Solstice

CHAPTER 1 Blood

British Pacific Flight 172 had left Tokyo for London Heathrow right on schedule, every one of its 332 seats occupied, every ounce of weight, every moment of balance accurately calculated. The route was standard these days: no more long, circuitous detours to avoid the Soviet Union, no more boring stopovers in Anchorage. Just a sharp hook to the west after takeoff, on to Vladivostok, and then a dead straight line along the great circle, coming down over Finland into Britain over the North Sea.

This was a two-man operation: one captain, one first officer, both watching the LCD screens of the new all-digital flight panel and relying, for the most part, on the autopilot to guide the plane's movements.

Ian Seabright didn't like to admit it to anyone, particularly the company's inquisitive human resources staff, but these days flying just plain bored him. It had been different when he first got into the game, straight from the RAF, in the seventies. Then you used your brain, sometimes your muscle, too. Today you just minded the computer, watching the dials flash and alter on some screen, making sure the silicon pilot didn't do anything wrong.

He was fifty-three, in reasonable health, a little overweight from all those long-haul stops in hotels where the food was free and there was precious little else to do. The first officer was Jimmy Mulligan, a bright, red-haired Irishman who'd worked his way onto the flight deck the hard way, through a private pilot's licence and then a low-paying gig as a flight instructor in the States. Seabright liked Mulligan. The man was smart, polite, hardworking. And yet, at just pushing thirty, he was already starting to look bored. Seabright, only two years from retirement, didn't envy him — with nothing to look forward to but this tedious round of routine. The idea of all those wasted hours in the cockpit appalled him.

Seabright looked at the moving map on the GPS. They were nine hours out now, cruising in still air at 37,000 feet in the middle of nowhere with the weather looking fine and sunny all the way, every inch of the route in daylight, straight into Heathrow. Out of the window some godforsaken part of Russia passed by slowly, even with a ground speed of 530 knots. A piece of nothingness in western Siberia, he guessed.

'You going to marry that girl, Jimmy?'

The Irishman smiled. 'You mean Ali?'

'I believe that was the young lady you seemed to be proposing to last night.'

Mulligan thought about it. 'You think she took it that way?'

Seabright closed his eyes and thought: They can fill these damn things with all the computers they want, but this little ritual won't ever go away. You just coop up a crew in some foreign hotel, leave them there for three days, and see what happens.

'She's sweet, all right,' Mulligan said. 'A guy could do a lot worse.'

'A lot worse,' Seabright agreed.

'Which makes a guy think, well, maybe he could do a lot better?'

Seabright stared at Mulligan and wondered why this short, meaningless exchange sparked a little flame of anger inside him. It all just comes around, he thought. There are things you can never tell another man. You just have to wait, let him discover it all for himself, then look him in the eye and say: Yes, me too. The casual drift from bed-hopping first officer to married (happily or otherwise) captain was one such journey.

'Looks like we've got company,' Mulligan said, staring out over the starboard wing. Seabright followed his gaze. A good ten miles off, on a parallel course tracking the same flight level, was a white 747 with imperceptible markings on the side. He dialled up the inflight frequency and put out a call. There was no reply.

'Bastards,' Mulligan muttered, reaching for a pair of pocket binoculars in the seat pocket. Then he focused on the distant shape and let out a low, sweeping whistle.

'Jimmy?'

The first officer took away the glasses from his face. 'Sir, wasn't there something in the paper about a summit in Tokyo? Lots of VIPs expected to be flying out?'

'Why do you think we're packing them into every square inch we've got right now? There was a world summit. Ended yesterday.'

'Well,' Mulligan replied, passing over the binoculars, 'it looks like we've got the American President himself on our wing. Can't expect those chaps to talk to the likes of us, now, can you?'

Seabright looked at the long white shape of Air Force One through the glasses. This was a new one for the book.

'I think you're right there…'

Then he snatched the instrument away from his face in a rapid involuntary physical jerk, feeling, for a moment, as if his upper torso were in spasm. The pain was sudden, sharp, and intense. And he wasn't alone. Next to him Mulligan was moaning. He had his hand to his forehead, eyes closed.

'You okay, Jimmy?' This was unlike him. Mulligan never swore, never complained about anything. The first officer rubbed his head for a moment or two, then unclenched his eyes and looked at Seabright. His eyes were more than a little pink, unfocused, watery too.

'Damn headache,' Mulligan complained. 'Came straight on me like that. Just my turn to get one, I guess.'

'Sure.'

Seabright knew he had the makings of one himself. And the tension of the sudden muscle spasm had not gone away entirely either. His gaze shifted to the display panel. 'Looks like you've got an amber alert light on the main gear, Jimmy. Nothing to worry about, I'm sure, but take a look.'

'Sir… ow!'

And the strange thing was, Seabright felt it too. A sharp, stabbing pain in the right temple, so hard it made him wince, just like Mulligan. Then it went away as quickly as it came, leaving a dull throb behind.

'What the hell was that?'

Seabright wiped his forehead, felt the sweat there, scanned the panel as he ran through the possibilities.

'You check the cabin pressure too, Jimmy. I got that pain as well and I don't think we're both imagining it.'

They scrutinized the dials, went through the routines they knew by heart, and confirmed the pressure, stable at the equivalent of 6,000 feet.

'You think it could have dropped, just momentarily, without us noticing it?'

Mulligan's face was close to the colour of his hair, and Ian Seabright felt, deep in his gut, something hard and cold and angry start to knot there and wait for him to recognize it.

'No,' he replied. 'That's just not possible.'

'I can pull out a record of the pressure if you like. See if it took a sudden drop.'

Seabright nodded, just for something to do, knowing this really wasn't the cause of it, knowing the pressurization system was behaving just as it should.

Mulligan punched away at the control deck, watched the displays shift and change on the colour LCD screen. When he finished, he only looked more baffled. 'Maybe it was one of those things,' he said, wanting to take back the words the moment he said them.

Seabright nodded and neither of them needed to say it, the phrases just passed unspoken between them, the old pilot's doggerel they drilled into you year after year. All those half-smart, half-true little maxims ran through both men's heads at that moment… that there really is no limit to how bad things can get, and how you shouldn't believe in miracles, you should rely on them. And, in particular this one: When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.

They sat in silence, in trepidation, and then they heard the security key turn in the cabin door and saw Ali Fitzgerald walk through, her face white and pale. The very appearance of her made the knot in Seabright's stomach turn on itself once more until this tangle of pain in his gut was rock-hard, icy and immobile.

'We've got a medical out there,' she said, and Seabright could see how close she was to real panic. 'It's a bad one, sir, and I already asked. There's not a doctor on the plane.'

Seabright stared hard at his first officer, checked the panel and made sure nothing else was blinking there except the one errant amber light on the main gear.

'You okay on your own, Jimmy? Don't just say yes. Think about this. I don't want more than one emergency on my ship.'

Mulligan thought before he answered; he knew the old man would demand that.

'I'll be fine. Best leave the door unlocked anyway.'

'Yes,' Seabright said, then unstrapped the shoulder harness, pulled himself out of the left-hand seat, and followed the stewardess to the door, held it half-closed, not letting her through.

'Sir?' She looked into his face, not understanding, not far from the edge, he thought, not far at all.

'Ali,' he said, as quietly, as gently as he could. 'Your shirt. You need to change it. You need to put a jacket on. Something. You can't go back through the cabin like that.'

She looked at herself, at the broad red bloodstain that marked the entire front of her white blouse, down onto her skirt, marked her skin too, around her neck, where she'd held the man's head, trying to do something, trying to do anything.

'No, sir,' she said, then waited for him to open the door, stepped behind the bulkhead that separated them from the first-class cabin, and pulled out a clothes carrier. It happened so quickly he scarcely had time to tear his eyes away. She tore off the blouse, then the skirt, washed her neck and forearms rapidly with a damp Kleenex and a bottle of Malvern water, and put on the dirty uniform she was carrying back from the outward journey.

'He's in business, sir. We've got the medical kit.'

'Good,' Seabright answered, and watched her step in front of him, turn in to the first-class cabin, smooth down her dress, start to do her job.

He followed her down the aisle, felt the eyes on him, the tension in the seats, and thought to himself that Jimmy Mulligan could do a lot worse. A hell of a lot worse if he wanted to.

CHAPTER 2 Sunrise

It was pushing four in the morning in the white-walled bed-room-cum-office on the first floor of the Mallorcan mansion. Somewhere else in the great airy country house people were beginning to stir. The computer screen burned a luminescent grey. The whispery haze of dawn came in through the window. It was a little cold just then, but the latent heat of the previous day, so hot it left him thinking he had never escaped Morocco, made the room smell damp.

'Michael?'

Sara Wong looked at Lieberman from the screen, her picture jerking a little with the slow frame rate, but not so much that he couldn't see something was going on there, something to do with concern and affection and other emotions he preferred not to think about too directly.

For a while, there had been little in his thoughts except this serene Chinese face gazing back at him from the other side of the world. Then the great domestic earthquake had struck, and the walls came tumbling down around their lives.

'We ought to get on with this,' she said, her voice a little tinny down the line. 'NASA or somebody else is paying a fortune for this direct satellite uplink. They may get a little cross if they find we're just staring at each other like a couple of tongue-tied kids.'

'Yeah,' Lieberman said, grinning. 'This is a hell of a long way to come to find your ex-wife staring back at you from the PC.’

'Strange for me too,' she said. 'Now we've got that out of the way, can we get on to something real?'

Lieberman lazily ran his fingers over his head, twisting his thick black curly hair.

'I told you,' Sara said from the screen. 'So many times. One day it will just fall out.'

He blinked, uncomprehending, then jerked his hand away from his scalp like a guilty kid. Sara had a way of mothering you, even after all these years separated.

'So what time is it in Lone Wolf?' he asked.

She looked really nice tonight. Just a plain white shirt, two buttons open at the neck, and her skin a pleasant shade of brown on the screen.

'You can count, Michael. You know what time it is.'

'Let me guess. Nine hours back from this bustling corner of civilization makes it… six fifty-two in California.'

She leaned forward, touched something on the keyboard that was out of sight of the camera perched on top of her monitor, and two analogue clocks appeared on his screen, one marked Lone Wolf Observatory, Los Altos, Northern California, the other Mallorca, off the north-eastern Mediterranean coast of Spain, the first with the hands at 6:54 pm, the second nine hours later.

'So.' She smiled. 'Tell me about the people. How are they?'

'Okay. Not that we've talked much.'

'You know anyone?'

He shook his head, and six thousand miles away in Lone Wolf Observatory, Sara Wong watched the intelligent tanned face move in the faint grey light of the monitor. Michael had always reminded her of some myopic bird of prey, trying to focus on the horizon, wondering whether to stretch his wings and fly or just stay motionless on the tree, doubtful if he could make the kill if he found it.

'Only one, and that's by reputation alone. The show's being run by that Cambridge guy, Bennett.'

'Simon Bennett?' She looked excited. 'He did the paper on planetary tides and… what was it? Heliocentric syzygies.'

'Yeah. I'd do that too if I thought I could pronounce it after a few drinks.'

Sara frowned. 'That's an educated attitude.'

'Sorry.' He did his best to look contrite.

'And the rest?' she asked.

'They seem friendly enough.'

'Work on it, Michael. You could use some contacts.'

'Thanks. I'll bear that in mind. Your tan looks great.'

He meant that. He really did.

'Yours too. Not that sunbathing is recommended these days.'

He stopped for a moment, wondered whether to say it, did anyway. 'It's still that hot there, huh?'

She nodded, and, for once, he couldn't read her expression.

'Been pushing a hundred for three weeks now. You need to keep out of it. There's people getting burned, talk of a skin cancer scare. The TV people say maybe it's El Nino, or just some kind of new level of instability in the weather system. Or maybe this little galactic ballet that's on the way. I don't know. The National Enquirer certainly seems to be making hay with it. Myself, I think we should be taking it more seriously.'

'Yeah.'

'And there?'

He really didn't know how to answer that one. 'Be fair. I only just turned up.'

'Right,' she said, and he could almost imagine there was something hard and grim in her voice, a wisp of anger because of the way he was avoiding the question. 'But what's it like now, Michael?'

'It falls at night. You'd expect that. But from the little I've seen and what people tell me, during the day it's hot, dry, and sunny with no letup. I don't smoke any more, you'll be glad to hear that. But if I did I wouldn't dream of lighting up around here. One match out that window and this whole damn island would be on fire. It's like walking on tinder. Just dry grass, dead trees, people wondering when the rain's going to come and clear the dust from their throats. There are pictures of this place when it was a farm. It should be green and fertile. Instead, it's just dry and desiccated.'

They were both silent for a while, letting NASA clock up some expensive dead time on the satellite uplink.

'You're going out tonight,' he said, wanting to lighten this a little. 'You've got that nice clean look about you I recognize. It says, "The hell with all this, I'm going to go out, I'm going to get taken to some nice, expensive restaurant somewhere and order lobster tails and Chardonnay." Am I right?'

She smiled a little; that was enough.

'Okay. You're right.'

'With him?'

'Him?'

'You know. Do we need the water torture right now? Do I have to spit out the syllables?'

'You mean "him" as in "my husband"?'

'Present husband. I have to correct you there.'

'Present and only husband.'

'Yeah. Some guy.'

She wasn't interested in this, she never was. Her mind was elsewhere. It was so obvious in her round, open face, and the way those big almond-shaped eyes kept staring at him — with some sadness, some worry he didn't want to see.

'Michael, talk to me. Please. We lost the satellite links through to Kyoto twice this afternoon. The solar flares got really bad and they just went down with all the damn electromagnetic activity. Not for long. Just a few seconds.'

'How bad?' he sighed.

'It put out some entire power systems, complete domestic and industrial grids down. Some suburbs in Tokyo. Australia a couple of places. Some telecommunications links went out too. Shut the Tokyo Stock Exchange for forty minutes, killed most of the high-speed data lines between some of the main Asian hubs and the West Coast. Plus they closed the airport in Hong Kong for three hours because they had no air-traffic control. Some big magnetic wipeout, they think, but my guess is they don't really know. People are too busy fixing things to find out what really happened. I guess that's understandable. And people are mad too. It got close to a full-scale riot in Tokyo when they closed down the Nikkei. On the TV there are these guys in shirtsleeves in the street screaming at each other like they could kill someone.'

He could picture this. He could see this angry scene in his head, and match it against all the others he'd seen since this particular heat wave began. This was the age of the frayed temper. Sometimes it felt as if the heat were just peeling off some outside layer of humanity from your body and letting the sky take a long look at the beast that lived underneath.

'People get mad in cities these days, Sara,' he said, and hoped he sounded convincing. 'Hell, they always did. What's new? How long did the burst last?'

'Peaked at nine seconds or so. That's all, and look what it did. You believe that?'

The day was getting brighter by the second. It beckoned him.

'We're scientists, Sara. It's our job to accept anything that happens provided there's some proof it exists. Are these emissions just magnetic or are you seeing X-ray activity too?'

She stared at him, looking a little blank. 'Search me, Michael. We're still waiting on the data. Like I said, most of the links were down and these things don't just come back up again like a dog begging for a bone, not after they get hit that bad. Once we get it, once it's been through analysis, we'll post it. You take a look. See if it makes sense to you.'

'Yeah. You bet. Some coincidence, huh? You and me getting lumped together on the same job like this? I'm really glad it happened.'

Sara was scared, he thought, and even if he didn't have the words to chase away the demons, he could just try a little old-fashioned courtesy.

'I guess this is our field, Michael, and it's a pretty specialized one. Who else are they going to drum up?'

Sara felt flushed, wondered if he was going to embarrass them both. But when she looked he was back running his fingers through his hair again, not thinking about her at all, or even noticing the impatient way she was watching him from the monitor.

'True,' he said. 'It's nice to be wanted. Why don't you go eat, Wong girl? You look hungry. Jesus, you look starving.'

Her face came back at him from the monitor, so open, so truthful, and she didn't need to point out how very wrong he was.

'You think anyone knows what's going on here, Michael? All this climate change, all this unpredictability. Why don't these things fit the way they should? Why are we going through this stuff now? Not in two years' time when this solar cycle is supposed to peak? What the hell's happening?' 'Sara,' he said, and wished his voice didn't sound so grown-up, 'nature's happening, and we're just baffled because we're too dumb to understand it. There's no evidence this is anything other than the usual chaos we have to deal with the more we understand what's going on around us. What bugs us is that it's out of our control. This isn't global warming. We don't just persuade Gillette to take CFCs out of their shaving cream, pay the Chinese to burn gas, and then wait for the ozone hole to close. All that kind of stuff is just a kid's game here. We're dealing with the sun, and whatever it's planning to do, it will do. I know some people find it hard to believe there can be anything in this universe that human beings don't control, but the sun is one of them. We don't write these rules, we never did, and if something out there feels like changing them from time to time, then that's its business.'

Mistake, he thought immediately, as soon as he saw the heightened fear in her face.

'B — but don't get me wrong,' he stuttered. "There's nothing here that suggests we're seeing more than a few climate changes that have been going on unnoticed for centuries. The thing that's changed is that we can kid ourselves we understand a little more this time around. Welcome to the circus.'

'Yeah, I guess you're right,' she said, not sounding convinced. 'Take care, Michael,' she added, sighing. She blew him a kiss down the screen, her big almond eyes examining him in a way he didn't even begin to want to think about.

'You too, Sara.' He watched the video panel collapse back into the monitor, leave a soft grey blankness in its wake.

Lieberman got up from the desk and walked over to the window. Out to the east dawn was marching in, good and yellow, none of the pretty colours associated with smog and pollution, just plain old sunlight, which was (he guessed; no one had actually said as much) one of the reasons the project had chosen La Finca in the first place. All this isolation helped when you wanted to measure the stuff that poured from the heavens: There was no pollution, no radio interference, no ground lighting to ruin the night sky. Just pure data, and whatever else the heavens wanted to rain down on you.

Nice, he thought, and wished to God he could shake that last picture of Sara out of his head. She looked unhappy, scared, which wasn't like her. It wasn't like anyone who worked in Lone Wolf, which — until he got fired for taking a drunken poke at Sam Smith, the director, at that Christmas party three short years before — had been as close to paradise as he was ever likely to find.

'Work,' Michael Lieberman said quietly into the room. Then he buried himself in the pile of reports sitting on the computer.

CHAPTER 3 Turbulence

The man was about his own age, Seabright reckoned, and probably out of condition. He was marginally overweight, with a round, flabby face, receding hairline, and bright blue staring eyes. They'd reclined the seat in business as much as they could, let him lie back, bleeding all the time. It was everywhere, on his jacket, on the seat, and, most of all, on his face. The scarlet gore was still pumping out of his nose, fast and furious, big sticky bubbles of it, coming through his fingers whenever they took away the wet paper towels to let him snatch some extra air.

Seabright didn't let anything show, not on the outside, just noted inwardly, in a little wrenched portion of his stomach, that this man thought he was dying. It was in his eyes. They stared back at him, pleading: Why me? Why me?

Seabright gave him a thin-lipped smile, then took Ali by the arm, led her to the window by the central bulkhead, and ran through the possibilities.

'What's his name?'

'Weber. German businessman. Travelling on his own.'

'Does he have any previous medical history?'

She shook her head. 'He says not. My guess is maybe high blood pressure — when he got on he had a florid complexion, was puffing and wheezing. But then we all were. It was hot.'

'There's no evidence of heart failure?'

'I'm a flight attendant, Captain,' she answered quickly, then cursed herself for letting it come out like that. 'Sorry. What I meant to say was, all I know is what I got from the training courses. I don't think there's any evidence of that. On the other hand, I've never seen anything like this before. One minute he was fine, a little red in the face, the next he's complaining of a headache, right out of the blue, pushing the button and asking for an aspirin. Before I could get it to him, this happens. It was just pouring.'

'Yes.' He could see that for himself. 'But it's slowing down now, isn't it?'

'Not much. He's been bleeding for thirty minutes now. I let it go on for a while without bothering you. But you saw the state he's in. He's lost a lot of blood. And he's still losing it. There's nothing…' She looked furious with herself. 'There's nothing I know how to do. Or anyone else we have on board, for that matter.'

'No.'

She looked at him and he knew what she was thinking: This was why you had a captain.

He ran through the options. His calmness, his reassurance, was as important to her as to the sick man behind him.

'I'll see if there's a diversion we can make. We're not exactly within spitting distance of a great hospital out here. Moscow might be the best bet, and that's maybe two hours out or more.'

'He can't go on like that for two hours.'

'This is a nosebleed, Ali. It has to stop sometime.'

She said nothing for a moment, just stared at him with an expression he found infuriating, as if there were something here he ought to understand better.

'Yes, sir. Just a nosebleed.'

Seabright wanted to get away from this, wanted to get back to the closed, secure cockpit and not look at the agony in her face.

'Is there something else?'

She didn't answer.

'Ali?'

'It's stupid. It's crazy.'

He could get bored by this, he thought. And he could get angry too. His forehead was throbbing. His temper was bubbling beneath the surface.

'If you've got something to say, say it.' She hesitated, not wanting to appear foolish. 'He's not the only one.' 'What?'

'When he started ringing for the aspirin he wasn't the only one. I've got three back in economy with nosebleeds. Not so bad as this. But bad enough, enough to scare them. Scare me. And more than I can count screaming about headaches. What's going on, sir?'

Seabright couldn't take this in. It made no sense. 'It's the crowd thing,' he said. 'They see one person doing it, they just follow.' Even as he said it, he knew it was feeble. 'No.' She wasn't just scared, she was angry too, and somehow this seemed to be directed at him.

'When it started, some of these people couldn't even see each other, sir. And it happened all at the same time. As if someone pressed a button or something and we all started hurting. And the blood too. Hell, I've got a headache.' She gazed straight into his face. 'Haven't you? Sir?' 'I have now,' Seabright lied quietly. Then thought about all the things he'd read and never really absorbed, about how an individual received more radiation in a three-hour plane journey at 37,000 feet than during an entire month working inside a nuclear power station. The German's face came back to him: big red gouts of blood, clotting, full of mucus, pouring down his face. But there was nothing in the records about a spontaneous event like this. Nothing he could remember.

He felt a sudden need to be back up front. 'You know what to do, Ali. Keep me posted.'

Then he marched back to the cockpit, not too quickly, not showing anything that any of the people in business or first, most of them looking a little more grim than usual today, could even begin to think of as panic.

You can't see inside a person's head, he thought, and added, as a postscript: Thank God for that. Because right then he was seeing exactly what would be waiting for him once he opened the security door.

He smiled at the front-row passengers in first, two sleek-looking Japanese moguls in dark silk suits, sipping their champagne, picking at little plates of caviar, both sweating uncomfortably. Then he pushed open the door, closed it quickly behind him, and stared at Jimmy Mulligan.

The little Irishman was slumped up against the yoke, just conscious, aware enough to look back at him with the same scared eyes he'd seen two minutes before. His face was red with blood, still pumping down onto his white short-sleeved officer's shirt, a steady liquid stream, thick and livid.

'Couldn't move,' Mulligan mumbled, his voice a drunken slur. 'Sorry, sir.'

Seabright stepped back through the door, picked up a half-full champagne bucket and a couple of cloth napkins, returned, and placed them in Mulligan's lap, then leaped into the left-hand seat and strapped on the shoulder harness.

'Clean yourself up, Jimmy. Get some water on your face.'

Seabright punched up the moving map display. He'd give it fifteen more minutes before making a decision, and if there was time, then Moscow it would be. But just in case, he pulled up the database of local airports, a string of names he didn't recognize. In a little under forty minutes they could be down somewhere that was supposed to have the facilities to handle this kind of emergency. If he was willing to take the risk on a backwoods airfield and a medical system that was probably primitive even by Russian standards.

He stared ahead, out of the wide-view screen of the cockpit, watching the empty land roll slowly underneath them, not a city, not even a small town in sight anywhere. And not a cloud either. It was so sunny and clear he felt he could see straight off the edge of the earth.

'Sir?'

Seabright had let his mind go blank, and mentally chided himself for the slip. Too much to do, too much to think about. He knew all the symptoms of the cockpit malaise that let your head drift off into nowhere just when the going got tough.

To his relief, Mulligan looked better. He wasn't slumped in his seat any more, his hands seemed steady. The bleeding was stopping. He'd be okay. Maybe the same thing was happening with the stricken German back in business.

"There was a call,' Mulligan said, and his eyes were still scared. Seabright wondered why he'd not seen that. 'Air Force One put out a Mayday. I got half of it, then I must have blacked out.'

'Shit.'

Seabright dialled the frequency and tried to listen through the white noise screaming through the speakers. There was half a voice there, then it stopped. From what little he heard, he could detect a low note of growing terror in the pilot's voice. They weren't the only ones trapped in this invisible storm in the sky.

'Air Force One,' Seabright yelled, 'we have your Mayday and will relay. What's the problem?'

The white noise diminished a little.

'Damned if I know,' said a shaky voice through the din. 'But we're losing systems here, we're losing everything, and…'

The sea of electronic screams came back.

'Sir!'

He'd almost forgotten about Mulligan. This situation was so bizarre.

'The lights…'

Seabright glowered at the LCD panels and what he saw there made his heart freeze over. It wasn't just the main gear any more. There were sinister little yellow and red lights flashing in places he'd never seen before, not even in training, warnings about pressurization, control servos, heating, and fuel flow, digital screams for help from systems that had nothing to do with each other, could not be connected by anything except their presence in the great electronic nervous system of the machine.

He punched the emergency button on the moving map, located the closest airfield, mentally registered that it was pretty much close to dead ahead, but 130 nautical miles away. He keyed the radio to the distress frequency and started to read out something he had committed to heart many years ago, in a two-seat tandem Chipmunk trainer, learning to fly in an RAF base in the Highlands of Scotland.

'Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Dragon 92…'

And when it was over he really didn't know if he'd reached the end of the message or not. There wasn't sufficient space left by the pain for that kind of thought. Somewhere through the routine little chant a hole had opened in his head, and into it had flowed white-hot molten metal, the colour of the centre of the sun, and it had roared and raged through every neural quarter it could find, screaming all the time, in his voice, in Jimmy Mulligan's too, with a deafening loudness that shook this small enclosed world, flying 37,000 feet above the earth, rattled it so hard he felt his body straining against the straps of the shoulder harness, so hard he thought it would shake everything, the aircraft, his mind, his being, into pieces.

It was impossible to gauge how long this lasted, or the amount of time, after it was over, it took him to come back to some form of consciousness. The aftermath was almost as painful as the experience. His head felt as if it had been hit with an iron bar. There was blood in his mouth, and he felt it streaming hot and sticky from his nose. He turned his neck — such agony there too — and strained to look at Mulligan. The first officer was awake, conscious, not the slumped, dead form he'd expected to see. He could move. Pretty soon, he thought, the man might speak.

The aircraft had settled down too. After the worst moment of clear-air turbulence he'd ever encountered, they were safe, they were flying, held in place by the checks and balances of the autopilot that kept them on course and never stopped for headaches, sudden haemorrhages, or any other frailties of the human species.

Out of nowhere, the pressurization circuits popped. There was a slight bang — one he knew from all those hours running through the drill — and the oxygen masks dropped down from the overhead panel.

This was where the training came in. This was where you acted first, thought later, and these instincts never left you, always clicked into place, sent you scrabbling for the mask, got it firmly in your hand, pulled the clear plastic mouthpiece around your face, adjusted the elastic retaining straps around the back of your head, stayed calm, stayed cool, then, when everything was okay, got your breathing back to normal, let your pulse rate slow down somewhere into the lower reaches of anxiety.

The air tasted stale and metallic, but he could live with it. In a moment or two he'd try taking the mask off anyway. This was another trick of the lights, an errant circuit going haywire, not some massive depressurization of the aircraft. He looked at Mulligan. The first officer had his mask on too, the mouthpiece stained by blood. He was breathing with a regular rhythm. There was no need for worry there. Aft, the stewardesses would be earning their pay ten times over, fighting to keep the cabin calm, making sure the masks had dropped on schedule, were on and working. This had happened to him once before and Seabright remembered it well. No great depressurization then either, just some hot turbulence rolling off the Karakorams.

He reached for the transmit button to resend the Mayday message, then stopped, found he could hardly bring himself to take a breath of the stale, tinny oxygen coming through the mask, could hardly dare to look at this sight, so strange, so terrifying in front of him.

Every tiny cell of every LCD panel on the display was now alight, screaming furiously for attention in ways that couldn't be true, couldn't make sense, cycling madly from green through amber to red and back again, beating to some internal rhythm that just got faster, more manic, as he watched.

Then reached some kind of climax, some form of satisfaction, and stopped.

Seabright listened to the sound of the aircraft dying, listened to the engines winding down, the fans and circuits growing cold, saw everything electrical on board cease to function, stared at the dead dull face of the display panels, and knew this was impossible, knew that no conjunction of events could kill every circuit in the machine, every backup with it.

The aircraft now stayed aloft through momentum and the locked aerodynamic form of its ailerons and elevators alone, buoyed in the current of air 37,000 feet above central Asia, no noise in the cockpit, nothing but the slow, insistent rush of air past the fuselage. It would be different behind them, behind the closed door, back in the passenger section. The two men couldn't hear the screaming there. They didn't need to. It was bad enough in their imaginations.

Even without power the cockpit was bright. The sun streamed in through the wide, clear windows, illuminated the electronic deadness that surrounded them, made plain their relentless, uncontrolled passage through the air.

Seabright stared ahead, out the window, watched the way the horizon was now starting to slip imperceptibly upward as the aircraft settled into a slow descent, and tried to guess the rate they were falling, tried to work out how long it would take them to sink from the sky to the ground.

CHAPTER 4 Annie and Mo

Michael Lieberman wandered downstairs for breakfast just before seven, drank the best part of a pint of fresh orange juice and three strong coffees, and wondered what he'd got himself into.

In Lone Wolf, and many other little hubs around the world where the serious solar astronomers gathered, Lieberman was the 'sunspot man'. His early career as a designer of solar-powered satellite systems was largely forgotten, though not by him. Now he was the one they turned to when they needed a map of that big burning orb in the sky. Not the expert with the longest list of qualifications after his name. Not the one with more papers in the library than you could fit into a lifetime of reading. It went deeper than that; it relied as much on informed hunches and some subterranean intuitive guesswork even he felt hard-pressed to rationalize. He had a feel for this area, could look at the data, the flow of the solar tide, the jerky rhythm of the X-ray charts, and, most of all, that restless pattern of blemishes on the face of the sun that he'd made his own. He could read the way the umbras and penumbras shifted and moved constantly, then pretty much guess where they might go next. And just now, with the spot cycle coming unexpectedly to a peak two years before it should, when anyone could buy a filter to stop that big yellow ball of glass from burning out your retina, then just stare at the sun and see the spots with the naked eye, that was a talent to nurture.

La Finca was like no science project he'd ever seen, not in two decades of professional research. There was no one else down for breakfast, no gossip and hopeful flirting across the tables. The place was occupied, however. He'd seen as much when he came in the previous evening, walked from the helipad, across the yellowing, lifeless grass in heat that was still unbearable, and met Simon Bennett, who'd politely, if distantly, shaken his hand on the doorstep before making an excuse and disappearing into a big, barnlike building set next to the main mansion where everyone seemed to be staying.

Lieberman had eaten a solitary dinner, sinking a couple of beers until his head felt dull, and trying to stop from wondering where the next infusion of money would come from after this little enterprise ran its course. Academic tenure was something he'd learned to despise (particularly since he no longer had it). But there were times, when the bills came through the door of his small rented apartment in San Francisco like confetti, that it had its attractions. At least he and Sara never had kids in the three jumbled years they'd been married. That was one consolation, he thought, then cursed himself for his dumbness. If there had been kids the marriage never would have gone sour in the first place. The tough and delightful business of raising a family would have swallowed them up. But you couldn't control your genes, couldn't order up kids like a pizza from Domino's.

He wasted time in the dining room counting off the long minutes to the eight am meeting Bennett had promised. Finally, with almost half an hour to go, the door opened and a woman walked in, hand in hand with a child who looked about nine years old. Lieberman smiled at them and got back a nice grin from the kid, something a little less warm from the woman. The mother was thin to the point of angularity, with a pretty, narrow face and long chestnut hair flowing down her back. She wore a loose cotton flowered shift, and her face and exposed arms were the colour of walnut, that overtanned look that was so unfashionable these days, when the dread phrase 'skin cancer' seemed to be on everyone's lips, all the more so now that the climate seemed to have turned so hot and wild. She looked like a hippie, he thought, one of the kids who populated Berkeley when he'd matriculated there at the end of the seventies. Like them, she looked a little lost.

But not the daughter, who, in snatched glances, grinned curiously at him, full of life, bright blue eyes shining, fair hair, long like her mother's, dressed in jeans with a cheap cheesecloth top. Not much money there, he thought, and maybe that got to the mother, but it certainly didn't bother the kid.

The girl went over to the buffet and picked up a huge circular pastry, like a snail shell, and started to unravel the end, tearing off chunks, stuffing it into her mouth, staring at him all the time.

'They pay you to eat that stuff?' Lieberman asked finally.

She gazed at him and Lieberman was aware of being judged, in that swift merciless way that he recognized as a particular childhood trait. Then the kid looked at her mother, saw the gap in her concentration, picked up another pastry off the table, put it on a plate, and brought it over to him.

'You should try it, they're great,' she said. Lieberman heard the mother sigh — she didn't need this, or want it, he thought — and took a big bite. The kid was right. It was delicious.

'These things have a name?' he said, staring at the girl, aware of the mother hovering behind him.

'Ensaimadas. You only get them on Mallorca. They're made of flour and lard. That's pork fat. Do you say "lard" in America? I can't remember.'

Lieberman put the ensaimada back on the plate and said, 'Lard will do, lard will do just fine. Sit down if you like. My name's Michael Lieberman.'

The girl smiled, and her mother just looked, but with the kid in the lead they joined him.

'Annie Sinclair,' she said. 'This is my mom. Mo.'

Lieberman bent down, hooded his eyes, and whispered, 'Does she speak?'

'When I get half the chance,' Mo Sinclair replied coldly, a trace of something that sounded faintly Scottish in her voice, then drew up a chair. 'Annie can talk the hind leg off a donkey. It sometimes makes me superfluous.'

'Ah,' he said, and let his hands flutter in a small wave of surrender. No man in sight, except this failed one who'd picked them up at breakfast. It was so obvious. They had a compact closeness between them that didn't let much light through, even on a shining, golden day like this.

'You work here?'

Mo Sinclair smiled wanly, and he was aware of being examined for a second time, evaluated in a more clinical, icy way. 'I am tech support for the network. When your PC goes haywire, call for Mo. Most times I can fix it. It's a small talent but it gets me work.'

'You two been here long?'

'A few months. We were just travelling on the island and I saw an ad. It's just a temporary thing.'

'And school?' he asked, looking at Annie, whose eyes went straight to the floor.

'Like I said,' Mo Sinclair added quickly, a note of nervousness in her voice, 'we're just here temporarily. There's time for school later.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Sure.'

And couldn't miss the way Annie darted a sly glance at him.

'I wish I travelled more when I was a kid,' he said, nodding.

'You do?'

'Yeah. When I was your age an outing to Woolworth's was a big thing. You don't know how lucky you are, Annie.'

The mother was looking at him frankly and he felt vaguely offended. He was just trying to claw back a little of the situation, nothing more.

'What do you do?' Annie asked.

'Oh,' Lieberman replied in a flash, 'I'm a professor. Don't take that wrong — I mean, I'm not the pompous type. Some people paint. Some people fix computers. I professor. Professoring is a full-time thing with me.'

Her eyebrows were halfway up her head.

'But what kind of-'

'Oh, I get it. Just being a professor isn't enough, huh? You want the grim details? Okay. Well, I used to design the things that turned sunlight into energy out in space. But that sort of fell out of fashion. Now I'm the sunspot guy. You know, those freckles on the face of the sun that everyone seems so excited about just now? If you want to know something about them — how big they are, what they're planning to do next — I'm the person to ask.'

'Oh,' she said, looking a little disappointed.

'I also launch my own personal space rockets and communicate with aliens in other galaxies. I'd love to tell you more about it, but then I'd have to kill you.'

Annie Sinclair giggled and stuffed half a pastry in her mouth.

'Bullshi-'

'Annie!' Mo Sinclair interrupted quickly, stifling a laugh. 'Mind your manners.'

Lieberman just grinned. Then looked at his watch. 'Well, it was cool meeting you but I have to transport out of this particular dimension. A meeting. Maybe someone's going to tell me why I'm here.'

'You don't know?' Mo asked.

'Nope. They send the contract, I do the job. Got any ideas?'

She shrugged, in a half-hearted way that made him think there just had to be a little more to it than this.

'Don't tell me,' he said. 'You just fix computers.'

'That's right. I don't think it's a big secret, but there's no reason to clue us in.'

'Right.'

'But you can tell us later.'

'I can?'

'We can buy you lunch!' Annie broke in.

'Oh, your mom's probably got things to do,' Lieberman said, offering Mo an out.

'No… I'd — we'd like that,' the mother said. 'We'll show you around. Go into town. Pollensa's beautiful.'

'I bet. But I have to run now. You know where this briefing room is?'

'Outside. In the old stable block. That's where the offices are.'

Lieberman smiled, felt a little uncomfortable with the weight of their stares, made his excuses, and went out the door.

It was bright, the heat already building in the air. The layout of the site was pretty easy to grasp. The big mansion was used for accommodation. The work took place in a vast single-storey barn sprouting antennae on its roof, set a hundred yards from the house out toward the clifftop. It wasn't much of a walk but it stole the air from inside him, even this early in the morning. The weather was on some strange, vicious bent, a searing cycle of heat that seemed to be tightening on itself. The grass crackled underfoot, dead, dry, and yellow. The heat bore down from the cloudless sky. The only sound came from the waves roaring against rock below the cliffline just a couple of hundred yards ahead. He walked to the edge and leaned on the perimeter wall. A couple of helicopters were parked, silent, sleeping fifty yards away. Behind the mansion, a massive four-square shape of gleaming stone the colour of the dead grass, stood a line of bare mountains that stretched beyond his line of vision, harsh and inhospitable. At their foot was the bright blue Mediterranean running to a white line of foam where it met the impassable rock. When they said Mallorca, he thought he was coming to some holiday island. This felt more like being stranded in some reclusive millionaire's hideout in the Galapagos. It was hard to think of anywhere quite so isolated for a research facility. There was no sign of another house in any direction, nothing but the outline of a ruined castle on a headland a good mile away. Astronomy made its home in some odd, distant locations, he thought, but he'd never met one quite as strange as this.

He walked into the big barn and was immediately grateful for the cool, dark interior. There were six people in the big open main room. It was full of PCs and wall charts, nice, classy wooden desks, high-backed executive chairs, and the buzz of people busying about their work. Three of the inhabitants were pushing papers around their desktops. The rest stared straight at him as he came through the door.

'Michael,' Bennett said, smiling, and held out a hand. Simon Bennett was probably in his mid-fifties, stockily built with neatly cut grey hair, a round face, and half-moon glasses of the kind adopted by Oxbridge academics of a certain age. He peered at Lieberman with bright, curious eyes. Bennett was wearing grey slacks, a white shirt, and a red club tie. It seemed incongruous in the surroundings.

The three paper-shufflers looked briefly at them, then left the room without saying anything, closing the door behind them as they went.

'You got many people here, Simon?'

'Thirty-two — not all on this single site, of course. We have another base in the mountains at Puig Roig. That's why we spend so much money on helicopters.'

'And… um.'

Bennett Looked puzzled for a moment. Academia didn't always teach you the niceties, Lieberman thought.

'Oh. Good Lord. I do apologize. This is Ellis Bevan, our head of operations. And Irwin Schulz, who runs the computers here, and a lot more than that too. Ellis's work I can begin to understand. I do have to sign off the budget, after all. Irwin, I'm afraid, may as well be talking double Dutch as far as I am concerned but he is, I assure you, a genius.'

Schulz blushed. He couldn't have been more than twenty- five or so, Lieberman guessed, a short, slightly overweight figure in a bulging T-shirt and jeans, and sporting round wire-rimmed glasses — all in all classic geek material. He held out a pudgy hand.

'Hey,' he said, 'I'm just the average propeller head. Don't believe anything else. You worked at Lone Wolf?'

'For a while.'

'Some place. I was there a couple of weeks ago. You people ought to blow your trumpet some more. We got this woman on the case there, Jesus, so bright.'

'Sara?'

'You know her?'

'I was married to her for a while.'

'Oh.'

Lieberman felt like kicking himself. Schulz was blushing all over his fleshy face.

'Hey, that's no problem. We're still friends.'

'Nice,' Schulz said. 'I never understood until recently how tiny the whole solar flare community really is. I guess you guys must know each other real well.'

'If only by reputation.' Bennett smiled.

Ellis Bevan peered at Lieberman and said, 'Good to meet you.'

He was about thirty, Lieberman guessed, tall, straight, and muscular, with close-cropped hair and a slightly sour expression on his thin, sharp-featured face. Bevan had the word 'administration' written all over him, Lieberman thought, and cursed himself immediately. It was wrong to judge people so quickly, but Bevan had the look of someone you turned to when you wanted to do some firing, when the budget was overrunning, and when the plumbing didn't work.

'Operations?' Lieberman said.

'Yeah,' Bevan replied in a flat East Coast accent. 'Everything outside the academic part of the project is down to me. Telecommunications. Transportation. Finance.'

'And a very good job he does too,' Bennett added. 'That's the last thing we want on our plates.'

'I'm sure,' Lieberman said. 'So what exactly is on our plate?'

The smile disappeared from Bennett's face. 'You mean you don't know?'

'Hey. I just got a last-minute call from the Agency saying you people wanted some advice in my field and you were paying real money. That's as far as it got.'

Bennett said nothing and Lieberman began to feel he'd lost a point. A real academic, someone who wasn't on the edge of burnout, would, at the very least, have asked.

'I see,' Bennett said after a couple of ponderous moments. 'These are big issues, Michael, and I don't have the time to go into them all right now. This evening I want to run a full briefing session. Mainly for your benefit.'

'I'll look forward to that,' Lieberman answered. 'You've got a lot of people here.'

'Most of them are engineers,' Bevan said. 'We need a lot of support for the kind of telecommunications rig we're running. You don't need to bring every last academic to the experiment these days. We've got a virtual network running between here, Lone Wolf, and another base we have in Kyoto.'

Thirty people to keep the network running? Lieberman still couldn't get a picture of it in his head.

'But-'

'Michael,' Bennett said with a thin smile on his face, 'we really are very busy. Can you leave your questions to this evening? I promise to talk a lot more then. And believe me, you'll find what I have to say… interesting. I just want you to know your role here is an important one.'

'Crucial,' Schulz said. 'We really need it.'

'I've followed your recent work,' Bennett continued. 'It's most encouraging. What we need from you is what you do best. An analysis of when and where the sunspot activity is shifting. We're trying to work out how much of the climatic and electromagnetic effects we're experiencing just now are due to the changes in the state of the solar disc. If you can give us an idea of where it's headed, we can tune the systems we have to make the most of the position.'

Lieberman blinked, surprised to feel a certain wounded pride. 'You mean that's it?'

Bennett nodded. 'Reports every hour. Irwin will set up a channel on the system later this afternoon. We're all pretty much on a war footing until the zenith has passed.'

'Great. So I'm kind of the weatherman here and that's that.'

'A very well-paid weatherman, Michael,' Bennett said quietly. 'And it's not exactly clerical work, trying to predict what happens on the face of a star ninety-three million miles away from us. Now, is it?'

'No? You sure Ellis here doesn't want me sweeping up too?' As soon as the words escaped his lips, he wished he had them back. Why must you insist on being a pain in the ass? he chided himself.

Bennett was back to shuffling papers. The interview was over. For today, at least, it looked like his role was to play tourist.

CHAPTER 5 Straight-in Approach

You don't just fall out of the air. Ian Seabright knew that, had it drilled into him from the first time he'd left the earth, behind the twisting prop of that long-dead Chipmunk. The aircraft did what it was supposed to do when it lost its source of thrust. It settled into the long, steady glide that was determined by the angle of its control systems and the aerodynamic profile they presented to the air as it flowed over its wings and fuselage.

It was descending at around 2,300 feet per minute, something he soon realized he could confirm by using one of the few instruments on board that didn't require electricity to feed it: the altimeter, with its subsidiary ascent and descent readout, triggered by the simple pressure of the air rushing past the aircraft.

You don't just fall out of the air.

The land below was flat and low — no mountains, no all-covering cloud, and thank God for that. There was time to think this through. There was time to act.

Seabright looked at his first officer seated next to him. Mulligan was a mess, his face mask smeared with dried blood, his white short-sleeved shirt stained too, big sweat patches coming out under the arms. The Irishman stared mutely back at him, not flinching, and Seabright felt grateful. Jimmy Mulligan was not a man to let you down.

Gingerly, Seabright removed the mask from his face, took a deep breath, tried to judge what it felt like. Instinct told him the aircraft was not depressurizing, that it would be okay for him to work without the mask that he found annoying. The atmosphere felt fine. The masks had actually fallen due to some electrical fault, not a pressure failure. What was now pumping oxygen into the cabin was the movement of air through the engines, and that would be enough for now. This would keep them alive as the aircraft continued its descent, and by the time you got down to 18,000 feet or so it didn't matter anyway. There was enough oxygen around at that altitude to keep you awake, keep the blackouts away.

Mulligan waited for the instruction, then took his own mask off.

Seabright spoke rapidly, thinking ahead all the time.

'I want you to go back, find Ali, tell her to get the rest of the crew together, to brief the passengers that we are working on the problem, we expect to have it fixed. But just in case, they should prepare for an emergency landing in around fifteen minutes from now, they should get the drill card out of the back of the seat and memorize every word on it, memorize the brace position, keep aware of what's happening out the window. Tell them they can take their oxygen masks off but they should keep them on their laps, use them if they need to. It might just keep the panic down a little if they don't have those damn things around their faces. Tell them not to expect any announcements. The intercom's down. They know that already, but make sure they don't expect it to come back up. Tell them we're in fine weather, descending onto flat, open terrain, not mountains. And we can see down every inch of the way.'

'Sir.'

'Then get back here pronto and help me get this bugger back flying again.'

'Done,' Mulligan answered, then took off his shoulder harness, wriggled out of the seat, and was out the door.

Seabright looked at the blank LCD screens in front of them. Still no sign of life, no indication that there was, anywhere within the aircraft, an amp of usable current. Not even hoping for any joy, he felt the yoke. Dead too. This was fly-by-wire. You needed the power, you needed the servos to shift the ailerons and elevators and rudder, to adjust the flaps and slats that kept the beast on its correct, three-dimensional journey through the air. Without electricity, the machine was locked in whatever attitude it held when the circuits failed, in this case the cruise configuration, which, just then, was the best he could hope for. Had the freeze occurred when they were climbing, the results would have been cataclysmic in a matter of seconds. The aircraft would have set itself a high angle of attack, expecting the thrust to keep it flying, keep it going up all the time at a healthy airspeed. Without the engines, and without the ability to trim for the glide, it would have flown itself straight into a stall in under a minute, shuddered to a halt in the air, ceased to be an object that flew, and turned into one that fell, like a brick, straight out of the sky.

Seabright knew this was a time to improvise. This was a machine — a very complex one, but a machine nonetheless. Its circuits and pulleys and servos, its huge fan-driven engines, the reservoirs of volatile aviation fuel that now sat leaden and useless in its wings, were just overcomplicated cogs in a child's toy. The way you got them working was by finding some means to re-establish the links that made them live. You had to use the tools that came in the box. You couldn't kick-start this beast back into being. You couldn't wind up some rubber band. You had to think alongside the system, not against it.

He was still staring at the dead grey panels, watching the altimeter unwind at the corner of his vision, when Mulligan returned, and that worried Seabright. He was the captain and he was taking too long at this. His mind wasn't working straight. He could have done something. Punched some buttons, tried the radio, punched anything.

Doesn't work like that, Seabright told himself. This wasn't some gigantic fruit machine waiting for the right combination by accident. There were too many sequences available, in the mass of buttons and dials in front of them, for that. You had to think your way through.

'We'll go through the start-up sequence, Jimmy. What's it like back there?'

'Pretty calm.' Amazingly calm, he thought, and Jimmy Mulligan wished his head hadn't made that analogy when he saw the people, strapped so tightly in their seats, just waiting. With the same blank, hopeless look you saw on animals making their way to the slaughterhouse.

'Ali's coping,' he added. And she was. Of course she was. Just.

Seabright had started to work the grey, lifeless panel.

'Sir…'

'I know. It's dead. We don't have time for explanations. Let's just see what happens.'

And so they spent a minute racing through the sequence, punching the dead buttons, reading through the list, faster than they'd ever done, so fast the company's chief pilot would carpet them on the spot if he'd ever heard it rushed in this way. Then they activated the final switch, sat back, and waited.

After five seconds, five seconds that seemed like a lifetime to both men, Seabright said, very calmly, no panic in his voice, 'Okay, Jimmy. Now we do it the other way round. We run through the shutdown sequence. Then we try the start-up once more. See if we can fire something up in this bloody thing.'

'Sir…?'

'Jimmy.' Seabright glared at him with a fierceness Mulligan had never before seen. 'Do you have some other idea?'

Mulligan said nothing.

'Right. Well, let's get to it, then.'

It was almost the reverse of the start-up routine. A few extra switches. A few extra procedures. By the time they had finished, the altimeter had wound down to 11,000 feet. It would take another minute or more to run through the start-up routine again. This would bring them down to close to 8,000 feet. There might be time enough to try this thing once more. There might be time to try something else. If he could think of something else, and right now there was nothing in his head except this repetitive set of actions that should, in a universe that worked by the rules, bring the aircraft back to life.

'That's it,' Mulligan said quietly.

The two men stared at the dead panel, lost for words. Then Ian Seabright closed his eyes, let his mind look into the blackness there, and wondered: What next? Do we keep on punching in this little chant all the way down to the ground? Or do we just sit back and wait? Let it all happen around us, in this dead plane, with its frozen controls, its burned-out circuitry, and close to 340 helpless people waiting to die? 'Sir.'

Mulligan's voice was urgent now. The first officer was tugging at his sleeve.

Seabright looked up, cursed the light coming through the window, the bright, piercing sunlight that made his eyes hurt, then saw something, recognized what it was, and found his mind coming back to him from that black, hopeless place it had found a moment before.

A single light winked on the panel. It was the auxiliary power unit, the tiny jet engine housed in the tail, and it was starting to flicker. Something inside had found the spark and, once it was there, had decided to inhale. 'Come on,' Seabright muttered. 'Come on.' Then he watched, in hot, sweaty silence, as the rest of the panel came slowly, erratically back to life, a life that was as much amber and red as green — but that didn't matter. Seabright could have reached forward and kissed every one of them because what they promised was hope.

Seabright gripped the yoke. Shook it, knowing this was pointless, knowing there was no physical link here, that only the buzzing of electrons down the circuit — if it still existed — could help him fly the plane. It was rock-hard. Still frozen. He kept his hand there, just in case.

'The number-one engine's coming back up,' Mulligan said, his eyes flashing over the panels, just a tremor of excitement in his voice.

'It's something. You just watch what happens there. Don't push it too hard yet. Make sure we don't start to lose it again. Once you're happy with that, work on the others. Leave the controls to me.'

The altimeter was unwinding more slowly now. Down to around 800 feet per minute, the aircraft's descent cushioned by the single engine pushing out a modicum of thrust.

Time, Seabright thought. Just what he wanted. Then made the Mayday broadcast he'd tried to transmit what seemed like hours ago, made it all the way through, with a reading off the moving map, a reading that looked as if it just might be accurate. Someone came back on it too, a controller with a heavy Middle European accent and an undisguised note of urgency in his voice. Seabright turned down the volume, didn't even think about responding. There were better things to do. They knew there was an emergency. The aircraft was squawking its stricken presence through its transponder to anyone who wanted to listen. He had other tasks to occupy his time.

'We've just got number one, sir,' Mulligan said. 'I think I can keep that one up okay. The rest are dead.'

'Fine,' Seabright answered. One engine was better than none.

'If worse comes to worst, Jimmy, we're just going to have to fly this aircraft gently into the ground. I want you to drop the gear at fifteen hundred feet, then give us enough power on the one engine from one thousand to cut the descent rate to something as gentle as we can get. The terrain should be obvious by then. If necessary, we'll use the power to pop us over any obstacles we can see and then get this thing on the ground, and-'

Seabright stopped in mid sentence, turned to the horrified Mulligan, and smiled.

'Sorry, Jimmy. I didn't mean to worry you.'

'It was you?'

'Oh yes.' Seabright grinned. 'Oh yes.'

The movement was so familiar to them, such a part of the training routine. Out of nowhere, the aircraft had moved out of balance, yawed in the air, slipping sideways, moving them in their seats until Seabright realized what was happening, centred the rudder, brought the ship back into a straight line.

'You try it,' Seabright ordered. 'Try some right pedal.'

The same thing happened, shifting them in the opposite direction, then Mulligan relaxed, let the aircraft take up its natural position.

'I have control,' Seabright said, and added, mainly to himself, 'and now for the big one.'

He pulled back gently on the yoke, expecting to feel it lock against him. This time it moved — only half an inch — and then he let it centre again. But it moved. The nose of the aircraft rose gently against the horizon. The altimeter slowed, came down to 7,300 feet… and stayed there.

'Airspeed?' Seabright wasn't taking his mind off these controls. He intended to stay on top of these all the way until the moment their wheels gently kissed the ground.

'Three-fifty and settled.'

Both men peered out the window, out to pale nothingness, empty, bare rocky terrain. But flat. Flat enough, if it came to it.

'Get working on that map, Jimmy. Either you find me some airfield near here and straight ahead or we're going for a forced landing pretty damn soon.'

Mulligan wiped his face with his arm, came away with a mixture of sweat and blood and mucus on his skin, and stared at the display.

'There's a military base ninety miles away; you need to turn twenty degrees to the right.'

These were command decisions, Seabright thought. These were why they made you a captain.

'We'll go for it, and take her down on the way if we need to. It's probably the station that came back on the Mayday call.'

Then, gently, with a rate of turn that was so slow that no one in the aircraft would even notice it, he moved the plane through twenty degrees to the north and let it settle once more. The aeroplane moved steadily forward through the sky.

Seabright tried to compose his thoughts. He needed to talk to the people in the cabin. And after that another call — to the airfield ahead, to explain their predicament. To describe, in as much detail as he possibly could, what had happened to them, at what flight level, and where. This was good practice. This was just plain good manners. If something struck your aircraft out of the blue, you told air traffic so they could pass it on to anyone else in the area, make sure they were aware of the danger. There was no other reason than that, Seabright said to himself, and almost believed it.

'We'll make it, Jimmy,' Seabright said, then started to work the radio. When the Mayday was done, he called Air Force One again. There was nothing on the frequency but noise.

CHAPTER 6 Calvary

Lieberman waited outside the huge wooden entrance doors of La Finca, feeling like a wallflower waiting for a date. The mansion was something. He stood at the head of a long, broad driveway that led inland, out of the estate. At his feet was a vast Renaissance fish pond in golden stone with ancient, crumbling statuary and the odd orange shape bobbing up to disturb the opaque green surface. Beyond the water, which seemed out of place in this arid landscape, a line of cypresses ran like exclamation marks down each side of the road, winding through parched, dead fields of wheat into a narrow valley. The crop moved in the faint wind, a febrile dance without energy. This place had money, he thought. Money and class. But all that didn't buy a respite from this strange hiccup in the climate that seemed to have gripped the world. When he thought about it, he found it impossible to pinpoint when the weather had gone bad. Meteorology was not his field, and his gut feeling was that it was wrong to judge what was happening with the climate on intuition alone. Stone Age man had probably spent a large part of his life complaining that the weather just wasn't what it was. Maybe there was some neural circuit inside your head that filtered out the prolonged extremes from your childhood and turned it all into an episode of The Waltons, a little rain, a lot of sun, and then some snow now and again. But as far back as 1995 he had started to feel the climate was changing for real, and he wasn't the only one. Maybe it was global warming, maybe it was some new mischief on the part of El Nino. He had no idea, but this couldn't be just received wisdom. The ice caps weren't melting like crazy, the Gulf Stream hadn't shifted north as the pundits had predicted. It didn't look likely that one day you'd be planting vineyards in Scotland or watching reindeer wander the streets of Paris — depending on your particular point of view — but it was obvious something was happening. And to him it just seemed as if someone had turned the weather dial so that it was always set to full. When it got hot, it got very hot. When it rained, it poured. And when it snowed, the best part of Canada and New England could lock the doors, break out the Molsons, and prime the generator, because no one was going back to work in anything close to a hurry.

This was the hot phase, and it had hung around here for a long time, long before the spot cycle began its early peak. Maybe these things were linked, in the way that cancer might be sparked by a random quark from Saturn zipping through your spleen. But this was no straight-line relationship. No one had yet figured out the way to read those particular runes.

There was the sound of a car scrunching across the gravel and Mo Sinclair drew up in a Suzuki Vitara, Annie in the back. Something different there, Lieberman thought. Mo didn't look as lost and dreamy as she had three hours earlier. She gave him half a smile. Annie jumped out of the open-topped vehicle, grinned, and said, 'We've been talking about it and this is the deal.'

'The deal?' he asked. He was wearing his Lone Wolf Solar Observatory baseball cap (which he liked to think of as office uniform) and not just out of vanity either. Sunburn was a real danger in this weather. 'What deal?'

'We show you Pollensa. You tell us what this stuff is all about. Okay?'

'You mean like… everything?'

'Everything.'

'Sure.' He shrugged. 'What little I know.'

'That will be nice,' Mo said coolly.

So he walked back into the building that served as quarters, back into his bedroom, and picked up the gear he'd need for his little tutorial. Then the first part of the tour began, on foot, the three of them sweating in the incessant heat. La Finca, it turned out, was even bigger than he had expected. Some fancy banking family from Madrid had owned the estate for almost two hundred years before getting caught up in the recession of the late eighties. By 1990, it was on the market, and Sundog — 'whoever they are,' Mo said pointedly — stepped in with an offer no one could match.

'But why here?' Lieberman asked as they walked over to the clifftop and caught a startling view straight out onto the empty blue waters of the Mediterranean. 'What kind of a place is this for astronomers?'

'You're supposed to be telling us that,' Annie objected, with the dogged lack of logic Lieberman associated with kids.

'It's private,' Mo said. 'You'll see on the way out how secure it is. One road in, with a locked guard post, the sea on the other side, and mountains everywhere else. Do astronomers need privacy?'

'Everybody needs privacy,' he said.

'Oh yeah,' Annie said, laughing. He could hear something tense in her voice and, for the life of him, couldn't understand what put it there.

'And it's not just here,' Mo said. 'Why do you think they've got two helicopters? There's some kind of place up in the mountains… they never talk about it when any of the locals are around. Or to anyone low on the food chain like me.'

'Maybe,' said Annie, 'they're all a bunch of spies!'

'Could be,' he said, trying to sound conspiratorial.

They both laughed then. It made Mo look a lot nicer, he thought — attractive, in a strained, skinny kind of way.

She stopped by the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the cliff top. The sea was a good hundred feet below, straight onto rock, no beach here, just the angry, relentless churning of the ocean.

But it was Mo he was looking at.

Just then she was close to beautiful, her long straight hair moving softly in the hot Mediterranean sea breeze. She looked like something precious that had been twisted and marked by some pain he could only guess at, something hard and strong and damaging, but still not cruel enough to take away everything that was attractive about her.

'Nice view,' she said, staring out at the ocean.

'Yeah,' he said, and looked. It was quite a sight. From the cliff edge you could see how perfectly La Finca had been positioned. The main house sat four-square, glowing golden in the bright morning sun, its plain rectangular lines broken now by the points of the cypresses lining the drives, and the smaller trees that marked paths into some adjoining ornamental gardens. A thin winding road led off from beyond the house, inland, rising gently into nothingness.

'That's the way in and the way out,' Mo said, watching him stare down the road. 'The only one, by car, anyway. There's no footpath except from the cove at San Vicente three miles off to the north, and that takes you through some pretty treacherous ground. Apparently it was mined during the Civil War in the thirties. Go south and you'd need to cling to the mountain for a good twenty miles before you ran into Soller. And don't even think about coming in by boat. There's no jetty down there, nothing. You see what I mean about privacy?'

'Idyllic, if you like that kind of thing.'

'Idyllic is the word, all right. Can you imagine how that banking family must have felt, having to leave all this?'

Lieberman let the question hang there, brooding on other losses.

It was Annie who finally broke the silence. 'Let's go into town,' she said.

Two minutes later they were sailing along the narrow private road in the Suzuki, the hot wind in their hair. A dour Spanish guardsman came out of his sentry box and opened an electronic green iron gate topped with spikes, a remote TV camera too. Then they were out of La Finca, driving slowly along a winding road, a dried-up rocky riverbed to the right and some low olive fields to the left. Finally, civilization appeared, with more and more country villas — big houses for the tourists and the rich weekend folk from Barcelona and Madrid.

They popped out of the mountains, crossed the narrow main road, and were in the town. Mo drove knowledgeably through a warren of narrow white-walled streets, parked in a space the size of a pocket handkerchief, then they climbed out of the car, Lieberman lugging the rucksack he'd brought with him. Annie took him by the hand, led him through two dark alleyways, before coming out in a large, open square, with a hulking church in the same golden stone as La Finca.

'We have money,' Mo announced.

'Their money.' Annie grinned.

Lieberman sat down on a battered metal chair, beside an even more battered tin table, and announced, 'Beer, ice cream, tapas. Let's party.'

'One beer,' Mo cautioned. 'Then I want some exercise.' 'Good,' he said, and looked for the waiter. Fifteen minutes later, they were out of the square, walking past the church and a cluster of ecclesiastical-looking buildings. The heat was so oppressive it felt tangible. Lieberman's checked shirt clung to his chest, and he could feel the sweat running in hot salty rivulets down his face.

They turned a corner, and stretching in front of them was a straight paved climb up a small hill to what looked like a chapel at the top.

Lieberman sighed and started to climb. Mo slowed to keep pace with him, always watching Annie, who raced ahead, never quite letting her go. As they reached the summit, he got the point. The sights were astonishing on all four sides. They gazed down into the town with a bird's-eye view. To the northeast was the broad sweeping bay of Pollensa, and, in the opposite direction, the long line of mountains that hid La Finca from the world.

Annie was seated on a stone bench underneath a scraggy cypress, trying to stay out of the sun. They joined her and she looked at Lieberman, smiled, and said, 'Your turn now.'

'Okay. We keep this short. Then you two can carry me back down that hill, since I doubt I can walk.'

'Wimp,' Annie said.

'I'm old,' he countered.

'Not that much.'

'Enough to know you should be wearing something on your head. Take this.'

He pushed the Lone Wolf baseball cap onto Annie's head and vowed to stand, as much as he could, in the shade of the cypress tree for the next half hour or as long as it took to bring this brief and — even to him — puzzling situation into the light.

The ground around the chapel was empty. No one else was dumb enough, he guessed, to brave the airless midday cauldron that had enveloped the island. He had his little notebook computer with the presentation notes on and a small portable telescope with an equatorial fork mount. Lieberman took out the scope, attached the fork mount to the body, then fitted the screen of the projector to the frame so that the image came straight out of the eyepiece and fell there, damn near perfect, and visible for everyone to see. They were watching him screw the thing together, and there was genuine interest there, in what he had to tell them, and maybe even in him too. They were curious, which he found both refreshing and satisfying.

He flashed a quick smile, stared at the nearly complete telescope in front of him, rolled in the last screw, stood up, and began.

CHAPTER 7 Descending

The cockpit door opened and Ali Fitzgerald walked into the cabin. Both men were busy: Seabright, who'd failed to raise Air Force One on the radio, was now peering through the screen; Mulligan was hunched nervously over the panels. Seabright thought he'd detected the shadow of the big 747 with the crest on its side somewhere over to their right. Then it had disappeared.

Finally, he broke away from staring at the bright, featureless horizon and asked Ali, 'How is it?'

'The German died,' she said softly. 'There was nothing I could do.'

Seabright looked at his first officer. Mulligan knew what his responsibilities were: Watch the lights flicker and glimmer on the panel, follow every movement of the digital dials on the one working engine. But his preoccupation didn't stop the news from affecting him. In another set of circumstances, he would have stood up and embraced her, tried to share some strength, but this was not the time or place.

'Ali'

It was Seabright who spoke, and as he did he noticed some fire in his colleague's eyes, some blame aimed — where? At himself? Or at Seabright, for taking this initiative, which was surely the right thing, the proper thing here, in this flying tin tube, just struggling through the air at 8,000 feet above the hot, inhospitable land, limping along at close to 150 miles per hour below its normal cruise, with thirty miles still to run to the field and the possibility of safety?

"They need you back there,' Seabright said, not looking at her, though there was precious little to occupy his attention outside the window now. The aircraft was flying straight and level, as if it knew the way to go.

'No, they don't,' she said abruptly, knowing he was wrong, knowing he just wanted her out of there. People are not stupid. They knew what was happening. They were strapped into their seats, trying not to anticipate this unknown thing called the future, feeling powerless, feeling weak. There was nothing she could do for them, nothing she could do for anyone, even herself.

She pulled down the jump seat from the back of the door, let herself slump into it. There was so much pain in the back of her legs, in her shoulders, it felt as if she'd been carrying around some huge weight on her back for hours. She was twenty-eight years old, and she felt more tired, more weary than she'd ever felt in her life.

The radio barked out of nowhere, so loud and sudden it startled them all.

'Dragon 92. We have you on track for a straight-in approach. Twenty-three miles to run. How are things?'

The man had a Russian accent. He sounded worried, maybe a little scared.

'We have one fatality on board,' Seabright said into the mike. 'Some sick people too. Cardiac cases, possibly. Can you cover that?'

There was a pause.

'We'll see what we can do,' the voice said after a while. 'Other traffic in your vicinity. No height, no precise position. Transponder not working. You see it?'

'Shit,' Seabright muttered, frantically scanning the sky. 'Negative.'

The radio went quiet.

'Captain?'

Ali's voice seemed to come from a long way away. Seabright's head hurt; there was pressure getting hard and painful somewhere behind his face. It wouldn't surprise him if he joined the nosebleed club soon, though he'd hardly ever had one in his life outside the rugby field.

'Not now, Ali. We need to deal with this… situation.' He wished she'd go away. If it came to it, he'd order her to get out of the cabin, pick her up bodily and put her back behind the bulkhead, out of sight.

She blinked back the tears, and they weren't just because of the way he spoke, which was so unlike him.

'Captain,' she said again, slowly and deliberately. 'There is something on the aircraft. On it.'

These were all familiar words but both Seabright and Jimmy Mulligan never thought, in their lives, that they'd hear them in this particular order. Or would have believed how cold they might feel when they were spoken, so quietly, in a voice one of them was slowly coming to regard as something essential, something vital in his life.

'There is something on the roof of the plane,' she said. Seabright looked at Mulligan, tried to read his expression, was ready to force her out of there himself, any way he could. Then both men turned round and whatever words were forming in their throats just died there, dry on their lips. There was something on the plane, clinging to its upper skin. And it was getting bigger all the time.

Ali was the first to see it for an obvious reason. She was sitting in the jump seat, behind Seabright and Mulligan, and this gave her an uninterrupted view of the entire cockpit area, right to the top of the big deep windows that ran past the pilots' heads, beyond the normal range of their upper vision.

From here, it appeared as a thin blue electric line, not quite transparent, like a brush stroke of vivid paint an inch or two thick along the top of the screen. It looked, for all the world, as if someone had poured some bright blue screen wash onto the roof of the airliner, then let it spread slowly, gently down the sides, running over the fuselage, then down to the cockpit windows.

The blue light had been almost stationary for a few seconds, though within its body there was movement: some of it rapid, like the coursing of sparking currents through some viscous medium… some slower, more liquid, like the gentle undulation of a tidal water flow.

'It looks like lightning,' Mulligan said, his head arched back to see the thin line of light.

Then it moved again, visibly, drew forward, fell a good four inches down the window, well within their line of vision now, no need to stretch their necks.

'You can hear it,' she said, and didn't even want to think about what this meant.

There was a sound, low but distinct, coming through the skin of the aircraft. It was like the fizzing of some chemical preparation or a power line that had been shorn through, and was now snaking and spitting wildly at anything it saw.

Seabright pressed the mike and said, 'Dragon 92, immediate forced landing, we have some form of electrical discharge on the aircraft.'

Then listened, not wanting to hear the response, just needing to know. The radio was dead. The antenna was on the roof. It would be one of the first things to go.

He stared out of the left-side window and thought his heart might stop beating. Moving in a parallel path slightly above them, a mere four hundred yards away, was the familiar white shape of a 747, looking equally stricken. Its entire hull was covered in a bright, shifting veil of blue electricity. The crest on the main door and the tail was only just recognizable through the flimsy, unearthly veil of energy.

'Gentle glide, Jimmy,' Seabright said. 'I don't want to see any more than eight hundred feet per minute all the way down unless I say so.'

They would not collide, he told himself, not if they kept their present course.

'Sir…'

Mulligan wanted to get this thing out of the sky as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and Seabright read his thoughts, had been there, gone through that point before his first officer had even reached it.

'I can put her into an emergency descent, sir.'

Seabright looked at the man. He was scared, and they didn't have the time for that.

'If we set her up in that attitude, Jimmy, think what happens if the controls lock again or we lose the engine. Or both. So be a good chap, now. Watch the engine. Watch the panel. Let's get out of here.'

There was nothing for Mulligan to say right then. He just nodded. And watched the screens. Something was happening there already and it was impossible to judge what it meant. Before, when the panel had gone down, it was as if it had actually died, had felt the lifeblood run out of its circuits, spill out into the atmosphere, and leave nothing behind. This seemed like the opposite. Everything was racing. Every gauge, every dial was coming to life, glowing, winking, brightly, furiously in front of him.

He felt like laughing, in between the anger, in between the red rage that ran around his head. There was something so ironic here. They'd survived being starved of electricity. Now it looked as if they'd be drowned by the stuff, dripping in from outside, down the windows, into the aircraft, into the wings, the control systems, every electronic nerve in its being.

And the fuel tanks too, Mulligan thought. Never forget the fuel tanks.

He watched what was flitting across the panels, not listening to what Seabright was saying, not even letting the words — and they were angry, getting angrier all the time — come close to his head, which hurt, which felt as if it were ready to explode. Because this was something new, this was something you never saw in the books. This was an entire aircraft being swallowed whole by some unknown, shapeless entity that fell from the sky, something blue and hissing, like a venomous electric serpent hooked to the biggest power grid in the world. You didn't read about these things in the books. Nothing prepared you for this, ever.

He felt something on his shoulder, looked, and it was Seabright's hand, shaking him roughly, trying to get him back into line.

Outside, beyond the wing, the 747 was closer now, moving slowly toward them, as if drawn by some gigantic magnet.

Jimmy Mulligan was, above all, a practical man. He took one last look at the gauges, closed his eyes for a second, tried to still his thoughts. His hands weren't shaking when he took off his harness. He felt calm, extraordinarily calm, felt that something inside his head was measuring these seconds as they ticked away so relentlessly.

Ian Seabright, still locked on the yoke, watched the blue fall farther, fall until it was halfway down the screen, far enough for the passengers to see through the cabin windows. Out of nothing more than habit, he wondered what was happening beyond the bulkhead. The aircraft flew on, steady as a rock. He stared out the window. The 747 was still closer. Only two hundred yards. And by the tail a new shape was growing, yellow and fiery.

Ali Fitzgerald had her eyes shut, cradled her head in her hands.

Mulligan knelt down in front of her, took her fingers, and she looked at him. She wasn't crying. In some way she wasn't even afraid.

Then she stood up, her back to the cockpit door. He rose too, felt her arms go around him, felt his face in her hair, against her cheek, soft and warm, damp with sweat, so real, so human it made him want to cry with rage.

She didn't kiss him. They didn't need that, clinging together like this, in some tiny tin cabin, held aloft in the atmosphere by nothing but the whim of the air outside. She just let her mouth brush against his neck, felt the way his did the same against her skin, and both thought, in a single image, of another time, two pale bodies twisting against cotton sheets in an anonymous hotel in an anonymous Japanese suburb, such physical delight passing between them it seemed impossible they could ever grow old or vanish from the face of the earth.

He leaned forward, gripping her more tightly, heard the sound from behind, unlatched the door, let it fall open, feeling these precious seconds slip away from them, seep out through the fabric of the aircraft, disappear like motes of light dispelled by some greater, all-consuming luminance.

It was like the hot breath of a dragon, so bright and yellow through the pale brown skein of her hair, half-obstructing his vision. The fireball rolled ponderously down the length of the cabin toward them, a perfect golden sphere, roaring as it came, so loud that he could hear no screams above it, with such deadly certainty that he could believe, perhaps, there were none.

Then the dragon breathed in his face, with a heat and searing proximity that took from his head the physical presence of Ali, the faint perfume of her skin, the whispering of her hair, the warmth of her touch, left nothing in its place but the temporary electrochemical stain on the cerebellum that went under the name of memory. And in a second even that was gone.

Twenty miles away, in the control tower of the military base of Bratsk, the two small green marks that Dragon 92 and Air Force One had painted on the ancient radar screen merged. Then, without warning, disappeared altogether.

Five thousand feet above ground, something glimmered briefly, a vast, fiery, elongated shape, bright and gold against the sky.

Like a halo.

Like a parhelion.

Like a sundog.

CHAPTER 8 Toast

'You want the good news or you want the bad?'

"The bad,' Annie said immediately.

'Okay, you asked for it,' Lieberman growled. 'You see the sun — no,' he interrupted himself so quickly, aghast he could have been that stupid, did his best to interpose his body between them sitting in the shade and the big yellow furnace burning into his back, 'no, I don't mean look at it. You must never do that. Never. Later, with my little toy here, I'll show you how you can look at the sun. Until I do that, don't even think about it. You understand why? It's too hot and it's so bright.'

'All right,' Annie said, a little disappointed that Lieberman had a serious side to him too.

'Okay, so… the bad news is,' he said, staring at the screen of the computer to remind him how this was supposed to go, 'the sun is a star.'

He watched the girl's hand go straight up and thought: This could take a long time.

'Stars come out at night,' Annie said. 'Everybody knows that.'

'Annie,' Mo Sinclair interrupted, smiling at him with, he recognized, the sort of conspiratorial self-indulgence you got in adults. 'Michael here is a professor.'

Lieberman wasn't going to let this pass.

'Hey! No problem, Annie. You got a point there. Stars don't come out at night, of course. They're always right there. It's just that the sky's so bright — or they're so dull, whichever way you want to look at it — that we don't see them. The point is the sun is a star too and we get to see that during the day. Now, why do you think that is?'

Two hands went up straightaway (so the grown-up wanted to play this game too; he could handle that). Lieberman picked Mo's.

'It's bigger and brighter than the rest,' she said, her smile curling down at the corners of her mouth as if to say: Two can play this game.

'Yeah? That could be one explanation. Not the right one, but it could have been. Maybe when you were nine years old you believed that.'

'Me.' Annie was scratching at the sky with her hand as if she wanted to hook her hand into the bright blue firmament.

'Okay?'

'It's closer than the rest.'

All the way there in under a minute and she didn't look as if it made her sweat. Mo smiled. Not bad. He could think of a couple of schools back home where it might take you half a day to get half that far with a bunch of fifteen-year-olds.

'It's closer than the rest. And one day that will be a bad thing. You see, stars are just like us. They grow. They change over time. Right now the sun is a nice, happy young little star — little and young in star terms, of course, not ours. But one day, when it gets older, it will wake up and decide to do what Main Sequence folk like it have to do, and that's transform. Like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. One day it will run out of fuel, all the stuff it burns to be a star, and then it will start to change into what stars grow up to be, which is what we call red giants.'

'I've heard of those,' Annie said.

'Great. So you know what happens then?'

She shook her head. Mo was silent. And he had them, he knew. They'd passed the point of even guessing the answer, were just itching to get on with the tale.

'What happens is the whole thing changes. What we think of as the core, the stuff at its heart, collapses right down into itself, and all the stuff on the outside, what we see in the sky, does the opposite, just races out, goes all kind of red and vaporous, gets really hot, and ends up being this new kind of star, this red giant thing, and that's going to be huge. So big it will be right here, right where we're standing now. On this very spot. Everywhere else on the world too. And you can guess what's going to happen to anything in its way.'

There was a pause while they took this in.

'Toast!' Annie said happily.

'Toast,' Lieberman replied.

'Cool!'

Mo watched all this, and, right out of the blue, he realized what it was she liked. Someone was giving Annie some attention, someone other than her mother. And why that should be unusual was a question that could have distracted his attention there and then, even with the narrative of this celestial dance starting to run inside his head.

'So what's the good news?' Mo asked.

'Hey. The good news is… we're all dead anyway! I'm talking a hundred million years away now. Why worry?'

'We could invent the secret of immortality,' Annie said slowly, stretching each word out one by one. 'Then there'd be a problem.'

'Sure. I thought of that. You know, if we get clever — or dumb — enough to invent the secret of everlasting life, don't you think someone might also figure out a way to hightail it out of here? Find a star in another galaxy that's more hospitable?'

'So if the sun is not going to be a worry for a while,' asked Mo, 'why are we here?'

'I'm here because I got paid,' Lieberman said quickly, realizing straight away that this was a question he maybe ought to have asked himself more rigorously. 'Hey, we all got to eat. And I already told you, if I had any secrets to share they'd be yours. But if you want the long answer, well, sometimes you have to get off your butt and go observe things to learn about them. And when you're a scientist — '

'A professor!' said Annie.

'Yeah… yeah!'

He was enjoying the show too.

'When you're a professor, you just have to be ready to up and go when the call comes through. Kind of like Superman, I guess.'

A single young face stared at him in silence, eyebrows arching toward the sky, and Lieberman just didn't even dare look at Mo, just knew her shoulders were shaking up and down and couldn't work out whether this was good or bad.

'Don't believe me, huh?'

A man had his pride. These were, as far as he could tell, a nice pair. They didn't believe in kicking a man when he was down, but that didn't put them past nudging him with their toes a little when the occasion arose. It gave you the right to respond.

'Take a look at this.'

Then he beckoned them into the light, into the scorching, dry brightness of the day, so hot it burned your skin the moment you stepped into it, and positioned them around the telescope, which was pointing straight up into the blazing yellow eye of the sun.

The projector screen, with its open white panel fixed to the bottom end of the scope, offered an image of the solar disc that wouldn't be harmful to look at. Of all the projections Lieberman had set up for his 'students', this one was, as he might have expected, the most spectacular of all.

The freckles on the solar orb were huge now, the biggest he'd ever seen. They were like living amorphous blotches on the burning yellow skin, dark and ugly, and so big they covered maybe a third of the entire surface. What he and Mo and Annie were observing was not the usual single spots, but ones that ran into each other, like they were mating, the dark umbras spawning many lighter penumbras until the picture looked like a blown-up slide under a microscope, the image of some deadly slumbering spore waiting to come alive.

The threesome were quiet; he could feel the sudden chill that ran between Annie and her mother. Without speaking they'd moved closer to each other. He chided himself for doing it this way, wished he'd devised a way to break it to them more gently.

Then, as they watched, one of the spots shifted. The umbra, a region of burning gas a hundred thousand miles or so across, moved. Merged with some other cell-like structure, sat together with it, feeling content, feeling whole, mated, and then multiplied again.

Someone gasped and he thought it just might have been Mo, nice, pained, distant Mo, whose life he'd just invaded, whose world he'd just thrown open with this simple astronomy lesson.

He tried to smile again, said, 'Hey! This is just fireworks. Nothing to worry about. Trust me.'

But it was futile. Somehow the joy had gone out of the day, and left nothing in its place but the blinding light that beat down on them from the sky, beat down with a relentless, burning ferocity that seared through the skin, seared right into the heart and touched it with the fiery furnace of creation.

CHAPTER 9 A Demonstration

'Are they alive?'

Annie looked scared.

'No, no, no, no…'

Lieberman liked talking to kids now and again, but sometimes the sheer, naive dumbness got to him.

He pointed to the yellow orb on the scope projector screen, trying to make Annie and Mo feel familiar with it, see it for what it was: just an image from outer space, nothing more, nothing less.

'This isn't magic. All you're looking at here is something like a giant light bulb. Lots and lots of burning gases a real long way away. This is a big thing, and it's mysterious too, for sure. But that's only because we don't understand it that well right now. You know what they used to think in ancient times? All sorts of stuff. About how this was a god or something, flying across the sky in his chariot. Hey, people used to think the earth was the centre of the universe, and the sun travelled around us, until a few centuries ago. But you don't believe that, do you?'

The girl shook her head.

'Why not?'

'Because teachers tell us it isn't true?'

'Because we all know it isn't true,' Mo intervened. 'It's in books. You're a little young for them now, but later you'll see.'

'When I get to school,' Annie said a little sourly.

'I'm sure that will happen, Annie,' Lieberman said. 'Once you and your mom are settled. And you're a bright kid. You won't have any problems picking these things up.'

Mo smiled at him, some new warmth there, melting a little.

'What Michael is saying is that what seems mysterious one moment isn't a little later, when we understand it more.'

'Which is science,' Lieberman added. 'Discovering. You know that word?'

Annie nodded her head.

'Course you do. But it's easy to forget what it really means. It's like ticking off something on a list. Once you're sure. And what we're sure of already is that these sunspots are just natural things. Like freckles or something, except in the sun's case they're huge freckles, maybe as big as sixty thousand miles across or more — that is, eight times the diameter of the earth…'

And actually, he thought, this particular group was bigger, bigger than any he'd ever seen.

'… and freckles that change all the time. Which is where I come in. I didn't always do this, you understand. Once, a while back, I messed around with engineering, and other tricks with the sun, though that's a story for another time. Right now I try to figure out which way the freckles are going to go, whether they're getting bigger, whether they might be getting smaller.'

'Do they change an awful lot?' Annie asked.

'You bet,' he said, and he was on home territory now, heading straight for the finish line. 'They come and go, a little like the tide. Not twice a day, like the sea does, but once every eleven years or so.'

'Is that important?' Annie asked.

'Depends what you mean by important.'

'I mean, does it matter? To us?'

'Well, the sun is a very long way away. Ninety-three million miles, to be exact. Seems crazy to think something that far away could be important.'

The girl grinned at him and he wanted to laugh: She really wasn't going to let go.

'You're going to say "but". I always know when grown-ups are going to say "but".'

'Smart kid,' said Lieberman, and she was, it was so clear. 'But…'

He kicked at the gravel with his toe and wondered how you crammed all this into a few minutes of idle conversation.

'But things sometimes do affect each other in ways you'd never guess. By now we know sunspots affect all sorts of things. Some are obvious, like the big spurts of flame that emanate from the sun, called solar flares. Others are just plain invisible, like magnetism and X-rays, that come shooting through space. Then there's the weather. You cut open a tree that's a couple of hundred years old and you can see that eleven-year sunspot cycle in the rings inside. When the cycle hits a peak, the weather gets warmer, everywhere, and if you get rain too, which we haven't recently, things grow. You can see it inside the trunk. When the cycles were pretty much dead, which was what happened back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a while — don't ask me why — the world got colder. Europe had some of its coldest winters anyone had ever known.'

Mo was the one with the question now.

'Is that why the weather has been so hot these last few years? I thought that was supposed to be global warming.'

'Hey' — he threw up his hands — 'we're all making this up as we go along. Some of it is global warming, for sure. No one disputes that these days, unless they get bribed by the oil companies. But the climate change seems to be equally linked to sunspots. There's no single reason behind it, just a cocktail of factors.'

'And what we're in now is the eleventh year of the cycle?'

That was a tricky one, and Lieberman seriously wondered, for a moment, whether to try to bluff his way through.

'No,' he said, opting for honesty. 'We're in the ninth. All things being equal, we shouldn't be seeing sunspots Like this for a good two years. Something happened, late in 1995, and from that point on we started to see some upsurge in the cycle, real steady, just like you'd expect, only early. And really marked too, recently, as if it was all coming to a head.'

'I read about that,' Mo said. 'And all the awful predictions. Are they true?'

'I do astronomy, not astrology. Yeah, it's true that the peak of a solar storm has an effect on the earth. A cycle hot spot back in the seventies knocked out entire power grids across the whole of Canada. It messes with telecommunications systems too, and we all know how much we rely on those. I guess we can expect some short-term effects but nothing apocalyptic, not unless you think losing TV reception for a couple of hours is a matter of life and death.'

'Oh.'

He couldn't shake the idea that somehow she was frightened by all this but not willing to admit to it.

'A line of thinking some people are following — and Simon Bennett is your man for this one — is that one factor is tidal. By that I mean that the activity on the surface of the sun depends, to some extent, on the position of the planets to one another. We know that the tides on earth are due mainly to the pull of the moon as it spins around us. Well, the larger planets in our system exert an even bigger force. It makes theoretical sense to think we feel something from them too.'

He wasn't really talking for them now, he was talking it out to himself. Mo understood this and encouraged him to continue.

'You're ahead of us?' she asked.

'Yeah?' Lieberman wasn't even thinking of them. He was out in the burning heat and not even noticing it, walking around the courtyard, picking up some pine cones that had fallen from the trees, then placing them carefully on the gravel.

'See, you've got to understand what the solstice is.'

He went over to the perimeter wall overlooking the town, grabbed a stray rock, put it on the ground in front of them. Then he held one of the pine cones above his head.

'Imagine the cone is a ball like the earth and the top part of it is the northern hemisphere. Where we are now. We move around the sun, of course, so what I'm showing you is bad science. But it's how we see it from the ground. Each day the sun sweeps across our horizon and when it's there, we've got daylight; when it's on the other side of the earth, we've got night. But the earth isn't really sitting bolt upright like that. It's declined. And that means the height of the sun changes during the year. During the summer solstice it is, at midday, as high in the sky as it ever gets. So we get more sunshine, more daylight, than at any other time of the year, not because we're closer but because we see more of it. Equally, during the winter solstice the same thing happens but for the southern hemisphere. Which is why our winter is their summer. You with me?'

They nodded. They always nodded in these situations, but he was pretty happy with it. He'd explained it more poorly in the past.

'Now, the point is that maybe the heightened effect of spots and flares and all the rest at the solstice isn't just due to the fact that the sun is brighter in the sky and around longer than usual. Maybe there's some tidal effect on us too, messing us about with gravitational pull. And all this accentuates what happens with the weather, and anything else that gets shifted around by spot activity as well.'

'Why would that explain how the cycle has shortened from eleven to nine years?' Mo asked. 'These are annual events.'

'Yeah,' he said, and was so engrossed in himself, so buried in the pictures inside his head, that he didn't even realize until later how smart a question it was.

"The point is that if these guys are right, it's not just the tidal influence from the sun we've got to take into account. It's everything. Every other major hunk of rock in the universe.'

She was shaking her head. She wasn't smiling any more.

'I still don't see it. That's always been the case.'

'Up to a point.'

He reached down for the computer, picked it up, took it over to them, let them look at the bright colour screen, and pulled out the sequence, one he was so familiar with, one he'd played over and over again until he didn't need to see it any more, it lived inside his head.

'Everything moves in the universe, everything is always orbiting everything else, okay? But we know how they move. This is all just mathematics — complex mathematics, for sure, but not beyond us. With this little machine I can show you how the stars looked in Bethlehem on the night Jesus was born. I can fly you past the surface of Mars and look back to see what the earth and our moon are like from there, today, five hundred years from now. It doesn't matter. These things are just some big clockwork mechanism in the sky and they'll stay like that until the big red giant comes along and gobbles them all up.'

They didn't say anything. Just looked at him with the word 'So?' in their eyes.

'So it's like the old saying about monkeys in a room writing Shakespeare. You keep them running like that forever and once in a while you get something weird. Take a look at this and you'll see what I mean.'

On the screen of the computer was a map of the galaxy, with only the major players marked out on it: the sun at the centre, the planets around it. They were orbiting slowly, randomly. In the corner of the screen a series of numbers in date format were flicking over, too quickly for anyone to read.

Lieberman watched the display, waited for the moment, then pressed a key. The picture froze where it was and even to them it looked impressive, even to a nine-year-old's eyes there was some awful symmetry here.

The planets formed a line. The earth was on one side, with Pluto, neatly labelled in red, behind. Aligned together perfectly on the opposing side of the sun were four planets, names flashing: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

'See — we know from studies done by NASA that just an alignment of Jupiter and Saturn can cause a twenty per cent increase in sunspot activity. When you add in three other planets in what we call the Grand Cross like this, and whatever effects their gravitational pull might have on the earth, maybe you get even more — or less, that's a possibility too. And…'

That was enough. He realized it abruptly. They were too quiet and he was just giving it to them too straight, without the caveats.

'And that happens on Wednesday,' Mo said, no expression on her face at all.

Lieberman swore inwardly at himself. The date was on the screen. He really shouldn't expect these people to be plain dumb.

'On Wednesday,' she continued, and walked around the yard as she spoke, arranging all the pine cones into a row, aligning them with the rock, 'we have both this conjunction of planets and the summer solstice. All together.'

'Correct.'

Lieberman looked at Annie and felt a little happier. He'd lost her. She'd wandered off somewhere else in her head, found this all too big, too distant to bother her, and he was relieved.

'And the reason we're here is to record it,' he continued. 'For posterity, some kind of solar project — don't ask, they haven't favoured me with a full brief yet. We're here to watch, make notes, take pictures. See what we can learn.'

Annie had her hand up again, and Lieberman braced for yet another unsettling question.

'I need to go,' she said, and he gave an inward sigh.

'Time for home,' Mo said. 'Say thank-you to Michael.'

'Thanks,' Annie said flatly, then began the climb back down the steps.

'Wait for us at the bottom,' Mo said.

They watched her hop and skip down the hill. Lieberman shrugged his shoulders, felt a little old and stupid after such a rambling display.

'Long time since I gave a school talk,' he said, shrugging.

'It was good.'

The scared side of her had gone. Maybe it had never been there, really; it was just something the burning day had fired in his imagination. But she was a little warmer. That was no trick of the light.

'You're kind,' he said.

'No. I mean it.'

'Annie's quite a kid.' He hesitated a moment, then ventured, 'Is it hard?'

'What?'

'Being on your own.'

Mo gave him a frank look. 'Annie and I… we've been on our own for a couple of years. We have an understanding.'

He could think of nothing to say, just nodded. This was not the time to ask, he thought. Definitely not. He started tidying his stuff away.

'Say,' he said after a few seconds. 'You play tennis? I brought along my long-framed Prince tennis racket, which I prefer to think of as the long-framed tennis racket formerly known as Prince. There's an old court I saw back at the house. It's a touch beaten up but I've got a spare racket. And tennis is quick. We could be over and done in thirty minutes.'

She laughed anyway, and looked frankly into his face.

'I'm terrible at tennis,' she said, smiling still.

'I'm great but I have no killer instinct, I drown in sympathy for my opponent. I promise to play down to you. I'll promise to lose if you like.'

'You're married,' she said, and it was a statement.

'Was. Strictly single and unattached these days.'

'Oh.'

She watched Annie skipping down the steps, following every movement.

'What kills a marriage in your world, Michael?' she said, turning suddenly to stare into his eyes.

'Same thing you find everywhere else, I guess. Time. Boredom. Insecurity. Fear.'

'And hitting on women when you're away from home?'

She didn't stop smiling when she said it. This was not, he guessed, a judgement.

'That too. But it's all connected. You'd be amazed how much fear gets to the heart of things, and winds up on the other side with some new label, like lust.'

She laughed quietly, and he guessed he deserved as much.

Lieberman's hand reached, automatically, for his head. His thick black head of hair was soaked in sweat. He missed the baseball cap.

'This isn't a move,' he said. 'I'm just trying to rebuild a few social skills that got lost over the years. Nothing more. Really. If I've offended you in some way, I apologize. I didn't mean to.'

'No problem. And thanks for the talk. It was… illuminating. And for helping with Annie too.'

'My pleasure,' he said, meaning it. 'And I'll tell you what. They're throwing some briefing tonight. I'll get you invited if you like. We could both find out a little more about why we're here.'

'Sure,' she said quietly, and looked down the steps, saw Annie waiting there seated on the stone wall.

He shook his head, and softly cursed the way the heat was turning his brain. For a moment there he almost thought she looked scared.

CHAPTER 10 Wagner's First Day

Helen Wagner looked at the office and knew it had been swept. It had that antiseptic look that came from polish and machines. People looking for things. People peering into the past. Standard practice when an office in the Agency changed hands under odd circumstances. And something so male about it as well: For all its cleanliness the place seemed untidy, disorganized, just plain wrong.

Until a week before, this had been the home of her predecessor, Belinda Churton, the woman who'd made the post of head of the CIA's Science and Technology directorate — S&T for short — a real job, not just a passing nod at fashion. In eight busy years, she'd screamed at the men who ran the Agency until they couldn't ignore her pleas. And Helen Wagner had followed her all the way, first as a newly recruited graduate out of MIT, then as number three in the formative years of the directorate's rise to glory, when the Internet and biotechnology came out of the lab and fell straight into the hands of crooks and terrorists everywhere.

She gazed at her reflection in the long, deep office window, the image hardened by the dazzling daylight outside. It was an attractive face, sympathetic and intelligent, with sharp blue eyes that never seemed to rest. She wore neat black hair tied in a bun, as if to put it in its place and drown a little of her natural beauty. She knew what the whispers were down the corridors, and this was the curse of her looks.

This hard, somewhat standoffish elegance belonged, they thought, close to the top of the organization, but not at its helm. She lacked the practical, careworn appearance of the person you expected to find running a department of government.

She wore a grey two-piece suit in light wool, and would take off the jacket, sit at the desk in her cream silk shirt the moment she settled down to the job. Physically, she felt good. She worked out. She looked after herself. She had a strong, curvy body that was guaranteed to turn heads, though she'd long ago stopped noticing. 'Keep the body fit, the mind follows,' her mother had said over and over again, in the long years of waiting, in the self-imposed exile that followed her father's sudden death. It was the kind of pat, easy sentiment that passed her lips so easily, spoken in that curious accent, a mix of Polish, Yiddish, and American, that never changed. This job, this ascent through the Agency was, Helen knew, some attempt at redemption. She wondered what her father would have thought, and knew such rumination was futile, stupid. He'd died when she was two, when the scandal had broken and refused to leave their door. There was nothing in her memory of that time. Her consciousness began later, in the dead, in-between years, waiting in the shadow of this infamous, vanished man.

Ten years after the Agency had first accused Pieter Wagner, an acclaimed nuclear physicist working at MIT in Cambridge, of spying for the Russians, ten years after they'd leaked the story to the media (lights popping at the front door of their small brownstone house on Beacon Hill, and the constant sight of men waiting outside, yelling questions, never going away), a federal commission had cleared his name, awarded the family close to $10 million compensation, and issued a public apology for the mistake. Which it was. Her father, it turned out, was just the innocent victim of an overzealous employee who thought that a foreign accent and an ancestry in Russian-occupied Poland were, on their own, sufficient grounds for suspicion. The money meant nothing to her, though it would later put her through MIT and pay for a year of research at the Sorbonne. He was gone: wrists slashed with a razor blade in the tiny white-tiled bathroom of the little house by the beach in Maine, the one, she later discovered, they'd rented as some kind of last refuge until the Feds came and broke down the door.

When he was posthumously cleared, she'd sworn she would become a scientist too, had made that oath in her dark, overheated bedroom on Beacon Hill. It was August 1978 and she was thirteen, already developing a prematurely adult beauty, already aware that she possessed something that made other people uncomfortable. In her own mind this was not a form of revenge. It was all a question of balance. When she joined the Agency, there were no favours, no backward glances, not as far as she could see. She was a scientist, and this was a good science job. If people talked, they talked behind her back, and she didn't even think of listening. The name Wagner had lost some of its topicality, to her great relief. She became herself, a person in her own right, not a portion of his shadow. And then, three years ago, her mother had died, struck down by an out-of-control truck. And the job, which swallowed her, consumed everything she put into it, with Belinda helping every inch of the way, like some surrogate mother and father all rolled into one.

She knew every inch of this office. Today it looked bare, bleak, and soulless. Belinda always had flowers and didn't care what the old guard thought of them. S&T was on the map; it occupied a growing part of the new Langley complex, employing close to three thousand bright young people who'd come out of college and found themselves thrust straight into the melting pot of almost every advanced science known to man. Thanks to Belinda's persuasive powers and her impressive academic record at Stanford, S&T had recruited some of the finest scientific brains she could find, plucked from the corridors of Cornell and Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, then thrust, without warning, into a world they couldn't hope to understand.

She remembered standing in front of the desk she now occupied, three months into the job, close to tears, telling Belinda she was resigning, that this was no way for any human being to live. The supposed need for there to be a clandestine veil over her life had killed the few tentative relationships she'd started to build. Worst of all was the one fatal time she'd fallen into bed with a fellow agent and discovered that their professional closeness only made things worse, made her more tongue-tied, more paranoid.

And Belinda had smiled, talked her out of it, as Helen knew she would, had spoken of how these crises came and went in Agency life, were just steps in the natural process of growing into the secret world. Helen had listened to her talk, speechless at the grasp this woman had of her own lowly work. Belinda was so high in the administrative structure of Langley that she could hardly be expected to recognize a junior trainee. Yet, when the moment came, she knew every last detail of the cases Helen had handled, was able to comment on them with such precision that this couldn't have been a trick, some quick executive briefing fitted in before the interview just to keep some junior employee on the ball.

When the interview was over, Belinda smiling, extending a hand out over the desk, Helen found it hard to believe she could even have considered leaving Langley. The place was too special. Belinda too. And perhaps, one day, even Helen herself, if she caught enough of her mentor's magic.

It had been around five on a chill January afternoon. When Belinda knew she'd won, she smiled at Helen, nodded across the room, and said, 'You look like you need a drink, honey. Watch this. I'm going to let you in on a secret.'

And then she walked across the room, over to the sealed glass window, looked out at the bare winter trees, and pulled up a grid in the air-conditioning system.

'You know, three years I've been asking those office guys to fix this vent, and three years they just keep forgetting to do it. There are rules about alcohol on the premises, Wagner, and if I ever catch you breaking them you'll be in big trouble, miss. But right now…'

Her hand dived into the vent and came out with a half bottle of Glenfiddich.

'… I'm prepared to bend a little. After all, what's the point in being the boss if you can't be allowed a little discretion?'

They sipped the whisky out of plastic cups, and Helen could still remember how it made her eyes water.

Belinda seemed ageless and indestructible, an icon of goodness in the occasionally murky waters that went with the job. Then one day she walked out of the office and was gone for good. All because some Montana crazy felt like making a point. All because you could pick up the tricks of the bomb-making trade on the Web, go out and buy the right fertilizer, rent a truck from Avis, and place your deadly mix of metal and chemical right next to a suburban garage, wait there all night, then detonate the thing with a cheap amateur radio remote control the next morning.

Two weeks later it still made no sense. The FBI was making noises about ecoterrorists, militiamen, and right-wing crazies, but no one had been arrested, and Helen had a feeling that, as the days dragged by, the case was drifting into nothingness.

The director of the CIA, Ben Levine, had called her into his office on the day the news of Belinda's death broke, given her the temporary deputy directorship of S&T, making her the effective head of one of the Agency's four divisions, all at the age of thirty-five. She should have been flattered. The job tasted like ashes in her mouth. She'd never liked Levine, they both knew it, and she could only guess that he picked her because there really was no choice. S&T, like the Agency, was in the middle of some messy executive regeneration. Larry Wolfit, the quiet, introverted scientist who was Belinda's official deputy, should have been first in line, but got passed over. Helen understood, in an unformed way, why too. Wolfit was a loyal, trusted, diligent S&T executive, but lately had seemed detached from the work, bound up with outside interests that took more and more of his time.

It had taken five days for her to go through the added security clearances, get some briefing on how the structure worked inside Langley when it came to dealing with the three other directorates: Operations, Administration, and Intelligence. She'd already met the assistant head of Operations, Dave Barnside, the principal liaison officer for the Agency's active service arm. He was one of the old school, bright, tough, and cynical, pushing his mid-forties and resigned to the idea that he'd probably never climb the ladder any further. Barnside made her glad she was in S&T. The rest of Langley was new to her, and she almost came to resent the insularity that Belinda had built into the directorate, the way it operated outside the orbit of the rest of the Agency, at least as far as most of its occupants were aware.

She took off her jacket, sat down at the large, bare desk, and stared out the window. The weather was dry and scorching again. She wished she'd worn something cooler. The trees looked half-dead; the grass that ran off into the woods beyond the complex was scorched. She was about to scroll through her E-mail and try to put some priority into the day when the phone rang.

'Wagner,' she said firmly.

'There's a car coming for you in ten minutes. Barnside and I are going on ahead for the meeting right now. We'll see you there.'

Levine's voice sounded as flat and dry as the landscape outside the window.

'Do I need to prepare?'

It almost sounded like a laugh. 'No one's prepared for this one. Not even me. We're going to the White House. There's a long day ahead of us.'

Then the phone went dead.

Her mind went blank. There was nothing on the agenda, nothing in any of the high-priority E-mails she was now calling up, that could explain this abrupt summons. In her years with the Agency she'd never even been to the White House. It was typical too that Levine had left her in the dark.

'Bastard,' she muttered, and got up, hooked her jacket off the peg.

She leaned around the door. Maureen, her executive assistant, had just arrived and was making a pot of coffee.

'It smells great, Maureen, but you're going to have to drink it by yourself. Put all my appointments on hold until you hear back from me. Anything urgent, you can get me on the mobile.'

Maureen smiled at her. 'My, that didn't take long, now, did it?'

She didn't answer, just walked back into the office and took one last look at the empty desk. Then closed the door and walked over to the window. The vent was still dead, not pumping out an iota of cool air. She picked at it with her long, slender fingers, pried it loose, and lifted up the metal grid. There was a half-bottle of Glenfiddich sitting there, half-full. She picked it up, and thought of the hand that had put it there.

'Jesus, Belinda, I wish to God this was you and not me talking to these people. This feels like one big nightmare.'

Briefly, she considered taking a swig from the bottle — for old times' sake — but common sense prevailed and she tucked the bottle back into the vent for another day.

It was a two-minute wait outside the S&T offices in the new wing. Over at the original Agency building that dated back to 1961 she could see a long black limo pulling away, two shapes in the back. Levine and Barnside, she guessed. They could have waited if they'd wanted.

A fawn Chevrolet came up, the driver anonymous behind overlarge Ray-Bans. Helen climbed in, aware that the day was so hot and airless she was sweating and short of breath before she even hit the seat.

When the car was out of the security gates of Langley and mingling with the flow 'of traffic headed for the city, she closed her eyes and tried to picture the day ahead.

CHAPTER 11 A Kind of Love

'Slowly, Joe,' Charley Pascal gasped, breathless, feeling his hardness move too quickly inside her. 'I don't get so much any more.'

The lithe, strong shape shifted position, his pale, half-Japanese face unsmiling, distant, though she didn't like to think of that. His rigidity became more still. Charley Pascal felt this familiar rushing of the blood, the growing wetness between them, and focused on herself, the way she always did at this point in the act, wondered how different this time was from the last, if you could measure it in terms of the electricity, the moistness between their entwined, coupling bodies.

Joe Katayama was poised over her so carefully, palms down on the bed, back arched, making sure to distribute his weight away from her body just enough to slacken the pain, but not so far as to take away the sparking ecstasy that ran between them. She remembered, when this began, how she'd gently move beneath him, placing the soles of her feet on his thrusting buttocks, extemporizing with the circular motion of his bucking, rearing body.

But that was before.

The best she could do now was touch his chest gently, delicately with her hands, feel for his nipples, hard and tiny, surrounded by circlets of hair, stroke the nape of his neck, hope to taste the rime of sweat there, place her fingers in his mouth, moving in and out across the moistness of his tongue, like a mirror image of this older, larger thing that conjoined their bodies, pushing her hard into the soft white mattress, generating the tinny squeaking of springs from the old wood-framed bed.

This time, she thought, it is different. I won't come. I won't get close.

The illness was moving with such speed now, hand in glove with the events that were shaping beyond the closed wooden door of their room, elsewhere in Yasgur's Farm. The discrete shaft of time that was what remained of her life stood in front of her, dwindling by the minute, and, as it shortened, the physicality of the world diminished, putting in its place some filmy, ethereal appreciation of the subtle, peripheral parts of her existence, unseen before the illness came into her head, began to infect her body.

She closed her eyes (trying, in her mind's eye, to bring the physicality back into their fucking) and felt, somewhere inside her partner's writhing, frantic body, the distant god Gaia work its way into his blood, firing the hardness that burrowed deep inside her. There were no thoughts in her head then, just the sudden, urgent need to hold his sweating flesh, to pull him farther into herself, all the while screaming, screaming.

Joe Katayama released himself and she opened her eyes. The warmth ran between them, so copious she could feel it draining from her, feel the dampness coming through the plain cotton sheet.

She reached up with what strength she had left, took his head, forced her tongue into his mouth, tasting the strength of his life, wondering how much this sudden, unexpected shock of a climax so strange, yet so powerful, might have milked her own diminishing store of energy.

He moved slowly inside her again, hardening. She pushed him away.

'No, Joe,' she said. 'Too much for me now.'

He stared at her with his dark, expressionless, half-open eyes and it perplexed her how little she could sense of what was going on behind this flat, unsmiling face.

'You were different,' he said, in a flat Middle American voice, the echo of concern behind the monotone, trying to break through. 'Maybe you're getting better.'

'No,' she answered. 'I don't get better, Joe. We both know that. I just change. We're all changing.'

As he drew back from her, she felt this hard extension of him leave her body, and wondered at the moistness that it left behind. Not all of it was Joe's.

They lay still on the bed, silent, staring at each other, listening to the breeze outside, feeling the stain on the sheet grow to a dry deadness on their skin. After a few minutes, from somewhere close by, they heard the low, soft sound of people talking, happy, a tiny undulation of applause.

He watched her, waiting. She said nothing.

'You think something's happened,' he said finally.

'No. I know,' she said, and wished he spoke French; it would, perhaps, help break this communications block that sometimes lay so obviously between them. 'I never doubted it, Joe. We're agents. We're channels for something that is so powerful, so real it can't be stopped. It rolls forward, like night after day. Like a tide that's come to cleanse us. Can't you feel it?'

'Sure,' he said flatly, and she knew he was lying.

In the end it didn't matter. Understanding wasn't essential. Just acceptance. And she was surrounded by disciples now, ones who didn't question this course they'd chosen. The world was waking up, and in the places she looked, the places that found her too, there was no shortage of followers.

'I need to join them,' she said.

He said nothing, picked her up in his arms, carried her into the bathroom, ran the water, tested the heat while she sat in a wicker chair, watching him fondly. When it was full, he lifted her into the bath, joined her, washed her all over, let her do as much for him too as she could.

'So sweet,' she said, stroking his damp hair. 'None of this could have happened without you, Joe.'

'You got inspiration, I got contacts,' he said, a brief smile there.

'A leader needs lieutenants,' she said. 'A vision without a means to its completion is just a dream.'

And such dreams, she thought.

He nodded, lifted her from the bath, towelled her dry, dressed her in the clothes she wanted, a plain cotton shirt, comfortable linen slacks. Then took her in his arms and placed her in the wheelchair.

As he bent over her, she kissed him.

'I know this isn't love,' she said. 'I know it's something else, Joe. Sympathy?'

The dark hooded eyes betrayed no expression. She felt guilty for pushing him this far. He was happier when he didn't have to think. He liked a role, a challenge. He didn't want to have to work out why, just how.

'I don't know what love is, Charley,' he said, and seemed genuinely puzzled. 'I'd do anything for you. I'd die. Is that love?'

'Yes,' she replied, and knew that evened up the lies. Such strength, she thought. There really was nothing he wouldn't do if it was needed.

'I want you to be happy as you go through this, Charley,' he said. 'It's important for all of us.'

'I know,' she said, and thought: He still doesn't understand. This is the fire from heaven, this is nature reclaiming its place in the order of things. Her own happiness was irrelevant.

A smile came on her face as he pushed her into the big control room, filled with the whir of the workstations, the quiet low hum of excitement. In her wheelchair, dressed in white, Charley Pascal looked radiant. There were eleven men and women there, all in clean white shirts and pale slacks, applauding as she came in. Tina Blackshire pulled herself away from the screen, grinned at her, acknowledged Charley's smile in return.

'Well?' Charley asked.

'It's down. It was them,' she said. 'We monitored the first message.'

'Good.' Charley nodded.

She looked at the clock on the wall, wondered about the zenith, how best to calculate its precise arrival.

'Let's not get overexcited. We've work to do. This is only the beginning.'

Tina Blackshire bent back into the computer. The rest of them moved over to charts and other monitors.

Charley pushed the wheelchair over to the window, measuring the strength in her arms (diminishing, she thought). They had everything they needed. Food. Information. The high-speed data links that were, to all intents and purposes, a virtual world, one they could enter and leave at will, with no one seeing their footprints. One they could, when the time was right, remake, forever. This place had no need of fixed geographical boundaries. You could touch a button in Hong Kong and make it flip a switch in Rio. There was a harsh, electronic oneness to it that was its own unmaking, and it removed the need for a physical presence when a virtual one served the purpose better.

Besides, Charley thought as she stared out the window, there were other reasons for staying under this single roof (not hiding, she thought, it couldn't be called that).

Outside the day looked as if it were aflame.

CHAPTER 12 The White House

Helen Wagner was rushed through the security entrance of the White House in a matter of seconds, then greeted by a smartly dressed middle-aged woman in a grey suit.

'Your colleagues are waiting for you in the Vice President's office, Miss Wagner,' the woman said quietly. 'He will be joining you once he gets back from the Attorney General.'

The woman wouldn't look directly at her. Helen was sure she'd been crying.

'I'll take you there.'

'Thank you.'

Her head spinning, she followed into a large lobby where a group of people bustled around, papers in hand, none looking at each other, no one saying much at all, and Helen thought she just might be dreaming all this. The scene had some surreal, inconsequential atmosphere to it.

She was beckoned into a larger office. Levine and Barnside sat there, with two other men, one she recognized as Dan Fogerty, the head of the FBI.

Levine nodded at her.

'Helen Wagner. Acting head of S&T. As of this morning. You're going to have to pick up on this one as we go along, Wagner. Hell, we all are. This is Dan Fogerty. I guess you know that. And Graeme Burnley. Right now the closest we've got to a White House Chief of Staff.'

Burnley was thin, with the kind of tidily manicured haircut she always associated with Washington lobbyists. He looked no more than twenty-five. His eyes were pink and watery.

'Hi,' Fogerty said, and waved her to a seat. She looked out the window. The White House lawn was still green, the kind of bright, artificial green you got when you watered things in a drought. In the distance a crowd seemed to be assembling: shorts and T-shirts, standard-issue uniform for the searing weather that seemed to be locked in for the duration of the summer.

The door opened and Tim Clarke walked in, shooed them to stay in their seats, and said, 'Let's cut to the quick, gentlemen. I know the outline. And I know I'm breaking the rules here. Right after this I go into a meeting of the National Security Council and doubtless you think I should have gone there first, let you brief them, and do things by the book. Well, to hell with the book. If what I think has happened, I'm mad and I'm looking for answers. So who's going to start giving me them?'

Helen couldn't help but stare at him. Clarke had been a sensation in American politics. Lionized for his role in the field in the Gulf War, a successful businessman after leaving the Army, then a fast-rising conservative force among Republicans as his wealth and ambitions grew. It was a classic rise from a working-class American childhood, and the only thing that set Clarke apart was his race. He was black, the son of emigrant Jamaicans, and the West Indies twang still surfaced in his voice from time to time.

All the same, had the Republicans stood a chance in the election, Clarke would never have made it onto the ticket with Bill Rollinson. But everyone — everyone — knew the Republicans were non-starters from the outset. Until the scandal machine resurfaced one final, fatal time. The Rollinson-Clarke team went from laughingstock to racing certainties in the space of two months, and swept the board when November came. She'd watched Clarke on TV, feeling so proud that a black American had finally reached so far, then checked herself. It was obvious why a black man was there. The white guys had screwed up so badly they were unelectable, so no one cared who the running mate was. And as she watched Clarke move uncomfortably into office — and, according to newspaper reports, get sidelined into speech-making — she guessed the same thought was going through his head too. There was something too pure, almost to the point of naivete about the man. He didn't push his family to the fore. She couldn't even remember the name of his wife, a pretty, slim black woman, who was always pictured slightly in front of their one child, a boy, as if she didn't want him to step into the limelight and risk getting burned. Clarke somehow didn't fit, and it wasn't just his colour. He lacked the sophistication, the guile that everyone took for granted in Washington.

Levine cleared his throat and said, 'I think this falls to me, sir. And I wish it didn't. At 0449 our time we lost contact with Air Force One on the way back from Tokyo. She was routed for Geneva. The last confirmed position was one hundred eighty miles east of Irkutsk. We keep constant radar surveillance on Air Force One whenever she's in range as a standard security measure. The indications are that she was in some kind of collision with a British passenger jet around one hundred twenty miles east of the city, but that's only half the story. Somehow both planes were downed by a single phenomenon. We have the same report confirmed from local radar too. They're sending out the Army to look for debris, and they've agreed we can airlift in our own team too. Some pieces of the planes are turning up already, according to the Russians. It's a mess, nothing much bigger than a passenger door, and that burned so bad they don't know whether it's ours or from the British plane. We have a mission on the way, people from the FAA along to take a look. This is Russian sovereign territory but we already have a commitment from the Kremlin that we can take in pretty much who we like so long as we don't take advantage of the situation.'

Clarke shook his head. He was a handsome man, thought Helen. He wore close-cropped, military-style hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sober, dark suit, and he was big in the flesh, at least six feet tall and muscular. But there was a genuine spark of emotion in his eyes, more than you found in most politicians. She'd seen that on TV. Here, six feet away, it was even more obvious.

'Any hope?'

Levine shook his head. 'All the indications are that both airplanes were totally destroyed in some kind of explosion on impact at around six thousand feet. We'll look, but it's impractical to think anyone survived.'

'Jesus,' Clarke groaned.

Helen watched him. You could forgive someone for losing it a little at a time like this. Who knew what LBJ was really like when they told him Kennedy was dead? And this was somehow much worse. So distant, so huge.

'Run me down the names, Graeme.'

Burnley looked at a sheet of paper on his knee, but it was obvious he knew these all by heart.

'The President and First Lady. The Chief of Staff and Mrs Sawyer. The Secretary of State for Trade and Mrs Olsen. Congressmen Simons and Bernhard, Congresswoman Lilley. Plus fifteen White House staff members and a crew of seven on the plane.'

'And?'

Burnley looked lost. 'Sir?'

"The other plane?'

He was lost for words. Levine interjected. 'There were three hundred thirty-two passengers and eight crew, sir. We have nationals, most are European.'

Clarke shook his head. 'Almost four hundred people dead. Someone want to tell me why?'

'Sir,' Graeme Burnley interrupted. 'There are formalities we have to deal with first.'

'They're done, Graeme. I spoke to the Attorney General. I get sworn in right after this meeting. They're working on a TV broadcast right now. Formalities can wait. I want to know what the hell happened, and most of all why we just got robbed of one hell of a President.'

'They go beyond that, sir. We need to be thinking about the funeral. The arrangements… this will be, effectively, a world summit and you will be leading it. We need to set agendas now.'

'No, we don't,' Clarke said immediately. 'Dammit, Graeme, Bill Rollinson was a man. We have to bury him and his family, for sure. And this nation is going to have to grieve for him too, all of us. But we can leave the politics out of it, for now anyway.'

They nodded, in a way, she thought, that said: You have to make these noises, sure, we know. But everyone understood how cool relations between Rollinson and Clarke had been recently, most of it revolving around how Clarke had been sidelined in government. Rollinson would push the black ticket so far, it seemed, and then no further. And as it turned out, in doing so he'd given America probably the last thing he'd ever expected: the first black president in its history.

'And I still want to know what happened.'

'Sir,' Helen said, and she tried not to blush when they all stared at her, 'I did some work on the Mauritius crash last year. When you get down to it there are really only three possibilities in these situations. Either there was some malfunction in the air — mechanical or navigational; or there was a device that destroyed one or both airplanes, or possibly damaged one so much that it crashed into the other; or the planes were destroyed by an outside agency. A missile, ground-to-air fire, enemy action.'

'The rest of you I know,' Clarke said gruffly, peering at her. 'No one introduced you, lady.'

Levine leaned forward. 'My apologies, sir. Helen Wagner here is acting head of Science and Technology at the Agency. Just started today.'

Clarke smiled thinly. 'Wagner. I know the name, I guess you get sick of hearing people say that.'

'The first time is okay,' Helen replied, unsmiling, feeling the eyes in the room upon her.

'First day on the job. Baptism of fire,' Levine added.

'Yeah, for all of us,' Clarke replied, looking at her. 'I can get to that stage myself, Miss Wagner. But where's the evidence?'

'There is no evidence,' Levine said, a touch sourly. 'First, it's clear that both planes suffered some kind of incident at altitude. Neither should have been at six thousand feet. Both lost contact at around thirty-three thousand feet, so we have to assume some dual incident affected them.'

'How far apart were they when they first reported trouble?' Helen asked.

'Ten miles,' Dave Barnside said, his eyes on Clarke. 'We have an Ops team going through the tapes now.'

'Could an explosion cover that kind of area?' Helen asked.

'Nothing you could get on board an airplane,' Barnside replied.

'It's inconceivable that both aircraft could have identical system failures at altitude,' said Helen. 'It must be an attack from the air or ground.'

Levine toyed with the papers in front of him. 'If it was from the air we would have picked it up on radar.'

'A stealth aircraft?' Clarke asked. 'We don't have a monopoly on that technology.'

Levine shrugged. 'No. The Chinese have stealth. And the Russians too. But if this was an attack in the air, the planes would have been destroyed when they were hit. They wouldn't have descended thirty thousand feet intact, as far as we can make out, before disintegrating. It doesn't make sense. And the same goes for some kind of ground-to-air attack.'

'Is anyone claiming responsibility?' Clarke asked.

Dan Fogerty pulled himself up in his chair. He looked just like he did on TV: a crumpled academic out of Georgetown, which was exactly what he once was. And the languid attitude and expressionless face hid, she guessed, a formidable intelligence.

'Someone always claims responsibility, Mr President. I hope you don't mind me calling you that. I don't see why any of us need wait on the formalities. You really have to bear in mind there will always be someone putting their hand up. Thanks to the Internet, they can do it for free just by E-mailing me these days. The news is only just starting to get out on the wires, of course, so the real lunatics are a little way off. Right now, we have three definitive claims. One is from some Libyan-based organization we've never heard of. One is from a Middle Eastern crew linked to Iraq. And the third is some bunch of ecoterrorists, not that we know much about them.'

'Anything there?' Clarke asked, impatience in his face.

'Nothing you can put your finger on, sir. The Libyans and the Iraqis make this kind of claim all the time. Partly to keep us on our toes, partly so that every time something big does happen they can put their hands in the air and say: We did it. The eco-group — I'm getting some data on them. I'm dubious, frankly.'

'Any particular reason for ruling them out?' Helen asked.

'The Libyans and the Iraqis have got the wherewithal to do something like this, Miss Wagner. I don't understand how a bunch of tree-huggers can hope to achieve the same. What's their means? You want my opinion? It must have been a bomb at altitude.'

Helen watched the way Levine and Barnside were shifting in their chairs, and wondered what was going through their heads.

'Bombs in two planes simultaneously, sir?' she asked.

Fogerty stared at her through owlish, tortoiseshell glasses.

'You have a better explanation, young lady?'

She smiled at him, thought that if someone else gave her the young lady routine she might go crazy, and said, 'Not right now, sir. These ecoterrorists: Did they give a name?'

'The Children of Gaia.'

'Ah,' she said, and nodded. 'Gaia. That's kind of a nature figure, I think.'

'Gaia, my dear,' Fogerty said, adopting his professor pose to the full, 'in Greek mythology was the Mother Earth, the daughter of Chaos, from which all creation sprang. There are modern beliefs — cults, if you would have them — which translate Gaia into meaning some kind of spirit of the earth within the universe, as if the planet itself was some kind of living entity in the solar system. Some think this spirit will rise to protect the earth from the damage we seem to be inflicting upon it. I think there are a good many quite respectable, if cranky, tree-huggers who follow this line, and doubtless a few crazies too. The crazies may well be capable of some such thing as Oklahoma. We all know that kind of act takes little in the way of organization and technology. Bringing down Air Force One over central Russia isn't something you can achieve with sacks of fertilizer and a homemade fuse.'

Helen listened in silence. For all his intellect, Fogerty clearly wasn't a man to waver from a fixed view of the situation.

Levine shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He needed a cigarette, she thought. It was written all over his sallow features.

'There is one other possibility,' Levine said. 'Which is why, in fact, I asked you here, Wagner.'

'Sir?' she said, thinking she could learn to hate this bastard a lot if he made a habit of leading her blind into heavyweight sessions like this.

'The sun thing, for chrissake. You read the papers, don't you?'

'Right'

Don't bluff, think fast, Helen counselled herself. That's what Belinda taught you.

'So,' Levine continued. 'You're the scientist. Can there be a link?'

Nice guy, she thought. Asking her to paraphrase an entire branch of astrophysics in a sentence, and one that people were only just beginning to understand in any case.

'It seems unlikely,' she said. 'It's no secret that we are about to be engulfed by a major solar storm. That happens every eleven years or so, and we usually experience some effects, such as the breakdown of power grids, the loss of telecommunications systems. We know the sunspot cycle is erratic right now. We know that the planetary alignment is disturbing it and altering a broad spectrum of solar radiation and other waveforms on the earth. None of this is new, though this time around their frequency and geographical spread are more diverse than anything we've seen before. That, I suspect, gives you your answer. If there was evidence that the force of the solar intrusions was increasing, and not just the frequency, then I think there is a possibility that the incident had its cause in some related activity. But we have no proof of that, or that airplanes have been affected by this kind of problem before.'

'No?' Fogerty asked, eyes wide behind his glasses. 'We still don't know what really brought down TWA 800. There's a whole host of unexplained plane crashes in the books.'

'But do they match up with the solar cycle, sir? I doubt it. Someone would have made the connection before. There's really no evidence that we are in for much else from this solar storm except some severe telecommunications disruption and an enhancing of the process of climate change, something we have been helping along ourselves in any case. I'm not saying it may not be painful, and it's a fact that disaster response teams around the world are on low alert. But it's not an intelligence issue, surely.'

'Really?' Levine grunted. 'Then how do you explain the fact that the Russian ground team that's there already reports the wreckage they've found is hot? Radioactive. I got them wiring back to us asking for safety equipment.'

Helen gritted her teeth.

'Since I was unaware of that fact until you mentioned it, sir, I can't explain it. When you pass me the file I will happily work on that information.'

'Makes more damn sense than Greek gods,' Barnside mumbled.

Tim Clarke looked at his watch. 'I want an hourly update on this. From all of you. If there is clear evidence of terrorist activity, I want to hear it from you people first, not CNN. And the same goes for any other theories. As far as the press is concerned, this is an inflight tragedy. Graeme, you go see the publicity people. I want the tone of this broadcast right. Let's focus on the loss of a President, not something we still can't put a finger on.'

'Sir,' Burnley said, and disappeared out the door.

Clarke looked at them all. 'You guys work together on this one. I know how you people like the odd border war now and then. This is bigger than all that. You understand me?'

'We both have clear-cut mandates, and we know where they're drawn, Mr President,' Fogerty said, smiling.

'Yeah, you make sure you do. And Miss Wagner?'

He was looking hard at her. She wondered what was going on in his mind.

'Sir?'

'Pursue every angle on this. Every one.'

Then the meeting was over. Clarke rose from the table, stared at each of them, and turned to leave.

'Mr President?' Fogerty said.

'Mr Fogerty?' Clarke replied at the door.

'I don't have the right words to say this, sir. To become President is an honour, probably the greatest any man can hope for. And to win that prize this way must be one of the oddest feelings on earth.'

'You can say that again, mister,' Clarke replied quietly.

'What I wanted to say was, you are the President now. There's nothing to qualify that. And I, along with everyone here, wish you well in the job. For all our sakes.'

'Thank you for that,' Clarke said, peering at him. 'I appreciate it.'

Then he was gone.

Five minutes later, outside in the corridor, on the way to the car lot, Fogerty smiled at Levine and said, 'You were pushing it in there, Ben. This guy's ex-Army. He likes to think you care. He also happens to be the President now. He deserves our respect.'

'Clinton appointed me,' Levine grunted. 'I'm just one more white Democratic appointee who gets his ass kicked out of the way once Clarke gets his feet under the table. You watch, we're in the same boat. Besides, this is just for show under the circumstances. A couple of hours from now he'll feel the weight of all that good old White House paper bearing down on him and sit back into the job. Shame, really. I'd hoped we'd have someone in that job who didn't shake when the wind started to blow a little hard. As for the respect thing, Dan, hell, you know as well as I do, no one deserves it. You earn it, that's all.'

Helen marched one pace behind the three men, staring at the wallpaper, wishing she wasn't hearing this.

'He'll make a good President,' Fogerty said. 'He'll earn your respect. Don't you worry. Not my politics, that's true. A hell of a way to get the job, though. Particularly if you're black.'

Fogerty stopped at the front desk and stared at them. 'I got someone else to see before I go, Ben. You heard what the man said on this. No range wars.'

Levine smiled and pulled out a pack of Winstons from his pocket, started to play with them, waiting for the moment he could light one outside. 'Cross my heart. And hope to die.'

'Yeah,' Fogerty said. 'You know, I miss Georgetown. It might be nice to be back.'

They watched him head off down a white-walled corridor.

'You did well in there, Wagner,' Levine said. 'I think he liked you.'

'I would have appreciated being told about the subject matter, sir. In particular the radiation.'

'Got to learn to duck and weave in this business. That right, Barnside?'

Barnside looked at her and smiled coldly. He was a big, fair-haired man, with the hard, strong physique of a football player, and no niceties at all. Barnside called it how he saw it, and if that meant he came across as charmless and aggressive, he really didn't give a damn. She could understand his rise through the Agency. He was smart, dedicated, and hard-working, with no private life that anyone got around to talking about. Just a bright provincial boy from Arizona who rose through the ranks.

'For what it's worth, Wagner,' Barnside said, 'I think that solar thing is a crock of shit. Not that I have your impeccable science background to prove it. You want my guess? Someone sneaked some nuclear device onto one of these planes. You wait and see. Occam's razor. Simple explanations. Bombs and bullets. It usually comes down to one or the other.'

'In that case,' she said, 'it's over to you boys in Operations, and S&T can go back to peering into test tubes.'

'Now, wouldn't that be peachy?' Barnside grunted.

CHAPTER 13 Time Past

It was early on a beautiful evening in Mallorca and Michael Lieberman was slowly acquiring the idea that it was to be one of the strangest of his life. A few hours before, he'd been staring at the screen trying to make sense of the crazy solar activity figures that were coming down the line. Then the news flash came up on the monitor, intruded into everything without being asked, and suddenly it was as if this remote Spanish mansion were hooked into the feverish nervous system of the Washington machine. Phones rang, people looked devastated, and there was a fever in the air that said this was about more than just the news itself, somehow the happenings in the sky had intruded right into their lives.

He looked through the big glass window at the back of the room and stared at the giant illuminated LCD map of the world set on the main wall of the control centre. It was one of those neat ones that painted day and night on the relevant parts, moving with the path of the sun and its elevation in the sky. The universal time was marked in UTC — which he still liked to think of as Greenwich Mean Time — in the corner. You could almost see the summer solstice approaching. The high point of noon was reaching the East Coast of America. A huge curving sweep of daylight, shaped like a breast pointing downward, ran from the North Pole, now in permanent sun, down through the East Coast of North America, through the Caribbean, south past the tip of Tierra del Fuego, to the edge of the Antarctic, where the sun never rose at this time of the year.

This was that ever-moving object midday, where the sun was at its highest, casting its brightness on the greater part of the world. On either side sat, to the right, approaching night, and to the left, rising morning. Darkness was sweeping across Australia, all of Asia, and the south-eastern foot of Africa, fast approaching the farthest tip of the Mediterranean. On the West Coast of America it was ten AM. A fine time to be sitting on the beach in Half Moon Bay, he thought. At least it ought to be, if the sun hadn't been so damn strong of late that you wondered what it was doing to your skin as you sat there watching the slow, strong swell of the Pacific.

He walked out of the room, racking his head for some explanation. People didn't die like this, presidents in particular. The air was still full of heat outside. He walked over to the old stone wall that ran along the cliff edge, parked himself there, watched the motion of the waves, the way the gulls moved on the currents of wind blowing off the ocean. There was a shadow next to him and he wished he could have summoned up the courage to ask her to go somewhere else. Mo Sinclair sat down beside him, unasked, and tossed a pebble over the wall, watched it make a tiny white dot of surf in the clear blue water a couple of hundred feet below.

'You look like a man about to resume smoking after a hitherto acceptable absence,' she said.

He gave her a sickly grin. His head was spinning. He didn't feel up to this.

'It's like the Kennedy thing, I guess,' he replied eventually. T was too young for that. Just. But I know what they mean now. And I wish I was thinking about the other people more. It wasn't just Rollinson. There were hundreds of them.'

'I know,' she said.

'It gets you the same way?'

She nodded. 'He's the icon, Michael.' She shrugged. 'His death makes it all real to us.'

'Right.'

She watched the smart, troubled face gaze out into the blue emptiness of the sea and wondered why he seemed to take this so personally.

'There's more to all this, Mo. You understand that?'

'How can there be?'

He shook his head violently. 'There is more to this. These plane crashes. Why we're here. Some of this craziness I do get. The instability of the weather, we know where a lot of that is coming from. The solar cycle. The crap we're getting from the flares right now. But…'

He watched a shining white seabird dive down the face of the cliff and disappear beneath the waves, waited for it to re-emerge, and knew he could never predict the point at which it would break surface.

'But we don't know. Give them time.'

'Yeah,' he said, and flashed a look at her she didn't understand. 'We really are overloaded with that here now, aren't we?'

She felt it was time to change the subject. 'You weren't always doing this, were you, Michael? I remember you said something to Annie. About designing satellites or something?'

'Oh yes.' The bird reappeared on the surface, something silver and wriggling in its beak, and true to form it was nowhere near where he expected. 'You ever hear of SPS?'

'No.' She looked puzzled. 'Should I?'

'Probably not. You're a little young for that particular dream.'

He shuffled on the uncomfortable stone wall and wondered why he was digging out this particular sheaf of bad memories right then.

'I'm waiting,' she said.

'SPS stood — no, stands — for solar-powered satellite. Back in the seventies, when everyone thought that the oil would run out before long and we desperately needed some alternative to carbon-based fuels, it was quite the theoretical thing.'

Mo smiled. 'I've heard of solar power. I thought it didn't really work.'

'Not on earth. Too costly, too inefficient, although those things may change. What won't change is the weather. You get clouds, you lose the throughput. Plain fact.'

She looked at the perfect day.

'It would work just fine here.'

'Yeah, but here's not where you need all those millions of watts of electricity. Try Detroit. Or Osaka. Not so good.'

'So?'

'So you collect it with a satellite. You put something with huge collection wings into orbit, pick up the juice, beam it back to the earth in the form of microwaves, and close down all the nuclear power plants, stop burning carbon.'

'Wouldn't that be dangerous?'

'You mean, do we get the fiendish death ray from the sky? Not at all. All of this was provable in theory by the early seventies. Just theory, mind. It took a bright, inquiring, optimistic mind to turn that into some kind of fact, design the satellite itself, come up with some costings to get it into space.'

She placed a hand gently on his shoulder. 'This wouldn't, by any chance, happen to be you?'

'No.' He looked offended. 'Do I come across as that arrogant?'

'A joke, Michael.'

'Right. It was a friend of mine. Let's leave it at that. I played my part. Those big wings I told you about? They were mine and mine alone. I was very much into engineering at the time, as much as solar astronomy, the two went hand in hand. Those things that put the juice there in the first place, they had my signature on them. Neat stuff too, even if I say so myself.'

She took her hand away and looked into his face. Somewhere underneath the surface there lurked a bright, animated side to Lieberman's character, and she couldn't work out why he kept it hidden sometimes.

'The way you talk about it, I guess it never happened. That must have hurt.'

His eyes flashed, and there was a spark of anger there she hadn't seen before.

'Hurt? You don't know the half of it. This friend of mine, she could sweet-talk the birds out of the trees. She went away, talked to all these grey people in Washington, in NASA. We were at Berkeley then, so they were reluctant to begin with. More money for the hippies, that kind of thing. But then, all of a sudden, we got bankrolled. Right out of the blue, a long-term R&D budget to design and build the thing. All the way through to a launch on the Shuttle, which was still in the planning stage itself back then, of course.'

'Whatever came afterwards, that was an achievement, Michael. You should feel proud.'

He turned to stare at her, and it wasn't a pleasant look.

'Really?'

She stuttered, 'I — if you don't want to talk about it — '

'Hey' — he touched her arm lightly — 'I'm sorry. You touched a raw nerve. I apologize.'

'So what happened?' she asked, and wondered whether she wanted to hear the answer.

'We began to build it. This friend and me, and a team of some of the brightest people you ever met. And it was like heaven. This was an idea that combined everything you could dream about. Space, exploration, advanced engineering, and guess what? We got to save the world at the other end too. I can't tell you what that felt like. I used to walk through the city, looking at the smog and the fumes coming out of the cars, thinking one day, one day soon, we just pop the satellite in the sky, work out some way of defraying the launch costs, the ground infrastructure, and bang. There we are. Limitless, constantly renewable energy, at negligible cost. Forever and ever. Amen.'

'They pulled the budget?'

He just looked at the ocean and said nothing.

'They'll come back to it one day, Michael. If it makes sense like you say.'

'Oh, they'll come back to it. You just have to look at the numbers to understand that. It may be fifty years. It may be a hundred. But at some stage we have to realize that this is the only luxury-grade oxygenated planet available to us right now, and we can't keep choking it the way we have this past century. Nothing else makes the grade, not with the kind of energy demands we take for granted nowadays. Maybe someone will come up with some other way of meeting the bill. Right now this is the only one I know.'

'I'm sorry.'

He looked at her, puzzled. 'About what?'

'That it won't be you. In all probability.'

He laughed out loud. 'You think that bothers me? Jesus, Mo. Who gives a damn about that? I'm a scientist. I write this stuff so that someone else, a year, a decade, a century down the line, gets to pillage it, make it better, fix the places where I went wrong. Am I pissed we're not doing this now? You bet. But it's not because I don't get to work on the thing. It's because…'

'Yes…'

'It's because we fritter away our time here, Mo. We're just so blind to what goes on, we veer from gloom and doom on the one hand — the sky is falling, the sky is falling — to thinking what the hell, it's all someone else's job. When really the answer lies somewhere in between.'

She looked at her watch. 'Aren't we supposed to be getting a briefing or something real soon?'

'Yeah.' He didn't look ready to move yet.

'And after they killed the project, that's when you moved into what you do now?'

'I became the sunspot guy. Overnight. A wondrous transformation. No big budgets, no engineering. No teamwork. Never again.'

'And your friend?' she asked hesitantly.

He said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the blue horizon.

'Well…' Mo glanced at her watch again.

'They didn't kill the budget. Just showed us its true direction. I didn't like where it was heading, but my friend stuck with it. It all fell apart a few years ago anyway.'

She watched him in silence; this was an interior conversation, not one in which she was involved.

'We were naive,' he said. 'We were just this bunch of bright kids trying to save the world, trying to tag on this giant pair of wings to a satellite, work on some way of converting all that nice sunshine into a big continuous burst of microwave energy that could take the place of a good number of power stations. We didn't watch the news much. Didn't even take any account of that great speech that Reagan made. March twenty-third, 1983. I stuck that date right into my memory later, when it all became so clear.'

She shook her head. 'I don't understand.'

'We thought we were working on a nice little government project to solve the world's energy crisis. It was all bullshit. We were just little cogs in some huge wheel, and I should have guessed it, should have known from all these guys in black suits who kept hanging around, watching the budgets, making sure everything was kept nice and tight and secure.'

The sun was getting low in the sky. There was a hint of coolness in the evening air; it made the skin prickle on her bare forearms.

'I shouldn't be telling you this, Mo. I signed pieces of paper. They made me.'

'Then don't.'

'To hell with them. It was all a fraud. There was never a plan to put an SPS in the sky. We were just the power plant for Ronnie's bee in the bonnet at the time. Remember the Strategic Defense Initiative? Star Wars, the press called it. A neat little circlet of bite-your-ass satellites spanning the globe. Strictly on a deterrent basis, you understand. Ho, ho. The Soviets throw up a missile, my little SPS unit, now transformed into some kind of orbiting Power Ranger or something, takes it out with microwave, laser, some kind of particle beam, you name it. They had all manner of shit getting tacked on its backside. That's when I found out. I walked in one day and finally got a glimpse of the total design blueprint, not just my part of it. These were war satellites, you'd better believe it. God knows what crap they wanted to build in there, and every bit of it got to live because of what I was making for them. I walked out. Like I said, my friend stayed, and I never did understand that. In the end, SDI itself went down, and all my work with it, I guess. Now no one wants to know about SPS. We just peer ten years ahead and say, "Looks good to me…" It's all such a waste.'

And it was, she understood that, just by looking at the pain, the anger in his face.

'I don't know what to say, Michael.'

'You don't need to say anything. I'm sorry I dropped that on you.'

'No need to be. And after that?'

She knew how to hold on to you when she wanted an answer, he thought.

'After that I got less serious. I got married. Then I got unmarried. I floated around the bright world of solar academia doing my sunspot act. It pays the bills. It gets me by.'

'But you think it's a waste…'

'Yeah.' He thought of Bill Rollinson again, and all those stories about Air Force One. 'I think it's all such a waste. And I wish I wasn't so damn stupid, I wish I wasn't here being some kind of weatherman for these guys when there's so much bigger stuff going on around us.'

Bill Rollinson and a couple of big silver aeroplanes falling from the sky, leaving a smear of radiation-hot metal across the earth.

'Oh my God,' he said softly.

'Michael?'

But he never heard her. He was staring at the dying sun on the horizon, wondering whether to feel stupid, mad, or both. And who to take it out on first.

CHAPTER 14 Argument

'I can't believe these things didn't get run through S&T,' Helen Wagner said, surprised by the sudden, unnatural venom inside her voice.

They were in Levine's office. It was approaching midday. Outside the day seemed gripped by a piercing white brilliance. Her head hurt. The air-conditioning sang a high-pitched whine but did nothing to keep out the enervating heat.

Levine and Barnside were staring at her from the opposite side of the table, clearly wishing she were someplace else. There should have been more people in the room for a meeting of this nature, she thought. It was too soon to say that the papers in front of her gave any clue as to the fate of Air Force One, but the possibility had to be there. And Levine was sitting on this. It was all so obvious. He was biding his time, hoping the game would move on before the full story worked its way out.

'First things first,' she said. 'Why the hell is Operations funding part of a scientific project? Without the knowledge of S&T? Or input?'

Barnside shrugged. He had his jacket over the back of his chair and sat in a white, neatly ironed shirt with a button-down collar and plain blue tie. Sweat stains ran down from beneath his arms halfway to his waist. His hair looked matted with sweat, and a single prominent vein on his forehead seemed more visible than usual, seemed to move physically as he spoke.

'Look, Helen,' he said, a note of reasonableness in his voice. "There are territories here. Just because Sundog's involved with scientific data doesn't put it in S&T's court automatically.'

'Bullshit,' she yelled, and knew her voice was too loud, her tone all wrong. She closed her eyes. The room was stifling. Her headache was getting worse. She looked at Barnside. There was a mocking smile on his face; he won a point there. She was the one who lost her grip.

'We're colleagues, Helen. We need to be able to work with each other on this one.'

'Sure, Dave. So turn over the files to me and let me judge for myself.'

'Jesus…' The vein was throbbing, bright and sweaty on his tanned forehead. 'You know I can't do that. At least I hope you know. Do you read the Ops manuals here or what? Work your way into this job, please.'

Barnside's face was flushed. He seemed on the edge — they all did, probably, which was understandable in the circumstances.

'I am asking a very reasonable question,' she continued. 'Why did Operations fund part of Sundog without the knowledge of S&T? Even if there was an operational reason — and I don't accept that for one moment — we should have been informed.'

'Like I said. Read the manual,' Barnside grunted. 'It's under "need to know". And "cell structure". If we wanted your input, we would have asked for it. But we didn't. If you want corporate niceties, go get yourself a job in the charitable sector.'

She glared at Levine, who just shrugged. 'Hey, he's right. It wasn't me that rubber-stamped the decision to go into Sundog. Our involvement was low-key and pretty basic. Understand this, people weren't asking us for scientific advice. They were asking us for management and security, some comfort factor.'

'And a damn good service they got…'

'Christ,' Barnside groaned. 'We don't have room for this, Helen. Are you here to help or what?'

Levine wagged a finger. 'Enough. Keep a handle on those tempers, both of you. Jesus, it's hot in here. Something go wrong with the goddamn air system?'

Helen couldn't believe how bad she felt. She prayed she wouldn't faint.

'So what happened with security, then, Dave?' she asked.

'Sundog was a low-priority project for us, the entire thing was virtually on ice,' Barnside replied. 'We're not sitting on it every damn day.'

'Great. And now it's out of control.'

'No one's saying that,' Levine objected. 'All they're saying to us is that the space side of things has gone off-line.'

She couldn't believe her ears. 'Let's put it another way. We no longer have control of the major part of the system.'

'Or direct proof that anyone else has either,' Barnside said grimly. His eyelids were half-closed.

They all felt terrible in this overheated, airless room — and she sensed it was more than just the heat.

'On the basis of the information you've given me,' she continued, 'it is my opinion that Sundog, if it were in the hands of a hostile party, could have been responsible for downing Air Force One. It has the military capability. With the solar configuration we have right now, the increase in radiation and general activity, the amount of pure radiation it could generate, God knows…'

'That's conjecture,' Barnside muttered. 'Pure conjecture.'

'And in any case,' Levine added, 'who the hell knows how to use it? Not the Libyans. Not the Iraqis. This just isn't their bag. We'd know if they had that kind of capability. Like I said, Sundog was basically on ice, one experimental satellite in place, three ground stations. The damn thing didn't work reliably when we tried messing with it. How the hell could anyone else take control?'

'I don't know,' she replied, and her headache moved up several notches. 'But the answer's there somewhere. So what about these Gaia people?'

'Cranks,' Barnside grumbled. 'Are we going through all that again?'

Levine lit a cigarette. She watched the foul-smelling smoke curl into the air, steal what little oxygen there was from it, and wondered whether she might throw up. 'We do routine monitoring of a few cults these days, Wagner,' he said, the grey fumes seeping out of his mouth. 'Makes sense. Some of them are serious bad news. But get this in perspective. There's a big difference between hacking a government Web site and stealing control of a billion-dollar space project. It just isn't a viable notion.'

'Depends how smart they are.'

'No,' Barnside yelled. 'It depends on a lot more than that. Equipment. Knowledge. Timing.'

'That's your judgement, Barnside. But you're not a scientist, and I am. You should leave that to me. You should have left it to S&T all along.'

Barnside glowered at Levine, closed his eyes, felt his forehead, and said, 'Will you tell her how things work around here, Ben? Or do I have to do that as well? I really don't have time for this.'

Ben Levine stared back at him. The director's bald head was covered in sweat. His eyes looked glazed.

Helen jumped. Somewhere down the corridor a fire alarm was ringing. She could hear people on the move.

'Keep quiet, Dave,' Levine said calmly. 'Don't make a fool of yourself.'

Helen pushed the papers from her lap back onto the table. 'We're wasting time here, gentlemen. I've been through the papers you've supplied to me about Sundog. Even a child could see they're incomplete. I don't have details of the security clearances in Spain, the personnel histories of the key players who've worked on the project in the past, managerial reports — '

'Hey, hey.' Barnside was waving her down and the sight of his big hand bobbing up and down in the airless space in front of her seemed so infuriating. 'One thing at a time, Helen. This is your first day. You're not even equipped with full security clearance yet. We're adapting to Belinda's loss as much as you. Can't you get that?'

She glowered at Levine. 'Sir?'

'Say it.'

'Did you give me this job precisely because you thought I wouldn't pick these things up? Is that what this is about? Keeping S&T nice and quiet while you try to sweep whatever is out there under the carpet?'

She could have sworn Barnside was starting to laugh.

'I warned you, Ben,' the big man muttered eventually. 'Just because she looks like a babe doesn't mean she acts like one.'

'I resent that — '

'Enough!' Levine hammered a tightly clenched fist on the table. 'I will say this once and once only,' he announced. 'You people have to work with each other. We don't have space for this kind of behaviour.'

The noise outside the door was getting oppressive. There were more alarms, the sound of people running down the halls.

'It's your call, Dave,' Levine said softly.

Barnside shrugged. 'Okay, Helen. You're smart. You deserve it. This isn't a question of clearance, by the way. It's simple need to know. You can read about that in the manual. We have an NOC inside Gaia. Nonofficial cover. Someone who doesn't work for us directly but gets paid by someone else and still does the job after all. Been there for over a year and come out with precious little, nothing that links them firmly into this. It's all supposition right now. But we're working on it. And a lot more besides. I'll get the files over to you. And…'

Barnside blinked, maniacally, she thought. Down the corridor the commotion seemed to be getting louder.

'I want you to read the manual on cell operation. I shouldn't have told you that. It breaks all the rules, but maybe they're made for breaking sometimes.'

'I don't need threats,' she said, and heard how shrill she sounded.

'This isn't a threat…'

Barnside's voice was cracking, she thought. This whole conversation was going crazy.

Levine turned on Barnside and his face was, bright red. Something happened in the air, like the sudden sharp prick of an invisible needle. All three of them winced, stared across the table. She saw a greasy line of blood appear at Barnside's nostrils. Then the pain returned, and this time it was so real, like a hammer blow in the head, and they were all screaming and yelling, holding their hands to their scalps, wishing away this hidden weight that pressed down on them from the sky, made it feel as if their brains might explode out of their ears.

There was a sound, something electrical, and in the corner of the room the PCs went quiet, then the lights failed, the air-conditioning began to wind down, everything that was modern in the office seemed to lose its lifeblood, the world became acutely still except for this ringing, agonizing and loud, that ran inside and outside her head.

She didn't know how long this lasted. It could have been minutes. When it was over, the weight lifted in an instant, and left behind a sea of different pains and sensations. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. The sleeve of her cream silk shirt was covered with mucus that had poured from her nose. Her eyes, she could feel, were wet with tears. Across the table Barnside's nose was pouring blood; it ran down his face like the makeup of a tragic clown. Ben Levine had his head in his hands, face down on the desk. Somewhere outside a woman was screaming.

Helen looked at Barnside and thought she'd never in her life seen a man so frightened.

Choose your moment, Belinda taught her. Always pick your time.

'They've got it, Dave,' she said quietly, getting up from the table, trying to keep her equilibrium. 'They took it from you and just delivered the proof. Now you just sit there while I get a doctor. And try not to bleed too much on this nice new carpet.'

CHAPTER 15 Reunion

They were in the control room, looking flustered, sweating, and when Lieberman saw them he just knew. Mo Sinclair was at his back and he was glad of that. He wanted a witness.

He walked over to Irwin Schulz, whose face was bobbing in and out of the glow of a screen, grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt, and said, very slowly, very deliberately into his face, 'You built it, goddamn you, Irwin. You built that damn thing and that's what's going wrong here, that's killed those people.'

Schulz stopped what he was doing and looked at Lieberman with cold, scared eyes.

'They built it, Michael. I just get to come in and try to sweep up the mess. Ask Simon. We're all in the same boat.'

'Bennett?'

The Englishman looked sick. His skin was pallid and clung to his cheekbones. Behind him, Bevan was barking down the videophone at a sea of faces on the screen.

'Irwin's right,' Bennett said. "We're just the caretakers. They did all that work in the late eighties, Michael. They thought it would be a shame not to see if any of it worked in practice. I'd hoped we wouldn't reach the stage where we'd have to broach this with you. There are security considerations. But obviously that's a little late now.'

'So why doesn't it work?'

Bennett bristled. 'It does work, actually. As far as we know. It's just that we don't seem to have the keys any more.'

'Not yet,' Bevan grunted, his face still stuck in the machine. 'We'll be there, with or without you, Lieberman.'

'Yeah,' Schulz said sourly, and hit the keyboard. 'Sure thing. I wish I felt that confident. Take a look for yourself, Michael.'

Lieberman pulled up a seat and rolled it around so that he was sitting next to Schulz. What he saw on the terminal chilled him: It was the original SPS design, four big hundred-metre-wide wings trailing in its wake, a cluster of antennae and dishes sprouting out of the front.

'What is it?'

Schulz squirmed. 'Imagine the SDI deterrence thing, but with the idea of deterrence sort of put to one side and replaced with some kind of full attack capability. Basically everything you got in the original SDI design — laser, microwave, particle beams — but upped somewhat.'

'Somewhat?' Lieberman asked.

'The SDI units were supposed to be able to take out missiles, planes, that kind of thing. This can do all that and a whole lot more too, right down to ground attack, the sort of impact you might get from a tactical nuke. Versatile little weapon. Shame it's a touch temperamental.'

'It doesn't work?' Mo Sinclair asked hopefully.

'Not reliably,' Schulz replied. 'I guess we just upped your security clearance, Mo. You do know what that means now, don't you?'

'Cross my heart,' she said, not smiling.

'A little more than that,' Bevan added.

'Yeah,' Schulz said. 'And maybe we all hope to die. Just might happen too. Sundog is true to its name, Michael. A real dog, and a rabid one at that. When they came around to trying out the systems, it was as unstable as hell. Not your part of the thing, that worked beautifully, I might say. Just the rest. Like trying to light a cigarette with a flame gun. Except it could come at you any which way it liked, depending which particular gear you selected.'

'This is your business,' Lieberman said. 'Not mine. If you'd wanted my help, you should have come clean to begin with.'

'And you'd have joined us?' Bennett asked.

'Maybe.'

'I don't think so,' Schulz said, smiling. 'We know how you responded when you found this thing wasn't designed to save the world. Besides, we do need that weather report of yours. On an ordinary day, Sundog is just a nasty piece of metal in the sky. With all the crap we have out there right now, and that getting worse by the day, it turns into something else.'

'Something that can down Air Force One?' Mo Sinclair asked.

'And maybe a lot worse too.' Schulz grimaced.

Lieberman shook his head and wished he were somewhere else, where the room wasn't full of the whirring sound of computers and the heavy weight of despair.

'It's your toy that got broken,' he said. 'You fix it.'

'It's not broken,' Schulz said. 'That's the point. Three weeks ago we lost the system for an entire day. Completely without warning. One minute we have everything, everything working so smoothly you wouldn't believe it. The next we lose contact and it's as if it's not even there, as if every damn circuit has blown. A day later, it comes back. We scratch our heads, hope this is just some temporary blip.'

Bennett sat down and took a sip of water. 'Well, it isn't. Six days ago we lost the satellite again. And nothing we can do seems to bring it back.'

'Maybe it's a fuse,' Lieberman suggested.

Schulz said very firmly, 'No, sir! I know that security system inside out, I designed most of it. It's got more failsafes in it than you've got in most nuclear warheads. Nothing could put it out completely. And besides, we've monitored traffic on some of the discrete frequencies we set up for the project. We can't decipher it. Someone must have double-programmed the satellite to accept two different kinds of encoding systems. Sundog is working. It is in place. God knows where this thing's being run from — you need a pretty powerful space antenna to cover that distance — but it's active, of that I can assure you.'

Lieberman felt giddy. He didn't want to be here, with these people, who were probably a damn sight more desperate than they were letting on.

'Let me get this clear. You mean you think someone's got control of this thing?'

Schulz looked at Bennett, who stared, in turn, at Bevan.

'We think so,' Bevan said.

'Don't you goddamn people take precautions? You're playing with monster toys here, folks. They make nuclear energy look like a box of matches. How the hell can this happen?'

'We don't know, Michael,' Schulz said quietly. 'But we have some ideas. And we think you can help there too.'

Lieberman laughed, and the sound nearly choked him. 'Help? You want to sucker me twice? Aren't you people making some assumptions here?'

'No,' Bevan said, looking at his watch, then at Schulz.

'At least let Mo and the kid go,' Lieberman said. 'If this thing can burn a hole in Air Force One, God knows what it could do to us here.'

'I can't do that,' Schulz replied, shaking his head. 'You are one good Unix jockey, Mo, and you're here. This came up out of the blue, and like I said, the project was pretty much on ice when it did. I need you. We can't afford to lose anything on the network we do have working. This thing is coming to a climax one way or another over the next couple of days. I can't ship someone else in. I'm sorry. I really don't think we are in any danger here, but we have to keep what we've got up and running.'

'Hey, Mo,' Lieberman objected. 'Don't rush into this. How do you know you can believe a word these guys are telling you?'

'I don't,' she said quietly. 'But to be honest, Michael, just now we really don't have anywhere else to go.'

Some people bring their own pain with them, carry it around in a little pack on their back, he thought. He wondered what had happened to this woman to make her think that life was just like that: You walked around waiting for the next bombshell to drop on your head, shrugging your shoulders when it came, smiling wanly and muttering, 'Okay.'

'Well, that's your choice, but as far as I'm concerned you guys can take a hike. I'm out of here in the morning. If you'd had the decency to tell me some of this before I arrived, maybe I would have given it a second thought. But since you spared me that, I am out of this.'

In the corner, Bevan smiled and simply said, 'No.'

'We need you,' Schulz pleaded. 'We need you more than you can even begin to guess.'

'Tough,' Lieberman said. He heaved himself upright, feeling old and stiff and cross. He felt a touch faint, and the room was shifting a little.

In the corner Bevan was still smiling. And checking his watch.

'One other reason, Lieberman. It's about time. Someone made an appointment and we ought to keep it.'

'What appointment?'

'Two more minutes,' Schulz said, his face pleading. 'That's all, Michael.'

The computers blinked and whirred constantly.

'No more.'

Schulz beckoned him to the biggest workstation. A video camera sat on the top. It was just like the rig in the bedroom, except larger, large enough to take in all of them if they wanted to have a video-conferencing party.

Lieberman sat down, nursed a glass of water, then turned to Bevan and said, 'Gimme a clue.'

'Someone you know,' Bevan said. 'We think there's someone in this you know pretty damn well.'

'We have packets,' Schulz said, staring at the screen. 'We have packet activity and I think that means something's coming through and… oh boy.'

They looked at the screen. Something had gone wrong. The picture was too big, too much of it was occupied by this leering, dominating face, and there was nothing Schulz could do about it, however hard he slapped the keyboard.

'Oh boy,' Lieberman echoed, and thought to himself: Sometimes your past does catch up with you in the most unexpected of ways.

Charley Pascal had cut her long dark hair savagely, so that it hung off her head in a ragged urchin crop, and it was hard to decide whether it was the kind of thing that cost you a fortune from some fashionable new salon off the Champs-Elysees or the sort of mess you ran up at home with a cutthroat razor, a cheap mirror, and a bad mood. Her eyes were the same, big and open and perfect, looking right into you, laughing all the time. There were creases at the edge of her mouth. She looked like some fashion model running a little past her time, and straight to seed with it.

'Why, gentlemen,' Charley said. 'Mr Bennett, Irwin, a couple of you I don't recognize. And Michael Lieberman. Dear Michael. They have you too? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.'

'No one more surprised than me,' Lieberman said, trying to think this one through.

'Fooled again, huh? They just keep doing that to you, don't they? Never mind. It's all going to change. Everything is going to change, in ways you can't even dream of.'

'Oh,' he said. And thought how odd it was to feel your life jumping between two discrete, distinctive periods in time, each with its own particular reality.

'This some kind of a payback thing? Aren't we a little old for that stuff? You stole the toy you gave them, Charley. Haven't you proved your point?'

'Oh Michael. You know so little,' she said, laughing, and the French accent was still there. 'Have you people been following what's happening in the world? Do you think I'm talking about payback?'

Simon Bennett said, 'So what are we talking about, Miss Pascal? If what you say is true, you have caused us some concern these last few weeks and no small amount of expense. I'd very much like to know why.'

She was grinning so close to the camera it couldn't quite focus. Maybe that was deliberate, Lieberman thought. Maybe she was trying to block out the background, hide any clue as to where she might be broadcasting from in that wonderfully indistinct place they called cyberspace.

'Are you happy, Mr Bennett?'

'My happiness is irrelevant, Miss Pascal. Could we kindly come to the point?'

'Happiness is the point, Mr Bennett. You don't understand that now but you will. Very soon too.'

'Hey, Charley,' Lieberman said, 'what's the problem here? Because this sounds crazy to me. We got all this shit stuff coming from the sky, we got bright people here. We can think this thing through. We can learn things, for chrissake.'

Charley Pascal's face loomed down at him from the wall, a good five feet high, and Lieberman really thought he'd cracked it then. She didn't look crazy at that moment. Her face relaxed, almost as if she were relieved about something, and he could remember what she was like when she first walked through the doors of the research lab in Berkeley almost twenty years before.

'Poor Michael,' she said in the end. 'Still as lost as ever.'

Lieberman looked at her and felt this moment hanging in the balance.

'Please, Charley. I don't give a damn what's gone under the bridge here. We can work this out. You give me a chance. You trust me. What do you want us to do?'

She laughed. It wasn't a sound he liked. Then she picked up a cigarette, lit it in front of the camera, blew smoke into the lens.

'The same thing I want everyone to do, Michael. Prepare. Everything comes around in its own good time. Life. Death. The cycle of nature. Sometimes you have to burn the corn to the ground to make sure the crop that follows prospers. Think of it that way.'

Charley Pascal did that laugh again, the one that made Michael Lieberman feel cold, then said, 'Oh, really, Irwin. You never give up. You have any luck?'

Schulz went red.

'Charley?'

'With all that low-grade snooping you're doing. Oh hell.. '

She reached forward, her face disappeared, and they heard the sound of a keyboard getting hit. Then she came back on screen and said, 'Irwin, you ever hear of the ping of death?'

He nodded. 'Surely. They had that when I was at college. That stuff is old. You could ping someone, anyone, out on the Net, provided you had their IP address.'

'That's right, Irwin. And what happened when you got pinged?'

'Well' — he couldn't understand where this was leading — 'someone took your system down. But all that's impossible now, 'cause we don't let any executables past the firewall, and even if we did — '

'Irwin?'

'Yeah?'

Lieberman watched Schulz's face. He was puzzled. Something was coming through on the monitor he didn't understand.

'Welcome to the new world,' Charley Pascal said, and then the screen went blank, her face dwindling into a fast-vanishing dot, there was a popping sound, and, one by one, every terminal in the room died, slowly, mechanically, on the hot, fetid air.

'Fuck,' Schulz muttered, in a way that made Lieberman think this was a word that didn't pass through his lips that often. 'Holy fucking fuck.'

And then, from a far corner, a sound. One of the terminals came back to life, lines of zeros and ones scrawling across its screen, and from the speaker the tinny sound of a guitar and a female voice. It was Sheryl Crow, and the mysterious way Charley had sent this thing unbidden to them, from God knows where out on the Net, meant that only the first line came through, just looped around itself continuously.

Singing, 'Every day is a winding road…'

Bevan came over to him, stood so close that Lieberman could smell the sweat on his body.

'We need your expertise. We need your insight. You knew the Pascal woman. Pretty well, huh? And now she wants to screw the world. Who knows? Maybe these two things are connected.'

'Bullshit,' Lieberman said, and went back to the briefing room, picked up a bottle of red wine.

'Bullshit,' he said again, then headed for the door, left them there, staring at his back for all he cared, thinking about how he'd get out in the morning. Walk if need be.

Outside it was a glorious Mediterranean night, the air hot and aromatic with the scent of wild herbs. The sun was dying out to the west, a gorgeous sphere of gold and red embedded in the velvet sky. The stars were out, so clear in the sky, alive, sparkling. The evening hummed with the skittering of insects on the hot, dry breeze. It would be another airless, sweat-filled night.

He half-walked, half-stumbled over to the clifftop, sat on the wall, drank from the neck of the bottle.

'Don't want company,' he said out to the sea when he heard her footsteps.

Mo Sinclair sat down next to him on the wall, looked at him with that accusing feminine expression he felt had probably accompanied his birth.

'We can't go, Michael. You heard what they said.'

'Watch me.'

'You don't have to like them. They need us.'

'Really?' he grumbled, wheeling round to face her. 'Now they do. But not when they were setting up this stupid piece of shit. Who do these people think they are, putting their fingers into a pile of stuff like this? Perry goddamn Como singing "Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket"? Jesus, they set out to do this kind of thing and they show no respect. And when it all goes wrong, they turn around to the likes of you and me and say, hey, this is your responsibility, you're the one to blame.'

'I heard what Bevan said. That was a stupid and thoughtless thing. I told you he was an unpleasant man.'

'Hell, I didn't mean that.'

'Then what did you mean?'

'Doesn't matter. Will you leave me alone? Can't a man even get drunk around here if he wants?'

She glared at him.

'Hey,' Lieberman said, 'I don't get it. We only met today. And there you are giving me that contempt thing just like we've known each other for years.'

'I thought you were different,' Mo Sinclair said, and turned on her heels, headed back to the mansion.

'To hell with "different"!' Lieberman yelled at her disappearing back. 'You know what they do to different people in this world?'

She didn't answer. Pretty soon she was gone, inside the mansion.

'Turn them into Charley Pascal,' he said quietly to no one, watching some distant lights bob up and down on the sea, now glittering under the brilliance of a nearly full moon. 'That's what.'

Then slowly poured the remains of the bottle of wine over the rocky wall.

CHAPTER 16 Colourpoint Shorthair

'What the fuck do you call that?'

Pete Jimenez stared at the picture in the cheap plastic frame with chilli peppers and sombreros on it, the sort of mass-produced item you picked up in the tourist stores at the airport. There was a growing sneer of distaste wrinkling his pockmarks. It was too hot in the room. The freeway leading out through Silicon Valley to San Jose was packed with slow-moving cars full of angry people. The world felt ugly just then, felt at the end of its tether, writhing underneath the relentless burning brightness of the sun.

'Looks like ET with fur on,' Vernon Sixsmith said, and wiped his brow. The air was stuffy and thin, as if there weren't enough oxygen in the atmosphere.

'Yeah. And not much fur, at that. Not much of anything here I can see. 1 guess we should stand down the SWAT team. These guys bill heavy by the hour and I don't think we got much for them to do here.'

'Yeah,' Sixsmith said. 'In a minute. No hurry.'

They hadn't expected much of the apartment. Barnside had had men crawl over Charley Pascal's place before. The address wasn't hard to find. The Pascal woman had quit the Sundog research team in Sunnyvale a year ago, after a long bout of absenteeism and a string of arguments with the management. By that stage, they guessed, she'd picked up all the information she needed.

At some stage too, she'd quit the apartment, continuing to pay the rent but, as far as they could work out, living somewhere else, probably with the rest of the Gaia crew, probably in the Bay Area, but no one could be sure. The woman was just plain elusive.

The apartment was in a block of buildings put up to cater to the growing single population of the Valley, the army of bright young computer things who were flocking in from all over the world to feed the digital industries that ran from close by San Francisco airport all the way out to San Jose. Charlotte Pascal was long gone, every item of clothing with her, that much was obvious on their first visit. Jimenez and Sixsmith fine-combed the apartment, opened the drawers one by one, looked under the cushions, talked to the solitary neighbour who was still around — a dopey-looking German girl with close-cropped blonde hair dyed partly pink — and found out nothing they didn't know the moment they came through the door. Charlotte Pascal had walked out of this apartment three weeks or more earlier, with the rent paid up until the end of the year, and she hadn't told a soul where she was going.

All this was a week before. Then Barnside sent them back again. Jimenez watched Sixsmith taking the call from Langley, and the look on his face said it all: My, what a persistent man.

Barnside asked for a closer look, so that was what he got. Jimenez flicked through the letters that had stood in the box in the apartment block mail area. Credit card bills, junk circulars, flyers from the local Chinese restaurant. Charlotte Pascal had nothing that could even count as personal in her correspondence, and the oldest item dated back to May 24. Jimenez shook his head and said, 'Vernon, we're wasting time here. We can get the lab people in, see what they say, if Langley's so keen.'

'Yeah.' Sixsmith nodded. 'In a month's time when they get around to typing the stuff out. You heard what Barnside said. He wants this stuff now.'

'Well, maybe he can tell us how we're supposed to get it, because for the life of me I don't know. This woman looks like she was some kind of hermit or something. No letters from boyfriends. The German kid says she never saw anyone coming or going ever. She thinks maybe Pascal wasn't even here most of the time she was supposed to be in residence. And just take a look at this apartment. What do you get out of it? It's like…'

'It's like she cleared it all out knowing we were coming,' Vernon Sixsmith said, trying to think this through, trying to put himself in the woman's shoes.

He walked over to the angular metal framed bookcase that still had some things in it: a couple of Stephen King paperbacks, some books on solar physics with titles he didn't understand, and a copy of something called the Linux Bible. And on the top shelf- this had nagged him ever since Jimenez pointed it out — the picture of a cat alongside a cheap tourist ashtray from Acapulco, a three-inch model of the Eiffel Tower that looked as if it had been cast in lead, and a pair of Mexican salt and pepper pots made to resemble desert cacti.

'Ugly fucking thing,' Jimenez said. 'The frame and the animal. Who the hell would want to bring that home from vacation?'

'A cat lover, I guess,' Sixsmith said, and took the photograph down from the shelf, turned it over, unpicked the back, took out the print.

'Hey,' Jimenez grunted, 'that's not some piece of tourist junk after all. That's her cat.'

'You don't say?'

There was nothing on the back, not the photographer's logo he'd hoped for. But this was a posed picture, Sixsmith was sure of that. The animal was seated against a pale blue background, the sort you got in studios, and it was craning its long, almost hairless neck as if someone, just out of reach, were holding out a piece of smoked salmon, teasing it into a nice pose.

'Get that German kid in here again, Pete,' Sixsmith said, still staring at the picture.

A few moments later Jimenez was back, standing behind the German girl, making movements with his head that said, This kid is not cooperating, this person has not yet joined the Friends of the CIA.

'You know what that is?' Sixsmith said, holding out the picture.

'Cat,' the German girl said flatly, her voice sounding mannish, not even looking at the photo.

'Yeah. I know that. But any cat in particular? Was it her cat? Miss Pascal's?'

She shrugged her shoulders, stayed quiet, and Jimenez walked out from behind her, smiled, and said, 'You know, for someone with no green card who's been working illegally and has a couple of ounces of dope stashed behind the CD player, you are being mighty unhelpful, young woman.'

'Fucking cops,' the girl grunted. 'I got a green card. I earn more money than you two put together. And I don't use dope. Go see for yourself if you really want to rifle through my panty drawer.'

Sixsmith closed his eyes for a moment and wondered how much more of Jimenez he could stand. Then he said, 'Fine, thank you very much. Now, before we declare war here, can I repeat myself? All I want to know is this: Is that Charlotte Pascal's cat? And if so, what the hell is it?'

She thought about it just long enough to irritate them. 'Sure. It's her cat. Loved the goddamn thing. Something rare too. Weird name. Let me think.'

Sixsmith prayed that Jimenez wouldn't blow this one.

'Colourpoint Shorthair,' she said after another infuriating pause. 'Name of Michael. I guess I should have known she was gone for good when it stopped waking me up at night scratching on her door and meowing. She never let the damn thing out of the apartment. Scared it would get run over, I guess.'

"This kind's rare?' Sixsmith asked.

'So she said. Cats aren't my thing. I took her word on it there.'

'Thank you.'

'Can I go now?'

'Surely.' Sixsmith smiled, wondering what this was worth. 'And thanks for your cooperation.'

The German girl went back to her apartment, leaving the two men fuming silently at each other in Charlotte Pascal's onetime living room.

'Well,' Jimenez said in the end, 'we know what kind of cat she likes.'

'Yeah,' Sixsmith muttered, but he was already dialling, straight through to the Agency information desk, where some clerical assistant in the city office sat permanently glued to the computer.

'Sixsmith here. I want you to look up a breed of cat for me.'

The line went dead for a moment, then a young female voice said, 'A cat?'

'Hey, you can hear me! Do we get to do some typing now too? A Colourpoint Shorthair. I want you to see if you can pull out some names of breeders, owners' associations, any kind of links you got.'

'Colourpoint Shorthair,' the woman said, then paused for a second or two. 'My, that is a pretty pussy. Looks like ET.'

'I been there already, friend. You got some numbers we can call?'

He heard typing down the line.

'You ought to be grateful for this stuff,' the voice said down the line. 'Most of the networks are down right now. Only a handful of us can access anything. That sun thing, I guess.'

'I'm waiting.'

'Yeah. Got a whole list of registered breeders here on the Cat Fanciers' Association site. Where do you want me to cut this off?'

'How many breeders have you got in the Bay Area?'

'Ten, fifteen or so.'

'E-mail them straight to my pager. We need to start calling right now.'

'Okay. One more thing as well.'

'Yeah?'

'Got some number in the city for the secretary of the Northern California Colourpoint Shorthair Owners' Club. Mrs Leonie Hicks, fine-sounding address out in Pacific Heights.' She gave him the phone number.

'Got it,' Sixsmith said, and cut the line, then dialled straight out again. An elderly female voice that sounded like the rustling of old tissue paper said, very cautiously, 'Yes?'

And Sixsmith was so glad he hadn't handed this one over to his partner.

'Mrs Hicks? Mrs Leonie Hicks,' he said, his voice a little higher than usual.

'Yes?'

'My name is Harold Levinson. I do so hope you can help me.'

'If I can.'

'You see, it's about poor Charlotte's cat. It's a beautiful Colourpoint Shorthair called Michael.'

'Finest cat in the world, Mr Levinson. A feline sans pareil is the Colourpoint Shorthair, but then you seem to know that already.'

'Quite. And so loyal too. Which is the point. You see, Charlotte moved out of her apartment next door to me in Redwood a month or so ago and took Michael with her. And now — I just don't know how to explain this — the poor creature has come running back to his old home, looking very sorry for himself. And I just don't know how to return him, you see, since Charlotte, in her hurry, never left me a forwarding address.'

'My oh my,' said Mrs Leonie Hicks. 'These cats never cease to surprise one.'

'So I was wondering if you could help.'

'Mr Levinson, my home is always open to any Colourpoint Shorthair in need of a bed for the night. It is pedigree, I gather?'

'Well, I am sure that is most generous of you, Mrs Hicks. But I was rather hoping you might have Charlotte's address. Her being so fond of this kind of cat, you see. I was wondering if she just might be on your books.'

The line went quiet and then the tissue paper rustled again.

'I don't think so, young man.'

'Can you check?'

'No need. I know all our members. We meet quite regularly. And I am sure I would remember a name like that.'

'French woman, kind of pretty, worked in the Valley.'

'I'm sorry.'

Sixsmith pressed the mute button, looked at Jimenez, and said, 'Shit.'

'Well, thank you, ma'am.'

'My pleasure. And remember, if you need a home for that poor creature

'I will,' said Sixsmith, thinking fast. Then added, 'Oh, one more thing. Charlotte had this beautiful picture of Michael taken in some studio somewhere. It's a real work of art. Clearly someone who understands cats. You don't know where I might go to get something like that myself, do you?'

'Now, there I can help you. If you want a portrait of a cat, there is only one man hereabouts who can do the job. Henry Lomax. You wait there one minute.'

Sixsmith pulled the phone away from his ear and sent up a little prayer. One minute later, Mrs Leonie Hicks was back with a number. Two minutes after that he was speaking to Henry Lomax, who remembered this job so well, since it happened only two weeks before. Sixsmith scribbled something down on his pad and cut the call.

He looked at Jimenez. 'Two addresses. Sunnyvale. And 2314 Ravel, that's on Potrero, he says, he delivered the pictures himself.'

Jimenez grinned. 'Hey, man, we're rolling!'

'Yeah,' said Sixsmith, and put the picture of the cat back on the shelf. It was crazy, he knew, but he didn't like the way the thing kept staring at him.

CHAPTER 17 Charley Pascal

Washington, 1913 UTC

Tim Clarke sat at the end of the table in the Pentagon bunker, dressed in an open-necked shirt and jeans, and stared at the group that had assembled around him. This was a subset of the National Security Council, with the additions he'd demanded and the live video link to La Finca. He wasn't feeling good about the team. It was an ad hoc amalgam of different agencies, different skills, no one quite meshing, no one quite understanding the prolix nature of the problem.

He'd decided against inviting the military in the form of the chiefs of staffs and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This wasn't a military threat, nor, at this point, would a military solution seem appropriate. He had the FBI to handle the internal situation, but there was no evidence that Gaia was necessarily resident in the US any more, and if they were, the Bureau had few clues about where to start looking for them. The Agency, from what he'd seen, knew more than anyone else, but that was still vague. Then there was Sundog itself. They'd patched through to the control room in La Finca, and the live video of Simon Bennett and Irwin Schulz sat on the bunker wall, alongside a digital world map showing the movement of daylight across the globe. They looked lost, academic caretakers of a half-forgotten project who had suddenly found the doors to their lab flung open to the world, and a bunch of strangers walking in, taking over the desks.

The conventional notion of security wasn't made for this world. There was something so global, so intangible, about the way the threat had emerged that it had outwitted them, and all they could do was stare at each other accusingly and wonder where next to punch the air.

His training told him you left these situations to the professionals. In his gut, Clarke knew that this would be a dreadful mistake. The zenith was now less than thirty-six hours away, and the growing presumption was that, whatever Gaia wanted to do, it was the peak of the cycle they would choose for the act. There was no time now for the infighting that would resume the moment he stepped out of the room. So instead he had to lead, directly, with no room for argument.

'Let's start this off with something we can all understand,' Clarke said slowly. 'What the hell happened in Langley this afternoon?'

Helen Wagner scanned the papers in front of her. 'Data is still coming in, Mr President, but it's already clear that the area of the CIA headquarters was subject to some intense kind of solar radiation around midday. The burst lasted, as best we can estimate, six minutes. We had massive electrical failures in the buildings, we're still missing some telecom circuits, and it may be several hours before we can hope to get back to normal. And it's not just Langley. There's telecom disruption through the DC area.'

'I'm not interested in the power supply. What about the physical effects?'

She shook her head. 'We don't know accurately what was in this burst, sir, so we're still in the dark. There was a huge increase in ultraviolet rays during the period, equivalent to standing out in the sun for the best part of a day. It's the unknown elements, the X-rays and the electromagnetic emissions, that are hard to call. The best guess of our physicians is that they are responsible for the illnesses. Mostly these are associated with a sudden rise in blood pressure — physical discomfort, headaches, nosebleeds, the triggering of cardiac incidents, and the like. If the radiation level had been on a Chernobyl level, we'd have monitored that, of course, but more importantly we would have seen other symptoms by now — vomiting, physical side effects. This thing gives you a nasty shock, and repeated doses would doubtless trigger carcinogenic occurrences, just as much as standing out under the sun all day. But it's not deadly in itself, unless you have a pre-existing condition. The real lasting damage may well be to the systems we take for granted. We have entire network backbones down and they don't seem much willing to come back up.'

'It's Sundog, Mr President,' Schulz said from the screen. 'It's all Sundog. The mix of rays is exactly what we got in the trials, and one reason why we half-mothballed the thing in the first place. It's dirty stuff and damn hard to control. But you got to remember this thing is a bunch of weapons, not just one. She's got hold of the transmission feed too and she can use that to mix data into the beam, foul up the telecom networks with all sorts of crap on top of the magnetic disruption you get anyway. Like the biggest computer virus you could think of.'

'We had to do some pretty fancy rerouting just to keep any of the network upright,' Helen added. 'But we shouldn't take that for granted. We have to assume we could lose a lot of our telecom infrastructure at any time when the satellite is in range. And we're still some way off from the zenith. What they're throwing at us on all fronts now is nothing compared to what we could get tomorrow.'

'Understood,' Clarke said. 'And on the ground?'

One of the NSC staff people Clarke didn't recognize cut in. 'The local authorities have the situation in hand outside, sir. There may be a curfew in selected DC areas tonight if this sparks unrest. Right now the TV stations are swallowing the line we're feeding them, that this is some kind of power outage. I don't know how long we can hold that, but we'll keep it as calm as we can.'

'Casualties?'

Helen said quietly, 'We have two staff reported dead of heart attacks. There are some automobile crashes on the freeway. Reports are still coming in.'

Clarke shook his head. 'This is so accurate. How'd they do that?'

Schulz's voice came out of the system. 'It's not a big deal, sir. The energy goes in a dead-straight line. Provided you can work out any refraction through the atmosphere, it's a simple calculation. The fact that they brought down two planes when clearly they were going for Air Force One maybe means they're refining it now.'

Clarke looked at the mute, immobile faces in the room. He knew the makings of despair when he saw it. 'So who are these people? What do they want? And what can they do to us if we don't give it to them or find them in time to take this little toy back out of their hands?'

There was an awkward silence around the table. Clarke gazed stonily at them. 'My, this is an unpopular assignment. Since we don't know the answers to those questions, can someone kindly tell me who the hell these people are?'

'I can give you some background, Mr President,' Barnside said, and hit the presentation panel. Two photos came on the video screen: one of a smiling, attractive woman in her thirties, with long black hair and a pale, intelligent face. The other was of Charley Pascal, as they now recognized her from the recording of her conversation with La Finca. It was possible — just — to believe these were the same woman, but they had to use their imaginations. Something had happened to this woman over the intervening years, something more devastating than mere age.

'Charlotte Pascal,' Barnside said, looking at the screen. 'Age thirty-nine. Born Bordeaux, France, been working in the US on a green card since 1983. Came to California to study at the Lone Wolf Observatory, then got a job directly with the Sundog Project. She left Sundog twelve months ago. She had full security clearance inside the project, so as far as we can tell there's nothing she doesn't know about how it works. She had an apartment in the Bay Area. We got some people checking out various leads. Seems she hung on to the apartment, even though she hasn't been using it. Presumably she's had some contacts with Gaia going back a long time. These people must have some kind of base. Maybe she just visited part-time, then moved in when she felt she had enough to quit Sundog.'

'Why does she look so different in the two photos?' Burnley asked.

'She's sick, physically sick, it's obvious,' Helen said immediately.

Barnside glowered at her. 'The first is her original passport picture. The second is from her brief appearance on the Net this evening. We made some inquiries. It appears that a year or so before Pascal left Sundog she was diagnosed with some form of incurable brain cancer, anaplastic astrocytoma.'

He'd no sooner said the words than Helen Wagner was keying at her palmtop computer.

'I guess that didn't help with the instability,' Barnside continued.

'You can't make assumptions like that,' Helen said quietly. 'There are some nasty symptoms — nausea, fainting, the gradual loss of the use of your limbs — but you can't assume that someone with brain cancer is, per se, irrational. Or incurable.'

'Well, thank you,' Barnside muttered. 'The incurable part comes from her ex-physician, by the way.'

'Where the hell is she?' Clarke asked.

Barnside grimaced. 'Immigration shows she left the US back in January and returned at the end of March. No record of her departure since then, so we think she's still here.'

'So when did she start talking to these Gaia people?' Clarke asked.

'The Children of Gaia. That's the name they use. We don't know,' Barnside answered. 'We only really started monitoring minor cults a couple of years ago, so we had some catching up to do there.'

'Scalable terrorism.' Clarke stared at the CIA and FBI teams assembled side by side at the table. 'Guess you guys took a while coming round to understanding that option.'

'In the beginning, sir,' Barnside replied, 'this wasn't terrorism. The Children of Gaia seemed to have a few people in at the start who were loosely connected with Heaven's Gate in San Diego, the cult that committed suicide over the Hale-Bopp comet. I guess you'd call them fellow travellers. Heaven's Gate swallowed the assumption that Hale-Bopp hid a spacecraft, and the cult members could rendezvous with that by killing themselves, moving from one plane of consciousness to another. The Gaia people didn't go for this space thing. They were loosely associated with a covert ecoterrorist alliance known as Siegfried. This linked various groups — people raiding animal research establishments, targeting the meat trade, the chemical companies, anything to do with hunting.'

'Like Dan said. Tree-huggers.' Levine nodded. 'Militant anti-abortionists and the like.'

'That's not quite correct, sir,' Helen intervened. 'From what I understand, I think you'll find these people get nowhere near the abortion debate. To them, man — at least modern man — is the enemy species. We despoil the planet. We interfere with nature. The idea of abortion is probably neither here nor there to them. They take what they think of as a broader view of the issue.'

'Maybe,' Barnside said. 'But let's stick to what we do know. You're talking serious computer geek territory here. They use the Net to communicate and recruit new members. To them, what they read on the Net is real, and the New York Times is pure fiction. They are separated from most everything we regard as normal life. And as far as we can work out, Pascal is now their leader, maybe has been for some time.'

'This woman designed part of Sundog?' Fogerty asked.

'A big part,' Schulz said from the screen. 'Charley knows this project inside out. She was one of the brightest people we had and she was there right from the beginning, when it was still, on the surface, a solar energy project. She worked on everything, from programming right down to the design of the hardware. We didn't change anything significantly. She knows how we work. If she has the keys, she can do what she likes right up until the moment we take them back.'

'And the people with her?' Clarke wondered.

Barnside shrugged. 'Our guess is thirty, forty at the most, and we're real short on detail. Probably living together now in some kind of commune. We lose track of them after a property in San Diego they vacated around the time Pascal left Sundog.'

Clarke stared across the table and they watched, waited for him to speak. There, at least, Helen thought, he had won a kind of victory. He had the authority, had stamped it on the gathering through his own physical presence, not the badge of office.

'Will someone tell me what kind of people they are? Can we deal with them?'

Helen was there first. 'Smart people. With no lives. No family. From what we know, we think there's ex-programmers from Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, IBM, Netscape… We're not slouches in this area, Mr President. We can match them. Given time.'

'Time. Let's leave that to one side for now, Miss Wagner. What do they want?' Clarke's voice echoed in the silent room.

Fogerty rifled through the papers in front of him. 'In a word, sir,' he said, ' "prepare".'

'What the hell does that mean?' Clarke asked heatedly.

Fogerty shook his head. 'That's all it says on the E-mail we got after Air Force One was lost, Mr President. That's all she said when she made that call to La Finca. We've heard nothing since.'

Levine rapped his hand lightly on the table. 'We need intelligence for this. More than anything.'

'Wagner?' Clarke asked, and he could feel the ripple of resentment in the room.

'We need intelligence, sir,' she agreed. 'But we need understanding too. Maybe if we can find out what drives them, that might help.'

'So what do you think?'

'I'm not a psychologist, Mr President. But if you want a guess… consider Pascal's condition. She's dying. She's surrounded by people who are probably willing to die for her too. And none of them mind. Their own lives — and by extension those of everyone else — are unimportant. That doesn't mean they're out to be mass murderers — '

'She shot down Air Force One, for chrissake,' Barnside grumbled.

'But not without reason, surely. We need to understand their view of the world and what they think it's becoming. My guess is they see themselves as agents, of Gaia, if you like. Of the earth. Of some moving force in nature. If you feel you're unimportant yourself, maybe the entire human race becomes unimportant. And what matters is something bigger. The planet. The universe, maybe. Perhaps they're looking to return us all to some kind of state of grace. It's as fundamental as that.'

Fogerty smiled at her from across the table. It felt distinctly odd. 'If you're right,' he said, 'then surely it's obvious what they want. Not the end of the world. The beginning of it. Eden. A return to the garden before it was spoiled, before we bit into the apple.'

'There were just two people in Eden, Dan,' Levine said quietly.

'Well, maybe you'd need more than that,' Fogerty added. 'A few more.'

'It's not possible,' Helen said. 'She could cause a lot of damage. She could kill a lot of people, take down networks, destroy financial markets, maybe… hell, create chaos for a while in any case. If you add in the extra energy we're going to see at the zenith, then maybe there is the power inside Sundog to destroy entire cities, I guess. But we'd still be back after a while. We wouldn't forget how to make the internal combustion engine, how to organize the fabric of society.'

The room went quiet, and that made her feel cold.

'Are we all so sure?' Fogerty asked. 'Imagine walking out of this building into a world with no jobs or electricity, no money, no transportation, no workable form of government. Would it all go back to normal just because someone, three months down the road, found the on switch at the power company? Not necessarily. From her point of view, perhaps civilization — what we think of as civilization, at any rate — is a thin veneer on the mob, and the more we take that veneer for granted, the easier it is to bring the walls tumbling down when it disappears. Just look at Rwanda. Look at Albania, any number of former Eastern Bloc states. As I reminded you all once before, Gaia is the daughter of Chaos. And it's from Chaos that everything springs anew. That's the real threat, Mr President. What comes after. She's betting that it pays to burn your house down now and again, because what gets built in its place has to be better than anything that went before.'

'Won't get that far,' Barnside said quickly. 'We can stop these people.'

'How?' Tim Clarke asked, and the question almost sounded rhetorical.

Barnside glanced at the monitor. 'You secure at that end, Bevan?'

The thin pale face nodded.

'I would appreciate it if this is kept out of any briefing beyond this room, sir. We have someone inside,' Barnside said, staring at Helen Wagner, daring her to intervene. 'We've had someone there for a while.'

'Then why the hell don't we know where they are?' Clarke asked.

'No contact, sir. Maybe it's too dangerous, or impossible. I don't know. But once this thing starts to move further, we'll have news. Mark my word.'

'You'd better be right,' Clarke said, shaking his head. 'You people keep me posted on the hour and when anything significant develops. And let's tailor this for the press as much as possible. As far as the public's concerned this is just one big worldwide computer crash. Let them write to Bill Gates, for all I care. That's all. And Wagner? Find out what makes these people tick. Find someone who can explain that to me.'

Inside La Finca, Irwin Schulz watched Ellis Bevan mop his brow, watched Mo Sinclair following the video link at her workstation, unseen by the camera on top of the main monitor. He wondered how soon he could wake the deeply slumbering Michael Lieberman. Then he put that thought to one side, caught Helen Wagner's attention on the monitor, and said, 'This isn't enough. We need to talk to NASA and activate that Shuttle idea. We need to talk to them right now.'

CHAPTER 18 Potrero

Ravel meandered over the crest of the Potrero hill like a thin strand of hair straggling across the top of a bald head. At the summit, it almost didn't make it. The road came up from the direction of the city, turned into a dead end for cars, then narrowed into a jagged footpath through low trees and scrub, set on a good sixty-degree drop, until the terrain became a little less vertical farther down and the street returned. In the confined, pedestrian part the houses were timbered and individual, some tiny, some low, sprawling mansions. Vernon Sixsmith couldn't, for the life of him, work out what kind of neighbourhood this was. Whether these ramshackle timber boxes, some big enough to accommodate an entire commune in the wild old days, would fetch upward of a half a million dollars on account of their cuteness, or this was just a piece of Potrero that got passed by in the gentrification process and was left to go ragged at the edges all on its own.

The SWAT squad arrived first and hung around at the dead end of the street, out of sight, just watching the house, waiting for orders. The penetrating afternoon heat made their armoured vests feel like dead weights, caused the sweat to work up beneath the black uniforms, sit, greasy and constant, on the skin. An advance surveillance team of two, posing as Pacific Bell linesmen, had started working on the telegraph pole one house down from where Charley Pascal and maybe the rest of the Children too were now living. They were wired and live, and any moment now Vernon Sixsmith hoped to hear from them. Even from here he could see the gear they were using: a directional audio amplifier that would pick up any sound in the house, even the creaking of bedsprings (and they'd heard that one often enough). Plus a wireless tap on the line that could detect a single ring and, with a touch of luck, the number on the other end.

Sixsmith screwed his eyes shut, tried to squeeze away the constant headache, and picked up a pair of binoculars from the back seat of the car. He took a few steps, stopped to look at the sky: pale, cloudless blue, nothing in it but the yellow fire of the sun and the faint, distant trails of airliners painted high in the atmosphere. One thing he liked about San Francisco was the temperate weather. That was why, he thought, they got a touch fewer crazies than LA. Normally it was just a little too chilly to get really worked up about things. But something seemed to have changed these past few months. The year had begun with some of the worst floods Northern California had ever experienced. A week or two later the heat wave began. Constant dryness, constant sun. The sort of weather that might never end.

He shook his head, then concealed himself in the shade of a dusty oleander bush and looked at the house. It was single-storey, painted a pale pastel shade of green, with ragged roof tiles in need of some attention. The window frames were white flecked with brown where the wood was showing through. The front garden was a mess of overlong grass and discarded household goods: an old freezer, the remains of a washing machine, a cheap, off-white sideboard that had cracked at the seams and now mouldered in the deep grass like a corpse getting flyblown. All in all, this was a nice road, Sixsmith thought. The neighbours must have loved having Charley Pascal move in.

Correction: Charley Pascal and her cat. The Colourpoint Shorthair was still bugging him. He felt sure that if he closed his eyes he'd see its face — ET with a touch of fur — staring straight up at him, straight into his head, and saying, all feline aggression and spark: Yeah?

The earpiece crackled and he watched the phony linesman's mouth moving, down the road. 'We got activity,' the surveillance man said. 'Someone's playing music'

'You hear how many of them are in there? Which room?'

The distant head moved. 'The music's too loud to make out anything much else. It's in the right-hand front room. That's all.'

Sixsmith swore quietly to himself and was aware of the way Jimenez was smiling thinly at him, saying: This is your call, partner, your decision. The handbook asked for proof there was someone in the house before the SWAT people could wade in. Otherwise the suspect just might be around the corner shopping for groceries when they pulled out the mallets and handguns. He might watch from the end of the street, laugh dryly, and be gone with the wind.

But the handbook didn't really say what to do when there was nothing but music in a house that looked as dead as a corpse.

'Wait,' Sixsmith said. 'Tell me the moment it sounds like someone is changing the music or you see movement'

Jimenez looked blankly down toward his feet and let out a long sigh. Sixsmith stared down the street, at the house. It was really grubby. Which was strange. Houses normally took on the characteristics of the people who owned them, in one way or another. The Sunnyvale apartment was neat, clean, and impersonal. This place looked like it was the home of someone who was making a statement: I am dropping out of this place, I don't care what it looks like, I don't give a shit what you think.

The earpiece crackled again. 'Phone call. Front room left.'

Jimenez smiled, didn't look at him, and took out his handgun.

'Patch the call through to me,' Sixsmith said, and ignored the low curse that Jimenez threw at the pavement. It was a French voice, nice, female, sounding pleasant. This could be someone talking to her mother or her best friend. It was all so calm, so anodyne, so everyday. This was the elusive Charlotte Pascal talking about shopping, about going out, someone at the other end of the line hardly getting in a word, just coming in with the occasional, 'Really? You don't say?'

Sixsmith listened for close to twenty seconds, cut the line, nodded to Jimenez, and said, 'Let's go, front room left.' Then watched the team work their way down the hill, Jimenez by his side. These guys were specialists. You left the initial stuff to them. And inside a minute it was done. The front door of the house was through, the front windows too. Hooded men were inside — no shooting, Sixsmith thought, that was good anyway. By the time the pair of them had walked down the hill and were standing at the front gate, the SWAT team leader was back outside, hood off, right glove off too, blood pouring from his wrist.

'Cut myself on the fucking window,' the man said, glowering at the wound. 'This isn't me. Too fucking hot to think out here. Stitches, I guess.'

'So?' Jimenez asked, cutting the sentence off as quickly as he could manage.

The man shrugged. 'The phone call was a tape. Left on repeat, cycling 'round and 'round. Like the CD player. Some clever stuff hooked into the PC. Just to make the place look occupied.'

'Shit,' Sixsmith said, and thought: This woman is so on the ball.

They walked inside. It wasn't as grubby as Sixsmith expected. In a way, it looked as if it had hardly been occupied. There was a mattress on the floor of the main room, a low coffee table with the CD player on it. Sheryl Crow was coming out of it a little less loudly now that one of the SWAT team (who was a fan) had turned it down, not completely off. In the corner was a desk with a PC and a phone connected to it. The computer was on: A geometric screensaver bounced slowly from corner to corner like a Ping-Pong ball moving through sludge.

A thin young SWAT guy with ginger hair came in, smiling, trying to be helpful, and said, 'Nothing in the mailbox except junk circulars. Not a piece of mail in the house as far as I can see. No clothes in the drawers. No pictures. Nothing personal at all.'

Jimenez sniffed the air. He could always tell which SWAT people wanted to cross into plainclothes work. They were so friendly. 'Can't even smell the fucking cat, Vernon,' he grumbled. 'And I got a sensitive nose. That cat never even lived here, if you ask me.'

Vernon Sixsmith wished Jimenez would shut up about the cat. He stared at the floor: bare boards, looking a little pale, unpolished for years. Something on a single, slightly raised nail. He bent down, picked at it. A piece of red fabric. Sixsmith stared at it closely, then pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and tucked it away for later.

'Someone had the carpet up,' Sixsmith said. 'Took it away.'

'Maybe the pussy peed on it. Maybe the fucking cat peed all over the place and that was that, they just had to move out and get things fumigated. That would explain why I can't smell nothing.'

Over in the corner the PC started whirring, coming to life.

'Shut up, Pete, for chrissake.' The Screensaver disappeared, to be replaced by a small yellow circle.

'Jesus Christ,' Jimenez said. 'What the hell is that?'

The SWAT man, still trying to be friendly, shrugged at him. 'The screensaver shit they get on these things right now, who's guessing? I bought my kid some PC for Christmas down at the Good Guys. Two weeks later he's knee-deep in beaver shots. The Good Guys? I ask you. And him ten years old.'

'Some of us started at nine. Early developers.'

'Yeah.' The SWAT man laughed, and Jimenez thought it could be real good fun to jerk this one around a little.

Sixsmith glanced at the computer. The image had changed. It was bigger now.

'Say,' Jimenez said, 'you heard the one about — '

'Shut up, Pete.'

'Okay, you're thinking. I recognize the signs.'

The cat bothered Sixsmith. 'What did that photographer tell me about the pictures he took of that cat, Pete? Remind me.'

'He told you he took 'em and delivered 'em here. Two weeks ago.'

'Yeah. And Pascal made out like she moved out of Sunnyvale three weeks before that?'

Jimenez paused, puzzled. 'Yeah…' Then looked at the computer. It had changed again. The image had grown. It was now clearly a medieval sun, with a face in the centre. Not a pleasant face.

'So,' Sixsmith said, 'she had the picture taken, went back to Sunnyvale, and put it on the shelf, even though she wasn't living there.'

'Guess that's the sum of it.'

He thought about the bare floorboards and wondered aloud, 'Now, why would she possibly want to do something like that?'

And the SWAT guy looked at the computer and said, 'Ugly or what?' The image filled the entire screen. It was the colour of gold. The face was huge and full of apocalyptic fury at its centre. Vernon Sixsmith suddenly felt hot and cold at the same time, stared down beneath his shoes, and said, 'I think we'd better get the fu — '

Then watched the earth erupt at his feet.

CHAPTER 19 Tina Blackshire

'Smile for the camera, Charley.' Tina Blackshire ran around Charley Pascal with the little Sony video camera, crouching down to the level of the big wooden couch where she sat, almost regally. Charley Pascal hadn't wanted to be filmed in the wheelchair. This wasn't a matter of conceit, she said. They had to be careful not to give anything away.

'When do we do the real thing?' Tina asked. She had a plain, blank face, almost unintelligent, Charley thought, although this was deceptive. She had been with them almost a year. She knew Unix. She knew the Web. Tina could handle low-level hacking tasks as easily as someone else might set out a spreadsheet. And she had no family, no friends. She was like everyone else inside the Children: alone, unattached. Capable, Charley thought, of putting that distance between your puny, temporary body and the greater, everlasting glory that lay beyond.

'Joe said after,' Charley replied a little sharply, not wanting questions just then. 'You have to be patient, Tina. He just wanted me to try the video out. Get some shots they could splice in if they needed them.'

Tina nodded, a broken, fragile expression, the invisible bruise of the gentle rebuke hidden somewhere in the pale, flat contours of her face.

Charley wore a plain white cotton smock. She smiled. Tina always made her smile, even when she had this infuriating childishness about her. She was twenty-five or so, had worked in database programming for Oracle in the big black buildings in Redwood City, just down from the San Francisco airport, until she threw in her job and came to join the Children full-time. She had a high-pitched, girlish Valley accent that broke into falsetto too easily when she became overexcited. She was slim, almost without breasts, and nearly six feet tall.

Once, Charley had taken her to bed, just out of interest, boredom maybe, knowing that Tina would never dream of saying no. They had tried this strange, half-serious mix of sex and affection, all tentative fingers and gentle probing, no passion, no excitement, just touching, feeling, sensing. Afterward, when Charley questioned her about it, Tina said she was a virgin. These things hadn't happened in her life. There was always some work to be done. What social contact she got was through chat forums on the Net, not in the real places of the world that Charley, before she got sick, had frequented. There were so many like that in the Children, it only seemed fair to Charley that she should spread her own experience among them.

In time, she had thought, she would take Tina back to bed, pushing it all the way, as far as she wanted, seeing how long the fragile smile stayed on the plain face when the question of penetration, of real fucking, arose. Somehow it never happened. Over the past year, Charley had screwed almost every member of the Children. Most had enjoyed it too, though some were uncomfortable, merely submitted themselves. This was part of the sharing, part of establishing the relationship (of love, of control too). She was their mother figure, and their leader. She knew their bodies, the taut, anxious ones, the slack, frightened ones, she had tasted their sweat, their semen, their salt hair, consumed them with her love, her passion. But never Tina again. It made her wonder.

'You look so lovely,' Tina said, then touched her hair, sexlessly, reached for the mirror-backed brush, stroked gently, fine bristle moving through shining black. The bright reflections of the hot day skittered around the room as she moved. Charley closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation. This was the world slowing down, she thought. Every day is a winding road…

Joe Katayama walked through the door. She looked fondly at him. The rest of the family were still outside, crowding hopefully behind.

'They want to watch,' he said.

Quiet Joe. Loyal Joe.

'It's not possible. You know that. Too many risks. If someone were recognized…'

He nodded. 'Okay. I'll tell them.' Then he went out and closed the door behind him, returning shortly afterward. She didn't need to ask their reaction. People followed Joe, as they followed her, and, when she thought about it, this could annoy her. In their passivity, which was part of their innocence, lay some streak of laziness, something that might one day pass for a lack of resolution, cowardice even.

'Tina,' Charley said, stopping the brushing with her hand. 'Joe and I need a moment alone.'

'Sure.' She looked so happy. There was a radiance in them all, she thought, now that everything was going so well.

Joe watched her leave. 'How do you feel?'

She thought about it. 'Strange. A little elated. Some trepidation. But not frightened, no. I don't believe I could be frightened with you around.'

He just looked at her, said nothing.

'Joe?' It was hard to extend any depth to these conversations with him. Intimacy didn't frighten Joe, she thought, it was simply something that he didn't want to embrace.

'Yeah?'

'Do you remember a point where this all turned? Where you knew what was happening? And you couldn't go back?'

'No,' he said immediately.

'When I quit Sundog, left the job, moved in full-time with the family. That happened for me. There was a day when I woke up and felt this thing moving through me. We were talking loose stuff at the time. Thinking about little things, small acts that no one would ever have noticed. And I knew we could do more. That it was down to me, to lead us through it.'

Her head was fuzzy from the illness and the dope. 'You were there then?'

'Yeah,' he replied. 'I remember that time. We were waiting for something to draw all the threads together, Charley. You did that. Don't ask me how. I'm not that bright.'

She held out her arms, he bent down his head, let her embrace him. 'You're bright, Joe. Bright and loyal and true. The best lieutenant I could ever ask for. Even when it gets hard.'

He kissed her softly on the forehead, pulled back from her body. 'I can do it, Charley. I thought about these things a lot. And no, I'm not bright. But I know you got things worked out.'

'That's her strength, Joe. Gaia did that.'

'Right.'

'And you remember turning that corner?'

He thought about it. 'No. I remember feeling lost, wondering whether there was any purpose in anything. And then coming round to realizing you did see it, and it all made so much sense. You got the revelation, Charley. For the rest of us, it all came a little more slowly. We didn't have the gift.'

'No,' she said, and thought: Someone has to lead, always.

'You're sure about this?' she asked. 'We ought to be sure.'

He nodded. 'I'm sure.'

She stared at the closed door. 'I think I knew already. Intuitively. But there was something that prevented me seeing it. This is a human condition, Joe. One of our failings. The animals know better how to trust their instincts. Perhaps we can relearn these things when the world gets to start anew.'

'You're right,' he said, and she watched him thinking wordlessly, realized there was something of the animal, feline and strong, inside Joe Katayama all the time.

'Everything else is there?'

'Sure. The Web page just needs the movie in it and we'll upload it. We're planning to shift the address constantly. They'll see it, but they won't see us. No problem. We'll be like a TV station with a broadcast to the world, but no one will have a clue where we're coming from.'

'Good.' And this was the moment, she thought, much more than the time they pressed the button on Air Force One. This was when the awakening, the rebirth, began.

'Let's have this done,' she said.

Joe Katayama went out and came back after a minute with Tina Blackshire. The girl looked radiant. Her eyes shone, were a little misty. Beyond the door, before it shut, Charley could just make out a small crowd of figures, waiting.

'You'll let me watch?' Tina asked breathlessly.

'Yes.' Charley nodded. 'We need you, Tina. We all need you.'

The pale, vapid face looked puzzled, but flattered too. 'I never dreamed I would be part of this…' She came over, touched the white gown.

'You brushed my hair so beautifully, Tina.'

'It's like being there,' she said, her voice trembling into falsetto. 'Like watching the Sermon on the Mount, or seeing Buddha or something.'

'I'm not a god, Tina. None of us are gods.'

'No,' the girl said, kneeling at her feet. 'I know. You said. We're all part of the greater god. Gaia. And the spirit of the earth.'

'We come from the earth, we return to the earth. You know that, don't you?'

'Yes,' she said quietly.

Charley reached forward and touched her, felt her breast. The nipple was hard. Tina looked at her, wide-eyed, not knowing.

'It's the feminine within us that is the source, Tina. It's important to remember that. The masculine is important, but only as a facilitator. It's the feminine where the godhead lives, for all of us. We ignore that and we cease to be alive.'

'Yes.'

'The world springs from the female, which tames, humanizes the male. Creation is joy, the start of the cycle. You know about creation?'

'Sure.' Her eyes looked as if they might pop out of her head.

'And you know about our unmaking? How the cycle ends?'

'Yeah,' she replied softly. Then jumped. Joe Katayama had turned on the video camera, which was now attached to a tripod. It had burst into life with a loud mechanical crack.

'You know what you're going to say in the broadcast?' she asked, wanting to change the subject.

'I know.'

'You have no notes?'

'I don't need them.'

'Wow. You want me just to sit here? I'll be in the picture?'

Charley smiled. The girl took her hand. 'Be brave, Tina. We all have to be brave.'

'Sure.' Joe moved the tripod a little closer, played with the viewfinder.

'It's on,' he said. 'Don't worry if you make any mistakes. We can edit it on the machine.'

'Yes,' Charley said, and closed her eyes. She wanted to feel the planets whirling in her head. She wanted to see the trails they made through the stars. But they weren't there.

Charley Pascal opened her eyes and said to the camera, 'The earth doesn't belong to us. No one gave it to mankind, no god, no creature from outer space. There are no explicit mysteries, there is no deus ex machina. We are what we have become, we are what we have made ourselves. And the earth is what we have made it too. That's the implicit mystery. The earth is its own spirit. It loaned itself to what we call life, not just man, but the animals, the plants, the birds, the creatures of the seas. And only man betrayed this earth spirit, which we call Gaia. Only man.'

She licked her lips. They were dry. Tina Blackshire's hand squeezed hers nervously. 'This cannot continue. You know this yourself. If you look in your heart of hearts, you understand this world, the world man has made, is unsustainable. We destroy a little more each and every day, and the cycle of that destruction increases each year. We extend our own lives upon the planet unnaturally, and destroy it as we do so. The world is soiled by our presence. We have squandered the gift that Gaia gave us, and for what reason? Greed. Insanity. The thrusting, covetous male principle that has come to live unchecked inside us. We are out of balance, and we have spread that imbalance to the earth.'

Charley Pascal looked into the dead eye of the camera and tried to imagine the world listening to this message, relayed by the TV stations posted across the Internet, stopping the traffic, halting the conversation in bars everywhere.

'We live temporal lives with no view to the future, no appreciation of the past. And if you think about it, you know that we must be reborn in the fire. This isn't a new beginning for our race, we're not butterflies emerging from the chrysalis. Our place is here. On the earth. But as part of a different order of things. We must destroy to create. We must go back to go forward. We must dismantle this false fabric of civilization and return to another time, when humanity was young. I need to open your eyes and I know this will be painful. Some will die. You shouldn't think of yourself, but of your children's children. Of the world they will inherit. Without greed and fear. Without oppression and pollution. The world Gaia granted us, and we, in our foolishness, destroyed.'

She waited, and Katayama closed in with the zoom until nothing but her face filled the lens. Her expression was hard and cold and threatening. 'We have the power of the sun in our hands. Ask your governments. They will deny it, but they know this is true. We have killed the President of the United States, we will give you more signs so that you can prepare. And prepare you must. This is a new era. This can be a new beginning. We will, for a short while, have the chance to throw off the shackles that bind us. On the zenith, when the sun is at its peak, the sky will burn. We will destroy this artificial fabric of your lives. We will raze cities. We will sear the artifice of man from this planet. And in its place we will put truth. Nature. Reality. Don't look to the TV stations and the newspapers to tell you what to do. They won't be there, not for a while. Look to yourselves, your own hearts. And afterwards, when the governments and the dictatorships have no chains around your legs, when the sky is clear and blue, and the air is fit to breathe, you will thank us. You will rebuild humanity, and the world we inhabit, and you will do it well.'

In our memory, she thought. She smiled, then beckoned to Katayama to pan out, move slowly back in the room. 'This is yet to come. There are evil men who will try to seek us out and kill us to prevent this happening. This is pointless. There is no time. And we have right upon our side. They infiltrate their agents in our midst. Thinking we are some kind of god, they try to plant a Judas among us.'

She bent down, awkwardly, toward Tina, felt her hair. The girl looked at Charley, looked nervously at the camera, lost for words.

'This isn't going to happen,' Charley said, and motioned for Joe to cut the video. There was an awkward silence in the room. Tina broke it with a pained smile. 'That was great.'

'No,' Charley said, gazing into her face. 'Are you one of us now?'

'Oh yes!' Tina seemed lost.

'Can you feel Gaia? The mother?'

'I guess so,' she said quietly.

On the other side of the room, Katayama had parked the camera, leaning on the tripod, taking in the whole scene at the sofa, the two women, one still, one crouched awkwardly on the floor. Charley Pascal looked across at him; he nodded. She touched Tina Blackshire's face. The skin was hot and pale and damp.

'This isn't for any reason of betrayal,' she said. 'Not for that at all.'

Tina Blackshire blinked. 'Betrayal?'

'You don't need to say anything, Tina. It doesn't matter. None of us matter as individuals, only as a whole, as a family. And you are a part of that, whatever has happened between us.'

There were tears in the girl's eyes. She didn't know where to look. Joe Katayama was moving across the room, taking care to keep out of the way of the camera.

'I don't know what you mean, Charley. Betrayal? I…' She wiped at her face with her bare arm. Her eyes were glassy. 'I didn't like making it with you, Charley. It was nothing personal. That's all. I didn't really want to do it.'

'Nothing matters any more, Tina. Nothing except the gentle sleep, in the arms of the Mother.'

'Charley,' she sobbed, 'maybe there are things we could talk about. Things I could tell you.'

Joe Katayama stood over her, reached down, and placed his hands on her shoulders. She went quiet on the instant. His thumbs felt like hard sheaths of muscle against the tendons of her neck.

'We all go in peace, Tina,' Charley said. 'How many can expect that?'

'Charley?'

Tina Blackshire's voice was slurred. Joe Katayama's thumbs found the two carotid arteries in her neck, pushed there, insistently, not hurting, just relentlessly, not letting go. Tina Blackshire found that, with the pressure, came something that ran beneath the threshold of pain, a gentle, rhythmic compulsion to close her eyes, relax into the thrumming sound of her own heart beating, trying to keep her alive.

'In sleep there is peace,' Charley said. 'And this peace comes to us all in the end. There is nothing to fear. Making and unmaking are part of the same process. From our bodies springs a new world.'

Tina's eyes were dry now. Her mouth had turned cold and tasted metallic. The room was fading, and the shadows were the colour of blood. 'Mother,' she said, her voice the thin rasp of shrivelled autumn leaves on arid ground.

Joe Katayama bent down, wound his arms around her neck, stiffened his upper body, then, in one single, sweeping movement, twisted hard, snapped the spine. There was a harsh, inhuman breaking noise. The girl died with a grunt, a sudden, animal expulsion of air from her lungs. Katayama relaxed his grip. Her head hung off her shoulders at an awkward, sickening angle. A sudden gush of blood came out of the corner of her mouth, ran thickly down her chin. He let the body slip gently to the floor. A brown stain was spreading down Tina Blackshire's pale shins, underneath the simple floral shift. There was a distinct smell in the room. Katayama walked over and turned off the video.

'Give it to them to edit, Joe,' she said. 'Then tell them about Tina. You did well.'

Katayama nodded, his flat face expressionless, although she was sure something was moving there inside him. He took the cassette out of the video camera and headed for the door.

Charley Pascal looked at the body at her feet, fallen in an odd, unnatural shape, like a rag doll that had been dropped on the carpet. There should have been something to cry for just then, but she couldn't figure out what it was.