Lieberman hesitated and took his eyes off the screen. Tim Clarke had a habit of staring at you until he got what he wanted. At least a video link gave you a break from the heat in his eyes. 'My guess, for what it's worth, is that it will be big, and continue to grow right up to the peak, which is a little over twenty-four hours away. By the zenith, this will be larger, more serious than anything ever recorded. Even without the toy Charley stole, we could be in trouble. This isn't just some passing heat wave. It has all manner of poisonous

crap inside it. Add Charley into the equation and I just don't know. It could be radiation. It could be direct heat. We're dealing with a cocktail of solar particles that could turn up in any form they damn well feel like. The death ray from hell or just a very bad day on the beach. None of us knows, not even Charley. That's why we abandoned Sundog in the first place, remember. It was so damn unpredictable.'

'A straight answer,' Clarke said. 'I appreciate that.'

'So what do I tell these business guys who keep phoning me?' Graeme Burnley asked. They all stared at him.

'Tell them to stay at home and watch TV,' Lieberman answered from the wall. 'For as long as it lasts. We're in the phony war stage now. It won't go on for long.'

Clarke nodded. 'Let's hope the Shuttle idea works out, but it doesn't mean we let up on any other options. What about tracking down the Children?'

Dan Fogerty cleared his throat and read from a piece of paper. 'It's slow, to be honest, Mr President. We've drawn a blank trying to trace any equipment-purchasing pattern that would match up with someone trying to set up their own transmission facility. Maybe they sourced this abroad. It's a possibility. But we do think they bought the wherewithal for a dome. We found a company outside San Diego specializing in geodesic structures. They say a bunch of people came to them two months ago with plans and specifications for the component parts for a unit that pretty nearly matches up with the Sundog model. Placed the order, paid cash, and collected a week later. The billing address is a phony, of course, and we're getting nowhere with an ID on the people at all. But the specs are too close to the Sundog model to be a coincidence. This is Gaia, all right.'

'You're pouring men on that, I trust, Dan,' Clarke said. 'You're going to find where they went with that thing.'

'Sure,' Fogerty said. 'It's happening. But there are a couple of points to remember. This is a kit. These people turned up with their own pair of trucks and took it away with them.

They could transport it pretty much anywhere in the country and erect it on site.'

'Not the sort of thing you'd miss,' Barnside said quietly, looking across the table. 'A forty-eight-foot dome.'

'Not if it was in a built-up area, Dave,' Fogerty agreed. 'But think about it. They could site that almost anywhere the entire length of the Rockies, and who would know the difference? Remember that Aio that went missing a couple of years back? That took us two weeks to recover when it went down in the mountains, and it was one big pile of metal.'

'So how do we track them down?' Clarke asked. 'They've got to be using this thing. What about the transmissions?'

'We're flying AWACs over the less densely populated areas, sir,' Helen replied. 'But that's one big job, and I imagine they're being very careful about when they use the dome to transmit right now. Does that make sense, Irwin?'

'Sure. If they've replicated the dome and the gear inside it, they don't need to stay on the line long. You could repro-gram the entire instruction set in under thirty seconds, and then switch off. I hate to tell you this, but unless we get real lucky, those AWACs are burning fuel for no good reason.'

'Keep them there,' Clarke said. 'What about the dome we still own? You're sure that's secure?'

'As sure as we can be, Mr President,' Barnside said firmly. 'We know what we're up against now. If she can break through this, she really can work miracles. We've put the men and resources in there, picked the place clean. And from what I understand, she doesn't have anything to throw at us from the sky.'

'Not yet,' Lieberman interjected. 'I don't think you people quite get it yet. We don't know what this is going to be like when the spot activity gets hyper. We don't have the books to tell us. She could just turn that beam on us here and there'd be hell to pay one way or another.'

'Maybe,' Clarke said, 'but there's no point worrying about things we don't understand or can't affect. Just make damn sure that place is as tight as you can get it. We lose that and we are in trouble.'

'Sir,' Barnside said, scribbling on a pad.

'This Vegas thing, Dan,' Clarke asked, 'is there anything in it?'

Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'Hard to tell, sir. A guy starts talking about the end of the world. Mentions the word "Sundog". Then kills himself. I mean: Why?'

'Maybe he was trying to run away?' Helen said, knowing it didn't make sense.

'Then why did he kill himself? Second thoughts?'

She caught Lieberman's eye through the video link. 'Michael. Can you remember if Charley had some links with Vegas? Anything at all.'

'She hated it,' he said. 'We went there once. For a Dylan concert at Caesar's, believe it or not. The concert was okay but the town — she loathed it. The tackiness. The venality. It's the last place on earth she'd choose to be.'

'We need to ID this man,' Fogerty said, 'and we're working on that one. Newspapers. TV. Everything, not that we're handing out the real story. If we can prove some link, we may have a start.'

'Assume there is a link, Dan,' Clarke said. 'What next?'

'Big area, sir.' Fogerty grimaced. 'We can focus the AWACs, do some aerial reconnaissance.'

'We can start doing that now, surely,' Helen said. 'I checked with our own imaging people. We have digital photography of every last square foot of this country. We can set them working on that straightaway.'

'Sure,' Fogerty said. 'But think of the scale of the task. Nevada, Utah, Arizona — it could be any of the three, and you're talking massive areas of bare rock there. Even if we knew what we're looking for, how long would it take to find it? Photo reconnaissance is a long-term exercise, not something you can pull up in an hour or two.'

'We do know what we're looking for,' Schulz said from the screen. 'A dome. You've got these photos in digital form, right? I assume you have some kind of reconnaissance software that can search images on the basis of recognizable shapes.'

'Sure,' Helen said. 'We developed it ourselves. Runways. Camouflaged buildings.'

'Then set it up to look for a geodesic. Even if it's camouflaged you're going to get an outline.' Helen scribbled some notes on her pad. This was straight up Larry Wolfit's street. The room was quiet. They were all waiting for Clarke.

'We're getting somewhere,' the President said. 'Maybe we can kill the satellite. Maybe we can take them. If we're in luck, we do both.'

'Sir,' Helen replied, and looked at the faces around the room. There was some hope there, she thought. They were moving in on Gaia at last.

CHAPTER 31 Capital

'Martin never came back? We never heard from him again?'

Joe Katayama shook his head. Charley Pascal smiled at him, the slow, strained smile he recognized as an expression of some real physical pain inside her. In the main room of the farmhouse, where the Children worked around the clock talking to the satellite, monitoring the wires, there was a slow buzz of excitement that was fast approaching anxiety.

'Everything moves in its sphere,' Charley said as they sat alone at the edge of the room, watching the work go on. 'Everything has its purpose. We need to start moving people out, Joe. It's killing everyone to be glued to these screens. We need to start dispersing.'

Katayama pulled out a sheet of paper. 'I'd been thinking much the same way. I got some pre-programmed routes they can follow, vehicles lined up, air tickets, train tickets for when the transportation gets back to normal. They know what to do. Spread the word.'

Charley almost laughed. 'They don't need to spread the word, Joe. We're not evangelists. You don't understand.'

Some small fire lit behind his eyes, and Charley thought: He has a temper; it just stays beneath the surface most of the time.

'No,' he replied, face hard and expressionless, 'I guess I don't. I thought that, when it was over, when we'd dispersed, that was what we did next. Pointed the way.'

She did laugh then, just to see if she could get a response, but the flat Oriental face stayed unmoved. 'Meet the new boss. Just like the old boss. I don't think so. We've done our teaching. We can help. People can advise, point the way if it's needed. That's not why we're here.'

'Why is that?'

'To cleanse,' she said softly. 'To purify. The way a farmer burns the stubble at the end of the harvest. The way an artist scrubs a canvas when a painting goes wrong. There's a god in all this, Joe, don't forget that. Not a god that lives in the sky with some long white beard and a list of commandments. The god inside us. All of us, every living creature. And when we purify, that god comes out. She doesn't need our help. It happens. Even though they'll get their TV stations back on the air before long. Even though their armies don't go away. The real revolution starts in the heart, when we start to see the world around us for what it is: chaotic and fragile, ruined by our own endeavours.'

'You put a lot of trust in people,' Katayama said.

'No,' Charley said swiftly. 'I put a lot of trust in my god. Let's get moving, Joe. Start to thin the ranks.' She pushed her chair across the room and touched the arm of someone punching away at a keyboard. He stopped, beamed at her. 'How goes it, Sam?'

'Like a dream,' he said in a monotone English accent. Heads turned, faces smiling. No need for concern, she thought. The Children were a family, would always remain a family, even when they'd dispersed. There was peace in the room, in spite of the heat that seeped in from the windows, rose from the humming terminals, enveloped them all. Peace and a resolve to see this through. 'Good,' she said.

Against her instincts, she had spent time learning the workings of the financial markets. It was necessary to understand what you sought to destroy. Sam Lambert had been pivotal in this. A former English stockbroker who had quit his job to work for a venture capital company in Palo Alto, he knew so much about the way this digital flow of capital worked, moving around the world in some obscene impersonation of the sun itself, twenty-four hours a day, never resting, never failing — until now.

The markets were like flowers, blooming for the sun. When the earth revolved and placed them in daylight, they opened their petals, let the life flood into them, raced and ran through the bright, waking hours. Then, eight hectic hours later, they felt the day start to grow darker and chill, wound down to sleep. And as one bloom closed, another one opened, following the daily circling of the sun's light upon the earth. It was a permanent, unchanging process, one that had been established decades before. What made it different now was the technology that threw an invisible electronic thread between each of those points on the globe, made it possible to trade in Tokyo from a desk in London.

This changed the nature of the exercise entirely, linked every part to the whole. To make a trade in London, however small, however local, was to throw a pebble into the gigantic pool of international capital that swilled around the world, taking little heed of governments and currency restrictions, circumventing them by some quicksilver body swerve that got you where you wanted by some other route. It might add a few milliseconds to the transaction, taking you through some cabling in Panama or Cayman instead of Berne or Bonn. But you got there. Everything got there, pretty much.

This digital nervous system was the financial world. And without it, Charley had come to realize, the complex fabric of modern money was merely a blank and empty page, a tabula rasa demanding something be written upon it, with precious little there to use as ink.

'See how it's moving,' Lambert said, as much to the rest of the room as to the figure in the wheelchair. Tokyo had closed well down, not disastrously so, but enough to give the Western markets, which had to follow the game, sufficient jitters for a few nervous stomachs. Sydney and Hong Kong had drifted to a close along much the same lines. There were minor markets in Western Europe that opened before London. But no one was in any doubt about where the big players lay. The way the world was structured, London had the job of defending this game, until New York chipped in halfway through, opening the day as the sun rose over Manhattan.

Charley Pascal sipped a camomile tea and watched the way thing were being sold, not heavily, just at a measured rate, just out of caution. Then, with no emotion in her voice, asked, 'Sam. Take a look at Zurich, will you? Tell me what you think.' And before he could answer, added, 'No. Before you reply, take a look at Amsterdam too.'

Lambert started hammering the keyboard, staring fixedly into the screen. 'Unbelievable,' he said.

The numbers on the screen were, literally, incredible. They represented the largest and fastest fall on the smaller exchanges he had ever seen. Not just Amsterdam and Zurich. In Paris and Frankfurt and Brussels the local index was tumbling through the floor. Across the world in Singapore, which thought it was heading for a quiet close with only a little backdraught from what had happened in Tokyo, the Straits index was now plummeting too. It was as if they had all walked to the edge of the cliff, then jumped. And any minute now they would take the Footsie with them.

'Look at the money markets,' Charley said. Lambert switched the table onto the screen. It was the same old story. People rushing to the dollar, the mark, and the yen, even gold, hunting for security and letting everything they perceived to be weak collapse behind them. The pound was in freefall, already pushing par with the dollar. The Euro followed suit, plummeting to new lows.

This was the biggest market in the history of the world. It spanned the globe and ran through fibre-optic cables and geostationary satellites, it pulsed twenty-four hours of the day. And it behaved with the same mute, unchanging instinct of a herd of beasts. There was a name for this, and it was one that Charley, as she had watched the markets these last few months, had come to understand. It was a depressive supercycle, of the kind that was around in all the great crashes, in '87 and 1929 too if someone had known how to recognize it. And all it needed to push the supercycle over the edge into complete economic collapse was a little help.

'What's the state of the storm, Louise?' Charley asked a blonde girl at the next terminal.

'Coming up good. As good as we've seen.'

'This is just nervousness, Sam,' Charley said. 'That's right, isn't it? Nothing we've done?'

'The nervousness is caused by our presence,' Lambert replied. 'But you're right, the systems are running pretty well in themselves. There's some disruption from the solar activity, but it's not a cause in its own right, we haven't fed any disruptive data into the Net.'

Charley Pascal leaned back in her wheelchair, closed her eyes, felt ecstatic. 'Open the gates, Louise,' she said quietly. 'Not all the way. Just enough to throw a wrench in the works. No fire. Not yet.'

'Done.' The girl was smiling. They were all smiling. Twenty or more people in the room, waiting, the keyboards silent for once.

Charley Pascal closed her eyes and tried to imagine what was happening in space at that moment, tried to feel the way this tiny slice of that gigantic sea of energy flowing through the universe was being channelled toward the earth.

'Well?' She lifted up her head and looked at Lambert. A small crowd was gathering around his terminal; she could hear the fast, hot chatter of their excitement. Sam Lambert's face was a picture: half-glee, half-horror. There was still the thrill of the trader there, even after all these years. It was Like jumping from a plane without checking if there was a parachute on your back, she guessed. Or Russian roulette.

The lights shifted and flickered on the monitor. It was Singapore that went first, taking down the overnight trading lines that still ran after the market close. One moment the figures were on the screen, with some frantic agency copy underneath them. The next they were gone. No 'network down' announcement. Nothing.

Moscow was the next to fall. In exactly the same way, twenty seconds later. Zurich followed and shortly afterwards Frankfurt. Then, so quickly it seemed to happen simultaneously, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. The panels on the monitor that should have carried a miniature stock chart were empty, just black voids, while the live part that remained, the London market, and the prospects for Wall Street, whose turn it was next in the game, just raced and ran and screamed at them.

The stock screens went blank. The Children watched, waiting breathlessly, to see if something would return. Finally, Charley spoke. 'What do they do now, Sam? What are their options?'

'I don't know. They must have contingency plans for this. They can keep the markets closed on a temporary basis.'

'Good. But what does that mean? For these people? For this old order of things?'

He tried to imagine. 'They can rebuild. They can suspend trading until they are happy they can control things.'

'But this is capitalism,' she said. 'This is global capitalism, without frontiers. It feeds upon the ability to move money instantly, digitally, anywhere, at any time. And we are removing that nourishment, we are destroying the cogs and wheels of this particular machine that entraps, enslaves us all.'

'I know,' he said.

'So what happens?'

'Collapse,' Sam Lambert said. 'Absolute, bloody chaos.'

'The mother of us all.' Charley Pascal grinned and threw her arms around him.

CHAPTER 32 Martin Chalk

It didn't take long at all for an ID to come through. Forty minutes after the Bureau put the picture of the dead man on the internal net, the phone rang in the Pentagon bunker and Dan Fogerty started to smile, furiously taking notes all the time. A hurried conference was put together in a quarter of an hour. Tim Clarke was back at the head of the table, and this time, Helen Wagner thought to herself, the military men were starting to look energized. Targets.

'We have a lead,' Fogerty said. 'The office in San Jose picked the guy up from missing persons. His name is Martin Chalk, age twenty-six. Used to be a postgrad student at Berkeley, something to do with quantum mechanics and fusion. Then a year ago he dropped out, joined the Children. His family complained to the local police station and then to us that he'd been kidnapped, brainwashed, the usual thing. He was living with the Children in some commune they had in San Francisco.'

'Did you check it out?' Clarke asked.

Fogerty looked uncomfortable. 'The local cops did that, sir. The guy was twenty-six. And very bright. He knew what he was doing. He was able to come and go as he wanted. There was no way they could intervene. This is a free country.'

Clarke sighed and shook his head. 'You're sure about the ID?'

'Oh yes, sir. Last year Chalk took part in some kind of ecoprotest on the Golden Gate Bridge. Climbing up the pillars and sitting there, holding up the traffic until the cops came and talked them down. He got fingerprinted after that. The records are still at the station. He was never charged, which is why we would have been a little slow to pick up on them through the main print database. But we double-checked. And we know that he moved on to San Diego, presumably to be near the Children, because there was still some correspondence after the arrest, when they were thinking about whether to prosecute. This is the man.'

Clarke surveyed them all and Helen was astonished. There was a smile on his face, and this was such a rare thing it made all of them, even the Agency people, feel rewarded. 'That's great work, Dan. We can work with this. We can do something. General Barksdale?'

'It has to be somewhere near Vegas,' Barksdale replied. 'We need to start putting people in place right now.'

Clarke nodded. 'Right, we need — '

'Sir?' Even the President was staring at her as if this were an unwarranted interruption.

'Miss Wagner?' Clarke looked coldly at her.

'Are we asking ourselves enough questions about this? We don't know why this man was in Vegas in the first place. We don't know what drove him to talk to that woman in the casino or kill himself.'

'This isn't your field, Wagner.' Levine scowled. 'If you'd got as many years in Operations under your belt as some of us around this table, you'd know that the simplest explanation is always the best. People are a lot less smart than we think.'

'So,' she continued, 'what we are being asked to accept is that this man somehow left the Children, made his way to Vegas — how we don't know — issued this warning, and then, for some reason, killed himself.'

'It doesn't sound so implausible, really.' Fogerty smiled.

'No? And he just happens to be someone that we can identify so easily? Someone who has prints? A police record?

It seems to me that if they wanted to give us a sign, if they wanted to lead us in the wrong direction, this is one great way of doing it.'

'That's bull,' Levine said.

'Not necessarily.' To Helen's astonishment it was Fogerty who came to the rescue. 'There's a possibility this is some kind of game. Or it could be something genuine. We just don't know. But what we do know is that it's the best — in fact the only — lead we have. Even if this is some elaborate kind of trick, we may still be able to pick something up from it. We now, at least, have a chance of narrowing down our focus. You can't expect us to dismiss that.'

'No,' she answered, thinking. 'I agree.'

'The important thing is to be ready,' Fogerty continued. 'We need to have a high-level team in place when we need them — and I'm not leaving this to anyone local. We're going to have to ship them in, and that's going to take… how long, Jim?'

A thickset man in a USAF uniform looked at his watch and said, 'We can have a team on the ground within five hours of departure. There's no civilian air traffic today because of the emergency. We can take you straight in to the domestic airfield in Vegas. I'll position helicopters there that will enable us to go on to pretty much anywhere in the vicinity in the space of an hour or so once you give us the target.'

'Right, Miss Wagner? Are you any closer to locating this target through reconnaissance?' Clarke asked.

'We're looking, sir,' she answered. 'We need to do some reprogramming. It won't begin in earnest for another three hours or so. That's as tight as I can push it.'

'Push it tighter,' Clarke said. 'And hell, the bottom line is simple, surely. This guy is the one proven link with the Children we've got. Do you people have any more about to pop out of the woodwork?'

No one spoke. 'Well, then, there you are. If something better comes in — and I don't see much hope of that written on your faces — we have the resources to cope with it. In the meantime, prepare to get a team down to Vegas that can go in, take hold of these people when we find them, and secure whatever installation they have there intact. Intact! Do I make myself plain?'

They all nodded.

'I have to go along,' Helen said. 'I need three or four people from my team with me.'

'No,' Barnside grunted, 'if anyone goes along from the Agency it's someone from the operational side.'

She blinked. 'We are going to have to take control of whatever equipment they have down there, and do it quickly. I don't want to risk trying that down the line. I've got MIS people who are going to be essential. But I need to be there.'

Clarke looked at her. 'I take your point. But what about the imaging? I don't want you sitting on the asphalt in Vegas if it means any slippage there.'

'We have an excellent team chasing that, sir. I can breathe down their necks as easily from Vegas as I can sitting in a bunker here.'

'You make a good case,' Clarke said. 'Organize your people. Take whoever you want.'

'Sir,' Barnside said testily, 'we can't have Agency staff out in the field without an Operations presence. If you're agreeable I'll accompany Assistant Director Wagner.'

'This is an FBI operation, Dave,' Dan Fogerty pointed out slowly. 'Remember our orders. No range wars here.'

'Guaranteed.'

'You're happy with that?' Clarke asked.

Fogerty nodded. 'Sure. Provided we all know where the chain of command lies.'

'It lies with me, Dan,' Clarke said. 'Ultimately. And let's not forget the purpose of this. At the risk of repeating myself, gentlemen, we need this installation in good working shape and, if possible, these people alive. The Shuttle can't be our only option. Understood?'

The door to the bunker opened and Graeme Burnley walked in, face taut with trepidation, a couple of sheets of paper in his hand.

'Good.' Clarke got up from his chair, not waiting for them to answer. He looked tired, Helen thought. He looked impatient, and that was dangerous in any leader. 'By my watch you'll probably be getting into Vegas towards midday local. Let's see if we can get this thing wrapped up by the end of the afternoon. And then get back to some nice easy problems, like running the country. And burying Bill Rollin-son. Until we do that, nothing starts to get back to normal.'

They watched him go. When the door closed, Ben Levine grunted, 'The little guy looked like he'd eaten a frog. I wonder what the hell was wrong with him.'

Fogerty watched them from across the table, and Helen was struck, not for the first time, by the contrast between the two: both relics of the previous administration, one an old pro, risen through the ranks, the other someone who crossed over from academia and, to an extent, never ceased to treat this as an intellectual exercise.

'You should get yourself one of these new smart pagers,' Fogerty said, pulling something out from his jacket pocket. 'This damn thing was twitching like crazy all through that little conversation we just had.'

Levine's eyes hooded over. 'What's it say?'

Fogerty looked at the screen and smiled. 'It says the markets have just gone. Right down into the gutter. Best avoid those falling bodies on your way down to Vegas, gentlemen. Hard cash is the currency of the day from now on.'

CHAPTER 33 Departure

'Quite a set-up.' The pilot nodded at the control centre, so white under the scorching afternoon sun that it made Lieberman's eyes hurt.

'Oh yes.' Lieberman was fresh from the video conference and finding it hard to focus on all the things running through his head. And wishing he could push one abiding image out of his mind. That of Challenger, rising into the sky on a hot day in 1986, punching into the blue heavens on a column of smoke and flame, then exploding like some giant firework that burned a big black hole in the stomach of all the millions who saw it.

Bob Davis tossed his dying cigarette over the edge of the precipice, then immediately reached into his shirt pocket to pull out another one. 'And not a bit of it works. We are in a mess, aren't we?'

Lieberman bristled. This quick, easy cynicism was something he knew all too well himself, but it just wasn't appropriate. He'd been all over the site, spent the best part of an hour poring over the scale model of the satellite. Leaving the motives to one side, what Sundog had achieved on the mountain was astonishing. They had created an entire operational nerve centre and placed it in a remote, secure location, away from prying eyes, yet linked through enough state-of-the-art communications gear back to La Finca, straight out into the big wide world.

And Bevan was right. La Finca was, to some extent, peripheral. The low, modern command base was the key. It was set a few hundred feet beneath the dome itself, on a long, protruding rock finger that was broad enough and flat enough to take both the building and the vital helipad. The dome sat remotely above everything, glowing in the sun like some huge golden golf ball perched on a giant rock tee stabbing upward at the sky.

Lieberman had taken the tiny funicular that linked the control centre to the dome, sat in the flimsy metal cage as it climbed the hill, feeling the sweat cling coldly to his shirt, looking out across the mountains, across the island, inland toward the Bay of Palma beyond. When it came to a halt, he stumbled out onto the summit, keeping his eyes away from the unguarded edge. There wasn't a single thing inside the dome that he understood, but it was impossible to be anything but impressed.

'Don't knock it,' he said. 'This is a work of art. It's not their fault someone stole it from them.'

The man coughed and spat over the edge. 'I'll take your word on that. It's just the bloody awful security that bugs me.'

Lieberman watched him draw heavily on the cigarette. 'I guess they thought the whole thing was pretty much in mothballs. You think it's that bad?'

The pilot looked at his watch. 'Oh yes. We'd best be going. If your earlier feelings about the time to leave still hold.'

Lieberman felt like kicking himself. The sheer sophistication of Puig Roig had entrapped him. The video conference meant he'd missed the last cycle update. It was a miracle Bevan wasn't screaming at him already. Worse, he really had no idea whether the cycle had worsened. There had been so much to see. 'Damn. Five minutes. I need to check something.'

And drag Annie and Mo away from this too, he added quietly to himself. There was such a buzz, such frantic energy being poured into the complex, that you could get swept up in it all and let the hours drift away into nothing.

'I'll see you at the machine,' Davis said, then launched a cigarette over the cliff edge and walked off toward the helipad.

Lieberman strode into the control room, took a snatched look at the incoming data on a free monitor, then found them still head deep in the system. 'You've got to cut that. It's time to go.'

'Not now,' Mo said, not even taking her eyes off the screen. The big American was over in the corner, talking to a couple of the staff people who'd shown Lieberman around. He was glancing at them.

'Exactly right now. GI Joe is about to come over here and call off our departure slot if we don't move this minute.'

She pulled herself away. 'Does that matter, Michael? We're here. Nothing's happened. And it's past the peak. Surely it's obvious. We're safe here.'

'You're right. It's just that I hate flying so much I want to get it out of the way as fast as I can. And whatever that thing is you're doing… I'm damn sure you could both accomplish it all down below.'

She thought about that. 'That's true. Now, anyway. I'm glad Irwin did send me up here. This network was on the point of collapse.'

'Good. Now can we go, please?'

'Done,' she said, and started to log off.

Capstick walked over and said, 'Are you folks on your way? If you're not out of here in five minutes I'm closing that window. And God knows when it's going to be open again.'

Lieberman felt something inside his stomach jump and asked, 'What happened?'

'Nothing like Kyoto, thank goodness. But we've got all hell let loose out there. Something's infected the stock markets. They're through the floor everywhere. The President has suspended all trading until further notice, most everyone else is following. Some big worries about currency effects too.

Everything trying to rush into gold, not that it's easy to buy anything.'

'Have they claimed responsibility?'

'You bet. Right there on the Web site. As pleased as punch about it. The news wires say this could push the entire world into a recession, and those loons are sitting up and applauding themselves.'

'I guess they have a different agenda.'

'They don't care,' Mo said. 'They just don't give a damn.'

'Right,' Capstick yelled, heading for the door, motioning for them to follow. 'But the bottom line is I need you out of here right now. Along with the crash, we've got a major telecom failure throughout the northern latitudes right now. The closest it's got to us is Toulouse, but I'm not taking any risks. If this comes any farther south we lock the doors and shut ourselves in for the night. I'm happy we can keep the link with La Finca now we've backed up the microwave dishes with a landline. But I'm sure as hell not having people flying in and out with some electromagnetic storm going on. Get one of those helicopters down on us and it could put this entire centre out.'

'Thoughtful of you.' Lieberman nodded, shielding his eyes as they came out into the ferocious heat and light. 'No problem. We're gone.' Mo and Annie followed in his wake, moving as quickly as they could. Capstick nodded as soon as he saw they were on their way, then was gone.

'You think anyone got hurt?' he asked no one in particular. 'All that guy could think about was money and hunks of equipment. Jesus. Maybe Charley's right, in some way. We do deserve all this.'

The engine was winding up. 'You don't mean that, Michael,' Mo yelled over the noise, and touched his arm.

'No?' So hot. So complex. So much in this place he didn't understand. 'Let's go before GI Joe changes his mind.' They climbed into the helicopter, Annie smiling at the pilot, who winked back at her.

'If you want to go the quick way, Bob, it's no problem with me,' Lieberman said over the noise of the engine. 'So long as you don't mind me throwing up along the way. Seems there's some major telecom breakdown out there. Capstick wants us out before it reaches here.'

'I heard,' the pilot yelled. 'He's an idiot. This thing is spreading west, not south. It's taken out the main lines in New York, for God's sake.'

'All the same.'

'All the same, you relax. We have one little thing to do, and then we're home.' The helicopter lifted off the ground, sending up a skirt of dust that briefly obscured everything, then cleared. They were hovering, stationary, ten feet off the surface.

'What little thing?' Lieberman yelled.

The pilot threw a headset at him, motioned him to put it on, did the same himself with a pair tucked into the pocket by the seat, then shouted backward over his shoulder, 'Sorry, my loves, only one extra pair in this beast. You just talk among yourselves.'

Lieberman put the cans on and was amazed by the difference. The sound dulled to a mute swell, and Davis's voice came through as clear as a bell. 'What little thing?'

The helicopter moved slowly sideways, thirty feet or so until it was hovering stationary again, this time over the stomach-wrenching drop down to the foot of the valley. 'Bob. What the hell are you doing?'

Davis shifted the stick gently, the engine note changed, and he replied, 'Satisfying my curiosity.' The pilot looked over his shoulder. 'Don't worry,' he said loudly to Mo and Annie. 'We just have to make one pass and then we're gone.'

Lieberman felt his guts start to wind around and around themselves as the machine slipped slowly beneath the level of the ridge and down the rock face some fifteen feet in front of them, another thousand feet of nothingness below.

'Meaning?' he asked.

'Meaning I spent the last three hours watching those boneheads play security men around this place, and I have to tell you the only suspicious device they'd ever manage to find is one that consists of a big black ball with a fuse coming out the top and the letters B-O-M-B painted on the side. It's pathetic.'

The helicopter was completely beneath the line of the ridge now. Lieberman could see that the centre was built on a huge overhang of rock that had somehow been left behind in the natural erosion of the original mountain. 'Bob, they checked those places you mentioned. I saw them doing it. They put a team down with ropes and stuff, and looked inside.'

The thin face glared at him. 'The obvious ones. Don't you think these people expect that? It's in the bomber's psychology. You pick the places you know people will look. And put the real nasty somewhere else altogether. Somewhere you'd never think of looking.'

Lieberman watched the cliff face move past them at a snail's pace, felt the vast gap between him and the ground below turn into something physical, something he could touch. 'Make this quick, for God's sake.'

'One pass, that's all. Around the ridge. And I'm probably wrong, let me say that straightaway. This is doubtless me just being downright awkward.'

'You said it,' Lieberman replied, and tried to stifle a burp.

The machine moved another few feet along the cliff face. They were now beneath the massive spur of rock, in the shadow of the overhang that supported the command centre. And there was nothing to see. Nothing at all. He felt Mo's hand on his shoulder.

'What's going on, Michael?' He shook his head. The pilot was trying to work the radio, cursing all the time.

'Problems?'

The pilot grimaced. 'It's blocked by the mountain. I can't even talk to them if we do see something. I'll just have to break off.'

'Bob…' Lieberman wanted to yell at this man, wanted to seize the stick on this thing and guide them gently, swiftly down to solid earth. Hanging like this in the thin and burning afternoon air was insane. 'There is nothing here. It's straight underneath the outcrop. You couldn't get at it even if you tried. That's why they didn't look.'

'No?'

The helicopter swung around a corner of the rock face, and the pilot said, 'Then what the hell is that?'

Lieberman looked at it in silence. As they shifted around the mountain, it was coming into full view, with the machine now edging toward ten feet from the mouth. And there was no mistaking this. Below, through the glass panels beneath their feet, you could see the winding, narrow track, invisible from a distance, that led to the place. This was some kind of disused, ancient mine entrance, an opening that spanned a good thirty feet in diameter, with nothing but blackness beyond.

'Bloody idiots,' Davis said. 'I knew they should have looked here. There could be any number of these things hidden in the lee of the peak.'

'What are you going to do?' Lieberman asked.

'What can I do? We'll fall back to the other side of the valley, I'll be able to radio them from there, and then we're going home. I'm damned if I'm hanging around here doing their dirty work for them.'

'Sounds good to me. You think that — '

And he stopped, pulled the headset off, knew that this was more important than anything else right then. Mo was screaming, over and over, frantic, hysterical, and for a moment he couldn't see why. 'Look!' she yelled.

In the mouth of the opening, emerging from the blackness, was a solitary figure: a woman dressed in khaki overalls, moving slowly forward into the light. Lieberman blinked. She had bright red hair, so bright it seemed unnatural.

'Oh Jesus,' the pilot said quietly to himself, then hit the throttle. The helicopter pitched up and started to move backward, turning slowly on its axis. Lieberman stared at the woman, trying to work out what this strange, shapeless thought was that kept running around the shadows in his head.

'She's not armed,' he said. Then he put the headset back on, repeated, 'Bob, she's not armed.' The helicopter was moving so wildly now, thrusting them from side to side, he thought he might lose all contact with what was up, what was down.

'She doesn't need to be,' the pilot said quietly, and then the sun was on them, pouring through the glass canopy of the machine. 'Base One.'

He yelled into the mike. No one returned the call. 'Base One!'

Climbing, turning. Lieberman didn't want to try to work out which way they were even facing now, so he focused back on the fast-disappearing mouth of the mine in the rock face instead. The figure was no longer there. The machine popped up above the flat level line of the helipad, fifty feet away, still ascending, still shifting back toward the sea.

'Base One!'

'Base One, we read you,' said a bored voice. 'You're supposed to be long gone from here, friend.' The engine screamed higher; it felt as if they were being pulled into the sun.

'You have intruders in a tunnel underneath the facility,' the pilot yelled. The radio was quiet for a couple of long seconds.

'Location?' It was Capstick's voice.

'A disused mine about three hundred feet below your level, just around the corner of the overhang, going back into the mountain. If you have people at ground level, they can get in through a path that leads up from the valley. You may need ropes.'

'Can you get there?' Capstick asked.

'We've been there, mate, and we're not going back. We can't land and we can't do a damn thing except sit there waiting for them to start firing.'

The line went dead. Lieberman looked at the pilot. The engine had lost some of its frenzy. The machine was edging back over the valley, rising steadily, on its way home.

'Hold position,' Capstick said.

'Negative, we have civilians on board.'

'Well, put them down somewhere, man. We need you to point these bastards out.'

Lieberman looked at Mo in the back. She was terrified, plain terrified, with Annie clinging to her. And Davis was wavering. Military men, he thought. It was hard to shake it from your blood.

'I can't just leave them,' the pilot said. 'If I find somewhere close by I can…'

You can what? Lieberman almost asked the question. It seemed a reasonable one under the circumstances. But there was something in the way, and it was half-noise, half-light too. It sat, ominous and golden between all of them, like a fiery beast taking in breath. And then it roared, exhaling, screaming, loud and blinding, blotting out everything else there with its vast, shimmering presence.

The machine bucked and wheeled. The pilot was wrestling the stick, forcing the throttle ever higher, trying to climb away from this thing. And beneath them, everywhere, was dust, a huge, swirling ocean of brown, alive and billowing, racing out from the ledge beneath the command centre, out toward them, with powdery fingers and fiery breath.

Lieberman looked at the base and thought: This is a sight that lives with you forever, stays imprinted on the cells of your neural fibres until they cease to function.

A bright, searing line of fire ran from the foot of the outcrop, close to where they found the mouth of the shaft, diagonally upward and inward, toward the massive heel where the projecting spur met the mountain, eating the rock like a fissure in a volcano, rising, destroying, weakening as it ran. There was a second explosion, a ball of fire roaring out of the rock. The pilot looked nervously at them. 'Brace yourselves, the shock comes after.'

Lieberman watched, clinging to the door handle in the helicopter to try to minimize the discomfort of the buffeting. The spur of rock on which the centre stood was failing, its integrity destroyed by the blasts. Tiny, distant figures, like racing ants, ran around the crumbling buildings, tried to cling to the structure, unable to second-guess which way it would twist and turn as it crumbled into dust. He watched and thought: Charley? Maybe the CIA woman is right. People do change that much. And then the view was obscured by a vast, billowing cloud of dust that raced toward them, the engine was screaming, the helicopter fighting to gain some height.

When it hit, it felt as if they were lifted by some giant, omnipotent hand that picked them up, gently at first, then with an awesome strength, and shot them up toward the sky. Just as suddenly, they were free, the machine was released from this violent, swirling force. The cloud was falling away beneath them. To their right, he could see the distant line of the sea, still and blue and placid. In this rush upward, the flimsy, forced engine of the helicopter and the sudden blast of air that came out of the valley had taken them over the peak, and they were now limping erratically out toward safety.

Lieberman watched the pilot fighting the machine, with his hands, with his feet. There were strange noises coming from above them. The helicopter seemed incapable of taking a straight line down toward the scrub in front, down toward land. He pushed his arm behind his seat, felt their hands grip him.

'We'll be okay,' Lieberman said. 'Don't worry. We'll be okay.'

The pilot looked at him and Lieberman felt cold. He was scared too. 'This thing's buggered, mate,' Davis said. 'If I don't put her down straightaway, it's going to come apart on us in the air.'

The engine coughed. Something metallic flew down in front of the glass. 'Shit,' Davis said, and pushed the stick forward, falling, hunting, turning the craft around, looking for somewhere flat enough to land. Lieberman watched the earth rise up to meet them. They were descending at something close to forty-five degrees now, he reckoned, and still there was nothing but sheer rock on either side. Annie started crying in the back. Or it may have been Mo. He didn't want to find out.

They veered to one side, and Davis was pointing. 'See the ridge?'

He couldn't even make it out at first. Off in the distance was a tiny spur of flat rock ending abruptly in nothing. It seemed incredible that they could even dream of landing there. Lieberman clung to the door handle, looked across the cabin. 'Okay,' he said. The man's eyes said it all. And in a long, halting swoop, the helicopter half-flew, half-fell out of the sky, skimming the steeply inclined rock face, catching strands of scrub as the life died in its airframe.

The pilot took his right hand off the stick and grabbed Lieberman's arm. 'We come in running. As soon as you can open the door, get these people out of the back. Take your belt off now.'

Lieberman shook his head. 'You want the belt off?'

'Please.' His eyes were begging. 'We have one chance with this. If it goes over, a belt's going to do you no good. If we manage to stay on the straight and level, I want you out ASAP, and clear of this bloody machine. Understand?'

Lieberman nodded and looked at Mo and Annie. 'You heard?' It was Mo who was crying. She seemed more scared than Annie in some way he couldn't quite understand. Something snagged the machine, bounced them briefly out of their seats. Lieberman looked at the pilot, fighting the controls, all arms and legs, and thought: This is one way to go, so wrapped up in the mechanics around you that the idea of moving from life to non-existence never really enters your head. Then the world turned upside down, there was screaming again, and something louder, the constant, ear-piercing screech of metal meeting rock, blood on the glass in front of him, pain shrieking in his head. And, in a moment, stillness.

He opened his eyes and looked across the cabin. Davis was breathless, holding the stick; above them the rotor was slowly winding down. They were on an incline. Not a gentle one.

Davis still looked scared. 'You're bleeding,' he said.

Lieberman felt his head. The scalp was damp and sticky.

'It's okay.'

'Good. Now get out of your side, mine's too close to the edge. Go carefully. Keep your heads down, that blade is still alive. Get well clear of the machine once you're out. I'll follow you. Now move!'

He didn't need to be told twice. Lieberman kicked open the door, saw the thin line of flat rock of the tiny plateau between them and the edge: no more than eight feet. He grabbed Mo by the arm, took the strain as she eased down onto the ground, then did the same with Annie. He looked again at the pilot. It was hard to tell. Even if he was hurt he wouldn't want to show it. 'Let me give you a hand.'

'For God's sake, man, get out!' The metal skeleton of the machine grumbled. Lieberman kicked and pushed and was out the door, let go of the frame, and heard it groan.

'Michael!' Mo yelled.

He registered the noise and knew, in an instant, what it was. The helicopter was shifting, off the plateau, off the edge. Their weight had changed the balance. It was slipping away from them, the pilot locked inside. He wheeled around and saw just how bad it was. The ridge was less than twenty feet wide, and the machine had moved so far to the left that half the frame now hung over the precipice. Davis was struggling to get out of his belt, and every time he moved, the machine tilted gently farther toward the edge.

'Stay still,' Lieberman shouted, and grabbed hold of the land-side leg, now rocking gently toward the sky. The pilot looked at him, afraid.

'Easy for you — '

'Shut up and stay still. I'm thinking.'

The helicopter rocked once more on the cliff ledge, Davis instinctively leaned inward, and Lieberman knew he couldn't hold this thing, all of them couldn't stop it from tipping over when it decided to go. One hand on the strut, the other working feverishly, he undid the cord on the videophone. 'Mo, help me. Please.'

She took the strap, unthreaded it from its fastenings, and pulled it clear. Extended, it ran to almost three feet, all solid nylon, strong too, he guessed. He threw it inside the cabin. 'Are you free of the harness yet?'

Davis nodded. 'I think so.'

'Good. When you're ready, take the strap by both hands and come toward me. This thing is going to fall away from under you pretty quickly. Know that now. But I can pull you free if you do your part. Understand?' Davis nodded.

'Your knee is trapped behind the stick thing,' Annie screamed.

'Yeah.'

Davis struggled. So much stuff inside this thing, Lieberman thought. It was hard to believe he could avoid every wheel and pulley and projectile as it fell past him.

'On my three,' the pilot said.

'You're still behind the stick.'

He nodded at Annie. 'I know… One.'

Lieberman took up the slack. The helicopter groaned.

'Two…'

Mo and Annie weren't watching this. He knew that, without having to see it.

'Three!'

And Lieberman thought his arms would be pulled from their sockets. Davis leaped up in the cabin, banging his head on the roof panel, yelling wordlessly, fighting with his legs. The machine began to topple over, creaking, sighing.

'Kick your leg free,' Lieberman shouted. 'Your leg, man.'

It was like a fight, a brawl. Davis was battling every piece of metal in the cockpit, and each stood in his way. Suddenly the aircraft pitched violently upward, the strut catching Lieberman in the face, the sky went dark for a moment, the strap fell free from his hand. He clutched at his eyes, wanting to scream, listening to the groaning metal, the rush of air, the sound of this huge contraption tipping itself into space.

'Michael,' Mo said, something in her voice bringing him back down to earth. He looked down. Mo was flat on the rock, the strap in her hands, Annie holding her ankles, being dragged gently toward the edge of the precipice. He leaped down to the ground, added his hands to the strap, held firm, dug in his toes, felt the movement slowly come to a halt.

'You're heavier than you look, Bob,' Lieberman yelled. 'I don't know how long we can hold this.' Something grunted from beyond the ledge. It was too hot. The sweat was running from every pore, making the harsh plastic weave of the strap cut into their hands. A dead weight tugged on the line, like a giant fish, then Davis's angular face appeared, inch by inch, at the cliff edge, then one arm, pushing upward, then a second.

The pilot rolled over onto the rock plateau, came to a halt on his back, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh. Lieberman felt Mo's body come close to him, put an arm around her, felt Annie too, held them both, not knowing who was sobbing, who was laughing right then (and still something nagging away inside). When something like sanity returned, he opened his eyes and saw Davis watching them.

'You're bleeding,' the pilot said. 'Cut on the forehead. Stitches, if you ask me. Any other problems?'

'No.'

'And you two?' Mo and Annie looked just fine.

'Good. Well, Professor, it seems you came off worse. Now shall we see if we can get that little toy of yours working before we burn to a crisp?'

'You bet.' Lieberman retrieved the videophone from where he'd left it. He turned the thing on and they stared at coloured snow.

'I guess it's time to walk,' Bob Davis said, and started out for the goat track that led down the dry, rocky escarpment.

CHAPTER 34 Something Visible

'They could still win this war,' Tim Clarke said quietly on the portable videophone parked on the dressing table in Helen Wagner's bedroom. 'You both ought to understand that.'

He was on his own again, talking to Helen and Schulz, circumventing normal channels as usual. Clarke hadn't melded with his advisers yet. There was something between them, she thought, something that might even amount to mistrust. In his own head, she thought, he had calculated the time scale of events and decided there was no room here for niceties. Either he led directly, from the front, or the response descended into committees and meetings. It was a high-risk strategy, but she could understand why Clarke was following it. He was still a stranger in the Oval Office.

"There's someone inside, sir,' she answered, pushing some spare clothes into a bag. 'They're second-guessing what we're doing. They seem to know so much. And don't forget about Belinda Churton, my predecessor. Someone killed her, and she'd be doing a much better job here than me.'

'Maybe, but I'm not sure we want to be diverted by that right now. And by the way, you're doing just fine. I'd tell you if I thought otherwise. You got your team right for this little trip of yours?'

'I think so. Barnside handles the practical side. I got Larry Wolfit, my number two, with some of his computer team too. If we get their installation intact, we can get it back on our side, don't doubt it.'

'I wouldn't dream of it. You and Barnside going to manage to get along out there?'

Clarke was quick to spot these things, she thought. 'The protective older figure act gets a little wearing sometimes, to be frank.'

'Yeah. I guess he can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. But then, so can you.'

'We'll cope.' She threw some things into the bag as they talked, trying to picture Barnside in the field. Maybe he got a new kind of fluency, of naturalness out there, found his true environment, like a seal rolling clumsily off the land into the ocean and finding how easy it was to swim.

'You do that,' Clarke said. 'We've got the world on a knife edge. There's no room for personal stuff. Yesterday all we got was phone calls asking when we were going to bury Bill Rollinson. Now the phone doesn't ring so much any more. People are retreating behind their own borders, back into their shells, wondering what the hell is going to fall from the sky next. Nothing works. Not the markets, not half the telecommunications north of the equator. I got the UN on my back like it's my fault, and half of that is because the phone lines between New York and Washington still work and we're the only people they can call. And if these Gaia people are right, things are going to get a whole lot worse tomorrow, in ways no one seems sure of. Isn't there anything else we can do on the ground now that the Spanish base is down?'

Schulz said, 'The Shuttle's our best hope, sir. Failing that, we're going to have to find them and take over their unit. That's the only other option.'

'There's nothing you can do to resuscitate La Finca or Kyoto, Irwin?' Helen asked.

Schulz shook his head. 'Not in time. Kyoto's still full of that VX crap and it's going to be a couple of days before we Can put people in there safely, a week or more before we can rely on what we have here.'

'What's the timing on the storm?' Clarke asked.

'Not good,' Helen said. 'As far as we can tell. Lieberman is still missing. We don't know whether he got out or not.'

'There's people been seen in the mountains,' Schulz said. 'But we haven't made contact yet. It's a big, wild area out there.'

Clarke grimaced. Behind his dark, thoughtful face they could see the bright midday light in Washington, the corner of what looked like the seal of office. All these icons, Helen thought, and their power on the wane.

'Where are we now?' the President asked.

'You just have to take a look out the window, sir,' Schulz said. 'This thing is clearly visible with the naked eye if you use a filter. And our guess is the peak is going to be big. Huge. Whatever effects we've seen so far, whether Charley caused them or not, they're nothing compared to what we might get from now on, with or without Sundog. We face massive disruption of telecom, power grids, maybe some geological activity too. Add in what Charley has under her belt and I think you could see localized peaks of radiation, maybe up to the strength of serious physical human damage. At this kind of level, it's hard to predict exactly what Sundog will spit out. We never envisaged its use in these circumstances, but she's got a lot of different levers she can throw — microwave, electromagnetic emissions, particle beam.'

'When does it peak, Irwin?' Helen asked.

'Too erratic to be exact, even if I was confident we had the right people to guess that one. Sometime between 1200 and 1250 UTC tomorrow, that's my best guess.'

Clarke swore softly, then said, 'So what you're saying is that we've got a little over nineteen hours to get this thing back? Or she can do what the hell she likes?'

'No, sir,' Schulz said, genuinely puzzled this point hadn't got home to them yet. 'What I'm saying is what Lieberman said, and no one seems to be listening. You have an emergency on your hands whatever happens. It just gets a whole lot worse if we leave Charley holding that magnifying glass in her hands.'

And with that, Schulz made an excuse and was gone. The line to La Finca went dead.

Clarke sighed. 'He's a smart guy, Helen. If he's right and we have a big problem either way, maybe you should be staying here.'

'No, Mr President,' she said, glancing at her watch. It was a twenty-minute drive from her house in Rosslyn to the national airport where the Agency Gulfstream would be waiting. There was another twenty minutes to spare. Time was ticking beneath their feet, and she didn't like the look on Clarke's face. It had a touch of the confessional about it. 'We have plenty of people capable of handling a natural disaster. What we need to make sure of is that we don't have an unnatural one that's much worse on our hands.'

'I guess so.'

She stole him a glance that said shoo. You weren't supposed to treat the President like that; but then, the President wasn't supposed to call you in your bedroom while you were packing. 'Excuse me a moment.' She yelled out into the hall, 'Martha? Will you feed the cat while I'm gone?'

'Sure thing, Helen,' said a middle-aged voice from the hall. 'It'll be a pleasure.'

Helen smiled at the videophone. 'The world champion cleaner. I'm a lucky sort of person.'

'Good. You're going to need it. Even after all I said, there's one hell of a goddamn range war brewing over this thing. If this goes wrong, a lot of people go down with it. Me included.'

She moved out of the range of the video camera for a moment so that he couldn't see the concern on her face. 'I didn't hear that, sir.'

'You deaf or something?'

'Sir, this is a crisis we have to deal with, one way or another.

I don't even want to think about failure, about some kind of retribution.'

'That's agreed. But if this does fall apart someone is going to have to draw a line in the sand. We're going to need new beginnings. And, in case you hadn't noticed, I am driving on this one. Not the military. Not the intelligence community. I chose to take control here because, in my judgement, that was the right thing to do. If that judgement proves wrong, I go. No one needs to push me.'

'Sir,' she said firmly, 'do you think it was the wrong judgement? Do you have doubts?'

'No. Not for a minute since this began. But that doesn't mean I'm right.'

'These are extraordinary circumstances, Mr President. They merit extraordinary solutions.'

'Yeah,' he replied, and shrugged. 'You're right. Forget what I said. Sometimes I just need to talk out loud, and right now I don't have a family here to inflict that on. Back to business. And the range war.'

'Over what?'

'Who goes in there and takes control. The Agency is shipping down an HRT. They leave just before you in some fancy damn 767 they keep for the purpose. Meantime the Army is calling up a Delta Force crew from Fort Bragg. And I know those guys very well. They'd eat you and me for breakfast and chew on the bones.'

'You don't need both of them. They'd just get in each other's way.'

'Exactly. And I would have told them so if I'd found out earlier. So what do you think?'

She threw the last few clothes and a washbag into her travelling case and zipped it closed. 'Who, exactly, is HRT, sir?'

'HRT is the Hostage Rescue Team,' Clarke replied. 'They took a lot of stick after the mess at Waco. And that was their call. Fogerty says they're more than just hostage rescue. You think that's on the ball?'

'I guess so. As my colleagues are forever pointing out, though, Operations is not my field.'

Clarke nodded. 'You got a good enough grasp. We need these people, Helen. But if we get a line on this dome, my guess is you and Irwin — and Lieberman too, if he's still alive — stand more damn chance of turning it around than any number of hard-assed soldiers. You can talk.'

'I guess it depends on what you see as the threat.'

'Meaning?'

'Are these people going to be armed and dangerous? And I think the answer is: Not in a conventional terrorist sense. Look at the profile of the guy in Vegas. Look at Charley. They're smart enough to plant bombs, screw up systems, but they're not soldiers.'

'I agree.' Clarke nodded. 'If we thought we'd have to fight every inch of the way in there, then Delta would be the only option. But we won't. We need to enter the place with as little damage as possible, then contain and control it.'

'Pretty much like a hostage situation.'

Clarke nodded. 'My feelings exactly.'

'The military won't like hearing it,' she said, glancing again at her watch.

'The military can do as they're damn well told.'

'Either way, the problem is time. They know we don't have a working dome or the chance of owning one now. In theory, they might be best placed to set the satellite up to do maximum damage, destroy the dome they have, and get the hell out of there. They could disappear in Nevada, Utah, Arizona… we'd never find them.'

'Is that likely?' Clarke grimaced.

'Maybe not. I talked to Lieberman about this. Charley's no fool. She can read the signs as well as we can and she knows this cycle is so erratic she can't be sure how to hit the peak. My guess is she'll hold it to the last possible moment.'

'The longer she holds on, the more likely we are to pick up a big bunch of people like that,' Clarke said.

'Maybe. But Charley's dying anyway, so I guess she thinks she's special. The volume work they needed — setting up the systems, stealing their way into Sundog — that's done. A couple of people could run that thing through the peak. Whatever the truth, the clock's fixed. We will probably wind up going in during darkness, sir.'

'Well, that has made up my mind,' Clarke said. 'HRT it is. You put soldiers in the dark and pretty soon everybody starts winding up dead. That's what we teach them to do.'

'Sir?'

Helen Wagner, to Clarke's amazement, was actually tapping her watch. He couldn't help smiling. 'It's okay. This isn't TWA. They don't go without you, I promise.'

'All the same…'

'One more question, Helen. We're assuming we do find their base. How much confidence do you have in this imaging idea?'

She took a deep breath and replied, 'I'm confident we can track down potential objects. And that, given time, we could track down the dome. It's all a question of time. We don't know how many ordinary, similar objects will show up. We have to eliminate them first. Larry Wolfit knows this field better than anyone. It's not our only avenue either. We have people on the ground too. That part of the world is big and empty but it's still hard to start a commune and build something like that without someone noticing.'

'I hope you're right.'

'I hope so too,' she said, thinking how Clarke had grown in stature over the last day and a half. She recalled the way Levine and Fogerty had talked when they left the White House at that first meeting. There were plenty of people who expected Clarke to fail, and they had underestimated this man, enormously. In a way, she guessed, he was doing a better job than Rollinson could. As a former military man, he knew when the bull was being ladled out, and when to cut to the quick. And though the strain was there, he rarely let it show.

'You go catch that plane.'

'Sir,' she said, and took the hint, reached over, switched off the phone. If you thought about things too hard, Belinda Churton sometimes said, you muddied the waters, made it all murkier than it really was. The thought that came into her head when she looked at Tim Clarke's tired, conscientious face was a grim one: I can't do this. I don't have the experience, the will, or the courage.

And she knew what Belinda would have said right then too: If that was the case, honey, why the hell do you think I chose you?

'Right,' she said, and picked up the bag, walked out into the hall, headed for the door. Martha was dusting some furniture. She stopped, smiled, and said, 'You going for long?'

'I don't know. Business.'

'Oh, wow, business, forget I ever asked, don't want those men in long black cars around my house, no, sir…'

The words drifted out onto the dust in the living room, unanswered. In this soulless, antiseptic room, Helen felt too aware of her solitary existence. It seemed as if the only footprints on the pale, perfect carpet were her own and Martha's.

'I'm sorry, honey. It's serious, isn't it?'

'I have to go.'

'This is about this sun thing, isn't it? Some situation. You know, if I hadn't been able to walk here and get back home in daylight I couldn't have come today. It scares me. Scares everyone, not that they'd let on. I got Frank sitting at home, putting up his feet, saying this is just some free vacation time, courtesy of the government. But it's not that now, is it? You know that. I know that. Even that dumb-ass knows that. People are frightened by all this. It's like the ground suddenly starts moving under your feet after all these years of staying solid. You go sort that nonsense out, huh?'

'I'll do my best,' she said softly, walked over and kissed Martha on the cheek. 'Take care of the house while I'm gone. And Frederick too.'

'Damn cat don't need taking care of. Thinks he owns most of Washington, that creature does.'

'I'm going, Martha.'

'Am I stopping you?'

Helen Wagner opened the door. Immediately the phone started ringing in the hall. 'Damn.'

'Hell. You answer that phone. I'll take that stuff of yours out to your car, wait there to see you off.'

Helen handed the bag over, watched Martha walk purposefully out the door, then picked up the phone.

'Wagner?' Levine sounded angry.

'Sir, I'm sorry-'

'You're sorry. We're supposed to be cleared out of here in three minutes' time.'

Her mind wandered; she looked outside. Martha was walking down the path, carrying the small green bag, her lips pursed, whistling. The sound came faintly to Helen through a half-open window. The day shimmered in a miasma. So much heat, so much lassitude in the hot, meagre air. A battered Toyota pickup was parked next to her Ford. The Toyota looked out of place, as if it had just come off a farm truck somewhere.

'I had a call from La Finca,' she said. 'Lieberman is still missing. We're going to have to re-create the solar activity projections without him and pray we don't need any modifications to the Shuttle gear.'

Levine was mad. 'Fifty damn people dead there, and the President kicking my ass all over the Pentagon. Wonderful.'

There was no one in the van. She looked at the nearby houses. No one mowing the lawns, tidying the flower beds. Something stirred in her memory.

'Those imaging people got us anything to go on yet?' Levine bellowed. 'I mean, we should be having this conversation on the plane, but I got people to brief right now.'

'Nothing so far, sir.'

Martha came to a halt next to her Ford, looked at the sky, pulled a sour face.

'Well, then, you get the hell down here now and let's get moving. We can talk some more in the air and…'

There were sacks in the back of the pickup: sacks and sacks and sacks, all full and neatly tied at the neck.

'Shit!' she yelled, dropping the phone, then ran for the door, stumbled over the coffee table, screaming, words that made no sense, just trying to get Martha's attention. It seemed to take an age to get outside. Her limbs were made of lead. The sun bore down on her like an invisible dead weight. Down the path, yard by yard, Martha with her hand on the door of the car.

'Martha!'

Not looking back at the house, the black woman pulled the door handle, opened the rear door, threw the bag in, turned, and smiled at her, puzzled.

'Run,' Helen screamed. 'Run!'

Footsteps, someone walking. She felt for her purse. There was a service pistol somewhere inside. She had no idea if she could remember how to use it.

Martha walked up and said, 'What on earth is the matter with you?'

And a man in denim overalls strode up to the back of the pickup, pulled at one of the sacks, heaved it off the vehicle, onto the ground, grunting. Something like sand spilled out of the mouth.

'Who the hell is he?' she panted.

Martha shrugged. 'Some guy doing some building work on the house next door. If you spent a little more time at home you'd get to notice things like that, young woman.'

'Right.' And this picture in her head — of Belinda Churton, blown to pieces — just refused to go away.

'Gimme the keys,' Martha said. 'One minute to lock up, make sure that cat of yours is happy, and I'll drive you over to the airport. You look like you could use some thinking time on the way.'

'Thanks,' Helen said, climbing into the passenger seat. And prayed she could stop shaking by the time she reached the plane.

CHAPTER 35 Phaeton

In front of them a line of poplars stirred gently in the tenuous evening breeze, making a sound like distant running water. The day was dying slowly in a wash of ochre, and the small town seemed deserted. With Bob Davis leading the way, they walked over the tiny Roman bridge and sat down in the battered plastic chairs parked outside the bar.

'Beer,' Lieberman said, pulling out the videophone, trying to clear his head. They'd walked for miles through heat that defied imagination, a fierce, burning wall of air that was too thin, too hot to breathe. He punched away at the plastic, missing the buttons he was aiming for, and announced, 'If this damn thing still doesn't work, I'm going to stamp on it here and now.'

The bartender came out of the deserted, dark interior. Mo chattered Spanish at him. He looked miserable.

'I hope your gadget works,' she said when he went back inside. 'He says the phone's down.'

'They heard the explosion?' the pilot asked.

She wasn't looking at Davis when she spoke. 'They heard. He says people are scared, Michael. There's talk on the radio about some kind of international crisis, and he doesn't understand it.'

'Join the club.' Lieberman's head hurt. He could feel the dried blood pulling at his scalp. 'Correction. I have had the last piece of scaredness scared right out of me. I am numb. And if that bartender knows his job, I'm about to get even number still.'

Three San Miguels and a Coke arrived at the table. He looked at Annie. She seemed a million miles away. Exhausted, he guessed. It had been a long, slow climb down from the mountain, trying to catch the attention of the occasional passing helicopter, trying to make the videophone come to life. He downed the beer almost in one swallow, ordered another, then turned on the phone. 'Come on, Irwin. Just this once.'

Grey static on the screen, audio scurf out of the speaker.

'Come on…' The LCD found some colour, a picture came together out of dots. Schulz stared back at him from the screen, goggle-eyed.

'Jesus Christ, Michael. We thought you were dead.'

'Not quite. Four of us here: me, Mo, Annie, and Top Gun Mark Two. Please send someone to get us. In a nice, earthbound vehicle, nothing with rotor blades.'

'Sure. Where are you? Things are happening. You okay?'

He looked at Mo.

'By the Roman bridge in town. Outside the bar,' she said.

'You hear that?'

'Yeah. That's a long walk from the mountain.'

'You're telling me. And my head hurts. I guess you must have been too busy to look for us that hard.'

Schulz seemed offended. 'Not so. We had guys out there. Charley let off one big bang. We're only just managing to assess what's left.'

'And?'

Schulz looked grim. 'Let's put it this way. I'm awfully glad NASA has run with that sunshade idea of yours. They're on countdown to launch right now. I'll run a link through to you. We're pretty much out of it as far as talking to Sundog's concerned. Whatever they had up there took out the command centre.'

Lieberman sighed and tried to replay the picture in his mind: the tongue of flame leaping out from underneath the promontory, the long, low concrete building starting to lose its form. And people running everywhere.

'Many hurt?'

'Yeah.' Schulz nodded. 'But it could have been a lot worse. And you guys got away. You don't know how good that makes me feel. Personally and professionally. Those sunshades could save us, Michael. And they have other leads back home too. They think they may have an idea where Charley is running this little show from.'

'Thank God for that. Deserves a drink or two.'

'Don't even think of it. We've got work for you here. Arcadia's about to get on her way. I'll patch through the live feed. Helen will be delighted to hear you're going to be around to hold their hands. She's en route to Vegas right now.'

Vegas? Lieberman couldn't work out why that made him feel uncomfortable. 'Okay. Just send us the limo.' He switched the phone off, wondered where the beer had gone, and looked around to order another.

'Please don't,' Mo said, putting her hand over the glass. A nice little feminine gesture, he thought. One he'd seen more than once in this world. This was a long day, Lieberman thought. So much traffic through his brain.

The pilot was swirling around the dregs in his glass. 'You think he could be right? If they get back that other dome, we could do something with it? Even if the Shuttle idea doesn't work?'

'Maybe. If, if, if…' He looked at the videophone. The screen was blank. Schulz still hadn't switched through the live image from the Cape, and he'd no idea how long it was to the launch. Somehow he didn't want to know. That image from almost fifteen years ago still lived in his head: Challenger dying in a giant shower of flame. He stared back over the road, toward the valley that led to La Finca. It was a pretty spot, low orchards, a few smart villas that bespoke money. But on this side of the track it was all local: cheap tapas, terraced houses, old, beaten-up cars. There should have been kids playing soccer in the street. There should have been people.

'What a mess we've made of this,' he said. Swifts darted overhead, their chattering coming back in soft echoes from the stone walls.

'Is that of anything in particular?' the pilot asked.

'Everything in particular.'

Inside, in the dark interior, there was bottle upon bottle lined up against the bar. Brandy and vodka, gin and all manner of local stuff. A man could have a good time here, he thought. A man could bring the curtain down in style, talking to the sun god all the while.

And in the end, he thought, there really was just the one thing to decide: which sun god you happened to be addressing, which one was looking down on you from the burning sky and wondering who put these bugs on the face of the earth.

There were so many to fit the bill. Apollo and Hyperion, Helios and Ra, Mithras and Hiruko. Every race that ever lived seemed, at some stage of its mayfly existence, to have come up with its own particular solar deity. The sky must have been full of them, arguing over who got there first.

And, Lieberman thought, his gut going cold because this stirred some long-dead memory he didn't want to face, on a mere mortal scale there was Phaeton too. He couldn't remember why it took so long for that corpse to rise up from the dry and dusty dregs of his memory. There had been a time (when Charley was bright and healthy and optimistic and the world seemed young) this name ran through his head almost every day.

Poor, stupid, mortal Phaeton, son of Apollo and some passing nymph. Star-crossed Phaeton, who cornered his dumb, adoring dad and wheedled out a promise that, just this once, he could drive the chariot of the sun across the sky and keep the universe in balance. There was something so human in this nagging request. Hey, Dad, can I borrow the Jaguar? Aw, come on.

And something human in Apollo too, in letting the kid go, even though he knew this was fated. The horses and his impetuosity would betray him, the course would be wrong, the earth would catch fire, and, with a thunderbolt from Jupiter, Phaeton would, to use Annie's apt expression, be toast. Phaeton, who was warned not to fly too high or too low, to steer the middle path, to do as he was told, to ignore the basic rule of being human: I screw up, therefore I am. Hey, we've got to make progress somehow.

There were those who thought the myth stemmed from some real event, like a meteor, some cataclysm from the sky. The legend said that the Libyan desert was created when Phaeton crashed to earth, that the scorching heat of this encounter forced up the blood of the Ethiopians and made their skin pitch-black. The Euphrates and the Ganges boiled. The poles were on fire. It was only when the earth herself, Gaia, daughter of Chaos, a family Lieberman felt he was starting to know well, spoke to Jupiter and called in a few favours that someone sent out the celestial Uzi and delivered a touch of holy retribution.

This was crazy. You didn't need to rationalize a line. Phaeton was all of us. This foolish, ambitious fragment of the universe — child of the sun, child of the earth — was each of us, the very essence of humanity, all the stupidity, all the vanity, and that bright, sparking thing called ambition, that curiosity, that urge for the truth.

We were Phaeton all along, but the toys got bigger, and with them the stakes. Every culture had its sun god, and every one its cautionary tale too. Of the mortal who flew too close to the fire and paid with everything he had. And the funeral oratory that followed, the one that said: Dumb kid, hapless kid, stupid kid. But you got to hand it to him. The moron was a trier.

It lived inside every one of us. It was what made Rocky keep getting in the ring, remake after remake. It was what made you think you could shoot some souped-up chunk of metal into space and steal a little piece of that holy flame, make it all your own.

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.

Oh yeah? Bigger toys, bigger stakes, with the same dumb mammal flailing through the ancient ceremony. This was being human, having some insidious, endemic thing that lived inside your soul and never let you rest. The world was just some giant room filled with buttons marked 'Don't Press', all manner of hell and damnation sitting on the other side, and we couldn't even hear the dybbuks jabbering beyond the door. Bring on the celestial idiots. Send in the clowns. And leave the earth to clean up the mess.

'What are you thinking?' Annie asked. He was so lost in this reverie, the question seemed to come out of the sky.

'I was thinking of an old story I used to read when I was a kid. About this dumb little brat called Phaeton, who thought he was bigger and stronger than he really was. And found out the hard way what happens when you mess with things you don't understand.'

Mo nodded at the ground. 'I remember that story.'

'Shame a few more people didn't.'

'You don't mean that, Michael.'

'No?'

'No. You're as much a part of this as any of them.'

'Bullshit.' He hardly had enough energy to be angry. The sun seemed to have stolen it from his body during the long, exhausting day.

She was adamant. 'You don't think we should just sit in dark corners, never finding out about the world. You're saying that what that myth means is that we're small, we're powerless, we're insignificant, and we should know our place in the order of things? I don't think so and you don't think so. That's what Charley thinks and she's wrong.'

He was silent. She was right.

'And one more thing. You forgot the real point of that story.'

'Being?'

'The love that Zeus felt for Phaeton all along, even when he went bad. A human love. One that surprised, maybe even alarmed him. To be weak and mortal and still believe…'

'Well, that's gods for you. Stroke them with a little humanity and see where they wind up. Extinct.'

She cast him a sour look, reached over, and stole the remains of his beer. 'You really do sound like those people sometimes. And that isn't you.'

He peered into her lean, tanned face, no emotion on the surface there, some kind of brittle hardness, like an eggshell, between her and the world.

'They're coming,' the pilot said. Across the main road a jeep was kicking up dust.

Lieberman closed his eyes and shivered, trying to let these churning, feverish thoughts subside into something he could handle. Something scratched at his attention. It was the videophone coming suddenly to life, the small flat screen filling with a picture that seemed so familiar: the distant white gantry of the launch pad, the Shuttle there, hooked to the back of the booster rocket like a limpet trying to hitch a ride to the sun. But this Shuttle looked different. Bigger, like the old one on steroids. He recalled what he'd heard about the altitude requirements. Someone had strapped the mother of all engines on the side of this beast and now it was ready to blow. Smoke was billowing out from the base of this giant machine. Lieberman was trying to remember what Schulz had said about the envelope, how long it would take this vast hunk of metal, and the three small human beings inside it, to escape the gravity of the earth, to move beyond the point where Sundog and Charley could peer down from space, run out a thin, poisonous finger of power, and turn them into fiery atoms.

Mo got up from the table, walked behind his back, put a soft hand on his shoulder, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. Davis shuffled his chair around, watched the drama begin. It sounded like a video game through the tinny speaker of the little phone. There was no hint of the vast mountain of energy that sat beneath these three, distant human beings. Then the Shuttle began to move, the camera following it, rising into the blue Florida sky, incandescent white beneath the power of the sun.

'Fly, damn you, fly,' Lieberman whispered.

And it did. For some period of time none of them could assess, the white shape rose in the sky, discarding the booster, rolling on course, pushing in a quickening vertical drive, getting smaller, heading for orbit. Heading for the game.

The screen went black for a moment, then Schulz was back, grinning with a wide-eyed ferocity. 'You got that?'

Lieberman nodded, and felt the way Mo was hugging him.

'We're moving, Michael,' Schulz said. 'We can win this.'

'Yeah,' Lieberman said, and wondered how stupid his own grin looked.

CHAPTER 36 Flying West

Clear desert, in every direction. Helen Wagner watched the empty plains roll beneath her and wondered why she couldn't close her eyes and get some rest. Barnside was sleeping thirty minutes after they left Washington, Levine not long behind him, right after he pulled together the briefing, made one last, uneasy conference call to the President. She watched them recline in the comfortable seats of the Agency jet, mouths half-open, and envied this effortless switch they had on their lives. There were just the three of them on the plane. Levine said both the HRT squad and the Delta Force team would be on the ground at McCarran a good hour before the three of them got there. Sitting on the asphalt, staring mutely at each other, waiting for someone to win the day, she guessed. There would be no changing Clarke's mind on the idea that HRT would be the ones to try to cast a nice, gentle net over the Children, of that she had no doubt. But that didn't stop someone in the military from making one last bid for glory.

Tired of watching the ground slip past, she went to the back of the plane, sat in the communications centre, keyed in her password, browsed through the pile of messages there. She clicked on the one from Schulz marked urgent, and got the news about Lieberman.

'Thank God for that,' she muttered, then shifted the rest of the E-mails into the pending tray and called back to Langley. Stuart Price took the call. He looked flustered.

'So what's the problem?'

Price blushed. 'Too much data or too little. It's the same old story with imaging. If you make the capture criteria too narrow, you get no hits. If you widen it just a little, in this case we're picking up everything from people's circular swimming pools to drainage tanks.'

'Can't you refine it in some way?'

'How? A circular object near a building? Plenty of those. A circular object away from a building? That's more promising. We're trying that. We've got some two hundred or so potential leads but before I even let you close to them I want to see them checked against what we know of them from public records. Most are turning out to be existing licensed structures.'

'Understood.'

'And in the meantime I've drafted in a team of trained photo analysis people from the Pentagon. Just to look at the pictures with a human eye. Still beats any damn computer I know of, and the more minds we have working on this thing, the merrier.'

Price went quiet, glanced off screen.

'Stuart?'

'I really ought to get back to this.'

'Say what you want to say. Please.'

'The point is… I have to be honest, Helen. We read the newspapers. We watch TV. I know how bad this situation is, and it worries me to think you're relying on us to pull something out of the coals. If you have something else that can narrow this down, then we might be able to get somewhere. Without it, we're just looking for that proverbial needle in a haystack. Give me a couple of weeks and that would be fine.'

'We don't have a couple of weeks.'

'I know. Let me put it another way. I'm real glad the Shuttle thing's going well. I think we should focus our hopes on that'

A good man, she thought. Working his heart out. 'We are. They still have to track Sundog down, and the damn thing was purpose-designed to make that hard to do. It's got some small position-adjustment power systems of its own, so it's not even that easy to come up with a particularly accurate ballpark estimate based on last known position. So you see, we can't rely on that alone.'

'I hear you. I just want you to be realistic about what we can achieve here.'

'I am. One last question and then we're done. How's the network holding up? How confident are we it can withstand this storm?'

'Search me. The MIS guys are going around the place clucking like hens, but that's nothing new. There's lots of bad shit going on out there right now in the public networks. But that doesn't affect us so much. Remember your history. They built ArpaNet to withstand a nuclear attack. I guess they have ways of keeping us running through this, even if we get some glitches along the way.'

'I hope so. I'll leave you to it now,' she said, smiled, and cut the line.

She looked at her watch. Another ninety minutes or more to go. They were late. But in any event, it hardly mattered. It looked as if they would be waiting on the ground, watching the sun set over Nevada, with nothing to occupy their time unless the Bureau had come up with some lead on their own.

She opened up the private information channel Langley had set up for the operation. Lieberman's last report was almost six hours old. She keyed the button for La Finca and Schulz came on the line. 'Hi,' she said. 'I heard the good news about Michael.'

'Yeah,' Schulz replied, half-grinning. 'Nice to have some breaks anyway.'

'So when do we get to see a new report from him?'

Schulz shrugged. 'Ask him yourself.'

The picture changed. Lieberman came on the screen. He looked whacked. The wound on his scalp bristled with stitches. 'Whoa. It's the slave driver from Langley. Do you ever give up?'

'No,' she said, looking somewhat amazed by the question.

'I'll remember that.'

'How's Sara?'

'I called when I got back here. She's okay. Iron constitution, she needed it when she married me. She's worried, of course. About everything but herself. So what's new?'

'Good. And you look… alive. Does it hurt?'

'You're too kind. Not that much.'

'The Shuttle's going to work, Michael, I just know that. But we still need to cover all the options. So when do we get that cycle report?'

He made a face. 'Ten minutes. Half an hour.'

'Great forecasting there. Mind giving me a little peek?'

He sighed. There was a pleasant relentlessness inside this woman you couldn't resist. 'You mean as far as the natural stuff is concerned? Dry and bad and nasty. Everything I thought was going to happen and some more. Heavy radiation, electromagnetic disruption. Massive UV values. You're going to be handing out some warning on general things like skin cancer and such?'

She nodded. 'They're going out already.'

'Sorry. I haven't had a lot of time to keep up with the news. Well, you tell people to stay indoors and catch the show when it comes out on video a few years hence. This thing is lighting up for the big one tomorrow.'

'What time? When will it peak?'

'Read my figures when I've done them. What I said initially still holds. I guess around 1210. Which is about as close to the solstice as you can get. It's still fluid, fluid enough to make Charley want to wait before pressing the final button, I imagine. But I think it's pretty certain that people on the Prime Meridian running from a little north of the equator up to maybe the tip of Scotland will get the brunt of it. Then it will start to die, only slowly, so you can expect a big wash of radiation and whatever else is inside that thing sweeping right across the northern hemisphere. We won't be anywhere close to normal until around 2400 or so. Which means it will affect everything from the Prime Meridian west right into the Pacific in some way or another. That's the real battleground Charley's got for tomorrow: London to Tokyo, and every place in between. And please, don't ask me what happens when she turns the magnifying glass on. What they got on Air Force One. What you got in Langley. All that at industrial strength, plus a little more I wouldn't care to guess at.'

She went silent, knowing there was something he wanted to say.

'You're really sure about this Vegas thing?' he asked finally.

She shook her head. 'Why do you ask? No, as it happens. But we know the guy who killed himself here was one of the Children. It's a lead. It's the best we can do at the moment without some hard intelligence. Like I said, we need to cover every option.'

'I understand that.'

'But?' she asked, puzzled.

He tried to smile. It seemed to be his lot in life to bring people down sometimes. 'I don't know. The idea of Charley in Vegas sounds odd to me. You be careful. I like these conversations. I'd prefer them to continue.'

She looked flustered, in a way that Lieberman couldn't help but find amusing.

'Is that a CIA blush, my dear?'

Helen Wagner's face did go noticeably pink right then. 'Dammit, Michael. Time and place.'

'Okay. That's a deal,' he said, feeling a touch guilty for embarrassing her this way. 'Hey, you want to see something that proves how careful we all ought to be? How different this world is starting to behave right now?'

Lieberman's face disappeared. She heard him speaking off camera to Schulz.

'Yes?' she said to nobody.

The tanned, intelligent features came up on the screen again. 'I got to move this little camera thing from the monitor to the window so it's looking outside, not at my ugly face. Won't take a moment.'

She waited, watched the moving image on the screen, then closed her eyes. 'Do I really want to see this?'

'Sure! This isn't The X-Files. This is real.'

In the Gulfstream jet moving effortlessly toward Vegas, she took a good look out this distant window in a remote Mediterranean farmhouse. The sun was setting in a sky the likes of which she had never seen. It was gold, burnished gold, mixed with a bright, sparking, rolling overlay of green, like an electric curtain, a dancing light show in the heavens.

'Tell me I'm not going crazy, Michael.'

'Of course you're not. If you lived in Iceland you wouldn't think twice about seeing this. The Aurora Borealis. The Northern Lights. And as fine a show as I've ever seen. You'd almost think this was the opening night of something new.'

'Don't say that,' she whispered.

'Hey, there you go, off on an X-Files trip again. This is pure physics. The Aurora is nothing but the solar wind burning up in our atmosphere.'

'In the Mediterranean? It's rare even in southern Canada.'

'I told you we had an industrial-strength dose of this stuff right now. Wait your turn. I'd wager the puny contents of my solitary bank account you'll be seeing this across a lot of the northern hemisphere tonight, probably tomorrow night too. Though Vegas may be pushing it a little far south. Sorry to disappoint. And you know something?'

'What?'

'It's beautiful. In a kind of cold, cosmic way.'

'Beautiful?'

'Yeah. Like a sign. The times they are a-changing. Remember that one?'

'Not my generation, Michael.'

'Or mine really. "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command." Maybe the generation doesn't matter that much after all.'

'I have to go,' she said, seeing, somewhat to her relief, Levine and Barnside awake and in conversation at the front of the plane.

'Right,' he said. 'Just don't get scared by what you see in the sky. That's natural, whatever we think. It's what's inside us that's scary. Sure frightens the life out of me.'

She looked at this strange image on the monitor — the Mediterranean sky alive with gold and a dancing green curtain of arcs and bands and coronas of strangely coloured light — and said, 'I'll take your word on that.'

CHAPTER 37 Beneath the Green Sky

Bennett looked a broken man. He sat in a corner of the control room, nursing a tumbler full of Scotch, silent, hardly watching what was going on. Lieberman nodded at Schulz. 'Is the old guy still with us?'

'Up to a point. Bevan really chewed him out about security after we lost the dome. Can you believe that? Like it's his fault? Now that it's up to the Shuttle and whatever they can run up in Vegas, I guess he feels out of it.'

'Speaking of the devil, where the hell is he?'

'Out with what remains of the military guys,' Schulz replied. 'Looking for anyone who's still up there. After that we go quiet here until some word comes back from the Shuttle. The military go back to Palma in case they're needed for crowd-control duties. Nothing left to guard here, I guess. All they're thinking about is tomorrow, what happens if we get it wrong and the storm does hit. Understandable, I guess.'

'They come across anyone else up there on the mountain?'

Schulz sighed. 'A few. You look tired, Michael. To be frank, you look terrible. Why don't you get some sleep? When the Shuttle comes up with something, we'll wake you. Until then, we're pretty much out of this show.'

The latest activity report was done. It was available on the network for Helen or anyone else who had access to it, and the signs were as bad as Lieberman had feared.

'What happened to Mo?' he asked.

'I think she went upstairs too. Her kid was absolutely out of it, from what I saw. You could all do with some sleep. If — correction, when — Arcadia finds that thing, you're in the driver's seat.'

'I know.' Lieberman's head hurt. And only part of it was the wound.

'Take a break, man. Think of that as an order, and be assured I'll be shaking you awake before long.'

'Sir,' he said, making a fake salute.

'And Michael?'

'Yeah?'

'I hate to ask. You and Mo? Is there something going on there?'

He blinked. 'Are you serious? Under these circumstances?'

'No, I didn't mean it like that. I just thought there was something a little weird between you when you got back.'

'We got blown out of the sky and had to walk a million miles to find you people. Plus I confuse her, I guess. I'm a confusing sort of person.'

'Say that again. Is that why you two can't look each other in the eye?'

Some things you forget, Lieberman thought. Some things just hang around in the back of your memory, waiting for you to give them a little nudge. 'Is that right? Search me.'

He shuffled off out of the barn, back to the mansion, past the quiet bunches of soldiers who were waiting under this strange green light, then slowly climbing into the trucks taking them back to the city fifty miles away. His head was hurting. He was feeling tired, but alert too, something harrying away at the back of his consciousness.

The bar was empty. He surveyed the line-up of bottles, then picked up some mineral water, threw a few chunks of ice and lemon into the glass, poured himself a big one, and went upstairs. He walked into his room feeling dog-tired, the drink slopping over the edge and splashing onto the tile floor. And jerked upright, stopped by the bed. The big double doors to the balcony were open. Outside, lit by the strange sky, Mo Sinclair sat on a simple white chair, back to him, a glass of something in her hand. From this angle she looked so thin, unformed, like a teenager.

He coughed and said, 'Did I come into the wrong room or something?'

'No,' she said, turning round, half-smiling at him. 'The door was open, so I used it.'

'So I see.'

'I've been drinking your vodka.'

'Permission granted. Don't be offended if I don't join the party.'

He went over to the balcony. She'd changed. She was wearing a thin red shirt, old and weathered, and cheap jeans cut off at the knee. Her hair was wet from the shower. She could have been sixteen, he thought, if you didn't look too close. Her face was naked, shorn of expression.

'I couldn't sleep,' she said. 'Not right away. And there's nothing for either of us to do until the Shuttle finds something.'

'And Annie?'

'Like a log. Do any children suffer from insomnia?'

'You're asking me?'

'Yes.'

'I don't think so. They tend to accept things for what they are. You need to grow up a little in order to fool yourself you make a difference.'

She looked at him, and she wasn't a kid just then, he thought. She had all that knowledge and intuition inside her that women seemed to possess just when you hoped they were looking the other way. 'All that easy cynicism, Michael. Is that really you?'

He gulped at the water, and wondered about the vodka before pushing away the thought. 'Sometimes.'

'You should have had kids, Michael. You're good with them. You can talk to them like a grown-up and on their own level too. That's a gift. I can feel Annie coming out of her shell a little more every time we meet'

'Why's she in that shell, Mo?'

'Jesus.' She gulped at the drink. 'We don't take the long way round to questions these days, any of us.'

'Blame it on the weather. It shines right through everything.'

'Not quite. Annie's like that because of me. Is that what you want to hear?'

'No. Because I don't really believe it. We all get sidetracked in our lives sometimes. Me more than most. There are times when you should blame yourself. And times when you have to accept that some days it just rains. None of us controls as much as we like to think.'

'No,' she said. 'Maybe not. But I'm grateful for the way you talk to Annie. Like she's real. Not some ornament around here. Can't we leave it at that?'

He pulled up a chair, planted it next to hers on the balcony, looked at the sky, and felt like a jerk. She was scared and he should have known that, would have known too if all the right parts inside him had been working as they should.

What scared her were the Northern Lights that stood above them, rolling and dancing, ageless, formless. There were reasons for this exhibition. They stood at the back of his imagination, hard and cold and factual, reasons that talked of all those extra protons and electrons that the sun had emitted colliding with the upper atmosphere of the earth, racing toward the magnetic poles and giving off their mutual energy in this psychedelic panorama that took your breath away, made you feel small and powerless beneath its vastness. But reasons belonged in the plain, all-seeing light of day. Sometimes they never followed you into the dark, unfamiliar rooms where you needed them.

This was the biggest Aurora he had ever seen, at any latitude. It flowed like a continuous greenish blue curtain to the north of them, its lower hem a fringe of violent ruby red.

Inside, the fabric seemed to be alive, seemed to move and pulse and breathe.

They stared at the lights, so bright they made the stars in the south invisible in the radiant night sky. She was shivering, he could see that, and it wasn't that she was cold.

'Take it easy, Mo. It's no big deal.'

The usual night noises were oddly absent, with few bird calls, only a gentle rustle of hot air across the dry grass. And beneath it all, like some distant, mystical orchestra, the sound of the lights. A gentle fizzing and crackling that was like static, the rustling of electricity.

She reached up, covered her ears, trying to stifle this sound from the sky. 'I don't want to listen, Michael. I can't stand the thought of being underneath all this. Not being able to hide.'

'You don't need to hide. This isn't Charley. This is natural. Being afraid of this is like lying awake at night worrying someone is going to turn off the gravity and send us all cartwheeling off into space. Even if that were a possibility, fretting over it would be pointless.'

She watched the green electric curtain pulsing, alive, above them, and said, 'You know these things. They make sense to you. All I see is… insanity.'

'No. You see change. The world changes. We get used to thinking that we control those changes but that's an illusion. It's always been changing. It's not what we have to be frightened of. It's what's inside ourselves when we realize how tiny we are against all this.'

Did this reassure her? He thought there was no way to tell. She kept something tight and close and private inside her, something that rarely saw the light of day.

'You're scared for Annie,' he said. 'You needn't be. It's people in the cities that need to be scared. When things break down, people damage each other. Charley knows that. She's not going to bother with us any more. We're too small.'

'I'm scared for all of us. The world scares me. Michael…'

Gently, gingerly, she put her arms around his neck, cradled her face against his skin. She was warm. There was moisture there. A dim memory, he thought: It was a long time since a woman had cried against him. A dim memory.

'What happened today-'

'Shhhh…' He put a finger against her lips, felt the warm, dry skin. 'What happened today is in the past. We got out of there. We survived. We will survive.'

She moved her face closer against him; he felt the hard, damp sharpness of her teeth on his neck, her fingers running through the back of his hair. Mo Sinclair kissed his cheek, pulled back, and he found himself staring into her strained, expressionless face.

'Michael,' she said, 'I can't be alone just now. I can't be.'

Something like electricity ran between them, mirroring the fire in the sky.

'This isn't a good idea,' he said, and she was rising already, back into the room, taking off her shirt, walking over to the bed. She was wearing nothing beneath the old red fabric. Her breasts stood small and taut against her thin, straight chest.

'We don't have time for ideas. Don't think, Michael. Feel.'

He took one more gulp of the water, tried to force some sense into his head, looked at the sky, and decided this was futile. 'You sound like me,' he said, out over the balcony to no one but the dancing, raging sky. 'You sound just like the old part of me, not my favourite part.'

Something clicked inside his head. Something that gave no way back. He rose from the chair and started to remove his shirt, his jeans. She was in the bed now, beneath the single sheet, her body just visible through its flimsiness, her face stained by the green light coming in through the open windows. She held out her hand. Pleading, Lieberman thought, and something now slumbering inside him asked: Why?

He sat on the side of the bed and pulled back the sheet, down to her breasts, staring at the dark, small nipples, soft as he touched them, not stiffening. He pulled the fabric down farther, revealing the long slender body, the colour of fading copper, too tanned, a triangle of dark hair.

'Don't think,' she said, and reached for him, felt the developing stiffness at his groin. 'Please.'

He let his head break free of this baggage of adulthood, shrugged off the last of his clothes, and climbed on the bed, touched the gentle rise of her stomach, bent down, licked her navel, felt the taut, tight lines of her stomach, her thatch, the damp, inviting sweetness it concealed, kissed her hard, hand raising now, into her long, dry hair, eyes closed (not in the green light, not in the green light), felt her legs submit, moved, was above her, inside her, gently shifting, rocking, probing, feeling.

And there was so much to feel: This part of being alive was hot and fevered, slow and ecstatic. In the faint green light that filtered into the room there lived a frenzied line of electric delight that brought them, moaning, screaming, fighting to some swift, elemental climax.

Her eyes were closed. She smiled, delicately, a tiny corner of her mouth turned upward, like a piece of punctuation on a physical page, and it came to him how new this was: to see her in some senseless delight, to know that within her taut, strained being there lived some small, insensate oasis of carnality, unfettered, wild, free.

Like this, she was truly beautiful: satiated, content, made whole by their joint coupling. He stayed in this place, relishing the fleshy warmth between them, becoming ever more conscious of it again. A voice inside his head said: Don't think, feel. And the pictures, the images of the day rolled behind it, in counterpoint, like a slow-moving video.

Michael Lieberman felt himself hardening, and the fire of procreation began the urging again, starting to order his hips, his groin into motion. Breathless, he pushed himself away, felt himself come free, with a small ache, pulled back over her body, rolled over onto the bed.

She opened her eyes and this was the old Mo again, closed, mysterious. 'Michael,' she said, looking into his face, some hurt there inside her voice, 'I thought…'

In the green light now she looked different. Her eyes rolled, like those of a frightened animal. She stared at the ceiling. Lieberman reached over, touched her face with his fingers, gripped her chin, forced her head round. 'Mo,' he said. Tears now, forming like transparent pearls at the corner of her eyes.

'Don't,' she said, trying to snatch herself away.

'I know.'

It was there so clearly now, like a photograph inside his head, and he wondered why it took so long to make sense of the image.

'You know what?' she answered, and there was as much fear in her voice, he thought, as there was aggression.

'You recognized that woman,' Lieberman said, still working to understand these words himself. 'On the mountain. In the mouth of the mine. You knew her.'

She closed her eyes, tight, so tight, and shook her head from side to side, so fast, so hard her hair went flying around like some whirling, wispy halo.

'You saw,' he said quietly. 'And you thought you could fuck that memory out of my head too.'

CHAPTER 38 Slipping

'McCarran Tower, this is November Five Seven Eight Whiskey Sierra.' The pilot let go of the PTT button and listened to the static, called again, then tried another frequency.

'Something local?' the co-pilot asked from behind impenetrable Ray-Bans.

'Probably. Give it a minute, Mike.' The distant city rolled out on the desert plain in front of them, dead flat in the valley between two arid mountain ranges, unmistakable across the clear, cloudless desert sky.

Mike pressed the button and made another call. 'Still static'

'Shit,' the captain said. 'I feel a command decision coming upon me.'

'The woman did say to call her if anything like this occurred.'

'Yeah, I know. But it doesn't matter if we have to go into McCarran blind, for God's sake. They grounded all the commercial airline traffic for today. Hell, you go talk to her.'

'Sure.' Mike unstrapped his harness and went aft. Helen Wagner was on the videophone and she looked angry. 'We got some static, some interference,' the co-pilot said.

'Tell me about it,' she grumbled. On the screen in front of her Lieberman's face appeared intermittently. Most of the time the image was filled with junk: white noise and distortion. When it was clear, she didn't like what she was seeing. Lieberman looked ashen and as miserable as sin.

'When you're ready,' the co-pilot said, and went back to the cockpit, feeling relieved.

'Michael,' she said, 'drop the video. Just put this over to voice. Maybe we'll get more over.' The screen died altogether, and, for a moment, the sound with it.

Then Lieberman said, 'Is that any better?'

'A little. But it's not great.'

'No,' he replied, in what was close to a distant, unintelligible mumble, 'same for you. What's the problem? Everything else seems clear this end.'

'I don't know. Some local interference here possibly.'

'This is electromagnetic, remember that.'

'I will,' she replied, and became aware of Barnside and Levine at her shoulder.

'You do that,' he yelled through the noise. 'I've been thinking about this. Charley said she'd give us a sign. And she hasn't. She's got something up her sleeve, something that comes straight out of the sky, not a box marked Semtex. It will be electromagnetic. It has to be. And this place you're going — a nice big network of wires and high-intensity, open-air electronic devices in the middle of the desert — is one hell of a location to try it out.'

'I know this,' she answered, trying not to sound too touchy. 'Is that why you called? Because if it is, we're going over old ground and I've got better things to do.'

The line went dead. Then Lieberman said, 'Keep your hair on. Are you sitting down?'

'Go on,' she said testily.

'We've found someone here who was one of the Children. And then made it here. They put her into La Finca as some kind of spy. She knows them. But we need to handle this thing carefully. I don't want some gooks just treading all over this woman because that won't do any of us any good.'

Levine looked at Barnside and said, 'Get that guy of yours hooked into this conversation. This is his damn job. Not some goddamn academic's.'

'Michael,' she said. 'Calm down. Take this slowly.'

'I am calm, Helen.' He didn't sound it at all, she thought. 'I have found someone who was one of them. And was told to come here, get inside this place.'

'She did that?'

'She's here. But she says that's as far as it went. She didn't do anything. She's scared. Of you. Of them. And scared for herself, her kid. You need to treat her right. Otherwise she'll just stay quiet, clam up.'

'I understand… Michael?' The line went dead in a big burst of static.

'You still there?' he said eventually.

'Yes.'

'Look,' Lieberman continued, 'I don't know how much she has to give, and this isn't going to be easy. But if we try, if we're patient, we can work something out.'

'Patient?' Levine snorted. 'You hear the guy? This woman could put us on the line with Gaia. Who the hell does he think he is?'

'Who was that?' Lieberman's voice asked out of the speaker.

'One of my colleagues.'

'Right. I guess I'm being dumb here, huh? You people are just going to break out the leg irons and beat it out of her.'

'No!'

Levine said, 'We'll do what it takes. What the hell does he expect?'

'I heard that,' Lieberman said, only half-intelligible through the noise. 'And you listen to me, whoever you are. You guys may enjoy running around with hard dicks and guns hanging out of your pants. But it hasn't done you much good so far, now, has it?'

Levine swore. Then glowered at Barnside working the radio on the other side of the plane, a headset clamped to his ears. 'That guy of yours asleep or something?' Barnside said nothing, just carried on talking quietly into the mike.

'Listen to me,' Lieberman said. 'If we take this slowly, easily, I think we can bring her around.'

'I hear you, Michael,' Helen said. 'Just trust us on this one.'

'Trust you?' The rest of the sentence disappeared in a sea of white noise. She saw Barnside dragging the headset off, wincing with pain.

'Give it a moment…' she suggested. But the aircraft bucked beneath them and she almost retched as her stomach rose up inside her body. It felt as if the plane had dropped a thousand feet or more in a single second, hit something hard below, and was running along some solid, rough ledge cut into the air. The impact scattered every loose object in the cabin: notebook computers, writing pads, pens, papers, mobile phones. She clung to her seat, desperately trying to fasten the strap, and watched Levine and Barnside struggling to do the same. A hand gripped her shoulder. It was the co-pilot.

'Belts,' he said. 'I want you all strapped in right now.'

'We're talking,' she objected.

'No one's talking, lady. The comm systems just went stone dead and we don't even want to think about what might have gone with it. This is no big deal. We got plenty of altitude and we could just glide into Vegas from this height if we wanted. But there's something turbulent out there and that means we want you tied. Now!'

She wished she could see beneath the opaque Ray-Bans. This man looked scared, she thought, and that was rare in a pilot. 'I asked you to tell me if we had problems.'

'Please…'

She unhooked the strap, got up, holding tightly to the seat, tried to smile at him, and said, 'You have a jump seat. I'm taking it. And that is an order.'

'Go for it,' Barnside yelled, buckling himself into his seat, and gave her what she hoped was a look of encouragement. 'You heard the woman.'

'Shit,' the co-pilot muttered, then turned his back on them, worked his way to the front of the cabin, holding on tight to every seat as he passed it, and pushed open the cockpit door. A sea of light the colour of gold flooded through it, then he was dragging her with him, pushing her hard into the tiny jump seat, strapping himself in, and pulling down the military-style harness that sat above it.

'Make it tight,' he said. 'You can wear these too.' He pulled out a spare pair of sunglasses from a pocket in the cabin and thrust them at her. She put them on, took a deep breath, and looked ahead.

Still trying to believe her eyes, she gasped, 'What the hell is that?'

The captain turned round and smiled. 'We were rather hoping you'd be telling us that, ma'am.'

On the horizon, suspended over the south-western portion of the city, level with their own altitude, stood a vast, elliptical golden shape, like a miniature sun stretched and distorted by gravity. It ran almost the breadth of the valley, joining the mountain ranges on either side of the flat, strung-out urban area, and shimmered, motionless, in front of them.

'What do they say on the ground?' she asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

'All communications are down,' the co-pilot answered, tapping away at the buttons in front of him. 'We haven't a clue.'

'Can't you even listen?'

The co-pilot turned his sunglasses on her. He reached for the panel and upped the volume. The sound of static, screeching, meaningless, filled the speakers. 'I've been dialling through everything, from the McCarran tower through to local radio on the NDB frequency and they're all the same. Beats me. I never had interference that could run clear through from UHF to AM.'

The captain eased back some more on the throttle. The aircraft had slowed, she now realized. They didn't know enough to turn it round, but they wanted more information before heading straight toward the object. It sat several miles away from the commercial airfield, which she could see clearly now, directly in their flight path.

'Ordinarily,' the captain said, 'I would have suggested that was some kind of optical illusion. You get this thing called a parhelion, a sundog. Caused by crystal diffraction in the atmosphere. Harmless.'

'I know what a parhelion is,' she replied. 'And this isn't one.'

'No. I guess the interference ought to tell us that. You wouldn't expect that from an optical illusion.'

'So what is it?'

'Search me. But one thing I know is we're going nowhere near it. I'm keeping this altitude just so we're nice and safe and as close to the airfield as need be.'

She stared at the object in the sky. The colour was changing occasionally. At the perimeter of the ellipsis it turned blue and green in flickering waves of flame.

'If I didn't know better,' the co-pilot said, 'I'd reckon that was ball lightning.'

'Not that anyone knows what ball lightning is,' the captain muttered. 'Or has ever photographed it. Or proved it does exist. And, if my memory serves me right' — he stared at the golden shape ahead of them — 'it's generally supposed to be about the size of a soccer ball.'

'Yes,' she said, and found it impossible to take her eyes off the object. 'But it is some kind of lightning.' The aircraft rocked again. Not so bad this time. There was a sound close by, like escaping air.

'Shit,' the co-pilot said, and started to press gingerly at the bank of switches and buttons in front of him. Vegas lay in front of them like a giant lightning conductor, the metallic spine of the Strip running through its core. Silence invaded the cabin. On the panel the lights went dead. The two pilots stared at each other.

'It's moving,' Helen said. They looked ahead and saw that the rim of this miniature, elongated sun was now almost completely blue. What looked like flames or wild electrical discharges ran flickering along the skin.

The captain watched it for a second or two and came to a swift decision. 'To hell with McCarran. I'm taking this thing into Nellis whether they like it or not. And fast.'

She watched them run through the checks on the panel, push and pull the levers in front of them. Nothing much seemed to be working on the plane. The nose had slipped beneath the horizon, and the pilot was working the machine physically, with his hands, with his feet. The smell of ozone, of burning wiring, was starting to became noticeable in the cabin.

'We lost the flaps,' the co-pilot said quietly. 'No power, no flaps.'

The captain shrugged. 'Oh my. Well, I always did want to do this with someone else's ship.' And he turned the wheel full to the left, then kicked in hard with the right rudder, putting the plane into a sharp side slip. The aircraft jerked itself uncomfortably around in the air, the nose twitching to the right, no horizon visible, and it felt as if they would fall out of the sky any second. She watched the altimeter. It was unwinding at three thousand feet a minute. This crazy attitude made it difficult to see what was going on in the city. The wing obscured the view. All there was out to the left of the plane was a sheet of gold and flickering blue. She closed her eyes. The plane, the world, seemed out of joint. She tried to think of Michael Lieberman, and what he had said. He was probably right. They attacked this problem as if it were something that could be cured with conventional force, conventional procedures. Charley Pascal was smarter than that. Even more, she was only part of the problem, almost a symptom of it.

Her head hurt. Maybe a nosebleed was imminent. She screwed up her eyes, tried to will away the pain. Then felt the plane move again, swing forward, back into balance, return to something like normality. Against her instincts, Helen Wagner lifted her head and saw a long, empty runway approaching quickly in front of them, military planes parked either side of the extended finger of asphalt.

The co-pilot operated a lever on the floor and something shifted with a bang beneath them. 'Gear down,' he said.

'All right,' the captain muttered, and toyed gently with the wheel. The aircraft kissed the ground with scarcely a noise, and began to decelerate along the asphalt runway of Nellis. She didn't want to look but there was no avoiding it. To her left, the fiery ellipse was descending, streaking blue and green and red as it came to earth.

'Lightning,' the co-pilot said. 'Has to be.'

'I think,' she said, 'we should get out of the plane. As quickly as possible. Get away from anything that is flammable or liable to attract an electrical discharge.'

The co-pilot’s opaque sunglasses were fixed on her. A line of blood stood hard and red in one of his nostrils. 'You mean we just stand out in the open, ma'am? And wait for this thing to come our way?'

CHAPTER 39 Shared Love

'It's a bad place,' Gunther said. 'It deserves what's coming to it.'

Sundog was primed now, sat in the sky with fire in its belly. The solar cycle was on the rise. Charley felt nervous. All the tests, all the minor experiments they had conducted — everything before had been a prelude to this event. They had learned so much, how inflexible and difficult to control the satellite could be. They had learned too how important it was to monitor the flux of the cycle, to time the moment they captured it precisely so that they stole as much of its energy as possible.

But there was still too much guesswork, and the cycle itself was so unpredictable. Time was running out for them as much as for anyone else. They had to be realistic, they had to accept that there were limits to what they could achieve. This was a gigantic instrument of destruction, but it concerned her that the precise way in which it would manifest itself was still, to some extent, in doubt. In this mix of fire and radiation, this whirring digital demon that slipped into the networks of the world and devoured them from inside, there remained uncertainties. Some experiment, some proof was needed, not just as a sign for the world, but also for her own peace of mind.

'No,' she said, bringing her mind back onto the small circle of figures around her. 'This isn't a time to think of good and bad, Gunther. We're not avenging angels. We're not punishing anyone. This is about a change in direction. A return to a natural order. Equilibrium. Balance.'

She closed her eyes and smiled: It was a bad place all the same. She could remember the gaudy, heartless streets, the phony smiles they met everywhere, the tawdry glamour. Vegas, it seemed to her, epitomized what was false and dishonest and wicked about humankind. That it should present such an opportunity to make the sign gave her no regret whatsoever.

Billy Jo asked, 'What will happen to them? Will they all die?'

'We don't know,' Joe Katayama, sitting cross-legged on the floor, said. 'How can we? Not all of them. Maybe not even many. That's not the point.'

You could think and you could dream and you could calculate, Charley thought, but in the end there was always the mystery. People misunderstood the signs: It was believing that the mystery could be removed that led you into seeking your own petty godhood in the first place.

'We walked in darkness,' she said. 'And then Gaia gave us hope, gave us light. For everything. For the world. Can't you feel it?'

Joe Katayama said, a thin smile starting to crack his face, 'I can feel it.' And someone else too. In a moment, there was laughter in the room, and it was genuine, she knew that. It would be strange if they didn't feel some foreboding, but still there was a close, compelling certainty that drove them forward. They remained a family even in the face of this forced dispersal.

'And you think,' Gunther said, 'that we really will change things? So soon?'

She nodded urgently. 'Of course. Why would we be here otherwise? This is a world ripe for change, Gunther. Like a caterpillar emerging from the chrysalis. Think how much we have achieved already. Closing the markets. Shaking the apparatus of the state.'

'But,' Billy Jo said, 'people aren't exactly changing right now. I've been following what's going on through the Web, on TV. People are scared. But I get the impression that for some of them this is just a way of getting a free day or two off work while they wait for the government to fix it. Like a power outage or an earthquake.'

'What do you expect them to say?' Charley replied instantly. 'That their world really is about to end? Change happens in your heart. Unless it begins there, it means nothing at all. And we will touch their hearts, we will make them look at themselves with fresh eyes.'

Joe Katayama said, 'It's a point, Charley. Maybe we ought to have told them a little more.'

'No,' she said. 'People are blind. People are stupid. They want proof. So we'll give them proof. And when it happens, it will be so big, so unavoidable, they'll know.'

They didn't argue. They never argued these days. 'The proof starts now. In Vegas. And here too. We have to move on. We have to disperse.'

They watched her, hanging on every word. 'We all know, through this shared love we possess, where this leads. We can't inflict this damage, this pain on these people — and that will be real — without showing them that we share it ourselves. This is our shared grief, our common legacy. We all move forward, hand in hand, to this fate.'

There was silence in the hot, airless room. Some were holding hands. Most looked happy. In this state, such closeness between them, it became easy to think with a single mind, she thought. It was when people were separated, moved outside the family, that they ran the risk of becoming lost.

'We will redeem ourselves, like them, in pace with the world. Joe?' He looked up at her from the floor, a thin smile on his face, content, she thought, like all of them. And he would be the last to leave the nest. He was needed to see this final stage to its conclusion.

'Yes?'

'How many of us are there now?'

'Twenty-four.'

'Twice the number as there were disciples,' Charley said, happy, relishing the love in their faces. 'Slowly, over the next eighteen hours, we disperse. You must leave the farm, go back into the outside world. The die is cast here. We've got the programs to prime Sundog. Someone has to stay, see it through. From now on you must start on a new journey. What we've achieved is good and important. But people will kill you for it if they know. Until the awakening, until they see this is a new beginning, we remain silent. We remain apart. We wait.'

Billy Jo put up her hand. There were tears in her eyes. Charley watched them roll down her cheeks. Tears of joy, she guessed. There was, in this fast-diminishing space in front of them, a hard, gripping form of ecstasy that wouldn't let them go.

'You're dying, Charley,' Billy Jo said. 'We won't see you again.'

'We're all dying. I'm no different than any of you, except that I have this knowledge that lets me say goodbye to you now.'

'All the same. I thought I'd be here. I thought I'd hold your hand.'

Charley touched the soft white cotton of her shirt with pale, shaking fingers. 'I wish it could be like that. But we can't jeopardize the very reason we're here. We're smaller than Gaia.'

Gunther nodded. 'Charley's right, Billy Jo. This is the way it has to be.'

'Okay.'

'Only love lies between us,' Charley said, 'and that love survives wherever we are.' She leaned down from the wheelchair, took Billy Jo's hand, and Gunther's too. 'If you like, if Joe is agreeable, you can be the first to leave. Together.'

They looked at each other and smiled.

CHAPTER 40 Trompe l'Oeil

Room 2341 of the Mirage Hotel looked directly south along the Strip, out past Caesar's Palace in the adjoining block, with its marble figures and fake porticoes and colonnades glistening white in the midday heat, past Bellagio, New York New York, and the big gleaming hulk of MGM, with the towers of Excalibur and the peak of the Luxor pyramid in the distance. Somewhere beyond that, Sam Jenkinson dimly recognized, was the airport where they had arrived, jet-lagged and exhausted, from England two days before. But no circling planes marked its location. The emergency had arrived in Vegas.

They were in the new Dali wing of the Mirage. Here everything was surrealistic. The elevators looked as if they had been modelled out of naked flesh. The clocks melted on the wall (and still worked). Even the waitresses, wandering around the floor area trying to sell you cigarettes and Keno tickets, looked like something out of a nightmare: huge feathered tresses, gold swimsuits, bizarre makeup, but not on their chests; their chests gleamed out into the big casino room everywhere, twin peaks of flesh, bobbing between the tables.

He stared at the big golden sky down from Luxor, took a swig of rum and Coke, then looked at his wife. Marion Jenkinson was fifty-seven, one year younger than her husband. She lay on the bed dressed in a pale red and lime-green polyester jumpsuit, one she bought the day before from Emporio while he was in the bar. Her clothes matched the room. The standard lamp was in green verdigris copper, twisting round on itself like a serpent. The bathroom door had some painting on it that looked vaguely familiar: a woman, half-naked, turning to sand. And on the ceiling, watching you all the time, huge, staring eyes, Dali eyes, with big eyebrows and, as a recurring motif, that twirled-up waxed moustache. He gazed out the window, looking puzzled.

'What's wrong, Sam?'

'Nothing…'

Marion Jenkinson climbed off the bed and came and sat next to him at the window. 'It's very bright out there.' In the distance, beyond Luxor, somewhere close to where the airport ought to be, he guessed, the sky was simply golden, as if the sun were so bright it had turned into a local corona.

'It's moving,' they said, almost in unison.

He shut his eyes for a moment. The day was so bright it began to make the back of his pupils hurt with a pain that was like a long, slow bruise. When he opened them, the huge golden shape was directly behind the Luxor pyramid, and it was vast, like the filament from some vast light bulb. As it got closer, it appeared more complex too. An incandescent blue, like electric flame, ran along its skin.

'What is it, Sam?'

'I don't know.' He surveyed the street. No crowds, no lines of people. Hardly anybody at all. It was a hot day, he thought. Maybe everybody would stay indoors to watch this kind of show, whatever it was.

'It is fireworks,' she said, and he was aware of her arm on his shoulder.

'I suppose so.' And thought: No.

The storm — it was some kind of storm, he thought, it had to be — was now engulfing the peak of the Luxor pyramid, and from its underbelly fell what looked like giant gleaming hailstones, hundreds, even thousands of them, pouring out from the churning guts of the thing, down into the dark glass, down to the ground. Then it moved on. The great golden cloud was swamping the fairy-tale towers of Excalibur. It was impossible to see what was left in its wake. The shimmering golden ellipse covered everything behind.

He looked across the street. As he watched, the lights started to go out. First on the Flamingo, then on the Imperial, finally on Harrah's, opposite them. There was a distinct electronic ping in the room. The TV died. The air-conditioning died. The sudden, unexpected silence seemed to occupy the entire room. Outside, the golden cloud had reached Caesar's. Spheres the size of soccer balls were tumbling down from its livid underbelly, some spinning on their axis, the movement visible by a whirling filament of streaks in their sides, some pure gold, all the way down, a few turning pale, dying in the sparkling air.

'Sam…' she said.

'I'm thinking, woman. Give me time.'

The cloud moved on and on. He went to the door of the room, threw it open, stared across at the elevator. A bunch of people stood around it, banging the buttons, swearing, looking frightened, some pushing at the door to the fire stairs. Marion was at his shoulder.

'I can't go down them stairs,' she said. 'Not twenty-three floors, and who's saying it's safe in there anyway?'

'Nobody.' He pushed her back into the room, wishing she'd be quiet. Behind them the window was now pure gold. The cloud was enveloping the Mirage, and with it came the shower. They sat on the bed and watched the light show outside the glass. The painted eyes on the ceiling, so many, bright and huge and vivid, seemed to be laughing at them.

The picture outside the window was changing. The light was no longer quite so solid. Elements were moving in it. Maybe this was how they formed, he thought. Maybe this was the beginning of the ball shower. She clutched his hand. Her skin was wet with sweat. The temperature seemed to have climbed ten degrees. There was a thin, acrid smell, like ozone, and, above them, a chirruping, fizzing noise that seemed to fall down on the room, with a physical movement, like rain.

'It can't get in,' she said. 'It can't break the window, for God's sake.'

'Right. We just wait. It'll soon be over and then…'

Making a sound like a nest of snakes, a gleaming, fiery ball appeared at the window and hung there, as if it were looking at them. It was a good three feet across, blue light flickering across its skin, and revolving slowly, like a globe turning on its axis. Briefly, it rose a few feet in the air, as if it were examining the sea of eyes painted on the ceiling.

'Shit,' he said quietly.

'Sam, it can't come in.'

'No.'

The ball came down to their level, came right up to the window, so close he expected to see the skin pushed back, like a nose pressed up to the glass. Then it moved forward again and he thought she was going to snap off his hand. It was protruding through the glass, two-thirds of it outside the room, one-third in. And growing. Moving. Behind it, two more spheres had appeared, were hovering in the same way, like mute animals, catching the scent of prey.

There was a noise like the firing of a small gun, and then the first sphere plopped through the window, hung in the air, eighteen inches off the ground. The room was filled with the sound of hissing; it seemed to come at them from every direction. The smell of ozone was unbearable, and there was a sense of heightened atmospheric pressure, the sort you got when a plane was landing. He looked at his wife. Her nose was bleeding profusely. She had her hand to it, her mouth open, the blood dripping in.

'Sam,' she said thickly. And then it was gone. The ball raced past them, heat brushing their legs, into the open door of the bathroom opposite, skittered around the four walls, hovered over the toilet, and disappeared over the edge of the bowl.

'Bloody hell,' he said. A blue light hovered over the pink ceramic unit and steam was rising from the hidden water. Then the basin exploded with a roar, ripping off the half-open door, sending shards of porcelain blasting through the room. They ducked beneath the bedclothes and waited for the noise to die down.

'One down,' he said, gingerly coming out from beneath the sheets. Outside, the brightness seemed to be diminishing. 'It's moving past us. It'll soon be gone.'

The two spheres still danced outside the window. One made a little bob, then popped through the glass, no noise this time, it was as easy as stepping through a shower. The second followed and they stood at either end of the long window.

'Get under the covers, love,' he barked. 'Get some protection if one of these things goes bang. Don't move too much in case they pick it up. They're looking for something electrical, and we may be the closest they get to it.'

She scrambled beneath the sheets. He followed her, felt her scrabbling for his hand. He squeezed it once, bent over, kissed her roughly on the lips. 'Not a good idea to touch any more, Marion. Maybe we make more electricity that way.'

The closest started to vibrate, and streaks of azure appeared inside its skin. 'Under the sheet!' he yelled, and pulled what fabric there was over them. The thing was doubling in size, rippling blue and gold, swirling all the time. He took one last look, then pulled the pillow over his face. It took no more than a second. The thing imploded on itself with a deafening bellow and the room was filled with shattered flying glass. They could hear it arcing through the air above them, then impaling itself into anything it could find.

Marion screamed, and he felt sick as he realized she was cut. Then the pain came in his head too, and something warm began to drip down his scalp. She started to sob. Beneath the covers, he reached over, touched her hand, just briefly. It was warm and wet. Then he opened his eyes and pushed back the pillow from his head. The entire length of the window had been blown out in the blast. Water was pouring down from a shattered pipe in the ceiling. The street was open to them, twenty-three floors below. But you could see it. He liked that idea. There was no fire. This was something they could survive. He put a hand to his head: blood, but not so much you had to worry.

In the corner, hovering two feet off the drowning carpet, the third sphere was almost motionless, hissing with a thin, constant noise. It looked pale, less active than the first two. And a little smaller. But it was alive — if that was the right word. And it was moving, very slowly, toward the bed.

'Sam,' Marion said from beneath the sheet. 'I'm bleeding. Bad.'

'Stick with it, love. And keep your head down.' He looked at the sphere and wished he could hate the thing. But it wasn't really alive, he knew that. And there was a simple way to deal with it.

Sam Jenkinson climbed out of the bed and sat down in the chair close to the window. To his amazement, his drink was still on the tiny side table, half-full. Hand shaking, he reached over, picked it up, and took a sip. It tasted foul: warm and tainted somehow. The sphere had stopped moving toward the bed. It hovered between them indecisively.

'Now,' he said, looking at the thing, going paler by the second a few feet away in front of the shattered window, 'why don't you be a good little monster and go fuck off home?' It flickered, was almost white. For a fraction of a second he could see the side wall of the room through its glowing body.

'Sam?'

'Shut up, woman.'

The ball rolled slowly toward him, hissing softly. He watched it stop a foot away and he really could see right through it. The thing was dying. Outside the day seemed to be returning to normal. It looked like a ghost. Or a thin reflection of the moon in water, he thought. The sphere stopped hissing. Then moved so quickly, he thought for a moment it had disappeared completely. Something pale and ghostly seemed to be crawling inside his mouth, up through his nostrils, even through his eyes, his ears, and it wasn't entirely unpleasant. It was warm, it sang, and when it was in the place it sought it was impossible to think of anything at all, impossible to feel anything except this strange, fevered thrum of energy that seemed to run inside and outside of his body.

The room went silent. Marion Jenkinson poked her head above the sheet, starting to feel weak, somewhat sick too. She looked across at him and went silent. He looked like one of those old pictures of a saint, with a halo that wasn't quite a halo, more a gentle ball of light that hung around his entire head. He was screaming, but she couldn't hear the noise. It seemed to get sucked from the room before it could get to her.

She closed her eyes and rocked gently, backward and forward, on the bed, until something hot and powerful picked her up with the sound of an exploding melon, threw her backward against the wall, left her slumped and bleeding, yelling at nothing, not opening her eyes, not wanting to see, clutching at the sheets, fists opening and closing, refusing to think about what was happening, what was flying in the room (warm and wet, making a sound like churning water) around her.

She didn't know how long she stayed like that. When she opened her eyes, she was cold. This wetness that covered her was cold too. She rolled over on the bed and looked up. The painted ceiling stared back at her, laughing, a sea of staring eyes. It was red with flesh, so much that it was contoured, seemed organic, physical. And one new feature too. Embedded in the staring, manic images was a piece of Sam Jenkinson, a single staring eyeball, around it a ragged corona of tissue and nerves.

She coughed into the sheets, retched dry bile, and tried to believe this was all a dream.

CHAPTER 41 Holy Fire

An hour after the attack the smoke still hung over the city a couple of miles distant. It was an eerie sight. There was precious little consistency in any of the reports they had. In some places it had started fires. In others it had passed over buildings, even through buildings, people too, with no ill effects whatsoever. And sometimes the results had been simply devastating. The tower of the Stratosphere was now nothing but a burned-out shell. In the old downtown, the huge, block-long electronic visual display canopy that had brought visitors back to Fremont Street seemed to have attracted the full force of the attack. It had been torn apart in a rain of fire that the crowds underneath had thought was all part of the show, until the metal began to rain down in a molten flood on their heads and the street turned into a river of flame.

In some cases the floating spheres of energy had invaded people directly and then simply exploded. The casualty list was something the emergency services couldn't even begin to guess at. Every man and woman at Nellis had been brought in to help with the rescue operation. The storm had lasted more than an hour, and Helen Wagner watched every agonizing minute in horror from the airfield, which was entirely untouched. The range war with the Delta Force crew, who drove over from McCarran to make contact when it became apparent that radio comm was down, was soon forgotten.

They teamed up with the Air Force people and tacitly acknowledged that if some lead on the Children were to emerge, then HRT would be the ones to follow up on it. There was too much work on the ground for them to think of anything else. She watched with quiet admiration the grim-faced, deliberate way they went about the job.

In a small office next to the main Nellis control tower Larry Wolfit was working away at the keyboard on his notebook computer. He wore a fresh checked shirt and jeans, big mountain boots sticking out from under the desk.

'You have a line out on that yet, Larry?' she asked. Barnside and Levine were somewhere else, outdoors, talking to the HRT people, she guessed. It felt more comfortable without them hanging around. Wolfit seemed to have spent the entire time since his arrival with his head deep inside the computer, hunting for clues.

'One just came through,' Wolfit replied laconically. 'Slow and very noisy but I can get something. After a fashion.' Wolfit looked different outside the controlled, cloistered confines of S&T somehow. He was more at home out here, close to the wilderness.

'Good. So tell me what caused all this.'

He screwed up his nose at the screen. 'Ball lightning, probably.'

'Which is?' She watched him struggle with the answer.

'Lot of arguments about that. Not conventional lightning, that's for sure. This is a real rarity in normal circumstances, though its existence is pretty well documented. The favoured theory right now is some internally powered electromagnetic phenomenon. Maybe a microwave radiation field contained inside a spherical shell of plasma. Or very high density plasma exhibiting quantum mechanical properties.'

She folded her arms and looked out the window. 'You mean we don't know?'

'What ball lightning is? No. But at least people do generally accept it exists nowadays. Some think it could explain a couple of other awkward phenomena. Spontaneous combustion. Instant conflagration with no sign of the fire that caused it. Makes a lot of sense. Real Old Testament stuff too. This is holy fire. You could use it for a million explanations out there. The burning bush, who knows? The Children promised us a message from heaven. They surely delivered that.'

'And the Shuttle?'

He shrugged. 'They're still looking.'

Military vehicles, coming and going. Ambulances carrying the dead and injured to hospitals where most of the electronic infrastructure was now burned to a frizzle. There was still power generation on the base, but the city's lines were down, and would remain so for days. There were already reports of how the heat, intense, dry, and devastating, was causing secondary problems among the survivors. It was 120 in the shade and rising, so fierce you felt exhausted just from a couple of minutes under the sun. She'd never liked Vegas, but there was something so foolhardy in the way the place was built up from the desert floor that you couldn't help but admire the spirit that had put it there. Now they had to begin all over again. And Lieberman was right: It was an island of electromagnetism in the middle of an empty wilderness. If Charley Pascal wanted somewhere to use, not just as a sign but as an experiment too, Vegas came custom-designed with the words 'guinea pig' printed in bold on its calling card.

'So what's inside this ball you're talking about, Larry?'

He grinned wryly, an expression that said he was on shaky ground. 'The best estimates say the temperature could be between fifteen and thirty thousand degrees Kelvin, with a pressure of ten to twenty atmospheres. That would explain the violence of the explosion if these things don't decay.'

'You're not telling me what causes it.'

He shook his head. 'I can't. We don't know. This is at the edge of everything we understand.'

'Sorry.' She wished he didn't look so out of sorts. They needed every smart mind they could get. 'I didn't mean to push you into a corner.'

"That's okay. What we do know is that it's usually linked to thunderstorms. But not always. The biggest sightings we've had up until now were associated with electrified underwater volcanic dust vents. You get these off Japan. When they erupt, you get balls rising from deep on the ocean bed, through the water and eventually becoming airborne. There's an event recorded back in the thirties where one six metres across came on shore and lasted for two hours. Alternatively…'

He was looking up from the computer, waiting for her attention.

'I'm sorry,' she said, wondering why she felt the need to talk to Lieberman right then. ‘I was somewhere else. Alternatively?'

'In 1957 a guy called Arabadzhi came up with a theory that what was really happening was the focusing of radioactive cosmic ray particles. Usually by the thunderstorm.'

'Cosmic rays?' Her mouth was dry just thinking about this.

'Precisely.'

'If you're right, the Children can skip the thunderstorm and the underwater volcanic vents altogether. What you get, when you focus it, is what we saw. One giant chunk of plasma that decays into the smaller spheres we saw coming out from underneath it.'

She tried to remember the details of the plane crash. 'Even when the solar storm was weaker, do you think this could have brought down Air Force One? And the other plane?'

'You bet. It was localized.'

'And all the telecommunications failures?'

'No. That's different. We were getting that anyway, without Sundog, just on a smaller scale. That's straight electromagnetic bombardment and they make it worse by feeding some data into the white noise. What we saw here… I guess this is what happens when they turn the dial that's marked "destruction" and focus it on one spot.'

It was so small. But it was something solid. 'We need to warn the people here about the radiation risk.'

'You're not going to stop them from going in there just by telling them it's hot. Those guys won't quit until they've got everyone out of that hellhole. Besides, I suspect it's marginal. This thing seems to dissipate pretty quickly.'

He was right about their determination. She knew that. Even if there were big yellow radiation signs posted all the way down the Strip they'd still be out there, combing the wrecked hotels and casinos, looking for survivors, not caring about tomorrow.

'All the same, Larry, we need to make people aware of what we think this is. And figure out some way of using that information.'

He was still quietly tapping away, with a calm, clinical detachment that she thought she could begin to find annoying. Maybe Levine wasn't playing some deep game by passing over Wolfit for the acting directorship. There was a coolness in the man that was hardly inspirational.

'There's a theory,' he said, 'that the stuff gets repelled by dead electrical circuits and attracted by live ones, which is the opposite of normal lightning, of course. If that's right, maybe we could channel it. If she attacked cities, we could try to divert it away from key areas.'

'You mean turn everything off?'

'Jesus. Not everything. If you did that the only faint electromagnetic current you'd get would be the one you found in living organisms. No, you need to think of ways of focusing it away by leaving some stuff on.'

He didn't say it; he didn't have to. They both knew the reports. Of people exploding, being torn apart in thin air. A kind of spontaneous super combustion. This phenomenon fitted more exactly the longer she thought about it.

'But we can do something. I need Lieberman in with us here. He's got the kind of mind that can get around all this. Get me through to him when you can. And I want to hear about this woman he's found. We're getting somewhere, you know.'

'Yeah,' he said laconically.

Maybe Wolfit just never got excited, she thought.

'If you want my honest opinion, we're pissing in the wind,' he said. 'Either the Shuttle knocks Sundog out or we just sit back and burn. Maybe we should be thinking about that second option a little more.'

She wished she had the energy to be mad at him. 'That's defeatist crap, Larry. You don't think that. I don't think that.'

'Scientifically — '

'Let's leave the dialectic, Larry. We don't have time.'

'That is a much-misused word,' he bristled. 'I am merely pointing out the facts. She told us to prepare. Maybe we ought to listen a little.'

A quiet man, with an incisive, quick intelligence, she thought. And, in a way, he was right too. There was precious little contingency in the works. 'Larry, we've gotten nowhere with the imaging efforts, the FBI is at a dead end with their investigation, and I'll be damned if I'm going to put every last hope we have on the Shuttle. Let's make the most of what we've got. There's got to be some research projects into this subject we can tap into. Get me some experts.'

He shook his head. 'Most of the research got killed in the cuts in the eighties. I mean, it's understandable. This is pretty peripheral stuff.'

'But there is material out there. You're quoting it.'

'Sure. And it's old. Like I said, that cosmic ray theory goes back to the fifties.'

'There must be someone.'

Wolfit nodded in a way she didn't quite understand. 'Sort of. I was coming to that.'

She sat down next to him and said, 'Show me.'

He hit the keys. 'Back in the early nineties there was some postgrad work done at Berkeley. Basically one guy. Looks like good stuff too, what I can see of it. A lot of the files seem to be missing. We can check but I doubt we're going to pick up more.'

'What he says… it backs the theory up?'

'Absolutely. A lot of it's pretty basic, but this guy claimed to have reproduced ball lightning in the lab. On demand. He knew the preconditions. He was able to create the stuff. Brave fellow.'

She peered into the screen. It was a sea of text and flashing hot links. 'This is the man we need, Larry. Get a phone number. Or better still, an address. We'll pull him in right away.'

Wolfit peered at her. 'No need. I can tell you where he is right now.' Then he pulled up the personal Web page. It was old, last updated in April 1998 according to the date on the bottom, and there was precious little there except a few personal details — hobbies: Linux, Goth music, Nordic mythology, and beer — a brief academic resume, and a photograph. Martin Chalk, looking a lot younger than the ID shot dispatched around the internal net, stared back at them from the screen, wide-eyed, gawky.

'The Children sure picked the right guy,' Wolfit said. 'Shame he's probably lying fried on some morgue slab out there instead of unravelling this baby for us.'

'That's not the issue,' she said quickly (sometimes she thought, maybe, she could get the hang of this Operations thing). 'Not any more.'

'So what is?'

'He was here. Whether he walked or they pushed him, this guy must have been close to the Children very, very recently. Don't you see, Larry? We don't just know what they're throwing at us now. We know where from too.'

CHAPTER 42 The Farm

'I don't get it,' Lieberman said. But when he listened to Mo's tale and watched the slow, relieved way it came out of her, he realized he did. They all did, he guessed.

They sat in a small private room in the mansion. Mo curled in a big armchair, Lieberman, Irwin, and Bevan around her in a semicircle. Not pushing her at all because they all knew there was no point. Extracting this slender strand inside her called the truth was a delicate operation. It would be so easy to snap the thing and lose it forever.

'No,' she replied, and there was no easy way to explain. The past was still hazy to her sometimes. Fleeing a shattered marriage, finding refuge, when the money was about to run out, with the Children in San Diego. These events had a loose, filmy reality. What she remembered most was Daniel Sinclair, and the way his sweet, quiet face turned sour when Annie was born. And his fists. She still flinched when she thought of those. Even Bevan, Lieberman noticed, couldn't rouse the anger to turn on her. Every life had twists and turns. Mo had taken a wrong one, fallen into Charley's arms at some low ebb, when the Children just seemed to make sense. After that, it simply became hard to leave.

The news let her off the hook. The link from NASA was screaming for attention. They had followed Schulz out to the control room, sat watching the giant monitor, and felt some huge wave of relief when Bill Ruffin's friendly face came up on the screen, grinned at them, and said, 'We're there. Apologies for the delay but this is one big place to hide. Where are our government friends?'

'Off-line,' Schulz said. 'We've got some major failure in the system in Nevada for some reason. They'll be back when they can, but we can handle this now.'

'Suits me,' Ruffin agreed, and cued up the external camera from Arcadia. Now they could see Sundog in all her terrible glory. The satellite sat above the earth like some giant insect. The sun and the light from below outlined the black, sleek form of the machine. Lieberman wondered at this collection of antennae and scanning devices just visible on its underside, tried to imagine how anyone could believe you could keep the world at peace by placing this deadly, unstable collection of toys in the sky above it. And then there was his personal contribution. For years he'd dreamed of seeing the solar wings in orbit. Now, when the moment finally arrived, it made him feel ashamed. They looked like the black, equidistant blades of a giant clover leaf, sucking the invisible energy from the cosmos and turning it into something dark and deadly.

'How far have you got to run?' Schulz asked.

'Thirty kilometres,' Ruffin replied. 'We need to cut the engines real soon and drift on in there. If we time it right, we'll be in EVA within ninety minutes or so, erecting your shade thirty minutes after that, and taking that thing down within another hour.'

'That's a hell of a long time for an EVA,' Lieberman said. 'You sure you can keep the Shuttle in range during that time without using any power?'

He remembered reading about how the EVA was the most dangerous part of any mission. There were so many things that could go wrong: meteorite storms, equipment failure, harness detachment. That was why you never, ever ventured out into that big empty space without a solid line between you and the ship. Once that was cut, you could float anywhere, be lost for good in a matter of minutes.

'Yeah,' Ruffin said. 'No problem.'

Schulz beamed at the monitors. 'Great news. What do you need?'

'Nothing right now.' Ruffin had the look of a man who needed to get on with his work. 'When we get to the EVA stage we'll take a floatcam with us. You can be a second set of eyes. I'd be grateful for that.'

'You got it,' Lieberman said.

'In the meantime maybe you people should just go and pray a little. No time for that here.' Then he cut the call.

Schulz punched some keys, to no avail. 'I wish we could get through to Helen. Damn network. Till then we just have to wait.'

'We need to talk some more,' Bevan said, looking at Mo, and she didn't object. They went into Bennett's vacant office, sat awkwardly at the table, Lieberman next to her, wishing there was something he could do.

'Ask away. I didn't betray you, Michael,' she said. 'I didn't betray anyone. Except myself. And Annie. Annie most of all.'

She reached across the table, touched his hand. 'Michael, I'm sorry if I offended you. What happened wasn't what you thought. Not directly anyway. I was scared. When I saw that woman today it was like opening a grave, lifting the lid on a coffin I thought was long buried. I couldn't shake that from my head.'

'Yeah,' he said, and squeezed her hand, then let it go. 'But you see the problem?'

She stared at the table. Bevan had turned on a video recorder, taping all this for further analysis. Schulz looked miserable again; the news from the Shuttle had lost its potency. Outside, the night was alive with the buzz of insects, frantic in the close, humid air. And she was relieved, he thought. After the initial despair, the end of this deception gave her some kind of deliverance. Deceit and pretence didn't come naturally to her. Shedding this false skin was welcome, even if she knew that, in the end, it was bound to lead to some new kind of pain.

Schulz stared at the table, not wanting to look her in the face. 'You of all people, Mo. I trusted you. I thought we could make something permanent for you here.'

'Me "of all people",' she said, smiling. 'What sort of people do you think should get involved in things Uke Gaia? Crazy ones? Criminals?'

'Inadequate people,' Bevan said quickly.

'Jeez, that sure opens things up a little. What do you think the waiting list is for that particular club?' Lieberman wondered aloud. 'One million? Two? Get real.'

She touched his hand. 'Don't, Michael. It's okay. I don't mind. I don't expect you to understand. I don't want your condolences. I don't expect your forgiveness.'

He poured himself a glass of water. Until Ruffin called them back into the game, there was nothing to do but wait. 'Lots of marriages get broken, Mo. It's a long way from there to Charley.'

'You need the context. Ask Irwin.'

'Me?' Schulz answered, offended. 'I don't know.'

She shook her head. 'But you do. You just didn't take that route. Back in the early nineties, Daniel started to live inside that damn computer. The Web was real to him, more real to him than me and Annie. I thought that I could rekindle something if I joined him there. And it's so… enveloping.'

'Yeah,' he admitted. 'Okay. I know.'

'Is this some dweeb secret that gets to be shared among the rest of us?' Lieberman asked.

'Hey,' Schulz said, 'just take my — our — words on this, will you? If you grew up in the California geek community during the nineties you knew someone who lost it. This job we do, the way we do it, you can get eaten up by these things. It can swallow you.'

Lieberman listened, eyes closed, feeling dog-tired, only half taking in the words. He was thinking about the day and this tangled jumble of images in his head: fire on the mountain, the sky ablaze. And Mo, naked, her limbs entwined with his, the hot, fevered focus between them, the way that kind of ecstasy could steal your very thoughts. He wanted to stop up his ears, he wanted to sleep. All the time he couldn't stop thinking about what was happening elsewhere. Sara leaving the hospital, going out into a world that was on the brink of chaos. This strange silence out of Vegas. Bill Ruffin and his crew floating in the emptiness of space, praying some jerry-built concoction of fabric and foam would save the day.

And somewhere, behind everything, Charley, no longer naive Charley, the genius with the appearance of some airhead bimbo. Charley with the crew cut, some cancer eating away inside her head, and this tragic, gnawing conviction that her own personal dissolution was somehow coupled, irrevocably, irretrievably, with that of the world.

'You spent two years with these people,' he said. 'Two years in which they went from being just a bunch of ecofreaks out onto the fringe to this… black place they are now. Why didn't you leave earlier?'

'Dumb question, Michael. I didn't leave Daniel. And he gave me nothing. No love. No affection. No respect. If I didn't leave him, why would I leave the Children, who gave me all those things? And more.'

'But you must have known…'

'Known what? I left there a year ago. They knew I was restless. They didn't like having Annie around after a while. She was the only kid in the place. And they told me to come here. Get a job in the project. Just stay below the parapet, talk to them when I wanted to. It was our chance to escape.'

Schulz nodded. 'And that's what you did. You did it, Mo.'

'I came here. Yes. But I didn't know they had this in mind.'

Lieberman looked at her and hoped for an honest answer. 'And if you had known?'

She laughed. 'I would have come anyway. Of course I would. Don't you understand what the power is in these things? Where the strength lies? It's in the closeness you have. That's all, and that's everything.'

'Like a family,' Lieberman said.

'Yes.' She smiled, and she did look serene, she was beautiful that night. 'Exactly like a family. But a real family. One that doesn't abandon you because it's too busy or finds something else to do. One that doesn't judge you because of who you are. One that gives you love and support and understanding whatever the circumstances. How could you betray that? How could you even think of it?'

'Yeah,' Bevan grunted. 'And so, when you found out we had someone inside, you called them, E-mailed, or something, and look what happened. That nice, kind family killed the one person we had inside who could have led us to them.'

'No!'

Bevan raised his eyebrows. 'You expect me to believe that?'

'Believe what you like. All I can do is tell you what happened. I left San Diego a year ago. We travelled through Europe first — they gave me some money and said there was no hurry — and I got here in January. It didn't take long to persuade Irwin to give me a job.'

'No,' Schulz confirmed. 'Good Unix people aren't easy to find here. I guess I should have latched on to the coincidence.'

'And when you got here,' Bevan continued, 'you contacted them when? How?'

'Once. Just after I arrived.'

'You're kidding me.'

'Once. By phone. To the house in San Diego, reverse charge. Check it with the phone company. They wanted to know who was working here. And if the project got into problems, that was when I was supposed to get in touch on a regular basis. I was meant to E-mail them, then they'd get back to me with a phone number. Charley said she wanted me to be their eyes and ears. She never said why. I never asked. I called once and then forgot about them. Until this began.'

'And we're supposed to believe that?' Bevan asked sourly.

She shook her head. 'You still don't get it. Like I said, proximity was everything. When I was there, I was a part of the Children. When Annie and I were here, all that started to fade. It seemed less important. There were other things in my life. Annie. This idea of building something for us both, leaving all that dreadful time behind. I thought…'

Lieberman wanted to be somewhere else, not watching this performance. We all reach crossroads, he told himself. We all take the wrong turning sometimes.

'I thought I'd never hear of Gaia again. I didn't want to. Just one call and they had no way of contacting me. They didn't want one; they said it would be unsafe. I forgot about them. I started to think about us. About how we moved on from all this.'

Schulz's eyes lit up. 'Hey! We got company.' The lights were winking on the terminal. Out of nowhere the screen came alive. Helen Wagner gazed back at them. Lieberman thought she looked exhausted, a little battle-weary and crabby too.

'You had a rough time over there?' he asked. 'We couldn't pick up anything through the network. You heard about the Shuttle?'

'It's bad here,' she replied. 'I'll tell you about that later, but I think we now know what Charley can throw at us. And yeah… I spoke to Bill Ruffin. That's the best news I've heard all day. It doesn't mean we let up anywhere else, though. The important thing right now is to close the net on these people. You're Mrs Sinclair?'

Mo nodded.

'I'm Helen Wagner from the CIA. I know you think we're the enemy or something but you have to forget that right now. These people have just blitzed Las Vegas. We have a lot of casualties here and I want to make sure the Children don't have the chance to do this all over again. We need your help. We need your cooperation. Frankly, I'm beyond threats. I don't care what's happened in the past. If you throw your lot in with us now, I'll see if I can help you out. You just have to take my word on that.'

'I'll do what I can.'

'That's excellent. We require names.'

'I can give you names. Joe Katayama. Anthony Tatton. Billy Jo Surtees — '

'Good. Bevan can get a list of those later. Most of all we need some clue of where they are now. Can you help us there?'

Mo shook her head. 'I wish I could. They were in San Diego when I left.'

'How were you supposed to get in touch with them?'

'Just on the standard E-mail address for their public Web site. Nothing secret. You must know what that is.'

'We do,' Helen sighed.

Mo Sinclair shook her head. 'I'm sorry. Like I said, I thought I'd left all this behind, and once they stopped hearing from me I guessed — I hoped — they wouldn't contact me again.'

'Mo,' Lieberman said, reaching out, touching her hand. 'Try. Didn't they even talk about moving somewhere else?'

She paused. 'Sometimes. I don't really recall.'

'Work on it. Did they talk about Nevada?'

She tried to remember. It was like opening the doors on a cabinet she'd forgotten: Everything inside was dusty and distant. 'Perhaps.'

One memory. 'They said something about a farm. I remember that. Joe and Charley were talking about a farm that interested them and they thought about giving it a new name. They really wanted a farm. Isolation, I guess. And it was an odd name.'

He held her hand. 'Like what?'

Mo shook her head. 'It was strange. Something like — I know this sounds stupid — Yogurt Farm.'

'In America, Mo, that is yogurt.'

'I know. That's why it sounded odd.'

'Yeah.' Lieberman grinned. 'Charley hated yogurt. But she had good taste in music. How about Yasgur's Farm?'

She smiled. 'That sounds about right. But what is it?'

'Stop making me feel old. Woodstock, 1969.'

Helen quoted on the screen, '"We are Stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."'

'My, a lady from the CIA who knows Joni Mitchell too. Some week this is.'

'It fits,' Helen said. 'So somewhere around here they have a place they've called Yasgur's Farm. And unless Bill Ruffin does his job, we've got under twelve hours to find it. You people think some more. I have to brief the President. He's on his way.'

The screen went blank. No one wanted to speak.

'The President in Vegas…' Lieberman said finally. 'It must be bad.'

Schulz fiddled with the news channels now coming back onto the monitor. 'It is.' Pictures of wrecked buildings, people in pain being rushed away on gurneys, panic, chaos.

'Is that what Charley really wanted, Mo?' Schulz asked. 'Can you believe that?'

She looked at the pictures on the screen and shook her head. 'Not the Charley I met. But I don't think that Charley is there any more. This is a different person, and like I said, once you have that closeness, people just follow. All the way.'

CHAPTER 43 The Cambridge Mandate

Tim Clarke insisted the Air Force provide him with supersonic transport to Vegas as soon as the severity of the attack became apparent. When he bawled enough, and looked as if he wouldn't stop bawling, they put him in the number two seat of an F15 and did as they were told. He was talking to people in the steaming heat of the emergency shelters set up on the city edge before Helen even knew he'd arrived. By the time she caught up with him, after an urgent, disturbing drive from Nellis through the deserted and wrecked Vegas streets, he'd left the camps of shocked, distressed people and gone to see the damage for himself.

Clarke was walking down the Strip, by the Flamingo and Caesar's, a bunch of Secret Service people following mutely in his wake, soaked in sweat, Graeme Burnley among them. Helen told the driver to stop and wait for her, then caught up with the gaggle walking behind Clarke.

Burnley stared at her when she arrived. He looked lost. 'This is one hell of a bad idea. The guy insisted on it but I'm telling you now we shouldn't be here. God knows what the radiation level is. Whether we've still got crazies in these buildings. Or what good this is doing at all when we've got bigger decisions to make. Also' — his face was red and soaked in perspiration — 'I wish to hell he'd remember that the rest of us don't fit the superman tag. You wouldn't catch me dead walking out here at this time of year, even when the weather was halfway normal. This is like marching through a furnace and it's as if he hardly notices.'

She watched Clarke tread down the middle of the deserted road, taking in the devastation on both sides. Half the Mirage was burned out, some smoke still rising from the smouldering shell. Fire crews stood back, watching the giant building from a safe distance. It looked bad. All you could hope to do in this kind of situation, she guessed, was evacuate as many people as possible. And right along the Strip, stretching away into the distance, the story seemed the same: rising smoke, damaged buildings that stood like rotten teeth against the clear blue sky, and emergency services idling away in the deserted road.

'I wouldn't worry about radiation,' she said. 'We did some tests immediately. It's flash energy. If you get it, you know about it, but five minutes later it's pretty much gone, down to a near-acceptable level. At least with this attack it is.'

'Great. That still doesn't explain why we're here. Jesus, we don't even have any film crew to get some mileage out of it.'

She just looked at him.

'Okay, okay, I'm sorry. That was an awful thing to say. And pointless too. I think the idea we can news-manage this one into some nice, comfortable place is disappearing fast.'

'I guess so,' she said, and watched Clarke ambling slowly along, taking everything in. This was the second day of his presidency. She guessed someone in that position could only move in one of two ways: get bigger or get smaller. And she didn't have any doubts about which direction Clarke intended to take.

'Helen?' the President said, turning round to look at the little group behind him.

'Sir?'

'You're okay,' he said, smiling. 'That's good. Come and walk with me. And don't worry about the traffic'

Burnley shot her a caustic glance, and she strode up to Clarke. On his call they picked up the pace and put a little extra space between them and the followers.

'Hell of a place for a private conversation,' the President said. 'Walking down the middle of the Strip at four in the afternoon.'

'If you want this to be private, sir.'

He groaned. 'Jesus. You people are so stiff it must make it hard getting up in the morning. So? What happened?'

'She turned up the controls. Focused it all somehow. We wondered what we'd get if she managed to pull everything together. Now we have the answer.'

'But what caused this?'

'We're working on the fine detail, sir. Think of it as a combination of fire, a powerful burst of radiation, and some odd electromagnetic effects too. A cocktail, if you like.'

'It looks like a bomb site, Helen.'

'And it is, of a kind. Except that some of the injuries go beyond mere blast effects.'

Clarke stared at her with that look she was coming to recognize, the one that said: Tell me now, because we don't let up until you come clean.

'It looks like we have some form of spontaneous combustion, sir. Of people. I'd like to leave it at that. For now.'

'Jesus…'

'And while I'm dealing out the bad news, I should say that this is only a foretaste of what she'll have tomorrow. When we roll up to the zenith, the energy out there will be much greater than we have at the moment. This could be just a sideshow compared with what's to come. Today she burned a track a mile or so wide down the city. What she can throw at us when the cycle peaks will probably be four, five, even ten times that magnitude.'

Treasure Island was coming up on the left. The two ships in the man-made lake outside were gutted, fire-eaten wrecks, half-sunk in the lagoon.

'And this was meant to be an instrument of deterrence?' Clarke wondered.

She shook her head. 'No one seriously suggested that, sir. Not when you go into the SDI papers in any detail. We knew what we were building all along.'

He kicked a stray Coke can with some force. 'Bull. Some people knew. But you didn't. Your predecessor didn't.'

'I guess not. I'm sorry, sir. If there's something you think I should be doing that I'm not…'

'Forget it. I'm just a grouchy old bastard sometimes. You ask anyone who was in the Gulf with me. Amazed the papers didn't pick up on that one when I became running mate. Maybe that was one way being black helped. I mean, what else did they have to say?'

'That's not fair. Or worthy of you. Sir.'

'No,' he said, dark eyes shining right into her. 'And thank you for pointing that out.'

'This meeting you've called…'

'Yeah. Thirty minutes to go. I know.'

'What's the purpose of it? We have as much work under way as we can and the lines of reporting are in place. Also I think we are starting to get somewhere. From what I hear, you have everybody in attendance. The chiefs of staff, us, the Bureau, these federal emergency people Levine keeps talking about. More people from Washington than I ever knew existed.'

He was staring at the shell of the big Treasure Island casino. 'Did a fund-raiser there last year. Boy, was that fun. Those guys never expected to see me coming back as President. Or in circumstances like this.'

'Sir. May I say something?'

'You don't sound like the kind of person who's easy to stop.'

'You have to lose the race issue. It could cloud your judgement.'

'My judgement.'

'Yes.'

He nodded, and she felt a little foolish. What was going through Clarke's mind just then was nothing that simple or visible. 'Maybe you're right. And maybe not. Anyway, you asked a good question. Why are all these people coming here? You ever hear of the Cambridge Mandate?'

'No.'

'Don't feel ashamed. I hadn't either, and it is supposed to be a secret. But I've been doing a lot of reading recently. Mainly because I don't like being surrounded by people who know a whole lot more about what's going on than me. The Cambridge Mandate goes back to the Kennedy administration. Bay of Pigs. All that nice part of our history when a lot of people in Washington suddenly got real scared that nuclear war was around the corner. Kennedy was in Cambridge at the time, which is where it got its name. What it did was pull together all the civil defence plans that had been put in place over the years and put them into a rounded whole. A neat, tidy set of executive orders that you can employ when the occasion arises and throw as tight a grip around this country as you can get. Martial law by any other name. And mark the timing of this. The Cambridge Mandate was designed to be used before the bombs started to fall. They were all Boy Scouts back then: Be prepared.'

'Is this still around?'

'Oh yes. Updated and approved by every one of my predecessors, including Rollinson, not that I knew anything about it, of course. Bill always did think he was immortal.'

She nodded. 'You have to have something like that. Even with the Cold War over. I didn't realize it was quite so tightly organized, but I rather expected something would be in place.'

'Sure, and that's what these guys are bringing down for me to sign. They don't want to wait to see what happens with the Shuttle. Their advice is we should put up the barricades now, take out the current Federal Defense Act, and tie the nation up nice and tightly this very minute.'

"This bothers you?'

Clarke looked behind them, saw the distance they were keeping from the Secret Service people. It was a false security, he knew that. If they wanted, they could pick up the conversation anyway. 'Of course it bothers me. Once that goes into place, this country is to all intents and purposes under a form of martial law. We take control of the telecommunications networks, install mandatory censorship in the news media. All existing forms of government are suspended and we work on the framework of the civil emergency network, which, in case you didn't know, is ostensibly answerable to local county officials and, in the end, state governors. Hell, I even have to hand over a whole piece of my powers to some new federal emergency council on the grounds that there's no other way to counterbalance the loss of democratic control elsewhere. This is a big thing. Every last detail is there, right down to the disposal of human remains. And it's open-ended. Think about that.'

She tried to imagine what this world would be like. What the alternative might be. 'In the short term, it might be a good thing. We don't need any distractions right now. We have to track those people down, not get pulled off-line by civil unrest issues.'

'Yeah. I know. But what worries me is this: How often do you see people voluntarily handing power back these days? If the Children do get to cause us some damage, how long is it before we return to some kind of normalcy? And if they don't, what happens then? Do we all tear up the piece of paper and go back to what we were doing? As everyone keeps telling me, this Pascal woman is smart. Isn't it possible we're just playing into her hands? By treating this as the end of the world, maybe we prompt the sort of response she's trying to get.'

'Sir, if you are going to impose some kind of order, you need to do it before the emergency if that's possible.'

'Yeah. You're the millionth person to make that point to me today.'

'It's a question of contingency, Mr President.'

'Really? You're right, up to a point. But think about it. In 1961 you could walk state troopers down the street and tell people to stay indoors and believe every word Walter Cronkite said on the one TV channel that was still broadcasting. You think that's a possibility now? Or is some guy going to come at you with a gun and decide to take advantage of the situation and do what he wanted to do all along? Or post some crap on the Net that scares the living shit out of everyone — and there's no way we can close that thing down entirely, believe me, not short of cutting off the power supply to the entire nation. Think of some of the right-wing crazies out there. You can imagine what they'd be saying. We've got a nigger in the White House who's taken our birthright away. We'd have so-called independent states springing up everywhere the moment they heard that Washington was taking over everything and running it through whoever we felt like. And like I keep asking, in a way, isn't that what these Gaia people want?'

They were at a big empty crossroads. No people. No cars. Just barren roads running off into the flat desert nowhere, and the husks of burned-out, shattered buildings. She shivered, even in the intense heat. What Clarke was talking about gave her pause for thought. 'I don't know, sir. That's your call.'

'Oh yeah, I'm aware of that. This is one big switch we're talking about throwing. So tell me. Is the Shuttle going to work? And if it doesn't, are we going to catch these people some other way?'

She thought about Yasgur's Farm and the woman in Mallorca,

Martin Chalk and fireballs raining from the sky. And, more than anything, about three astronauts edging their way toward Sundog in orbit above them.

'You bet. The Shuttle can do it. If that fails for some reason, we'll get them ourselves. They're here. Everything points to that. This was as much a test site, for them as a warning for the rest of us. They're watching. And we will track them down. I can't guarantee you this will blow over without some damage. Lieberman thinks we would probably be in line for that even without the Children. But we will find them. We will put a lid on this thing.'

And nearly added: Trust me.

Clarke smiled at her and said, 'Well, in that case, I think you've made up my mind.'

Twenty minutes later, Helen Wagner followed mutely behind Graeme Burnley as they entered the conference room at Nellis. Clarke walked in, looked at the assembly of suits and uniforms, looked at the pile of executive orders awaiting his signature, and said, 'Gentlemen, you can file these papers for another time. We're here to beat these people. Not give in to them.'

He listened to the murmur run around the room, wondered who would be the first to object. Much to his surprise, it was Graeme Burnley, who laid his pen on his notepad and sighed, like a man at the end of his tether.

'Mr President. This is your decision. You're the chief of the Armed Forces. What you decide, we will do. But I have to warn you — '

'Warn me, Graeme?' Clarke replied, half-amazed. 'Is that what I'm paying you for?'

'I'm paid to tell things how I see them. What you're suggesting, this wait-and-see idea, it runs counter to the advice of everyone. We have discussed this and there really is-'

'Mr President,' Ben Levine interrupted, 'we're twelve hours away from what could be the worst global disaster imaginable. We need to act now. Not wait until the last minute.'

Clarke watched the men in uniform nodding. 'Really, Mr Levine?'

'Yes, sir. This is plain practical preparation. And we're all of one mind on this.'

'No we're not,' Dan Fogerty interjected. 'None of you even asked my mind. You just took it for granted I'd go along.

The President's right. This is premature. We're accepting defeat before we've even given the game a good run.'

'Twelve hours, Dan,' Levine objected. 'After that we could lose everything we've got to get the message over. TV. The phone system. Everything. You want to try putting some order into this country after that?'

Helen looked at Levine and knew, from the stony certainty on his face, that he wanted no interruptions.

'No, sir.'

Every face in the room looked at her. She didn't even try to read Levine's. Some bridges needed burning. 'That just isn't correct. Even if we don't manage to intervene before the zenith, we've still got some time. The best guess we have is that the zenith is close to midday UTC. That's six am in Washington. It's not going to get hot enough or high enough to give the Children the potential for major damage in the US until the sun's moved around a little, say four hours or so. We don't have to rush into anything right now.'

'Thank you, Miss Wagner,' Clarke said. 'I hear what you all say and I agree. My decision is we wait, gentlemen. We wait and we work. Now, is somebody going to tell me how we find those people out there?'

Dan Fogerty raised his eyebrows at Levine, who was going red across the table, then shuffled the report in front of him, stood up, and began to speak.