Distraction

6

Greta arrived after midnight, in an unmanned cab. Oscar checked his door monitor. A Greenhouse nor’easter had come in, and fat snowflakes swirled in the conical glow of alerted streetlights. A wan-dering police drone zipped behind Greta’s head like a black leather swallow. Oscar unlocked his door, peering with a game and cheery grin from behind its bulletproof facing.

She stamped in with a face like a thundercloud. He rapidly abandoned the notion of embracing her. “You didn’t have any trouble getting here, I hope?”

“In Boston? Heavens no.” She yanked her hat off and knocked snow from its brim. “Boston’s so civilized.”

“There was a little trouble in the street earlier.” Os-car paused delicately. “Nothing too serious. Tell me all about your conference.”

“I’ve been out with Bellotti and Hawkins. They were trying to get me drunk.” She was, Oscar realized belatedly, very drunk indeed. She was plastered. He re-lieved her of her coat like a nurse removing a bandage. Greta was dressed in her best: knee-length woolen skirt, sensible shoes, green cotton blouse.

He hung her hat and rumpled coat inside the entrance alcove. “Bellotti and Hawkins would be the gentlemen study-ing fibrils,” he prompted.

Her scowl faded. “Well, it’s a pretty good conference. It’s just a bad night. Bellotti was buying us drinks, and Hawkins was shaking me down for lab results. I don’t mind talking results before publication, but those guys don’t play fair. They don’t want to reveal their really hot stuff” Her lips thinned with contempt. “It might have commer-cial potential.”

“I see.”

“They’re industry hustlers. They’re all cagey, and edgy, and streetwise. They’re hopeless.”

He led her through the dayroom and snapped on the kitchen lights. In the sudden cozy glow, her face looked congealed and waxy. Smudgy lipstick. Loopy-looking crisp dark hair. The unplucked eye-brows were especially unfortunate.

She closely examined the pedestal chairs, the chromed table, the ceramic rangetop island, the built-in resonators. “This is some kind of kitchen you have here,” she said wonderingly. “It’s so… clean. You could do labwork in this kitchen.”

“Thanks. ”

She settled with drunken caution into the white plastic shell of a Saarinen tulip chair.

“You have every right to complain,” Oscar said. “You’re sur-rounded by exploiters and morons.”

“They’re not morons, they’re very bright guys. It’s just … Well, I don’t do industrial work. Science is not about the money. Basic science is all about … Basic research, you see, it’s supposed to be for…” She waved one hand irritably. “What the hell was it?”

“For the public good?” Oscar suggested suavely.

“Yeah, that was it! The public good! I suppose that sounds totally naive to you. But I do know one thing-I’m not supposed to be stuffing my own bank account while the taxpayers pick up my tab.”

Oscar dug through the glossy sliding shelves of a Kuramata cabi-net. “Would a coffee help? I’ve got freeze-dried.”

The scowl returned, settling into her eyebrows as if tattooed there. “You can’t do real science and be a businessman on your week-ends. If you’re serious about it, there aren’t any weekends.”

“This is a weekend, Greta.”

“Oh.” She gazed at him with an alcohol-fueled melange of surprise and regret. “Well, I can’t stay with you for the whole weekend. There’s a hot seminar tomorrow morning at nine. ‘Cytoplasm Domains.’”

“Cytoplasm sounds very compelling.”

“I’m here for tonight, anyway. Let’s have a little drink together.”

She opened her purse. “Oh no. I forgot my gin. It’s in my bag.” She blinked. “Oh no, Oscar, I forgot my overnight bag! I left it back at the hotel…”

“You also forgot I don’t drink,” Oscar said.

She cradled her forehead on the heels of her hands.

“It’s fine,” Oscar said. “Just forget about work for a minute. I have a krewe. We can supply anything you need.”

She was havinga bad moment at the kitchen table: doubt and bitterness. “Let me show you my house,” Oscar told her cheerfully. “It’ll be fun.”

He led her into the dayroom. It had a Piet Heim elliptical coffee table, steel-and-birchwood cantilever chairs, an inflatable vinyl divan.

“You’ve got modern art,” she said.

“That’s my Kandinsky. Composition VIII, from 1923.” He touched the frame, adjusting it by a hair’s width. “I don’t know why they still call this ‘modern art’ when it’s a hundred and twenty years old.”

She carefully studied the glowing canvas, glanced at Oscar medi-tatively, examined the painting again. “Why do they call this stuff ‘art’ at all? It’s just a big mess of angles and blobs.”

“I know it seems that way to you, but that’s because you don’t have any taste.” Oscar restrained a sigh. “Kandinsky knew all the big period art krewes: Blaue Reiter group, Surrealists, Suprematists, Fu-turists … Kandinsky was huge.”

“Did it cost you a lot of money?” Clearly she hoped not.

“No, I picked it up for peanuts when the Guggenheim threw a fire sale. All the art between 1914 and 1989 — you know, the Com-munist Period, the core of the twentieth century — that’s all totally out of fashion nowadays. Kandinsky is the very opposite of ‘modern art’ now, but you know, I find him absolutely relevant. Wassily Kandinsky really speaks to me. You know… if Kandinsky were alive today… I really think he might have understood all this.”

She shook her head woozily. “’Modern art’ … How could they get away with all that? It’s like some huge, ugly scam.” She sneezed suddenly. “Sorry. My allergies are acting up.”

“Come with me.”

He led her to his media center. He was particularly proud of this room. It was a modern political war room done in a period idiom. Chairs of pierced aluminum were stacked against the wall, there were modular storage units, swarms of flat displays. Danish shelving, a caster-trolley, bright plastic Kartell office baskets. Handsome Milanese lamps… No frills, no furbelows, no wasted motion. Everything pruned back, all very efficient and sleek.

“This looks all right,” she said. “I could work in a place like this. ”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. I hope you’ll have that chance.”

She smiled. “Why not? I like it here. This place is very you.” He was touched. “That’s very sweet, but I should be honest about it … It’s not my interior design. I mean, that Kandinsky canvas was certainly my choice, but after I sold my start-up company, I bought this house, and I brought in a professional designer… I was very focused about my house then. We worked on this place for months. Giovanna was very good about it, we used to absolutely haunt the antique markets…”

“ ‘Giovanna,’ ” she said. “What a lovely name. She must have been very elegant.”

“She was, but it didn’t work out.”

Greta gazed with sudden waspish attention at the tracklights and the gleaming tower of chairs. “And then there was that other per-son — the journalist. She must have loved this media room.”

“Clare lived here! This was her home.”

“She’s gone to Holland now, right?”

“Yes, she’s gone. That didn’t work out, either.”

“Why don’t they work out for you, Oscar?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He jammed his hands in his pockets. “That’s an excellent question, isn’t it?”

“Well,” she said, “maybe it’s an excellent question, but maybe I shouldn’t have asked it.”

“No, Greta, I like it when you show up drunk and confronta-tional.”

He crossed his arms. “Let me get you fully up to speed here, all right? You see, I’m the product of unusual circumstances. I grew up in a very special milieu. Logan Valparaiso’s dream home. A classic Holly-wood mansion. Tennis courts. Palm trees. Monogrammed everything, zebra skins, and gold fixtures. A big playground for Logan’s friends, all these maquiladora millionaires and South American dope czars. My dad had the worst taste in the world. I wanted this place to be differ-ent.”

“What’s different about it?”

“Nothing,” he said bitterly. “I wanted my home to be genuine. But this place has never been real. Because I have no family. No one has ever lived in here who cared enough about me to stay. In fact, I’m rarely even here myself I’m always out on the road. So this place is a fraud. It’s an empty shell. I’ve tried my very best, but it’s all been an evil fantasy, it’s completely failed me.” He shrugged. “So, welcome home.”

She looked stricken. “Look, I didn’t say any of that.”

“Well, that’s what you were thinking.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“I agree that I can’t outthink you. Not from a dead start. But I do know how you feel.”

“You don’t know that, either.”

“Oh yes I do. Of course I do. I know it by the way you talk. By the way you move your hands. I can see it in the way you look.” He smiled. “Because I’m a politician.”

She put her hand over her own mouth.

Then, without warning, she embraced him and printed a damp kiss on his upper lip. He slid his arms around her lean torso. She felt magnetic, hypnotic, absolutely compelling.

She bent backward in his tightening grip and laughed.

He pulled her toward the inflated couch. They fell together on it with a bounce and squeak. He buried his face in the sweet juncture of her neck and shoulder.

She slid her narrow hand through the open collar of his shirt. He nuzzled her jawline. Those wondrous cavities beneath her earlobes. The authentic idiosyncrasy in the tendons of her neck.

Their lips parted stickily. She pulled back half an inch. “I like feeling jealous,” she said. “That’s new for me.”

“I could explain all that, you know.”

“Stop explaining. I’d bet anything Clare’s dresses are still in your bedroom closet.” She laughed. “Show me, I want to see.”

Once upstairs, she spun in place, swinging her purse, tottering just a little. “Now, this room is amazing. Your closets are bigger than my dorm room.”

He set to work on his shoes. He stripped off his socks. One, two. He started on his cuff links. Why did it always take forever to strip? Why couldn’t clothes simply vanish, so people could get on with it? Clothes always vanished in movies.

“Are these walls really white suede? You have leather wallpaper?”

He glanced over. “You need some help undressing?”

“That’s all right. You don’t have to rip my clothes off more than once.”

Six endless minutes later he lay gasping in a nest of sheets. She sidled off to the bathroom, her hairdo smashed and her collarbones flushed. He heard her turning on the bidet, then every faucet in the room — the shower, the tub, the white sink, the black sink. Greta was experimenting, running all the local equipment. He lay there breath-ing deeply and felt weirdly gratified, like a small yet brilliant child who had snatched candy from under a door with a yardstick.

She came padding from the shower, black hair lank and dripping, her eyes as bright as a weasel’s. She crept into bed and embraced him, clammy, and frozen-footed, and reeking of upscale shampoo. She held him and said nothing. He fell asleep as if tumbling into a pit.

He woke later, head buzzing and muddled. Greta was standing before an open closet door, examining herself in its inset full-length mirror. She was wearing panties, and a pair of his socks, which she had jammed, inside out, onto her narrow, chilly feet.

She held a dress before herself and studied the effect. Oscar sud-denly recognized the dress. He had bought Clare that sundress because she looked so lovely in yellow. Clare had hated the dress, he now realized groggily. She’d always hated the dress. Clare even hated yel-low.

“What was all that noise just now?” he croaked.

“Some idiot banging the door downstairs,” Greta said. She dropped the dress on the floor, in a pile of half a dozen others. “The cops arrested him.” She picked out a beaded evening gown. “Go back to sleep.”

Oscar turned in place, scrunched the pillow, grabbed for slum-ber, and missed. He gathered awareness and watched her through slit-ted eyes. It was half past four in the morning.

“Aren’t you sleepy?” he said.

She caught his eye in the mirror, surprised to see him still awake.

She turned out the closet light, crossed the room silently, in darkness, and slid into bed.

“What have you been doing all this time?” he murmured.

“I’ve been exploring your house.”

“Any big discoveries?”

“Yes, I discovered what it means to be a rich guy’s girlfriend.” She sighed. “No wonder people want the job.”

He laughed. “What about my situation? I’m the boy-toy of a Nobel Prize winner.”

“I was watching you sleep,” she said wistfully. “You look so sweet. ”

“Why do you say that?”

“You don’t have an agenda while you’re sleeping.”

“Well, I have an agenda now.” He slid his hand over her bony hip and obtained a firm, intimate grip. “I’m a hundred percent agenda. I’m going to change your life. I’m going to transform you. I’m going to empower you.”

She stirred against the sheets. “How is that weird little miracle supposed to happen?”

“Tomorrow I’m taking you to meet my dear friend, Senator Bambakias.”

Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar’s majordomo, had a grocery delivery shipped to the house at eight AM. Yosh was not a man to be deterred by the mere fact that he was hundreds of miles from the scene. He had a keyboard and a list of Oscar’s requirements, so the electric hand of the net economy had dropped four boxes of expensive shrink-wraps at Oscar’s doorstep.

Oscar set up the new air filter in the breakfast nook. This fi-nessed Greta’s allergy problem. Allergies were very common among Collaboratory workers; the laundered air was so pure that it failed to properly challenge people’s immune systems, which hence became hyperreactive.

Then Oscar tied an apron over his lounge pajamas and put the kitchen to work. Results were gratifying. Oscar and Greta tore through lox, and bagels, and waffles, with lashings of juice and coffee. When the ravenous edge was blunted, they toyed with triangled rye toast and lump fish caviar.

Oscar gazed affectionately across the table’s massive flowered centerpiece. Things were going so well. He believed in breakfasts. Morning-after breakfasts were far more intimate and emotionally en-gaging than any number of romantic dinners. He’d been through a horrid gamut of breakfasts: breakfasts that were hungover, shame-ridden, full of unspoken dread or politeness stretched tighter than a banjo string; but breakfast with Greta was a signal success. Steamed clean in a white terry bathrobe and socketed in her Saarinen chair, she was a mutant swan in freshwater.

She smoothed a black mass of caviar across her toast and licked a stray dab from her fingertip. “I’m gonna miss that cytoplasm panel.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve bought you the full set of conference tapes. They’ll ship in the morning set at lunch. You can speed through all the boring parts in the media room.”

“No one goes to conferences to watch the tapes. All the action’s in the halls and the poster sessions. I need to go back there. I need to confer with my colleagues.”

“No, Greta, that’s not what you need today. You have a higher priority. You need to go to Cambridge with me, and confer with a United States Senator. Donna is arriving any minute; she’s been shop-ping, and she’s going to do you over.”

“Who is Donna?”

“Donna Nunez is one of my krewe. She’s an image consultant.”

“I thought you left your krewe in Texas at the lab.”

“No, I brought Donna with me. Besides, I’m in constant touch with my krewe. They haven’t been abandoned, they’re very busy back there-laying some groundwork. As for Donna, she’s been devoting a lot of thought to this project. You’ll be in very good hands.”

Greta put down her toast with a resolute look. “Well, I don’t do that sort of thing. I don’t have time for an image.”

“Rita Levi-Montalcini did.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about her?”

“You once told me that this woman was very important to you.

So, I put my oppo-research people on her. Now I’m an expert on your role model, Dr. Rita. Rita was a Nobelist, and a neuroscientist, and she was a major player in her country’s research effort. But Dr. Rita understood how to handle her role. She dressed every day like a Milanese jewel.”

“You don’t do science by dressing up.”

“No, you run science by dressing up.”

“But I don’t want to! I don’t want to run a damned thing! I just want to work in my lab! Why can’t you get that through your head? Why won’t anyone let me do my work anymore? If you’d just let me do the things I’m really good at, I wouldn’t have to go through any of this!”

Oscar smiled. “I bet that felt marvelous. Can we talk like adults now?”

She snorted.

“Don’t think that I’m being frivolous. You are being frivolous. You are a national celebrity. You’re not some ragged grad student who can hide out in your nice giant test tube. Rita Levi-Montalcini wore tailored lab coats, and did her hair, and had real shoes. And so will you. Relax and eat your caviar.”

The door emitted a ring. Oscar patted his lips with a napkin, belted his dressing gown, stepped into his slippers.

Donna had arrived, with heaps of luggage and a set of suit bags. She had brought two winter-clad Boston high-maintenance girls in a second taxi. The three women were having an animated chat with a young Anglo man. Oscar recognized the man — he didn’t know his name, but he knew the face, the cane, and the support shoes. This stranger was a local guy, a neighborhood regular.

Oscar unsealed his door. “How good of you to come. Welcome. You can take your equipment up to the prep room. We’ll be sending your client in presently.”

Donna ushered her charges upstairs, chatting briskly in Spanglish. Oscar found himself confronting the man with the cane. “May I help you, sir?”

“Yeah. My name’s Kevin Hamilton. I manage the apartment block up the street.”

“Yes, Mr. Hamilton?”

“I wonder if we could have a word together, about all these guys who’ve been showing up trying to kill you.”

“I see. Do come in.” Oscar shut the door carefully behind his new guest. “Let’s talk this over in my office.” He paused, noting Hamilton’s cane and the clumsy orthopedic shoes. “Never mind, we can talk downstairs.”

He led the limping Hamilton into the dayroom. Greta appeared suddenly, barefoot and in her bathrobe.

“All right, where do you want me?” she said resignedly.

Oscar pointed. “Upstairs, first door on your left.” Hamilton offered a gallant little salute with his cane. “Hello,” Greta told him, and trudged up the stairs.

Oscar led Hamilton into the media room and unstacked an aluminum chair for him. Hamilton sat down with obvious relief “Good-looking babe,” he remarked.

Oscar ignored him and sat in a second chair.

“I wouldn’t have disturbed you this morning,” Hamilton said, “but we don’t see a lot of assassinations in this neighborhood, generally.”

“No. ”

“Yesterday, I myself got some mail urging me to kill you.”

“Really! You don’t say.”

Hamilton scratched at his sandy hair, which had a jutting cowlick and a part like a lightning bolt. “You know, you and I have never met before, but I used to see you around here pretty often, in and out at all hours, with various girlfriends. So when this junkbot email told me you were a child pornographer, I had to figure that was totally de-tached from reality.”

“I think I can follow your reasoning,” Oscar said. “Please go on.”

“Well, I ran some backroute tracing, found the relay server in Finland, cracked that, traced it back to Turkey… I was download-ing the Turkish activity logs when I heard some gunfire in the street. Naturally, I checked out the local street monitors, analyzed all the movement tags on the neighborhood CCTV… That was pretty late last night. But by then, I was really ticked off. So I pulled an all-nighter at the keyboard.” Hamilton sighed. “And, well, I took care of it for you.”

Oscar stared in astonishment. “You ‘took care of it’?”

“Well, I couldn’t locate the program itself, but I found its pushfeeds. It gets all its news off a service in Louisiana. So, I spoofed it. I informed the thing that I’d killed you. Then I forged a separate news release announcing your death, and I faked the headers and fed it in. It sent me a nice thank-you note. That should take care of your problem. That thing is as dumb as a brick.”

Oscar mulled this over, thoughtfully. “Could I get you a little something, Kevin? Juice? An espresso, maybe?”

“Actually, I’m kind of bushed. I’m thinking I’ll turn in now. I just thought I’d walk down the street and give you the news first.”

“Well, that’s very good news you’ve glven me. It’s excellent news. You’ve done me quite a favor here.”

“Aw, think nothing of it,” Kevin demurred. “Any good neigh-bor would have done the same thing. If he had any serious program-ming skills, that is. Which nobody much does, nowadays.”

“Forgive me for asking, but how did you come by these pro-gramming skills?”

Hamilton nudged his chin with the handle of his cane. “Learned them from my dad, to tell the truth. Dad was a big-time coder on Route 128 before the Chinese smashed the info economy.”

“Are you a professional programmer, Kevin?”

“Are you kidding? There aren’t any professional programmers. These losers who call themselves sysadmins nowadays, they’re not pro-grammers at all! They just download point-and-click canned stuff off some pirate site, and shove it into the box.”

Oscar nodded encouragement.

Hamilton waved his cane. “The art of computing hasn’t ad-vanced in ten years! It can’t move anymore, ’cause there’s no commer-cial potential left to push it. The Euros have settled all the net protocols nice and neat, and the Chinese always pirate anything you publish… So the only guys who write serious code nowadays are ditzy computer scientists. And nomads — they’ve always got time on their hands. And, you know, various white-guy hacker crooks.” Hamilton yawned. “But I have a lot of trouble with my feet, see. So coding helps me pass the time. Once you understand how to code, it’s really kind of interesting work.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you? I feel very much in your debt.”

“Well, yeah, there is one thing. I’m chairman of the local neigh-borhood watch, so they’re probably gonna bother me a lot about this shooting incident. It would be good if you could come over later and help me reassure my tenants.”

“I’d be delighted to help you.”

“Good deal, then.” Hamilton stood up with a stoical wince.

“Let me see you out, sir.”

After Hamilton’s shuffling departure, Oscar swiftly transferred the contents of his laptop into the house system and set to immediate work. He sent notes to Audrey Avizienis and Bob Argow in Texas, urging them to run immediate oppo scans on his neighbor. It was not that he distrusted Kevin Hamilton — Oscar prided himself on his open-minded attitude toward Anglos — but news so wonderful seemed very hard put to be true.

At 11:15, Oscar and Greta took a cab to Bambakias’s office in Cam-bridge. “You know something?” she told him. “This suit isn’t as stiff as it looks. It’s really very cozy.”

“Donna’s a true professional.”

“And it fits me perfectly. How could it fit so well?”

“Oh, any smart surveillance scanner can derive body measure-ments. That was a military-intelligence app at first — it just took a while to work its way up to haute couture.”

They sped across the Longfellow Bridge, over the Charles River basin. Yesterday’s snow was already half gone to slush on the slopes of the Greenhouse dikes. Greta gazed out the taxi window at the distant pilings of the Science Park. Donna’s hired girls had done the eye-brows. Sleek, arched eyebrows gave Greta’s narrow face a cast of terri-fying intellectual potency. The hair had real shape to it now, and some not-to-be-trifled-with gloss. Greta radiated expertise. She really looked like she counted.

“Things are so different here in Boston,” she said. “Why?”

“Politics,” he said. “The ultra-rich run Boston. And Boston’s rich people mean well — that’s the difference. They have civic pride. They’re patricians.”

“Do you want the whole country to be like this? Clean streets and total surveillance?”

“I just want my country to function. I want a system that works. That’s all.”

“Even if it’s very elitist and shrink-wrapped?”

“You’re not the one to criticize there. You live in the ultimate gated community. It’s even airtight.”

The office of Alcott Bambakias was in a five-story building near Inman Square. The place had once been a candy factory, then a Por-tuguese social club; nowadays it belonged to Bambakias’s international design and construction firm.

They left the cab and entered the building. Oscar hung his hat and overcoat on a Duchampian bottle-rack tree. They waited for clearance in the first-floor reception area, which boasted six scale models of elegant Chinese skyscrapers. The Chinese were the last na-tion still fully alive to the rampant possibilities of skyscrapers, and Bambakias was one of the very few American architects who could design skyscrapers in a Chinese idiom. Bambakias had done extremely well for himself in the Chinese market. His reputation in Europe was similarly stellar, long preceding his rather grudging fame at home in America. He’d done swooping Italian sports arenas, stolid German dike complexes, a paranoid Swiss eco-survivalist compound… He had even done a few Dutch commissions, before the Cold War had made that impossible.

Leon Sosik arrived to escort them. Sosik was a portly man in his sixties with prizefighter’s shoulders, red suspenders, a silk tie. Sosik rarely wore a hat, since he proudly sported a fine head of hair — successfully treated male pattern baldness. He looked Oscar up and down. “How are tricks, Oscar?”

“Tricks are lovely. May I introduce Dr. Greta Penninger. Dr. Penninger, this is Leon Sosik, the Senator’s chief of staff.”

“We’ve heard so much about you, Doctor,” said Sosik, gently gripping Greta’s newly manicured fingertips. “I wish we were meet-ing under better circumstances.”

“How is the Senator?” Oscar said.

“Al has been better,” Sosik said. “Al is taking this hard. Al is taking this very hard.”

“Well, he’s eating, isn’t he?”

“Not so you’d notice.”

Oscar was alarmed. “Look, you announced he was eating. The hunger strike is over now. The guy should be wolfing raw horsemeat. Why the hell isn’t he eating?”

“He says his stomach aches. He says… well, he says a lot of things. I gotta warn you, you can’t take everything Al says as gospel right now.” Sosik sighed heavily. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him. His wife says you’re great at that.” Sosik reached absently into his trouser pocket. “Dr. Penninger, do you mind if I debug you? Normally we’d have our new security guy doing this, but he’s still in Washington. ”

“That’s quite all right,” Greta said.

Sosik swept the air around her body like a weary bishop sprin-kling holy water. His device registered nothing in particular.

“Debug me too,” Oscar said. “I insist.”

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Sosik said, pursuing the ritual. “We’ve had Al bugged top to bottom for weeks. His nervous system’s bugged, his bloodstream’s bugged, his stomach is bugged, his colon is bugged. He did public MRI scans, he did PET-scans, he drank tagged apple juice — the inside of his carcass was a goddamn public circus. And when we finally got him off all the monitors, that’s when he goes haywire.”

“The hunger strike got great coverage, Leon. I’m giving you that.”

Sosik put tile scanner away. “Sure, but what is it with that crazy scumbag in Louisiana? How the hell did that ever get on the agenda? Al is an architect! We could have stuck with public-works issues, and done just fine.”

“You let him talk you into the idea,” Oscar said.

“I knew it was a goofy idea! It’s just … Well, for Al it made sense. Al’s the kind of guy who can get away with that kind of thing.”

Sosik led them up a glass-and-plastic elevator. Bambakias had caused the former fifth floor to cease to exist, leaving a cavernous contemporary hangar with exposed water pipes, airducts, and elevator cabling, all tastefully done-over in tangerine, turquoise, peach, and Prussian blue.

Thirty-five people lived within the offices, Bambakias’s profes-sional krewe. It was both a communal residence and a design center. Sosik led them past ergonomic office chairs, platelike kevlar display tables, and twitching heaps of cybernetic Archiblocks. It was cold out-side, so squishy little rivulets of tame steam warmed the bubbled membranes underfoot.

A corner office had been outfitted as a combination media room and medical center. The health monitors were inert now, and lined against a wall, but the screens were alive and silent, flicking methodi-cally over their feeds.

The Senator was lying naked and facedown on a massage table, with a towel across his rump. A krewe masseur was working at his neck and shoulders.

Oscar was shocked. He’d known that the near-total hunger strike had cost Bambakias a lot of weight, but he hadn’t realized what that meant to human flesh. Bambakias seemed to have aged ten years. He was wearing his skin like a jumpsuit.

“Good to see you, Oscar,” Bambakias said.

“May I introduce Dr. Penninger,” Oscar said.

“Not another doctor,” the Senator groaned.

“Dr. Penninger is a federal science researcher.”

“Oh, of course.” Bambakias sat up in bed, vaguely adjusting his towel. His hand was like a damp clump of sticks. “That’s enough, Jackson… Bring my friends a couple of… what have we got? Bring ’em some apple juice.”

“We could use a good lunch,” Oscar said. “I’ve promised Dr. Penninger some of your Boston chowder.”

Bambakias blinked, his eyes sunken and rimmed with discolor.

“My chef’s a little out of practice lately.”

“Out of practice on the special chowder?” Oscar chided. “How can that be? Is he dead?”

Bambakias sighed. “Jackson, see to it that my fat campaign man-ager gets some goddanm chowder.” Bambakias glanced down at his shrunken hands, studied their trembling with deep disinterest. “What were we talking about?”

“Dr. Penninger and I are here to discuss science policy.”

“Of course. Then I’ll get dressed.” Bambakias tottered to his bony feet and fled the room, exiting through a sliding shoji screen. They heard him call out feebly for his image consultant.

A fluted curtain shriveled upward like an eyelid, revealing a lucid gush of winter sunlight through the glass blocks. The corner office was a minor miracle of air and light; even half-empty, the space some-how felt complete and full.

A small furry robot entered the office with a pair of plastic pack-ets in its tubular arms. It placed the packets neatly on the carpet, and left.

The abandoned packages writhed and heaved, with a muted in-ternal symphony of scrunches and springs. Geodesic sticks and cabling flashed like vector graphics beneath the translucent upholstery. The packets suddenly became a pair of armchairs.

Greta opened her new, executive-style purse and touched a tissue to her nose. “You know, the air is very nice in here.”

Bambakias returned in gray silk trousers and undershirt, shad-owed by a silent young woman, her arms laden with shoes, shirt, and suspenders. “Where’s my hat?” he demanded querulously. “Where’s my cape?”

“These are very interesting chairs,” Greta told him. “Tell me about these chairs.”

“Oh, these chairs of mine never caught on,” Bambakias said, jamming one scrawny arm through the ruffled sleeve of his dress shirt. “For some reason, people just don’t trust computation enough to sit on it.”

“I trust computation,” Greta assured him, and sat. The internal spokes and cables adjusted beneath her weight, with a rapid crescendo of tiny guitar-string shrieks. She settled daintily in midair, a queen on a tensile throne of smart chopsticks and spiderweb. Oscar admired responsive tensegrity structures as much as the next man, but he sat in the second chair with considerably less brio.

“An architect gets the credit for design successes,” Bambakias told her. “The failures you can cover with ivy. But weird decor schemes that just don’t work out — well, those you have to keep inside the office.”

A silent group of krewepeople removed the massage table and replaced it with a folding hospital bed. The Senator sat on the bed’s edge, pulling up his gaunt bare feet like a giant seabird.

“I noticed another set of these armchairs on the way in,” Greta said. “But they were solid.”

“Not ‘solid.’ Rigid. Spray-on veneer.”

“ ‘Less is more,’ ” Greta said.

A spark of interest lit the Senator’s sagging face as his dresser saw to his shoes and socks. “What did you say your name was?”

“Greta,” she told him gently.

“And you’re, what, you’re a psychiatrist?”

“That’s close. I’m a neuroscientist.”

“That’s right. You already told me that, didn’t you.”

Greta turned and gave Oscar a look full of grave comprehension and pity: Since her makeover, Greta’s expressions had a new and shocking clarity — her flickering glance struck Oscar to the heart and lodged like a harpoon.

Oscar leaned forward on his thrumming piano-wire seat, and knotted his hands. “Alcott, Lorena tells me you’re a little upset by developments.”

“ ‘Upset’?” Bambakias said, lifting his chin as the dresser tucked in his ascot. “I wouldn’t say ‘upset.’ I would say ‘realistic.’ ”

“Well… realism is a matter of opinion.”

“I’ve triggered a state and federal crisis. Four hundred and twelve million dollars’ worth of military hardware has been looted by anar-chist bandits and has vanished into the swamps. It’s the worst event of its kind since Fort Sumter in 1861; what’s there to be upset about?”

“But, Al, that was never your intention. You can’t be blamed for those developments.”

“But I was there,” Bambakias insisted. “I was with those people. Yeah… I talked to all of them, I gave them my word of honor… I have the tapes to prove it! Let’s run through all the evidence just one more time. We should see this together. Where’s my sysadmin? Where’s Edgar?”

“Edgar’s in Washington,” the dresser told him quietly.

The Senator’s hollow face tightened drastically. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

“I followed the siege situation,” Oscar said. “I’m very up to speed on developments.”

“But I was there!” Bambakias insisted. “I could have helped. I could have built barricades. I could have brought in generators… But when that gas hit them, they lost their minds. That’s when it all really hit me. This wasn’t a game at all. It was no game. We weren’t players. We’d all gone mad.”

There was an evil silence.

“He spent a lot of time on the net with those Air Force people,” the dresser told them meekly. “He really was almost there with them. Practically.” Suddenly her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’ll find his hat,” she said, and left with her head hung low.

A lunch trolley arrived, set for two. The chowder was served. Oscar moved his featherweight responsive chair and flicked a linen napkin ostentatiously. “This is not a defeat, Al. It’s just a skir-mish. There’s still plenty of space on the old go board. A Senate term lasts six years.”

“A lot of good that does them. They’re in camps now! Can you believe that our government is that cynical? They’ve left our soldiers in the hands of the man who gassed them!” Bambakias waved a hand at the flickering screen behind him… “I’ve been watching him spin this. Huey. As if he’d rescued them. The son of a bitch is their public savior!”

“Well, it was a very ugly incident, but at least there were no fatalities. We can put that behind us now. Tomorrow’s another day.” Oscar lifted his gleaming soup spoon and creamed off a layer of chow-der. He sipped it pretentiously. It was, as always, superb.

“Hold on,” he told Greta, who had made no move to eat. “This isn’t right.” He sat up. “What’s with your chef, Alcott? Canned chowder?”

Bambakias scowled. “What?”

“This is not your special chowder.”

“Of course it is. Has to be.”

“Try it,” Oscar insisted.

Greta nodded permission, unneeded since the Senator had lunged from his bed and grabbed at her spoon. He sampled the bowl.

“Kind of a coppery undertaste,” Oscar alleged, squinting.

Bambakias had two more spoonfuls. “Nonsense,” he growled. “It’s delicious.”

The two of them ate rapidly, in rabid silence. “I’ll find another chair,” Greta murmured. She rose and left the room.

Bambakias settled into Greta’s vacated chair and crunched half a handful of oyster crackers. His dresser arrived again, and set the Sena-tor’s hat and cape nearby. Bambakias ignored her, bending over his bowl with a painful effort. His hands were badly palsied; he could barely grip his spoon.

“I could sure do with a milk shake right now,” Oscar mused. “You know, like we used to have on the campaign.”

“Good idea,” Bambakias said absently. He lifted his chin, ges-tured with two fingertips, and spoke into apparently empty air. “Vince; two campaign power milk shakes.”

“Did Sosik show you the latest polls, Al? You’ve done a lot better by this episode than you seem to think.”

“No, that’s where you are both totally wrong. I’ve ruined every-thing. I provoked a major crisis before I was even sworn into office. And now that I’m a stinking criminal just like the rest of them, I’ll have no choice — from now on I’ll have to play the game just the way they like it. And the Senate is a sucker’s game.”

“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.

Bambakias swallowed painfully and raised one bony finger.

“There are sixteen political parties in this country. You can’t govern with a political culture that fragmented. And the parties are just the graphic interface for the real chaos underneath. Our education system has collapsed. Our health system is so bad that we have organ-sharing cliques. We’re in a State of Emergency.”

“You’re not telling me anything new here,” Oscar chided. He leaned over and stared enviously into Barnbakias’s chowder. “Are you going to finish that?”

Bambakias hunched over his bowl with a wolfish glare.

“Okay, no problem.” Oscar raised his voice to address the hid-den microphones. “Vincent, hurry up with those shakes! Bring us more chowder. Bring dinner rolls.”

“I don’t want any damn dinner rolls,” Bambakias muttered. His eyes were watering and his face was flushed. “Our wealth disparities are insane,” he mumbled into his soup. “We have a closed currency and a shattered economy. We have major weather disasters. Toxic pol-lution. Plunging birth rates. Soaring death rates. It’s bad. It’s really bad. It’s totally hopeless, it’s all over.”

“Vincent, bring us something serious. Quick. Bring us teriyaki. Bring us some dim sum.”

“What are you rambling on about?” Bambakias said.

“Alcott, you’re embarrassing me. I promised Dr. Penninger some good food here, and you’ve gone and eaten her lunch!”

Bambakias stared at the dregs of chowder. “Oh my God …”

“Alcott, let me handle this. The least you can do is sit here with us and see that your guest is properly fed.”

“God, I’m sorry!” Bambakias moaned. “God, I’ve been so wrong about everything. You handle it, Oscar! You handle it.”

Two milk shakes arrived in fluted glasses, their bases caked with frost. The chef himself brought them in, on a cork-lined salver. He gazed at Oscar with a look of dazed gratitude and backed hastily out of the office.

Bambakias’s lean Adam’s apple glugged methodically. “Let me tell you something really awful,” he said, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “This whole business has been a tragic error from day one. The Emergency committee never meant to drop that air base. Their management and budget software was buggy. Nobody ever double-checked, because everything the stupid bastards do is an offi-cial emergency! So when the screwup became obvious, everybody just assumed it had been done deliberately — because it was such a clever, sneaky way to screw with Huey. They’re dying to screw him, because Huey’s the only politician in America who knows what he wants and can stick with it. But when I went looking for the silent genius who was running this brilliant conspiracy, there was nobody there.”

“They gave you that line of guff? I hope you didn’t believe that,” Oscar said, silently switching Bambakias’s empty glass for his own. “These Emergency creeps are geniuses at sleight of hand.”

“Yeah? Then tell me who has been trying to get you shot!” Bambakias belched. “Same issue, same controversy — you could have been killed because of this! But whose fault is it? Nobody’s fault. You hunt for the man responsible, and it’s some nasty piece of software half a light-year out of the chain of command.”

“That’s not political thinking, Alcott.”

“Politics don’t work anymore! We can’t make politics work, be-cause the system’s so complex that its behavior is basically random. Nobody trusts the system anymore, so nobody ever, ever plays it straight. There are sixteen parties, and a hundred bright ideas, and a million ticking bleeping gizmos, but nobody can follow through, exe-cute, and deliver the goods on time and within specs. So our politics has become absurd. The country’s reduced to chaos. We’ve given up on the Republic. We’ve abandoned democracy. I’m not a Senator! I’m a robber baron, a feudal lord. All I can do is build a personality cult.”

Five of Bambakias’s krewepeople arrived in force. They were thrilled to see the man eating. The room became an instant bedlam of kevlar picnic tables, flying silverware, packs of appetizers and aperitifs.

“I know that it’s chaos,” Oscar insisted, raising his voice above the racket. “Everybody knows that the system is out of control. That’s a truism. The only answer to chaos is political organization.”

“No, it’s too late for that. We’re so intelligent now that we’re too smart to survive. We’re so well informed that we’ve lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we’ve lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we’ve lost all sense of shame.” The sudden wave of nourishment. was hitting Bambakias hard. His face was beet-red and he was having trouble breathing. And he had apparently stopped thinking, for he was quot-ing his campaign stump speech by rote.

Greta reappeared at the doorway, dodging the hospital bed as two krewemen wheeled it out. She entered and sat demurely in a newly structured chair.

“So you might as well just grab whatever you can,” Bambakias concluded.

“Thank you, Senator,” Greta said, deftly seizing a skewer of ter-iyaki chicken. “I enjoy these little office brunches.”

“See, it all moves too fast and in too complex a fashion for any human brain to keep up.”

“I suppose that’s why we can sit on it!” Greta said.

“What?” Oscar said.

“This furniture thinks much faster than a human brain. That’s why this fragile net of sticks and ribbons can become a functional chair.” She examined their stunned expressions. “Aren’t we still dis-cussing furniture design? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, Doctor,” Bambakias told her. “That’s my worst regret. I should have stayed in architecture, where I was needed. I was getting things accomplished there, you see? A truly modern sense of structure… that could have been my monument. I might have done wonderful things… Doctor, that old glass dome of yours in Texas, it’s twenty years behind the times. Nowadays we could create a dome ten times that size out of straw and pocket money! We could make your sad little museum really live and bloom — we could make that experiment into everyday reality. We could integrate the natural world right into the substance of our cities. If we knew how to use our power properly, we could guide herds of American bison right through our own streets. We could live in an Eden at peace with packs of wolves. All it would take is enough sense and vision to know who we are, and what we want.”

“That sounds wonderful, Senator. Why don’t you do it?”

“Because we’re a pack of thieves! We went straight from wilder-ness to decadence, without ever creating an authentic American civili-zation. Now we’re beaten, and now we sulk. The Chinese kicked our ass in economic warfare. The Europeans have sensible, workable poli-cies about population and the weather crisis. But we’re a nation of dilettantes who live on cheap hacks of a dead system. We’re all on the take! We’re all self-seeking crooks!”

Oscar spoke up. “You’re not a criminal, Alcott. Look at the polls. The people are with you. You’ve won them over now. They trust your intentions, they sympathize.”

Bambakias slumped violently into his chair, which thrummed alertly. “Then tell me something,” he growled. “What about Moira?”

“Why is that subject on the agenda?” Oscar said.

“Moira’s in jail, Oscar. Tell me about that. Do you want to tell us all about that?”

Oscar chewed with polite deliberation on a dinner roll. The room had gone lethally silent. Against the glass block a mobile mosaic had established itself, gently altering the daylight. A maze of dainty lozenges, creeping like adhesive dominoes, flapping neatly across the glass.

Oscar pointed to a netfeed. “Could we have a look at that cover-age, please? Turn the sound up.”

One of Bambakias’s krewe spoke up. “It’s in French.”

“Dr. Penninger speaks French. Help me with this coverage, Doctor.”

Greta turned to the screen. “It’s defection coverage,” she trans-lated. “Something about a French aircraft carrier.”

Bambakias groaned.

“There’s been a statement from the French foreign office,” Greta said tentatively, “something about American military officers… Electronic warfare jets… Two American Air Force pilots have flown jets to a French aircraft carrier, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re asking for political asylum.”

“I knew it!” Oscar announced, throwing his napkin on the table.

“I knew Huey had people on the inside. See, now the other shoe drops. This is big, this is a major twist.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” Bambakias groaned. He was ashen. “This is the final indignity. The final disgrace. This is the very end.” He swal-lowed noisily. “I’m going to be sick.”

“Help the Senator,” Oscar commanded, jumping to his feet. “And get Sosik in here, right away.”

Bambakias vanished in a cluster of panicked retainers. The room emptied as suddenly as a Tokyo subway car. Oscar and Greta found themselves suddenly alone.

Oscar watched the screen. One of the American defectors had just appeared on-camera. The man looked very familiar, utterly cyni-cal, and extremely drunk. Oscar recognized him as an acquaintance: he was the public relations officer for the Louisiana air base. He was wearily delivering a prepared statement, with French subtitles. “What a genius move! Huey’s dumped his Trojan horse people into the hands of French spooks. The French will hide those rogue airboys in some bank vault in Paris. We’ll never hear from them again. They’ve sold out their country, and now the crooked sons of bitches will live like kings.”

“What a convenient interruption that was,” Greta told him. She was still eating lunch, pincering her chopsticks with surgical skill. “The Senator had you pinned down and right on the spot. I can’t believe you had the nerve to pull that trick.”

“Actually, I was keeping a weather eye on that screen all along, just in case I needed a nice distracting gambit.”

She sampled the dim sum and smiled skeptically. “No you weren’t. Nobody can do that.”

“Actually, yes, I can do that sort of thing. I do it every day.”

“Well, you’re not distracting me. What was it about this Moira person? It must be something pretty awful. I could tell that much.”

“Moira is not your problem, Greta.”

“Ha! Nobody around here is addressing my problems.” She frowned, then poured a little more soy. “Really good food here, though. Amazing food.”

“I’m. going to get to your problems. I haven’t forgotten them. I just had to shelve those issues for a minute while I was getting the poor man to eat.”

“Too bad you couldn’t get him to keep it down.” Greta sighed. “This has certainly been eye-opening. I had no real idea what to expect from your Senator. Somehow, I imagined he’d be just like you.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Oh… a Machiavellian, showboating, ultra-wealthy political hack. But Alcott’s not like that at all! Alcott’s a real idealist. He’s a patriot! It’s a tragedy that he’s clinically depressed.”

“You really think that the Senator is clinically depressed?”

“Of course he is! It’s obvious! He’s crashed from starvation stress. And that myoclonic tremor in his hands — that’s an overdose of neural appetite suppressants.”

“He’s supposed to be long off all those pills.”

“Then he must have been hoarding them, and eating them se-cretly. Typical behavior in the syndrome. Those repeated presentations about his so-called criminality — those far-fetched guilt obses-sions… He’s very depressed. Then when you tricked him into eating, he turned manic. His affect is all over the map! You need to test him for cognitive deficits.”

“Well… he was just faint from hunger. Normally, he’d see right through a childish gambit like that chowder stunt.”

Greta put down her chopsticks and lowered her voice. “Tell me something. Tell me the truth. Did you ever notice that he’s enormously outspoken and energetic in public, but then he always retreats and cocoons himself? For, say, two or three days?”

Oscar nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“First, he’s very expressive and charming, working twenty-hour days, throwing off a lot of sparks. Then, he’s just gone. He claims he’s thinking things over, or that he needs his privacy — but basically, he’s dug himself a hole and pulled it over him. That’s not uncommon with creative personalities. Your Senator has bipolarity. I imagine he’s al-ways been bipolar.”

“He’s ‘in the back of the bus.’ ” Oscar sighed. “That’s what we used to call it, when he pulled that routine on the campaign.”

“In the back of the bus, with Moira.”

“Yeah. Exactly. Moira was very good at getting next to him when his guard was down.”

Greta narrowed her eyes. “You did something awful to Moira, didn’t you?”

“Look, the man is a U.S. Senator. I put him into office, I have to look after his interests. He had an indiscretion during the campaign. So what? Who am I to judge about that?” He paused. “And who are you, for that matter?”

“Well, I came here so that I could judge the Senator,” she said. “I hoped he could really help me. We could have used an honest, decent Senator to back the lab, for once. Obviously, Alcott’s some-one who could really understand us. But now he’s been destroyed, because he went head-to-head against Huey — a man who just chews up people like him. Politics always chews up people like him.” Her face grew long and grim. “Look what he’s done with this hopeless old building, look at this beautiful work he’s done. He must be some kind of genius, and now they’ve just crushed him. This really makes me sick at heart. What a loss. He’s lost his mind. It’s a national tragedy.”

“Well, I admit that it’s a setback.”

“No, it’s over. He’s not going to come around just because you force-fed him. Because he is demented. He can’t help you anymore — and that means that you can’t help me. So it’s all over, and it’s time for me to give this thing up.”

“We’re not going to give up.”

“Oscar, let me go back to my lab now. Let me work. It’s the reasonable thing.”

“Sure it is, but I’m. not a reasonable person, and these aren’t reasonable times.”

Leon Sosik came into the office. “Bit of a debacle there.” His face was gray.

“Can you believe the audacity of that guy?” Oscar said. “Huey had a French aircraft carrier waiting offshore. The guy’s a traitor! He’s in league with a foreign power!”

Sosik shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“We can’t acquiesce in a naked power grab like this. We’ve got to nail Huey’s feet to the Senate floor and beat him like a drum.”

Sosik stared at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m serious! Our man has flushed Huey out of the canebrake, and now he’s revealed his true colors. He’s a clear and present menace to national security. We’ve got to take him out.”

Sosik turned to Greta with courtly concern. “Dr. Penninger, I wonder if you’d allow me to speak to Mr. Valparaiso privately for a moment.”

“Oh, of course.” Greta rose reluctantly, setting down her chop-sticks.

“I could get our chef to put together a little takeout box for you,” Sosik said considerately.

“Oh no, I do need to be going … If you could just get me a cab. There’s a conference in town. I have work to do.”

“I’ll have our chauffeur take you to your meeting, Doctor.”

“That would be perfect. Thank you very much.” She gathered her purse and left.

Oscar watched her reluctantly, then spotted a screen remote and plucked it up. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he told Sosik. “She has an agenda, you know. We could have gotten to her a little later.”

“They told me you were like this,” Sosik said soberly. “They told me you were exactly like this, and I couldn’t believe it. Would you put down that remote control, please?”

Oscar squeezed his way through a set of feeds. “This is a break-ing development, Leon. We’ve got to spin this quick, and nail the guy before he launches his next cover story.”

Sosik gently plucked the remote from Oscar’s hand. He put his hand over Oscar’s shoulder. “Kid,” he said, “let’s go for a walk. Let’s do some serious face-time together.”

“We don’t have a lot of time to kill right now.”

“Kid, I’m the chief of staff. I don’t think I’ll be wasting your time. All right?”

A krewewoman handed them their hats and coats. They took an elevator down to the street.

“Let’s walk toward Somerville,” Sosik said. “The audio surveil-lance is a lot less tight there.”

“Is that a problem? We could walk apart and talk things over on encrypted phones.”

Sosik sighed. “Would you slow down to human speed for a min-ute? I’m an old man.”

Oscar said nothing. He followed Sosik north up Prospect Street, hunching his shoulders against the chill. Bare trees, straggling Christ-mas shoppers, the occasional Caribbean storefront.

“I can’t stand it in that office just now,” Sosik said. “He’s throw-ing up, he’s shaking like a leaf And the people in there, they all worship the ground the man walks on. They’ve had to watch him come apart at the seams.”

“Yeah, and our walking out on them isn’t likely to help their morale much.”

“Shut up,” Sosik explained. “I’ve been in this business thirty years. I’ve seen a lot of politicians come to bad ends. I’ve seen them go drunk, I’ve seen them go crooked, sex scandals, money scan-dals… But this is the first guy I ever saw who cracked up com-pletely before he even made it to Washington.”

“Alcott’s always ahead of the curve,” Oscar nodded. “He’s a visionary. ”

Sosik shot him a nettled glance. “Why’d you pick on this poor guy? He’s not any kind of normal pol. Was it the wife? Did she have something on you? Was it the personal background thing?”

“Normal pols aren’t getting the job done, Leon. These aren’t normal times. America’s not a normal country. We’ve used up all our normality. There isn’t any left.”

“You’re not normal. What are you doing in politics?”

Oscar shrugged. “Someone has to deal with your thirty-year leg-acy of solid professional achievement, Leon.”

Sosik grimaced. “Well, he gave it his best shot. And now he’s toast. ”

“He’s not toast. He’s just crazy.”

“Crazy is toast. Okay?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s true-he’s had a mental breakdown. That’s a problem. It’s an image problem. When you get a problem that big, you can’t stonewall it. You have to shine a light on it. This is the problem: he starved himself half to death in a sincere protest, and now he’s lost his mind. But our keyword here isn’t ‘crazy.’ Our keywords are ‘sincere’ and ‘protest.’ ”

Sosik turned up his coat collar. “Look, you can’t possibly play it that way and get away with it.”

“Yes, Leon, I could. The question here is whether you could.”

“We can’t have a Senator who’s non compos mentis! How the hell could he ever get a bill passed?”

“Alcott was never cut out to be a legislative technician. We’ve had enough of those nitpickers. Alcott’s a charismatic, he’s a moral leader. He can wake the people up, he can guide them. and show them the mountaintop. What he needs is a way to compel their attention and make them. believe in him. And now, he’s finally got it.”

Sosik considered this. “Kid, if you did that and it really worked, it would mean that the whole country’s gone crazy.”

Oscar said nothing.

“How exactly would you angle it?” Sosik said at last.

“We have to demonize Huey on the patriotism issue, while we come clean on the medical problem. Constant bedside reports when-ever Al is lucid. Winston Churchill was bipolar. Abraham Lincoln was a depressive. We call in all our chits from the FedDems, we get the party to stay with him. We fly the wife in, she’s a fighter, she’s stand-ing by him loyally. Grass-roots sympathy mail, we’re spooling it in by the ton. I think it’s doable.”

“If that’s doable, then I’ve lost touch. That’s not the America I know. I don’t have the stomach for that. I’d have to resign. You’d have to be chief of staff.”

“No, Leon, you’ve got to be chief of staff You’re the seasoned professional, you’ve got Beltway credibility, and I’m … Well, I can’t be in the picture at all. With my personal background, I can’t possibly front a big medical-publicity spin.”

“I know you want my job.”

“I’ve got my hands full already.”

Sosik snorted. “Don’t give me that.”

“All right,” Oscar said. “I admit that I’d like to have your job, but I have my own agenda to look after now. You see, it’s Greta.”

“Who?”

“The scientist, damn it! Dr. Penninger.”

Sosik was astonished. “What? Her? She’s pushing forty and she’s got a face like a hatchet! What is it with you, kid? Not two months ago you had your pants around your ankles for some campaign jour-nalist. You were lucky as hell not to be outed on that. And now her?”

“Yeah. That’s right. Her.”

Sosik rubbed his chin. “I forgot how hard up a young guy can get… Can it possibly be that good?”

“No, it’s not that good,” Oscar told him. “It’s no good at all, it’s bad. It’s real bad. It’s worse than you could imagine, it’s terrible. If we’re ever caught, we get outed. She’s a fanatic workaholic — science is the only thing in the world that doesn’t bore her to death. Huey adores her and wants to recruit her for some kind of mad-genius brain lab he’s building in a salt mine … She drinks too much. She has allergies. She’s eight years older than me… And oh, she’s also Jewish. Though for some reason the Jewish thing hasn’t come up much.”

Sosik sighed, his breath steaming in the air. “So that’s your situa-tion, huh?”

“That’s almost it. Except for one more thing. She’s truly a ge-nius. She’s a unique, brilliant, wonderful thing.”

Kevin Hamilton was visiting Oscar’s house for a neighborly chat. Kevin, a man of deeply irregular schedules, had brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a bag of dried banana chips.

“Politics are irrelevant now,” Kevin informed him airily.

“I’m not asking you to become a political activist, Kevin. I’m just asking you to join my krewe and run my security.”

Kevin munched a handful of banana chips and had a swig of chocolate milk. “Well, you being the guy you are, I guess you’ve got the money for that sort of thing…”

Oscar adjusted his laptop on the conference table. “There’s not a lot of time for idle chitchat here, so let’s put our cards on the table. I know you’re a rather special guy, but you’re not the only guy in the world who can do net research. So can I. You’ve got a civil disobedience record as long as my arm. You spent ten years with no visible means of support. Your dad is a convicted computer criminal on elec-tronic parole. You’re a police informant and a surveillance freak. I really think I need a guy like you in my outfit.”

“Nice of you not to mention my dicey ethnic background,” Kevin said. He set his sandwich aside and produced his own laptop from a battered valise. The ancient machine was pasted together with tension straps and travel decals.

“I never, ever mention that sort of thing,” Oscar said.

“Not that you would. You’re not an ‘ethnic’ guy.” Kevin con-sulted his own screen. “As far as I can figure out, you’re some kind of lab product.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“My dad went bad after his business crashed-but your dad was a genuine gangster. Good thing for you that the feds don’t like to bust movie stars.”

“Yeah, and his films were criminal acts, too.”

“You must be really hard up, man. I don’t do bodyguard work. I’ve got it together to run a successful neighborhood watch. It’s a good gig for a guy who was a big-time nomad — I get to sit still now, and I’ve got a roof over my head. But you’re a dodgy politician with some major-league enemies. I could get killed working for a guy like you.”

“The plan here is that I don’t get killed, and you get paid for that. ”

“I dunno why I’m even listening to you, man. But you know — I gotta admit that I kinda like your proposal. I like a guy who knows what he wants and just goes right after it. There’s something about you that… I dunno… it just inspires confidence.”

Time to play the next card. “Look, I understand about your father, Kevin. A lot of decent people suffered when intellectual prop-erty crashed. Friends of mine in the Senator’s office could talk to the Governor about a grant of clemency. I believe I could do something for you here.”

“Now, that would be great. You know, my dad really got a raw deal. He was never your typical racist white-power bomber. The feds just brought up that terror-and-conspiracy indictment, so he would plead out on the embezzlement and wiretapping charges.”

“He must have had a good lawyer.”

“Sorta… his lawyer had the good sense to defect to Europe when the real heat came down.” Kevin sighed. “I almost went to Europe myself, and then I thought… what the hell? You can drop out as a road prole and it’s almost the same as leaving the country.”

“You don’t mind traveling to Texas? You don’t mind missing Christmas? We’ll be flying there right away.”

“I don’t care. Not as long as I can still log on to my own servers.”

The door chimed. Moments later, Donna arrived with an airmailed packet.

“Is that for me?” Kevin said brightly. He eviscerated the package with a massive Swiss Army knife. “Mayonnaise,” he announced un-convincingly, producing a sealed jar of unlabeled white goo. “This stuff could be really handy.” He stuffed the jar into his accordion-sided valise.

“She’s arrived,” Donna whispered.

“I have to see another guest,” Oscar told Kevin.

“Another ‘guest’?” Kevin winked. “What happened to the cute one in the bathrobe?”

“Can you get back to me in the morning with your decision?”

“No, man, I’ve made up my mind. I’m gonna do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, it sounds like a nice change of pace. I’ll get right on the job. Clear it with your sysadmin, and I’ll see what I can do about shoring up your net.”