Solstice

CHAPTER 44 Close Quarters

'Nice view,' Bill Ruffin said. He and Mary Gallagher had just left the ship, attached to it by the long umbilical tethering line that snaked out in their wake. They had enough oxygen to last three hours, enough tools, as David Sampson had put it, to build a damn space station if they wanted. Sundog hung in front of them looking dead and still and gigantic. The earth sat below, radiant and blue. A few cloud systems drifted across the Pacific like stray feathers caught in a tantalizingly slow wind.

Ruffin had been in space enough to have gained an intimate feel for his position in relation to the land below. You couldn't measure locations in conventional terms here, you had to depend on technicalities like inclination and azimuth to define where you were. They found Sundog locked into an equatorial orbit that was just unpredictable enough to avoid easy detection. But to Ruffin there was an easier way to think of this place, and the analogy always came to him, on every EVA. If he reached into an imaginary pocket on his space suit and dropped an imaginary nickel, an imaginary gravity, unaffected by the very real atmosphere beneath him, would take it down in a dead straight line to hit the face of the earth. In this case around two hundred miles west and a touch north of the Gilbert Islands. They had come across Sundog when the satellite was poised above the gigantic empty blue waters of the Pacific, and that was perfect. He didn't want Charley trying to mess with the thing while they got on with their work. That way the Children might spot some disruption in the power curve and start looking for a reason. This was the down time on the satellite's flight around the world. There was no one to burn for an hour or two, until Tokyo came up on the horizon. They had room to get this right.

'Forget the view,' Schulz said in Ruffin's earpiece. 'We're getting real close to this thing now and I want you to make damn sure she doesn't hear us.'

'No dissenting voices here,' Mary Gallagher said. She peered at Ruffin. In space, buried deep within their bulky suits, they looked like awkward intruders, creatures out of their element. That part always scared her a little. The Shuttle was like flying, a rush of adrenaline at takeoff and landing, and a lot of routine in between. EVA was always tension, from the moment you stepped outside the ship to the point you got back and breathed its dank, stale air again. There was so much to go wrong in this empty, bleak place, and from what she'd seen this was likely to be the longest space walk in the brief history of the science. It felt deeply odd to be doing this under the command of people she didn't even know. NASA control at Houston was now in the back seat. Once the satellite was in their sights, they passed the entire command process over to La Finca and left it to them to take the thing down.

'You got this?' she said, and flicked the floatcam on. The three-foot-high round cylinder with the rotating lens moved gently in front of them.

'Yeah,' Schulz replied.

'Good,' Ruffin said, 'you have control of the thing. We got enough junk to contend with.'

The engineers had done a fine job with Lieberman's blueprint for the shades. Packed into four compact tubes was a tightly rolled web of rigging with gas pump canisters sewn inside. Expanded, they could cover the solar panel wings of the satellite with room to spare. Compressed, they looked like a set of business equipment being hauled along for an exhibition. The canisters followed in his wake as Ruffin floated gently toward the satellite, propelled by nothing more than the momentum of his departure from the Shuttle hull. The ground crew had ruled out the use of any small impetus devices to let them navigate the gap between the ship and Sundog. Something like that could have triggered the defence mechanism. So instead he and Gallagher had just taken aim, pushed themselves gently off into space, and waited as they floated the four hundred metres or so toward the big black sails. It was hit or miss, but there really was no choice. And it looked as if they were going to get it right the first time around, which was good news, even though everyone had factored in three attempts. Ruffin was glad they weren't going to have to reel themselves in along the line for a second go. He shared Mary Gallagher's enthusiasm for bringing the EVA to a rapid close.

'Remind me about the superstructure of this thing,' he said. They were midway between the Shuttle and the satellite and, in his estimation, would probably be able to touch the thing in under two minutes. He thought he knew this by heart anyway, but some reassurance wouldn't go amiss. 'What can I touch? What can't I touch?'

'Okay,' Schulz's voice said. 'There are no alarm systems on the exterior. We assumed that the only physical visitors we were likely to get were friendly ones. So, in theory, you can touch what you like.'

'In theory,' Mary Gallagher echoed.

'Precisely,' Schulz said. 'What will trigger a response is if you fire up anything with much of a power surge. The Shuttle's down to standby, right?'

'Affirmative,' Sampson said at the helm of Arcadia.

'We can confirm that too,' the NASA controller added.

'Nice to know you're still there,' Ruffin said to the team back home. 'When do we go back onto your work schedule?'

'When that thing's dead, Bill,' the familiar voice said. "Then we get you three out of there real quick and back home for a few beers.'

'Done,' Ruffin said. 'So I can touch any part of this thing I want when we get close to it?'

'Provided you stay away from the earth side,' Schulz confirmed.

Ruffin peered at the approaching hunk of metal. Close up it looked positively threatening, a big black mass of aluminium and silicon. They were now aimed almost dead centre at its heart. If they continued on their present course, he ought to be able to reach out and grab one of the giant wings, steady himself and Gallagher too, get back in line with the satellite, and move on to their next task, assembling the shades.

'Don't touch the panels themselves,' Lieberman added quickly.

'Hey, Professor. Why might that be?'

'They're fragile. If you hold too hard, the silicon could break, and that will surely do something to the power flow. Maybe it could notice.'

'Understood,' Ruffin confirmed, and rolled the floatcam in front of him. 'You see where we're headed?' Sundog was closing fast and soon he would have to make a decision about which piece of it was going to stop their movement, prevent them floating right through and over to the earth side of the system and, for sure, triggering a response. 'You guys see the support strut for the panel closest to me?'

'Got it,' Schulz and Lieberman said simultaneously.

'Unless you indicate otherwise, I intend to make a grab for that. Once I have it, Gallagher here can slow herself down by grabbing hold of me. Then we get on with erecting this sunshade.'

There was a pause on the line. 'Looks good,' Schulz said quietly.

'Here we go,' Ruffin announced to no one in particular. The floatcam was probably broadcasting this, he guessed. Somewhere down on the earth they were watching these two unwieldy figures in oversized white suits floundering around in space, trying to hook themselves onto a hunk of metal that held a black butterfly wing pointing back at the sun. The fingers of his big glove closed around the aluminium strut and Bill Ruffin was amazed to discover that, for one short moment afterwards, his eyes had closed of their own accord.

'Sir?' Schulz's voice said out of nowhere.

'We're here,' Ruffin announced, and knew they'd be hollering and clapping in those distant places just then. He fastened a temporary line to the structure of the satellite, then looked across at Mary Gallagher. She had grabbed hold of his sleeve, steadied herself, and was already working on the canisters.

'Point the floatcam at the base of the satellite,' Schulz ordered. 'The central section facing out towards you.'

Ruffin peered at the flat end of Sundog, like the bottom of some gigantic beer can, and moved the camera around so that it was in view. 'What am I looking for?'

'One big single LED. It should look green.'

Ruffin peered at the metallic plate. The light was there, all right. And it was green too. 'Got it.'

'We see it too,' Schulz said. 'Green means Sundog is primed and active. When the system goes to standby, that light should go to orange. Don't go anywhere near the damn thing then. Wait till it's red. That's total shutdown. It's dead bar a couple of backup circuits.'

'Understood,' Ruffin replied.

'Also,' Schulz added, 'if you trigger some kind of response mechanism, all the defensive weaponry is behind that plate. It has to retract before it can deploy. We built it like that so no one could see what was in there. If you see something moving, we got problems.'

'Right,' Ruffin said dryly. 'We'll know when to run and hide.'

It was a two-person job to erect each shade, and they'd been through this as much as they could down on the ground. The panels were made of fine, silver-coloured fabric, tightly packed into the container. On each side of the wing there was a ribbed, airtight tube with a small pressurized canister of oxygen built into the base. The idea was to point the device away from Sundog, back to the Shuttle, hit the activate button on each canister simultaneously, and watch the shade unravel slowly. When each was erected, it was attached to the aluminium centrepiece and drawn into position.

Ruffin checked on the position of the floatcam and watched Gallagher finish the final portion of the central strut. 'You people down below got a good view from there?'

'Yeah,' Lieberman's voice said.

'Here we go…' He and Gallagher nodded at each other, hit the button on their side of the canister, and watched the shade unfurl slowly in space, like the wing of a silver butterfly that had just emerged from the chrysalis. When it reached its full length, the two ribbed channels that fed the gas along the edge of the wing met on the semicircular end. The final result, Ruffin suddenly realized, was going to look like one of those old-fashioned ceiling fans that were now back in fashion in fancy hotels hunting for some period appeal. Slowly, not missing a single detail, they fastened the wing to one spoke of the circular centrepiece.

'Perfect,' Ruffin muttered, and looked at the Shuttle. It was getting farther away than he'd expected. The long lifeline linking them to the exterior was now a low ellipse. Sampson had done his best to make the drifting spacecraft match the progress of Sundog, but the limitations imposed on them made it hard. The two were just slightly out of kilter, drifting apart. Ruffin pushed the thought to the back of his head and got back to work on the other panels. Gallagher was ahead of him already and he could guess what was going on in her head. She'd seen the line paying out too.

It took thirty minutes to erect all four wings of the shade system and attach them to the centrepiece. By that stage the thing looked so much like a giant fan from some Mexican flophouse that Ruffin thought he could taste cold margarita at the back of his throat. The ground people had kept commendably

quiet throughout. There was, he guessed, nothing you could say.

He admired the big shape floating out between them and Arcadia now, and knew it would only take a few more minutes to manoeuvre into position, then wait patiently for Sundog to cool down and lapse into silence before starting the final part of the job. The line back to the ship was close to taut, had a slowly diminishing sag to its length.

'We're ready to put this thing in place,' Ruffin announced to everyone who cared to listen. 'But before we do, we need to break the link with the ship. This thing's drifting too strong for us.'

He nodded at Mary Gallagher and, in unison, they unhooked the clasps on the slim white nylon cord from their suits and let the line float away from them, out into the empty blackness of space, severing their one possible point of contact with a piece of the planet they called home.

Bill Ruffin took one last look at the blue emptiness of the Pacific beneath them and said, 'Let's get this done.'

CHAPTER 45 Strategy

Three hours earlier Larry Wolfit had been playing with the imaging system in the makeshift headquarters of McCarran when there was a commotion at the door and a bunch of people walked in, Tim Clarke at their head.

Wolfit gulped audibly, stood up, and said, 'Mr President.'

'Yeah, yeah,' Clarke replied, waving his hand at the team of people in the room. This was both Bureau and Agency now, trying to work alongside each other, and if the breakthrough was going to come anywhere, he guessed this was where it would be. 'Let's cut straight to the quick, shall we? None of us can rely on the Shuttle alone, and even if that bet does come off we still need these people reined in. That job seems to have fallen to you. All I want is the short demo, a picture of where we are.'

Wolfit looked at Helen Wagner, who stood behind the President, with Dan Fogerty, Dave Barnside, and Ben Levine making up the rear. She nodded.

'This is a Bureau operation, Mr President,' he said cautiously. 'I don't want to tread on anyone's toes.'

'Larry,' Fogerty said, 'this is your toy, and it's your people back in Langley who are pushing the buttons. You kick off, okay?'

'Sure,' Wolfit replied, and sat down, swivelled the chair back to the screen. Clarke walked over, stood at his back, and stared at the digitized aerial photography on the monitor. 'Where's this?'

'Northeast Nevada, sir, close to the Utah state line. The town you can see there' — Wolfit reached forward and pointed to a cluster of light on the monochrome picture — 'is Wend-over, smack on the border. If I pull out a little we'll see Wells to the west. That's I-80 joining them. You see the continuous line?'

'Sure,' Clarke said. 'When I said demo I didn't exactly mean the real basic stuff.'

Helen intervened. 'What the President is trying to ask, Larry, is how are we doing?'

'Not so good. You understand anything about how this works, sir?'

'No.'

'Well, what we have here is a whole set of digitized aerial photographs of the area. We got these from the Army, which has this kit too, but since we wrote the software it made sense for us to run the job. These are satellite pictures, good for a pretty sharp image of anything down to about six feet or so in size. The resolution is amazing, but that makes it all a little harder, of course, since there's so much data to process before you can find what you want.'

'That I do understand,' Clarke said.

'Right. So the way we try to shortcut things is we produce a digital profile of what we're looking for. You choose the item, then the computer goes off to see if it can find a match. Nothing's that precise, of course. So we have to have some control of the tolerance. I'll show you.'

He worked at the keyboard. The map changed in contrast, a little hourglass came up on the screen, and four newly painted circles appeared. 'This is what we get if we just run a straight match against the system. That' — he pointed at a circle outside the town of Wendover — 'is an electricity substation. As luck would not have it, Nevada Power and Light favours a substation design that kicks off our dome algorithm pretty neatly. The same goes of this hit beneath it. The other two we can rule out too. One is a rodeo ring at a dude ranch — we can see that just by drilling down into the image from a standard daylight view. The other is a water tower — been there for years. We can cross-reference this into the local planning database pretty easily and see if there's a listing for the object. So when we rule those out, we need to degrade the match. Then see what happens.'

Wolfit pressed a single key. A rash of new circles appeared on the screen. 'That's just a one per cent degradation. Gives us no fewer than nineteen new objects to investigate. And bear in mind we're looking at a mere hundred square miles or so of the target area here. We've been told to look at a square running five hundred miles on each side. That's a quarter of a million square miles, all told. So imagine replicating just this one per cent degradation there. Then look what happens when we go to two…'

He hit the keyboard again. The screen was covered in circles. 'Then three.' It was now virtually impossible to see the underlying geographical features of the image. Overlapping circles ran everywhere.

'If I move a couple of percents beyond that, we're going to lock up the system. We don't have the byte power to crunch those numbers. And even if we did, we don't possess the manpower to analyse the number of hits. I've got every last person I can find working on this back at Langley, plus we've co-opted the imaging departments of the Air Force and the Army too. But it's still a long process. Where we are now is that we've eliminated just about every one of the initial hits in around three-quarters of the target area — and most of them are those damn power substations or some pre-existing water installation that comes through on the planning records. If we hit lucky, we just haven't got there yet and she's sitting somewhere in the unsifted area. If we don't, then in thirty minutes or so I push that one per cent button and we start to pray.'

Clarke looked at Ben Levine. 'This is clever stuff, but it's not going to get us there.'

'No, Mr President. That was one reason why we put those papers in front of you, sir.'

'Forget the damn papers, Levine. You heard what I said on that subject and that's that. If you don't find these people using this nice billion-dollar toy of yours, how do you propose to do it?'

Fogerty stepped in. 'That's a Bureau issue, sir. I thought I'd make that point before Ben here did. We're running checks on everything we can think of. Existing databases, local police records, credit card companies, hotel bookings, anything where someone might have kept details of an address.'

'And?'

'This isn't rocket science,' Larry Wolfit said. 'I can show you just as easily as any of the other guys. See…'

A new image came up on his screen. 'This is a central database of all property records listed in the state of Nevada. We put in a keyword search for "Yasgur's Farm" — and we do have fuzzy logic built in here so it would come up if they'd changed the spelling slightly — and what do we get? Nothing. Same goes for Arizona and Utah. We got the power companies, the phone companies, the water companies, Internet service providers, rental car firms… there's scarcely anyone who doesn't sell or monitor something that we can't tap into. Nothing. Not a single close match. Maybe they do use this Yasgur's Farm term themselves, but my guess is it's some kind of code word, not a real name. Geeks love that sort of stuff. And it doesn't help us a bit.'

'What about the people?' Fogerty asked. 'Are we still getting a blank there?'

'Afraid so. These must be decent, clean-living folk. No parking tickets, no speeding fines. Nothing that's put their record into any database we can find since they left San Diego with not a forwarding address in sight.'

'Shit,' Clarke said quietly.

Levine's voice broke the silence. 'Sir?'

'Yes?'

'We can still go back on those orders. I don't like the idea any more than you, but if all we have is the Shuttle, we're cutting this fine.'

Clarke's eyes gleamed in the half-light of the room. 'If you push me once more on that subject, mister, I'll relieve you of your post here and now. Understood?'

Levine nodded and said nothing. Helen stared at Barnside, wondering if this was crazy, wondering if she really was the only one who could see this. Clarke turned to go.

'There is one other possibility,' she said.

The President looked at her, some sourness in his eyes. 'Well?'

'We know this has to be a remote location, right?'

'For sure,' Larry Wolfit said, watching the screen, playing with the imaging application again.

'Well, in that case it wouldn't have an official name, not in the sense that it was one that went down on credit cards or in the property records. More than likely it's a post office box number that's the official address.'

Barnside was watching her, smiling as if he enjoyed seeing her try to guess through something so out of her field. 'Even if you're right,' he asked, 'where does that get us? We still have nothing to go on.'

'Really?'

When she thought about it she could still feel the harsh, clean cut of the Atlantic air against her skin. And some pain behind it all as well. Childhood and pain went together.

'For a while, when I was a kid, we lived in Maine, somewhere really remote. That was a box number too — had to be, the mail people said. But no one lives in a number. We had a name for the place. Haven Cottage. And that's what we called it.'

'Nice memory,' Barnside said, unsmiling, 'but I still don't see where it gets us.'

'The point is that after a very short while we started getting mail, from people we knew. They would put the name we used for the place alongside the PO box number. Pretty soon, we'd get mail that dropped the number altogether, just read Haven Cottage, the area, and a zip code. And that still got through. Every time. When you're remote, that happens. You could just put someone's name on it if you felt like it, because — '

'- the mailman knew,' Clarke said, staring at her. 'Jesus, here are you guys punching away at computers and the answer we need is probably sitting inside the head of some mail depot manager right now, ready for the taking.'

Barnside was shaking his head, grinning all over his face. 'Can't be that many of them. These are remote, low-population-density areas. And these people must get mail. Just print out the contact names for the depot managers, Larry. The Agency guys can take it from there.'

In the corner of the room, a printer started to whir. Pretty soon names were spewing from it and Fogerty had his men dispatching them as they came, carving out the different territories. Helen watched them pawing through the sheets of paper, Barnside silent at her side, and waited until everyone had moved away from them, to stand behind Wolfit and watch the progress on the screen.

'Say it, Dave.'

'Say what?'

'That I am muscling in on something I don't understand.'

'Oh that.'

She wished he'd cut the stupid grin. 'Hey. You're right, of course. You're right a lot, Helen. It must be hard being you.'

'Thanks.'

He was struggling with something, wondering whether he really wanted to say it. 'You're trying to justify yourself, I guess.'

'Bull…' she groaned.

'No, it's true.'

She glowered at him. The man could be so infuriating. 'Why do I need to justify anything?'

'That cottage. It was where he killed himself, wasn't it?'

She didn't bother to reply.

'No problem,' Barnside said. 'I understand. And that drove you here, drove you into the Agency, kept you fighting to keep your head up all the way. As if that proved something.'

'I don't,' she spat, 'have to prove a damn thing.'

'No?'

He wasn't smiling any more. He was downright uncomfortable. 'You know what I'd think in your position, Helen? I'd think I'd get in there, I'd show these people who destroyed him, who ruined this innocent man. Except I wouldn't have the guts now, not me. Believe that.'

She watched them racing through the pages coming out of the printer, and she couldn't think of a thing to say.

'And something else too, Helen. Once you get there, once you know the kind of world we live in, suddenly everything doesn't look so black and white any more, does it?'

She tried to stop listening. She wished she could move away. 'Meaning?'

'Meaning that once you know what life's like in this place, you get to wondering whether everything is as nice and simple as that. Whether any of us is as innocent as we seem. And maybe whether your old man really was innocent.'

She wished she hadn't given up smoking. She wished she had a drink. 'You talk too much.'

He shook his head and put a big hand, like a bear's paw, gently on her shoulder. 'If it's worth anything, I read the files. Years ago. I know what your family was doing in Maine. That was where you ran? When they were closing in on him. In Boston. You just upped roots and got out of town for a while, thinking this would all blow over.'

'That's irrelevant,' she said, catching her breath in the stifling, overcrowded room.

'No. It is absolutely relevant. This is where he ran. And this is where he killed himself when he knew the game was up. Is it right you were the one who found him? That must be hard to live with.'

Speaking very slowly, she said, 'Will you get off my fucking back — '

'No. I won't. Because you're letting something personal get in the way of the job. And you're too smart, too damn good for that.'

'You're an a — a - asshole, Dave,' she said.

'An a — a - asshole?' he said, eyes twinkling. 'Hey, I never knew you had a stutter lurking beneath the surface there, Helen. Listen. I read the files. All the files. Not just the ones that went to the Senate committee and got them off the hook. Your old man was clean. As clean as any of us. You got to believe that and let this thing go before it eats you right up.'

She could see the little cottage in her mind's eye. If she tried, she guessed she could smell the salt air coming through the window, mingling with the cold, harsh aroma of spilled blood.

'I didn't enjoy saying that,' Barnside added. 'But it needed saying.'

She looked at Barnside and knew that, in his own odd way, he was trying to help. 'Well, now you've said it. So can we get on with the job?'

CHAPTER 46 Calling the Postman

As the Nevada night fell and Bill Ruffin worked with Mary Gallagher to erect a flimsy, opaque clover leaf in space above the sun-drenched Pacific, FBI agent Bernard Mason phoned the US Postal Service sorting office in Alamo, north of Vegas, out on the long drab line of 93 running through the desert. He got a mouthful of abuse for his pains.

Mason held the phone away from his ear, waited for the cursing to subside, then said, 'Sir, I know it's the busy time for you.'

And wondered to himself: How many busy times do you get in a one-horse town like this? On a day when the world, by official order, has put a closed sign on its door and the entire phone system has been down until only an hour ago?

'Then call back later,' said the old, sour voice on the end.

'Sir,' Mason continued, 'this is the FBI. And this is important. What's more, you don't have a delivery tomorrow, what with the emergency and everything.'

'You're so clever, smart-ass, how come you even knew I was here?'

'I phoned your home. Your wife told me.'

There was a pause on the line. 'She told you that?'

'Yeah.'

'Bitch. I told her I was going drinking. How'd she know I just came in to catch up on some paperwork?'

362

'I guess some of us are just wedded to the job. They notice, you know. Mine does.'

'Yeah,' the voice said, a touch of empathy there. 'Well. What do you want?' And listened.

'New York State,' the man said at the end.

'Excuse me?'

'Yasgur's Farm. Woodstock, New York State. Don't you people know history?'

'Yeah,' Mason said. 'We know that one. But this is someplace named after it. In Nevada. Maybe.'

'Maybe?'

'I'm just asking. I thought you guys just liked to get stuff through, even if it had the wrong address, no zip code, that kind of thing… just like the Mounties, always get your man.'

'Hey, you want to hear about no zip code? We get stuff here with no goddamn name on it sometimes, and they still expect it in their mailbox the next morning.'

'Precisely, sir. So I was wondering. If something came your way with "Yasgur's Farm" on the front of the envelope, would you people know what to do with it?'

'Don't ask me. I'm just the manager. But if you wait a moment I'll ask a man who might know.'

The line went dead. Mason shuffled through the sheaf of numbers in front of him. Nevada was a big place. It seemed to have an awful lot of post offices. Ash Springs was next.

'You still there, Mr FBI?'

'Oh yes, sir.'

'I spoke to Ronnie Wilson who, surprise, surprise, is taking the opportunity of this unexpected holiday to prop up the bar at Joe's. He's our field operative.' The man chuckled. 'You get that?'

'I am trying to contain my merriment, sir. And?'

'He says there's someplace out at Cabin Springs, the old dry lake, out on the back road through the wildlife refuge. Couple of times recently he's had to make some special deliveries out there. Says they had zip codes, a PO box number, and "Yasgur's Farm" on the label. You believe that? These people. Either they give you too little information or it's too much.'

Bernard Mason blinked, felt his heart make a little jump, and reached for the pen. 'He's sure about that.'

'Oh no. He's just making the whole damn thing up. You people have lives to go to or what?'

'Okay,' Mason said, 'give me the details.'

Thirty seconds later he pushed a piece of paper in front of Fogerty and said, 'We got a hit. Remote farmhouse out on a back road that runs out from 95 all the way through the wildlife refuge straight into 93 just short of Alamo. Close to the 93 end.'

'Map,' Fogerty said, and watched Larry Wolfit mangle the keyboard. The zip code pulled up an area map from the Postal Service. This provided an overlay for the digital security image.

'Jesus Christ,' someone said behind Fogerty. An officer in Air Force uniform was following the screen.

'You know this?' Fogerty asked.

'That's on the edge of the Nellis restricted area. We let people through because of the refuge and there's a couple of homes, mainly for weekenders. We're taking practice bombing runs up to ten miles short of Cabin Springs. They're right under our nose. This is going to be easy.'

'Really,' Fogerty said quietly, and went back to the screen. 'Have you found this place yet?'

Wolfit had the refuge up on the map. There was precious little detail at this altitude, just the thin line of the desert track and an outline, like an ink spot, of the lake itself.

'There.' He pointed at a speck of light the size of a pinhead, then zoomed in, took up the resolution, and drilled down through the layers until the picture was clear. Yasgur's Farm, from above, looked like a sizeable modern ranch house, probably extended over the years from a single rectangular shack.

Now it was large, four distinct sections tacked onto each other, probably giving a good three thousand square feet of space if the place was single-storey, more if they had any first-floor extensions.

'It's big enough,' Helen said.

'But where's the dome?' Fogerty asked.

'Property records,' she demanded, and watched as Larry Wolfit pulled up the database.

'According to the state file, this property's real name is Buena Vista Farm,' he said. 'Dates back to the fifties. Property changed hands in March. New owner a corporation registered in Switzerland. No more details.'

'Yeah. Great,' Barnside said. 'But like the man said, where the hell is the dome?'

Wolfit zoomed out again, hit the degradation button on the filter, and saw a single bright circle appear a quarter of a mile away from the house, along what looked like a ridge.

'Water tower,' said the man in the next seat. 'It's down there on the map. Mentioned in the state filing too, planning permission back in 1989.'

'Sure,' Helen said, and watched as Wolfit zoomed in on the thing. 'But if you wanted to really hide something, what would you do? You'd find some pre-existing feature and replace it. Remember what Lieberman said? These people are clever. We've been looking for something new. Maybe that's what they wanted us to look for.'

'Good.' Fogerty nodded, watching the image come up in size on the monitor. Wolfit ran it up all the way. No one was impressed. The image was so indistinct, it could have been anything. The dome. A rodeo ring. Even a water tower.

'We've got Nighthawks in that area,' the Air Force man said. 'I can get one there in five minutes.'

'Will the folks in the farm know?' Fogerty asked. 'We need some element of surprise.'

'Not a chance. These are helicopters with silent flight capability. We can be over there at six hundred feet and they won't hear a thing. And you could put the movie they get on HBO if you want.'

'Do it,' Fogerty said. 'And while we're waiting, get the HRT people in the briefing centre, work on the assumption we have a hit here.'

The room suddenly became less crowded.

'I have to go with them,' Helen said. Fogerty stared at her, eyes wide behind the big owl glasses, and then at Barnside, who had moved next to her.

'You still feel that way, Miss Wagner?' Fogerty asked. 'You could run it from here if you wanted.'

'No,' she said quickly. 'I have to be there. The whole purpose of this mission is to capture their system intact and working. I need to be there with my team. I need to be on-line to La Finca all the way. And once you've secured the target, I want you people out of my hair.'

Barnside shrugged. Fogerty gazed at her in silence.

'Here she comes,' Larry Wolfit said. 'We've got a live feed from the chopper.'

The monitor was now occupied by a blue-tinged video screen, the image distinct and sharp, but eerie, like the picture from an early moon shot. The desert floor looked like the surface of the moon too. Then a lone coyote wandered across the screen, there was the outline, hard and straight, of the road, and a scattering of scrubby brush.

'Where are they going?' Fogerty asked.

"The house,' the Air Force officer said.

'Kill that,' Fogerty demanded. 'I want to see this dome first. Without that, we've got nothing.'

Someone barked orders at the back of the control room. They could see the direction of the chopper change on screen. Some low scree came into view, more scrub, and then a shape, circular but indistinct.

'Go in closer,' Fogerty said.

'It's at max resolution already.'

'Then fly lower.'

The man in uniform hesitated and said, 'But what if they hear-'

'Just do it,' Fogerty said. 'We don't have room for guesswork.'

'Sir.'

It was, Helen thought, just like the film of an Apollo mission, the sort of stuff you watched when you were a child, wondering what all the fuss was about. The grey, bare landscape rose up to greet you, looking airless, inhospitable. Someone gasped. 'Hold it there,' she ordered.

A mosaic of polygons covered the surface of the flashing image, and around the exterior ran what looked like a perfect circle.

'They skinned it,' she said. 'They've put an exterior skin right around the whole damn thing to make it look like a water tower from the ground, and then just left the top open hoping we wouldn't see.'

Fogerty stared at the screen. 'All this gets recorded, is that correct?'

'Yes sir,' Wolfit replied.

'Good. Well, let's get this helicopter back to altitude and over to the house. We have plans to make.'

Helen waited, looked at him.

'Well?' Fogerty asked.

'I'm still awaiting your decision, sir.'

His face gave nothing away. 'This is a Bureau exercise, Miss Wagner.'

'Sir-'

'But I take your point. Be there for the briefing.'

Levine gave out a sardonic smile. 'Sure, that's okay with me too, Dan.'

'Good.'

'You should take Barnside along too,' Levine said. 'He could come in useful.'

Fogerty looked at the big man. 'I guess you people are happier in twos. Sure thing.'

Barnside grinned at her and she didn't know what to make of it. 'Hey, Helen,' he said. 'We'll make a team yet.'

CHAPTER 47 Connect

At this height above the earth the satellite's velocity was 3.86 kilometres per second and the period required to complete a single orbit 723.37 minutes, almost exactly twelve hours. Charley had positioned Sundog to sit squat in the centre of the earth day, wherever it was over the globe. That way she could make the most of the storm that was building in space behind it. She could adjust the speed across the globe at any time by firing up the satellite and adjusting the orbit: higher meant slower. Lieberman had worked out the forecast for the present track. She had it right on course for Western Europe when the zenith rose up to greet them, and well in line for North America over the following twelve hours. Perfect timing, Lieberman guessed, a natural Charley attribute.

He didn't mention any of this as they watched the astronauts on the big screen at La Finca. He'd done his best to show them how to shut his part of Sundog down. Now it was just a question of letting the crew get on with its job.

Bill Ruffin and Mary Gallagher sweated inside their suits, watching the four wings of the giant oversized shade hang over Sundog, casting a vast, deep shadow over the solar panels, and beyond to the satellite itself. The two astronauts felt at home in space, knew how to handle zero gravity, how carefully and slowly they had to manoeuvre, to feel the objects they were trying to work with. It was a mistake to rush a single thing. If one vital part went missing, received an accidental knock, the impetus would send it flying, with a balletic slowness, out of their reach forever. Ruffin and Gallagher would have no second chances, and that thought stayed with them during this interminable period of waiting.

The LED on the base plate seemed to have been stuck on orange for years. Then Ruffin slowly closed his eyes, dreamed of home, a warm Florida beach, cold beer, a nice quiet raw bar with country music floating out of the speakers.

Lieberman's voice broke through the silence of their helmets. 'We saw the light change. My part's over. You're in Irwin's capable hands now.'

'Thanks, Professor. You can have a job at the Cape any day.'

Ruffin looked at the light. It was red, no mistakes there. Mary Gallagher was already reaching into her tool kit, waiting to be told. He took a deep breath and, without thinking, scanned the black horizon for the Shuttle. It was a long way off now, a kilometre at least, looking like a kid's model in white plastic. They still had plenty of air left. Plenty of time too. All that was needed was to bring the satellite off-line, then call up Dave Sampson, get him to bring the ship back up, manoeuvre around once more, pick them up, and head off home.

Home. Such a small, insignificant word for a concept so huge it could occupy your entire life.

'Bill?' Mary asked. They were in the shade cast by the clover leaf, and the satellite shielded her from the bright reflecting surface of the earth just then. He could imagine her smart, sparky eyes staring at him through the visor, behind the deep reflected image of the glowing living globe that sat there now.

'Nothing,' Ruffin replied, and wished his mouth didn't feel so dry. 'Let's get on with it.'

The two of them removed the clasps of their lines from the struts, worked their way down the aluminium arms of the panel structure, and reattached the cords, this time to the exterior of the satellite itself. Ruffin stared at the red light, shining like a little beacon. Sundog looked dead. 'This thing is down now, Irwin. Why can't we just leave it at that? If she's got no power, she's no threat.'

'The power won't stay off,' Schulz replied. 'At some stage Michael's wings are going to move out of alignment, and then she wakes up, Charley's back in business. The only way we can be sure that thing's dead for good is for you to get behind the panel and key in a final shutdown sequence. But you get a good window from the shade trick. As long as the power's down from there, we're okay to open her up.'

Ruffin looked at the giant sunshade. It cast an enormous shadow right over the entire solar panel clover leaf and part of the satellite too. It was rigid in space, kept in place by the tiny, immutable forces of momentum that were shared by these strange mechanisms performing an odd little distanced dance, an unconscionable height above the surface of the earth.

'I get it,' he sighed, and thought: 'It would be too easy just to throw a shade over the thing and go home.' He looked at Arcadia and asked, 'You can see us okay from there, Dave?'

The radio crackled. 'Not too well. I'm some way off now and the angle's bad. But don't you worry. Once you take this thing down I'll be around and scooping you up in no time.'

'That sounds good.' Ruffin jerked on the cord of the floatcam, which was still static behind them, back with the solar structure. 'You're going to take us through this, Irwin, step by step. I know we practised in training but I like all the eyes I can get.'

'Sure,' the voice from the ground said. The cylindrical camera came up to Ruffin. He steadied it with one hand, then pointed the lens at the body of the satellite. It was, as luck would have it, cast in darkness by the huge parasol they had erected. Ruffin had half expected this: Murphy's Law applied in space too. He and Gallagher took out two powerful flashlights, attached them to an external antenna, turned them on, and illuminated the entire area.

'You got that?'

Somewhere on earth, Ruffin knew, they would be looking at the matte-black exterior of this thing, seeing much the same view he did now. There was an access panel on the outer skin of the satellite. It had a smart card slot on the side, and enough warning signs by it to put off any curious intruder who didn't hold the key. The panel was positioned, sensibly, close to the base of the unit, so anyone trying to work on Sundog could see the status light at the same time.

'They can't reprogram the access code,' Schulz's voice said. 'If that worries you.'

'Hadn't even occurred to me until that moment,' Ruffin said, then took one final look at Mary to make sure she was on top of this, pulled the card out of the tool kit, and pushed it into the slot. Nothing happened.

'We live to fight another day,' he muttered, and waited. The line was silent. 'Anyone there?'

'Damn,' Schulz whispered. 'The door panel is on a hydraulic mechanism. It should have popped open when you inserted the card.'

Ruffin looked at the thing. It was about three feet wide and two feet deep, a flat, plain lump of metal, with what looked like rubber hermetic seals around the edge.

'Suggestions?' he asked.

'It's stuck,' Schulz said immediately. 'If it had rejected the card we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. There's a small explosive device built to guard against unauthorized access, and that will work even on power down.'

'Thanks again for the welcome information,' Ruffin said calmly. He looked more closely at the panel. Something was visibly amiss. He pulled the floatcam farther in. 'Take a close look at the seal. It looks warped down one side to me. Does that mean anything?'

The line went quiet, then Schulz replied, 'I agree. It looks as if the material is compromised in some way. It's pressurized from the inside. I guess if it's loose maybe the servo doesn't have enough power to break the seal.'

'So all we need do is rupture this manually, and then the panel will depressurize? We should be able to pry it off if need be?'

That long silence again.

'We need decisions here,' Ruffin said, and noted the anxiety in his own voice.

'I just want to be sure. I was looking at the actual plan of that section. And you're right. There's no reason why you can't pry the panel off completely now. The backup system has accepted the ID card. It's going to stay quiet.'

'That's nice.' Ruffin looked at Mary. 'You got something like a screwdriver in there? This is going to be like prying off the lid of a jar of jam, I guess.' She pulled out a long, flat-handled lever and handed it to him.

'Just get underneath the seal, loosen it, use as much force as you need,' Schulz said. 'The pressure should do the rest.'

'I'm with you there.' Ruffin thrust the blade gingerly into the crevice around the near edge of the panel. 'I'm getting right-'

It happened in an instant. He felt the lever go loose in his hand, then the panel door shot up violently toward him, collided with the front of his suit with an impact he could feel through the thick material and the pressurized interior. The force was astonishing. It sent him bucking backward, rolling head over heels out toward the panels, out toward the blackness of space. He could hear people screaming in his headset. His mind was a blur. Then the safety line attached to the satellite cut in, jerked him to a painful stop, and the pictures gradually stopped spinning in his head.

Someone, a familiar voice from NASA, was yelling in his ear, 'Check suit integrity, Bill. Goddamn check it!'

Ruffin took a deep breath, closed his eyes, found himself thinking once again of home, that beautiful beach, gulls squawking lazily overhead, then looked at the gauges on his sleeve panel. 'Looks good here. You people getting any readings down there that suggest otherwise?'

A pause, then the NASA voice said, 'No. Guess we were lucky.'

'Yeah.' He pulled gently on the line and floated back down to the satellite. Gallagher watched him all the way, and he guessed her eyes were wide open and worried behind the glass.

'Hey.' He reached over, touched her with his big glove, a ridiculous gesture and he knew it. 'There was nothing you could do. It's okay.'

'Sorry,' Schulz said over the line. 'I guess there must have been more pressure inside that thing than I appreciated.'

'No problem. Like the man said, we're all making this up as we go along.' The panel door was gone now, long gone, floating off somewhere into the void. The opening revealed precious little: another covering panel, this time held by tamperproof

screws around the edge.

'Teamwork time,' Ruffin said. Gallagher passed him an electronic, torqueless screwdriver, and took out an identical device herself. Then they turned the tools on and set to work on the screws, three down each vertical side, the same number on the horizontal. It took ten minutes, but this time there was no pressurization problem. The plate just came away in their hands. It revealed a dark, deep hole that wasn't reached by the lighting they had originally jerry-built. Ruffin motioned to Gallagher and she unhooked one of the flashlights, held it in her hand, and pointed it down the hole. Ruffin smiled. This was what he had been praying to see ever since the Shuttle had lifted off from Canaveral: a small LCD screen with sixteen places for digits on it, each blank, and beneath a numeric keypad. He pulled the floatcam in farther and listened to Schulz's purr of relief.

'Sixteen numbers and we're there,' Schulz said.

'Know them by heart.'

'I'll read them off all the same.'

Ruffin punched the first one in and couldn't believe it. His hand really was shaking, deep inside the cumbersome glove. It took a couple of tries to get it right. Then he hit the green enter button, watched the number come up in its little window, and moved on to the next.

He was on the seventh when Schulz said somewhat nervously in Ruffin's ear, 'What happened to the sunlight?'

Ruffin fumbled the number again and swore mildly. 'Sorry. You lost me. We're nearly there. Can't it wait?'

'No,' Schulz said firmly. 'We've got a wider view of the area than you from the floatcam. Pull your head out of that hole and take a look around you. The sunlight's changing.'

Something stirred inside Ruffin's head, annoyingly out of reach. Reluctantly, with a sigh that was audible to everyone listening around the world, he pushed himself away from the control panel and blinked in the bright, piercing shaft of sunlight that was now falling on their backs.

'Shit. I jerked the damn satellite when I got thrown back like that. It's moved. It's out of sync with the shades.'

'Bring the floatcam back,' Schulz barked. 'I want to see the wings.'

'No need,' Ruffin said grimly, but moved the camera unit anyway. Up above them he could see the two clover leafs, one attached to Sundog, the other floating free. When he got thrown back by the pressure of the door, his line had shifted the entire satellite out of kilter with the shade above. Ordinarily, he guessed, some adjuster rocket would have fired in and straightened the thing up. But Sundog was down. Just then, anyway.

'No problem,' Schulz yelled, in a voice that said just the opposite. 'I can't risk trying to key in the rest of the sequence. We just need to get you back out of range of the thing, back where you were, then put the shades in place again.'

Ruffin looked at the flimsy silver apparatus they had erected. The four identical wings had now moved close to thirty degrees out of alignment with the satellite. The solar panels had to be getting almost their full entitlement of the sun, and what Schulz had said rang in his ears: This thing stayed down as long as the power was off.

'How soon?' he asked, unhooking his line from the satellite, watching Gallagher do the same, slowly, certainly, making sure she got it right the first time.

'Don't know. Look at the LED.'

Ruffin took hold of Gallagher's arm and pushed both of them away from the hull, back out toward the errant wings. They rounded the back of the satellite. He glanced at the base plate. The light was red. He took a deep breath, and then it was orange.

'She's waking up, Irwin,' Ruffin said slowly. 'Orange now.'

'Get yourself out of there, nice and steady,' Schulz yelled. 'Get out of range. We go back to square one.'

'Yeah.' The light changed again. 'It's green.'

No one spoke. The two suited figures floated out into space, out toward the silver wings. They were ten metres or so from the base plate now, Ruffin guessed. The line was still silent. He watched the metal plate begin to retract, slowly, with a mindless, mechanical certainty, sliding open to reveal a deep, complex pit of equipment. What lay underneath was impossible to recognize, a tangle of spikes and antennae, sensors starting to move sluggishly, like some waking beast sniffing the air, trying to locate its prey.

'The door's open,' Ruffin said. 'It's connecting.'

In the tinny speakers of his helmet someone said, 'Oh my God…'

They were clear of the thing now. Far enough away to have been safe, if Sundog had failed to pick up their presence during their slow flight back from its perimeter. Beneath them, radiant blue and gold, the earth lay like some precious, distant jewel. Bill Ruffin reached out and held Mary Gallagher's hand, and still the picture of the damn beach wouldn't leave his head. The gulls circling, the smell of salt water, the taste of that drink, these things were real.

'Our Father,' he said quietly, 'who art in Heaven, hallowed — '

It looked like something from a kid's game or a prop from a movie set. The thin red beam just came right out of the guts of the beast straight at them, a waving wand of energy slicing through space, slicing through their suits, their bodies, making this last moment seem so strange, so unreal, a writhing, agonizing dance in the airless black vacuum they'd dared to brave, so big, so endless it could swallow them up forever and never leave a trace.

In Bill Ruffin's helmet, now floating through space attached to a dead torso severed in half by a waving wand of light, there was a cacophony of voices, yelling and screaming, all on top of each other, none making sense.

Eighteen hundred metres away, in the cabin of the Shuttle, Dave Sampson, mind reeling, still trying to believe this was happening, listened to the babble of sound, tried to pick out what he recognized, what was foreign. Someone he knew, a NASA voice, not calm now, but still familiar, was yelling at him to get out of there, and damn fast, screaming so loud it covered up completely Schulz yelling the exact opposite. Idly, without thinking, he reached down and flicked the buttons on the start-up sequence, heard the giant machine start to come to life.

There was a sound, familiar and encouraging. Servos coming to life, pumps energizing, the slow rumble of power feeding into the system, electricity running the complex length of the spacecraft. And something else, from way behind. When Dave Sampson looked up from the winking lights of the panel and stared over his shoulder, there was nothing there now except fire, a vast, all-consuming fire, that rolled toward him like some ancient, fearsome weapon from an old and angry god.

CHAPTER 48 In the Waking World

'Not your fault,' Lieberman said gently to Schulz, who looked pale as death. 'It's not anybody's fault.'

Schulz looked devastated. 'I should have thought about it. When he got kicked back and held by the line. I should have realized that would move the satellite out of sync'

'And so should I. Those guys knew the risks. They wouldn't blame you, any of us. They were bigger than that.'

'Yeah.' Schulz sighed miserably.

'So let's get on with the job. This game's not over yet.'

And it wasn't, even though Charley clearly thought otherwise. Schulz guessed she must have known something was wrong when Sundog went off-line. That had to show up on the Children's system. She didn't need to activate the defence mechanisms and blow the Shuttle team out of the sky. The satellite was perfectly capable of doing that for itself. But she could take some kind of revenge. Fifteen minutes after they lost the ship a curt E-mail came through from her, copied to La Finca, the CIA, the Agency, and the main international news wires. It gave a brief, deliberately inaccurate account of the destruction of Arcadia. The last word Charley wrote was: Prepare.

Schulz had closed his eyes and asked Mo Sinclair to watch the wires, the Net sites, any source of information she could find, and try to monitor what Charley might be up to as the solar storm began to rise to its peak. Lieberman watched her working, saw the shock in her face, then sat down by her side, began to help, at one point touched her hand, felt good that she returned the pressure. And like this they turned these facts, figures, and pictures into a running report that chilled the blood, and brought home the true nature of the event

that was shaping around them.

This was a global catastrophe by its nature, not a contiguous sequence of discrete occurrences. It moved over the earth slowly, at the speed of the dawn, and breathed its poisonous fire in no particular order, to no discernible pattern. To Mo Sinclair it felt like being trapped in the path of an oncoming hurricane, unable to take your eye off this monstrous thing that was blotting out more and more of the horizon as it approached, and unable to move too. You might as well hope to dodge the footsteps of some fairy-tale giant who was stumbling drunkenly toward you. There was as much chance of salvation in standing where you were as trying to second-guess the program of this crazed, all-powerful leviathan.

There were such reports on the news wires. The storm had broken the precious digital thread that bound together the modern world, tied newspaper to radio station, TV network to the World Wide Web. Suddenly the conduit of information that had been taken for granted was leaking and flaky, and with this went the notion of currency, of validity. This was the digital world at its best and worst. Where the pipes held, the major channels came through with reports that were occasionally flimsy but at least held the promise of some grain of truth inside them. In the absence of fact, rumour raced in to fill the vacuum, and the Net was alive with dubious stories, half-baked theories, tales, and hearsay, multiplying around the world like some feverish digital bacteria. She found herself hating this junk, wishing it would go away. She didn't want to think about some of the crazier theories out there, the ones that said this was the end of everything, that Judgment Day was on us, and it was time for the earth to start cracking, the skeletons to start walking out of the ground.

What the storm did for some people, she realized, was strip away a layer from the outer part of themselves and let the baser, animal side that lay beneath come to the surface, grin insanely at the sky, and get on with the job of being 'free'. Chaos and freedom were close bedfellows and when that veneer of politeness, of community, of sensibility was destroyed, it was difficult to tell one from the other.

What she saw coming in from the sources she could rely on, the sporadic reports from CNN and the BBC running through the Web TV sites, only served to prove this. When the storm struck, people didn't stay inside. There was looting, there were riots. When the human animal was cornered, put into the tight, confined, inescapable space of the city and had the burning light of the sun in its face, not everyone wanted to curl up in a corner and dream of the good times. To some this catastrophe was welcome. It tore down the old world and put something wild and anarchic and new in its place. Which maybe was what Charley had wanted all along. And beneath this newness was something that, when Mo thought about it, was more terrifying than the prospect of cataclysm, of political upheaval, or of wide-scale fatality. Stripped of humanity, out in the open, beneath the feverish fire of the sun, people became something different, something that laughed at the very idea of an organized, decent, caring world. This rolling, teeming wave of fire didn't destroy the planet. What it unmade was the simple, accepted notion of society, and put cruel bedlam and the mindless, heated rage of pandemonium in its place.

The reliable information they could garner confirmed the scale of the devastation, and how ineffectual the measures taken to secure against it had proved. And these, she couldn't help thinking, were just the early reports. There could be much worse to come. According to both BBC and CNN a series of tsunamis that devastated the northern coasts of Japan had stirred some kind of millennial movement, led by local cults. Tokyo's subway had been occupied by sullen, terrified crowds, the red light district of Osaka destroyed by a machete-wielding mob. Secondary earthquakes devastated much of modern Kyoto but left the ancient temples standing, and it was here that the population congregated, scared, angry, vengeful. Martial law was put in place, as it was in most cities that lay in the path of the storm, but it was hard to persuade soldiers and the police to go on the streets to enforce it. These cities remained on a knife edge, even when the sky returned to normalcy. Once the storm was over, the streets became a little calmer. Some kind of amnesty for the rioting was being promised. Still, it was impossible to say when a semblance of normalcy might return.

From the main networks, they were able to gauge the amount of damage in the capitals from Japan through to Eastern Europe. It varied from minor — Moscow seemed to be untouched, if the reports were to be believed — to shocking. The ancient quarters of Tashkent and Samarkand were in flames, destroyed by sporadic fires and local earthquakes. The two remaining active nuclear reactors at Chernobyl seemed to have imploded upon themselves and dispatched into the clear golden sky a cloud of radioactive dust that threatened both Belarus and the Ukraine.

Telecommunications were a mess everywhere now, the chaos extending beyond the path of the storm. The TV people said that most Western governments planned to keep the markets shut until they could invent some way of reopening them without a massive, disastrous collapse of confidence. Stock prices had fallen so deeply that several major financial institutions and multinational corporations were technically bankrupt at the point of suspension.

Beneath the facts lay a churning ocean of rumour and misinformation, and she couldn't turn her face from it, however hard she tried. It was like driving past an accident on the freeway. The rumours ran unchecked and multiplied around the unofficial Web sites set up to monitor the storm. There was no way of verifying them. All she could do was read the snatched, illiterate dispatches, a chill going down the back of her spine, and wonder at the state of the world.

In Islamabad a solar observatory was torched by a chanting crowd of hysterical worshippers from a city mosque, and every one of the staff inside burned to death, some pushed back into the flames when they tried to escape. A mob in a remote village in Armenia destroyed its local church, built a pyre on the bare hillside, and burned everything that could be stripped from the ruin. Afterwards, they crowned a seven-year-old girl with a diadem made from metal foil, paraded her around on their shoulders from sunrise to midday. By then she was covered in burns, her skin peeling, and they ceremonially murdered the child in the village square. The local chief of police wielded the knife that was used to kill her. In Istanbul, the last song played by Bosphorus Rock 101 before the power failed was by U2. Bono sang, in a low, melancholy voice, 'I'm not the only one, who's staring at the sun.' Then the airwave disappeared in a sea of white noise.

With Lieberman working alongside her, Mo patiently stored this rising flood of venom and promised herself that one day the world would recover enough of its senses to sort the wheat from the chaff, tell her how much of this really happened, and how much lived inside the head of the mob.

Finally, some small voice inside chastising her for the order of things, she turned to the academic Net. Here they sifted through what data was still trickling through on the monitoring network that should, in another world, in another time, have leisurely recorded the course of events from apex to apogee, waited a few years, then produced some learned papers.

There was a consistent, unbroken line of reporting from only a single point in the chain, Learmonth, in Australia. Everywhere else was down, either through a direct storm effect or because somewhere in the chain of digital command that ran through to La Finca the line had snapped. Did it matter? Probably not. Just now, Learmonth was all they had.

And the data was incredible, outside the bounds of anything anyone had ever seen.

Learmonth recorded the temperature of the photosphere, the sun's outer layer, at 7,000 degrees centigrade, a thousand degrees higher than its previous record. The fire at the core was constant at a steady 22 million degrees, 2 million above its historical peak, and a temperature which, she guessed, a physicist might believe theoretically impossible, if theories made sense any more.

You didn't need to rely on the observatories in any case. Those who were rash enough to wander out into the day could, with the naked eye and a suitable filter, see most of the disc of the sun obscured by a single giant blemish. Soaring flares were visible without a telescope, like a halo around the burning core, and on the earth there was a stream of reports about freak atmospheric conditions involving sundogs, false coronas, and strange lights in the sky that were so bright they blotted out even the sun itself.

Schulz walked over and interrupted their frantic keying. 'We need to give them the news,' he said, and the sound of his voice made both of them jump. The power of what they had seen on the screen was so magnetic nothing else seemed to matter.

'We're ready,' Lieberman said with a nod. In La Finca, three heads appeared in a video window at the top of the screen: Helen Wagner, Dan Fogerty, and the dark, complex face of Tim Clarke.

'We were following your reports,' Helen said quietly. 'That's excellent work, and I know it must be harrowing too.'

Mo and Lieberman had painstakingly painted the major incidents on the screen, recording every confirmed event that came in over the wires, marking it with a little electronic flag coloured for the seriousness of the effect: pale yellow for minor, bright yellow for substantial, red for an emergency-level disaster. The markers ran in a curve, following the true circle route across the northern hemisphere, rising in the Pacific east of Japan, then moving slowly with the rising sun, through the eastern provinces of Russia, through China and Mongolia, on relentlessly into Kazakhstan and the Urals. The yellow flags disappeared long before the sweep of the storm reached the Caspian. From then on there was only red, sporadic, and they all knew why. When the effects grew more serious, it was harder to report them. They could only stare at these blank spaces on the map and wonder what was going on there, guessing how long it would take to cross into Western Europe, which sat in the path of the maelstrom.

'What's the worst we know of?' Clarke asked. 'What's this?' He pointed to a red marker near Sapporo in northern Japan.

'There's been a rapid trigger of earthquake activity in the region,' Lieberman said. 'Most of it offshore, fortunately, but that's led to tidal wave activity. There's hundred-foot tsunamis reported, major damage, serious casualty figures. We've also got seismic readings from several stations around the world that indicate quakes around Beijing and some activity in central Asia, close to Samarkand.'

'Communications?' Helen asked.

'Patchy. We're getting a surprising amount out of Japan and the Far East. Maybe that's because a lot there is based on cellular technology already. They never got around to building physical wired systems, so there's less infrastructure to be knocked out. I don't know. It's just a guess. The way things stand now, I guess we're looking at a national emergency that beats anything we've seen in Japan in living memory, certainly the Kobe quakes back in '95. The rest of it, we just don't know. The TV news is also running stories about political uncertainties in some of the central Asian states, even Moscow too. You must have something through diplomatic channels.'

'Not that you can rely on,' Clarke replied. The President looked hard at the map.

"This is all really northern. Yesterday you people said we were getting reports of hits way down to the equator, in the southern hemisphere even. Now they seem safe.'

'It's what you'd expect,' Lieberman said. 'Yesterday the storm was more diffuse. It was weaker and it covered a greater area. Today the alignment is more effective. So everything is more focused. More powerful. And confined to a smaller area.'

'I didn't realize that would happen,' Clarke said. 'It's a blessing of a kind, I guess.'

'Not really,' Helen added. She looked at Lieberman and knew he was thinking the same. 'We can't be fooled into thinking the effects are confined to the vicinity of the storm. Tsunamis can have a wavelength of several hundred miles. We haven't seen any volcanoes triggered yet but if that happens the collateral damage can be huge, a really long way away.'

'Yeah,' Lieberman added. 'And these earthquakes? You know what kind they are yet?'

'From what we've seen they're all strike-slip faults,' she replied quietly. 'That seems to be the type that is more likely to be triggered by the storm.'

He closed his eyes for a moment. 'Don't tell me. Let me guess. The San Andreas. This is a strike-slip?'

'Yes. We are going to put out a full-blown quake alert from north of San Francisco to south of San Diego, the length of the fault, pretty soon.'

'Jesus.' He hated the very idea of an earthquake — that something you took for granted, something that lived beneath you, the rock you walked upon, should suddenly give up the ghost, shrug its shoulders, and collapse into chaos.

'Well,' Clarke said finally, watching them all, 'is someone going to try to answer the big question?'

The La Finca team was silent.

'Professor Bennett,' Helen said, 'you're the expert here. How much of this is Gaia? And how much would we be getting anyway? What will we gain by taking Sundog off-line when we find them?'

Bennett shook his head. 'I can't answer that precisely. We have no way of knowing. Without Gaia, these would be extraordinary circumstances. This bad? It's hard to believe. They're orchestrating this, even if they don't understand the detail any better than we can.'

Clarke nodded grimly at the team around him. 'This information stays with us for now. Understood? I don't want those people out there shoving those damn papers at me all over again.'

'Sir.' Fogerty nodded. 'But they will be back.'

'Then get inside that damn farmhouse and make sure they got no reason.'

'Right,' Fogerty said. 'The earliest we can hope to secure this is two-thirty am.'

'What?' Lieberman's face stared at them from the screen, contorted with disbelief.

'You heard,' Fogerty snapped.

'That's more than two hours from now. That's like ninety minutes or so from the zenith.'

Fogerty looked exasperated. 'We have the one chance here. I don't want it to go wrong.'

'Michael,' Schulz said. 'If we get back control even fifteen minutes before zenith, that's enough. We can switch off whatever input the Children have.'

'Great. One chance. And this may decide whether we wake up tomorrow with a world we recognize or not.'

'Correct,' Tim Clarke said. 'Do you have any other suggestions?'

Lieberman fell silent. He hated the way people in authority had this effect on you. 'Yeah,' he said, just as he felt someone was starting to reach for the off switch. 'Why don't we use our brains instead of racing around chasing our asses?'

'Meaning what, Michael?' Helen asked.

He looked at her face on the screen and was shocked by the impatience, the momentum in her face. 'Mo,' Lieberman said, taking her hand. They both stared into the monitor.

'You see this woman, Mr President? They sent her here to help them. She didn't. She's getting treated now like she's some kind of pariah. Like she's your old man, Helen. And you know what? Even though she didn't help them, and they know that, these people still seem to be running rings around us. You get that? You understand why we always seem to be one step behind?'

Tim Clarke glanced at his watch. 'No, mister. Do you?'

Lieberman said nothing.

'We know where they are, Michael,' Helen said slowly. 'We can get in there, take back control, and put an end to this thing. We're not done.'

And he understood that. He just couldn't work out why it gave him no comfort.

CHAPTER 49 HRT

John Collins, the head of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, had assembled Helen Wagner, Larry Wolfit, the two other people in the Langley S&T team, and Dave Barnside for a short, personal briefing before the main meeting. At the end, Helen asked, 'So you mean we stay out of your way until you think it's all secure?'

Collins was a big man, six feet tall, a fit-looking fifty or so, with grey, close-cropped hair, and bright, piercing eyes. He stared at her and nodded. 'Guess that about sums it up. Once we have that place under our thumb, you can do what you like. My job's over. But until it is, I don't want my folks tripping over you, understand?'

Helen nodded. 'The odds are these people won't return fire or anything like that.'

'Probably not,' Dave Barnside said. 'Nothing that neat or clean. More likely the place is wired with Semtex, just like it was in San Francisco and Spain. You got anything to keep us clear of that? I don't want my ass blown all over Nevada.'

Collins's expression stayed deadpan. 'We've got equipment that can detect the obvious signs of explosives. It's a trade-off, really. You people are short of time, and a complete scan of that site would take a day or more.'

'You've got fifteen minutes,' Helen said. 'Any longer than that and we might as well not be there.'

'Right. In that time we can clear the obvious signs. We got sniffers that will detect common explosives, triggers, trip wires, pressure plates, that kind of thing. And, while I hear what you say — these people haven't used guns before — I'm not taking any risks. We go in there on the basis that this is a hostage rescue and the equipment that interests you — in the farmhouse, in the dome — they're the hostages. We immobilize anything that threatens that objective.'

'Don't get too excited,' Helen warned. 'We may need those people in there to help us get things moving again.'

Collins shrugged his big shoulders. 'Point taken. We'll do what we can.'

They walked out and watched him take up his place in front of the overhead projector in the Nellis briefing room. The air-conditioning made a loud, continuous noise, but it still couldn't dispel the close, enervating heat of the night.

The walls were plastered with aerial photographs and local charts. There were no more than twenty HRT agents there, plus some Marine helicopter crew members who would ferry them into the area using big twin-rotor Sea Knight helicopters.

Collins rose at the front of the room and started to talk. 'We can keep this short, folks. I want you people in the air at ten to the hour. The target is forty miles almost straight due north from here. We've got five Sea Knights handling the transportation. That means you should be hitting ground around two-fifteen am local just under a quarter of a mile from the target. I want the farmhouse and the dome secured in twenty minutes maximum. Then we hand over to the specialist guys, though the team leaders may be required for some local interrogation. We work in four teams, five in each. What information we can glean from intelligence suggests there may be up to thirty people in this building. Currently the light output is modest. My guess is a good number of them are taking a nap. Even if they're all awake, the likelihood is that few if any of them are carrying handguns. We can't take that as read, so use all the usual precautions and act with discretion. But the brief here is to treat this like a hostage situation. We want control and we want this situation stabilized, with minimum damage, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Bill?'

A tall black man with a lean, ascetic face rose and faced them. 'The template for this is one of those nonnegotiable, low-damage situations we know so well. We practised this long and hard. Now's the time to make it work. We got one main room in this building, some smaller ones off it, down a long corridor…'

He pointed to the plan on the wall. Yasgur's Farm was a sizeable place, Helen thought There could easily be thirty people or more in there.

'… plus bedrooms, of course. Now remember: low damage. And that goes for equipment as much as people. We want to pass this property on to the folks who need it in much the same condition it is now. You're all familiar with these.'

He held up a small metal canister and a pair of goggles. 'Flash grenades are the key here. We divide into four teams, one for each door. Each team has a delegated member for grenade duty. On the signal, you pop a single one through the window and the rest of us go through. You know the drill. These things are pure light. Anyone who's awake inside that room won't be able to see straight for two minutes once the cycle ends, and then won't regain full sight for another hour or more. And remember too that you get four flashes over thirty seconds, and just now and again we get a rogue one that misses its timing and fires up later than that. The rules matter here. Your goggles stay on for two minutes after that last pop, just in case.'

John Collins, arms folded at the podium, stared down at them. 'I go with the first team. Now, isn't that a surprise?'

A line of laughter ran through the team. She liked Collins's timing. It punctured the nervousness they all felt

'Once we're through, if this thing goes right, they'll be sitting on the floor, immobilized, before they even get their eyesight back. If you see weapons, respond, and warn the rest of us. When every last man and woman of them is out of action, we hand over to the technical people. Okay?'

Bill was handing out sheets of paper. It was the floor plan of the farmhouse, with delegated areas for each team to control.

'Sir?'

Collins peered at Helen. 'Miss Wagner?'

'The dome. How do we handle that?'

'Okay,' he said, and turned to the aerial photographs, pointing at them with a laser wand. 'The dome is on a rocky incline to the northwest of the property. We can't land any closer to it than we can to the farmhouse itself. What's more, if you look here' — he pointed to a series of marks on the image, moving in a straight line from the farmhouse to the dome — 'you can see what we interpret to be some kind of control system, probably microwave. We'll have to reach the dome on foot and the only way to do it is to cross the microwave system on the way. Our guess is that they have, in all probability, wired this up with some line-of-sight detection system. Hell, you can buy the stuff you need down at Radio Shack for twenty dollars. They'd be crazy not to. But what that means is we don't want to be running up this track until we have secured the building. That could give them undue warning, and, if there are any devices in the way, it would prevent us from dealing with them.'

'So?' Helen asked.

'So,' Collins replied, letting them all see his eyes roll upward a little, 'once we are in control, four Cobra support choppers come up with the lighting rigs from a U2 concert strapped to their asses. When they switch that on, the desert floor will be as bright as it looks at midday. We get to see anyone trying to sneak out of the area. We get to see every inch of the way from the building up to the dome. My men clear it first. You and your team follow. We know the time situation, believe me. We will do this as quickly as is humanly possible. But until we give you the nod, I'd be grateful if you'd stay clear of the area. Understood?'

'Sir?'

Collins looked at Barnside. He'd had enough questions already. 'Mr Barnside?'

'I'm Operations. I should be with you in the farmhouse.'

'I know your job, Mr Barnside. You can come along behind with the support team if you like. But the same rule applies. You stay out of our hair until we invite you through the door. Plain manners.'

'Hey' — Barnside grinned — 'I'd come just for the pleasure of watching you guys perform.'

They laughed at that. Just good old male camaraderie, Helen guessed, and exchanged knowing glances with Larry Wolfit, who was busy scribbling notes on his pad. Wolfit leaned over and whispered in her ear, 'Look. If these people want to play soldiers, I'd rather Barnside was with them than us. We let the other two guys go on ahead, and we just stay back, wait until it's clear. Okay?'

'Yes,' she said. Then John Collins clapped his hands and the room began to empty.

Ten minutes later they approached the huge, dark shadows of the Sea Knights, like giant crows beached on some faintly lit shoreline. The rotors began to cut through the hot, black air, winding up until they made a noise so deafening it was impossible to talk, impossible, even, to think beyond this brief, urgent slice of time that lay ahead of them, hidden in the vast, all-enveloping folds of the night.

CHAPTER 50 Doubts

Joe Katayama made a spire with his hands. Long, thin fingers, powerful, all-encompassing. Charley Pascal smiled at him and said, 'Be patient, Joe. We have to wait.'

They sat alone at a desk at the end of the big control room, now half-empty. The Children were leaving as planned, climbing into the collection of old cars they'd acquired, slowly heading off down the dry dusty road that linked them to the outside world. She felt happy. Something so large, so cosmic was starting to fill her head. It felt warm, familiar. Full of love and some odd kind of recognition.

The whir of the big network server was just audible, like the distant sound of an army of tiny night insects. There were enough people still left to do what was necessary. Soon they could be safely down to just three — herself, Joe, and young Eve, who knew the system so well now, and would stay right up to the final sequence before she too left to find some new life in a world that would be rebuilt around her.

Eve. Just the thought of the name filled her with joy. This was a rebirth that didn't even need Adam. By the time of the zenith, Charley would be the only one left on the farm. The danger of the group remaining intact was too great to contemplate. There would be some kind of revenge, and it was inevitable that, at some stage, the authorities would find their lair. If that was soon, she would be occupying it alone, with her drugs and her needles, safe in the knowledge of what she had achieved. And the rest of them could, when the time came, spread the word, about Gaia, about the need to nurture the precious planet, preserve it for everything that lived, not just the human species. Not that the world needed it. Charley had faith in her god. What would pass, would pass.

The team had departed according to the roster Katayama had drawn up. There were only eight of them left now, with four more climbing quietly into a car outside. This was a kind of death, she thought. Their absence stole some degree of life from her. Like a string vibrating in sympathy, her own private poison had risen on cue. She could no longer feel her lower limbs. Her hands shook from time to time, and there was a distinct neural tic down the left side of her face, like some tiny stroke.

This was not the work of a god in the conventional, human sense. Not an entity as such at all. Yet Charley Pascal felt sure that her own journey into the long, dark, thoughtless sleep ahead would be timed to perfection. A few hours after the zenith, when it would finally be safe to allow the cycle of the satellite to carry on its work, she could close her eyes, listen to this system dying into nothingness around her, and then let perpetual night engulf her.

Katayama asked, 'What happens if we lose the feed?'

The flat, crass question made her jump, almost annoyed her. 'We won't lose the feed.'

He stopped messing with his hands, placed them flat on the plain yellow pine of the desk. 'But what if? They got the Shuttle damn close to us. We were lucky to get away with that.'

'Luck had nothing to do with it,' she said coldly. 'You still don't understand, do you?'

'I understand you're pushing this right to the end, Charley. We could just program the thing now, destroy the uplink, and then have done with it. There'd be nothing they could do, even if they found us.'

'They won't find us in time. How could they?'

His eyes never really opened, she thought. There was something so masculine in this.

'They're not smart enough, Joe.'

'Maybe not,' he grunted. 'All the same, it's a question that's worth asking. Does the risk balance out the reward? Does what we get by waiting really make it worthwhile?'

Charley Pascal sighed. It had been a long time since anyone had truly questioned her authority, and now that it had happened, she felt affronted. 'That's my call, Joe. You're important to us. What you've done, sorting out the equipment, sorting out our security, that's vital. But you're not an astronomer or a physicist. And I am. So believe me when I say we have to do it like this.'

'Even with the risk they might get here first?'

'Sundog isn't bulletproof,' she replied testily. 'We can wind it up just so much and after that it breaks. Sometime after the zenith, the amount of pure energy that we'll be pushing through that system defies analysis. Even I'd be hard-pressed to put a figure on that. We've got to use it wisely or the whole thing will blow. To do that I need the best, most recent guess we have on how the storm's changing after the zenith, when we can use it to most effect. And I need to see how it responds when we do open up the gates all the way. I've got to do it like that, Joe. Otherwise we could be sending fireballs into the middle of the Atlantic, or making people sweat in Boston when we might be razing Chicago to the ground.'

'Yeah,' he said, shifting restlessly in his seat.

She didn't want an argument just now. 'Look. We've got the best information on the trend of the cycle there is. No one could supply us anything more timely.'

'I know.' A shadow of a smile. It was as close as Katayama could get, she thought, and realized, with a twinge of guilt, that she was glad this forced, close relationship now had so little time to run. 'I just get impatient.'

'Men do. And besides, isn't there something else you're forgetting?'

He stared at her with those heavy-lidded eyes, not understanding.

'We're not alone in this, Joe. We are part of the engine. We are agents of something bigger. If we weren't here helping the cycle along, somebody would be in our place. We can't lose. It's unthinkable.'

'Right.'

Sometimes he could be so impenetrable, so difficult to read. 'I want to see the cycle report,' she said curtly.

'Okay.' He got up, went behind the wheelchair, pushed her over to the terminal. Eve was sweating over the incoming data. She looked little more than eighteen: a thin, flat-chested kid with long dark hair that kept falling in front of her face as she typed. She wore an i love linux T-shirt and cut-off blue jeans. A scrolling window of text and graphics swam across the screen.

'In a nutshell,' Charley said.

'Big,' Eve replied in a flat English accent. 'There was a lull for a while a couple of hours ago, and then it started to build. You can look through the reports. Major seismic events in Asia. A lot of telecom links down too. Confined to the northern hemisphere. There's nothing that seems able to touch anyplace below the equator directly. They'll still get hit by after-effects, of course.'

'How much of this is us?'

Eve shook her head. 'Not a lot. I'm putting in some extra background feed, a big broad wash, nothing focused like we did in Vegas. Is that right?'

Charley nodded. 'I don't want this pushed too hard until we have a real target. We could have done something with Tokyo, I guess, but that could have jeopardized what we have later.'

Eve looked at her. This was not some game. She wanted to get this right. Everything else seemed unimportant. 'You think we could break Sundog, Charley?'

'I know we could. The power in the storm is unimaginable. If we use it too quickly, or at the wrong time, it could blow everything. And if the cycle comes up really high, that may not be at the peak. We could be wasting what we have then. Why turn it on New York if there's enough heat there already?'

Eve glanced down the corridor. 'You still want me to go last?' she said, no emotion in her voice. (Eve had no emotions, Charley thought; this life, for her, was just a passing stream of events.)

'Joe's last. You go before him.'

'That means I have to make my own way out there, alone,' Eve said, the long dark hair flicking in front of her eyes.

'No. None of us is alone. You can't even think that.'

'No.' Eve's face was blank. Charley watched her reactions and glanced at Katayama. There was no room for changes at this stage.

'I don't know what I'll do,' Eve said.

'You'll find out, Eve. Don't worry.'

'I know..'

'Eve,' Joe said, that same thin smile on his face, 'this is the only way.'

'Think of what they would do if they found us here together,' Charley added.

'And what they'd do to us,' Katayama said. 'In the end, we get to be heroes. In the beginning — '

'They crucified Jesus,' Charley said, and immediately regretted the analogy. This was a superficial one. They deserved better than that and it seemed to scare the girl.

'I guess we'd be in big trouble. But watching everybody go — it's as if the fewer of us there are here, the weaker the whole thing feels. I start to ask questions.'

Charley touched her arm, felt the warm young skin. 'No. We're all one in this. You'll come to feel that, Eve.'

'I guess so.' She looked so young. Pale complexion, tired eyes.

'I'm taking a rest now,' Charley said, and signalled for Katayama to push the chair. 'You keep at it. You come and wake me if you need to talk.'

'Sure.'

Katayama pushed the wheelchair into the bedroom, lifted her body carefully out onto the bed. She winced, almost felt like screaming. The pain was beginning to work its way into new parts of her body, creeping slowly with each minute, running like a gentle, sluggish fire. She pointed out the needle and the morphine on the bedside cabinet and said, 'Watch her, Joe. We can't change things now.'

'She's scared, Charley. She's just human.'

'Exactly.' Her face was screwed up with the pain. Then she closed her eyes and tried to dream the sky into her head.

CHAPTER 51 Calculation

After they finished talking to the people in Vegas, something went out of the atmosphere of the room. Bevan, much to Lieberman's surprise and near-admiration, had come over, looked Mo in the eye, and said, 'Hey. What's done is done. The big guy's right. Let's just focus on the job.'

And then the rest of them left the room, leaving Lieberman and Mo to fill it with some vast, empty silence. She broke it. 'Michael..'

'No,' he said, putting a finger to her lips. 'You don't need to say anything. Really.'

'I do.' She was dog-tired but there was still some sense of serenity about her. Talking about her pained, fractured past had lanced some wound.

'Maybe. But not now. We'll have plenty of time when this is over, Mo. If you like. And that's your choice.'

She came close to him, kissed him gently on the cheek. Then Annie was through the door, watching them silently, not knowing what to make of this.

'You look bright and sparky,' he said. 'Unlike the rest of us. You got some sleep?'

'Yes. Mom?'

Mo was over, stroking her hair. 'What's wrong, Annie?'

The girl blinked, big wide eyes that said, Scared, scared, scared. Mo held her to her waist, eyes closed, face screwed up in agony again, and Lieberman thought: This is one pretty picture Charley has given the world.

'Hey,' he said, striding over, some bustle in him he didn't even begin to recognize. 'Will you two snap out of this, please?'

His arms were around both of them, feeling this warmth there, feeling the comfort of their physical presence. Annie stared up at him, wide-eyed, looking for something.

He reached down, held her chin. 'This will be okay, kid. Trust me. We can see this through. All three of us.'

'I heard Irwin talking.' Her voice was soft and damaged. 'They know.'

Mo groaned.

'Know what?' he asked. 'That you two got a bum deal from life? Met some weird people along the way? So what, Annie? You didn't do anything. You just found some odd company. Big deal. One day, you two can come to San Francisco with me. If you like. You want weird people? I can show you ones you wouldn't believe.'

'Michael…' Mo said.

'It's an invitation. That's all. Think about it at your leisure.'

Annie stared at him. 'They won't take me away?'

Lieberman bent down, gazed into her pale, serious face. 'No. Why? And anyway, they wouldn't dare. We'll see this through. The three of us. And when we get out on the other side, I don't know what happens. But it gets better. For all of us. That's a promise.'

'A promise,' Mo repeated, her head buried deep in his shoulder, so deep he couldn't begin to see her face. Michael Lieberman closed his eyes and wondered at this moment, its intimate closeness, the power of emotion that lived like an electric charge between them. Family, he thought. This, he guessed, summed it up. Sharing the pain, the ecstasy together. He really didn't need to wonder why Mo took to the Children when the floor disappeared from underneath them. Open arms didn't demand questions.

'So,' he said, breaking the hot, laboured silence. 'Do we get to go outside now? Take a breath of fresh air? There's drinks on the terrace, from the sound of it.'

They unclasped themselves from each other and walked out into the scorching day. The rest were seated on the veranda, underneath the shade of a gigantic palm, jugs of fresh orange juice on the table. Annie ran ahead and sat on the edge of the pond, watching the golden shapes of the fish come up to the surface now and then, throwing pebbles into the grey-green viscous water, following the circles they made. He and Mo pulled up chairs and helped themselves to the drinks. He felt edgy. Everyone just wanted to do nothing but wait, he thought, and wouldn't Charley be so happy with that.

'Tell me about this satellite again, Irwin,' he asked. 'What did you do to my original design? What did you add?'

He watched the surface of the old stone fish pond, Annie perched on the edge. Feeling helpless. Feeling exhausted and grateful for the shade of the palm that cut the power out of the gleaming day.

'I thought we'd been through this, Michael,' Schulz replied, a distinct, sharp note of annoyance in his voice. 'We're all a little tired here.'

'Let's wait and see, you mean?'

'Look, we've done what we can. When they get that system back on-line, we're all ready to go. Till then, let's just relax, huh? There's no point in running round and round in circles over nothing. We may need all the energy we've got later.'

'Yeah. No point.'

They didn't even think the cycle reports were that important any more. Everything had come to focus around this place outside Vegas, walking in there, guns blazing, stealing back what someone else had stolen from them.

'We're tired,' Mo said.

'Me too. But doesn't something bug you about all of this?'

'Such as what?' Bennett asked.

'How, ever since it started, we never really got around to doing any thinking for ourselves, because someone else was always feeding a chunk of information that shaped what we did anyway. Like this Vegas thing. Like taking out the domes. And there's a curious thing too.'

'What?' Schulz asked.

'How come everyone else in this loop — Spooksville in Langley, most every European capital we can think of, Tokyo, Vegas, San Francisco, they're all looking up at the sky and see all manner of crap coming down on them. And we just sit here watching most everything work? Do you ever think about that? Aside from the explosion of the dome, we haven't had a single serious outage. It's all happened elsewhere.'

'No reason for it to happen here,' Schulz said. 'We're way away from any major financial centres. Why should she target us when she's blown up the dome anyway?'

'Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we were supposed to be in charge of the whole thing.'

' "Were",' Schulz said.

'Point taken. Still…'

'Still what, Michael?'

He rolled the dregs of his orange juice around in the glass and watched Annie playing by the thick green water of the pond. She had a little paper yacht folded from a used sheet out of the laser printer. He could still see the text on it: numbers, formulas, graphs, all the mechanical things you used to describe what happened in this wonderful place called science. 'Still, I think we're being dumb, somehow.'

Bennett, who looked dead to the world, said, very slowly, 'I don't think any of us would argue with that.'

'No. So Sundog. Remind me, Irwin. You took my design and added all that ugly Star Wars stuff on the bottom.'

Schulz sounded offended. 'Michael, how can you call it ugly? You only saw it on the damn model'

'Okay, I know, I know. Ugly is as ugly does. And my name's Forrest — '

'Michael!' It was Mo this time, and she looked close to annoyed.

'Sorry. I babble creatively. Einstein did it too but no one snitched.' He watched Annie pushing the little boat across the pond. Sundog was something like this, only with the extra dimension of space added in. This was science too. Somewhere there was a bunch of numbers that could add up the satellite's present position. Somewhere a little line of buzzing electrons ran back from Sundog right to Charley, directly to her lair, talking in some two-way conversation only they understood. It irked him no end that a chunk of equipment he'd initially designed was being used in this way. And something else too.

'You're wrong, Irwin,' he muttered.

'About anything in particular?'

'About all that ugly stuff you tacked onto the butt of my beautiful machine. I didn't just see it on the model.' The image was still there in his head and he knew why it had stayed hidden. There was just too much pain in those last moments of the Shuttle crew. He'd liked Bill Ruffin, felt touched by the dogged, dutiful enthusiasm of the crew.

'Maybe you weren't watching, but after your nice machine killed those people, that floatcam of theirs got jerked around by something itself — I'd rather not guess at just what. It moved around from the dark side of Sundog out into the light. The business end, I guess you'd call it.'

Schulz took a big gulp of his drink. 'I guess I wasn't looking right then.'

'No. I don't blame you. But I don't think I was hallucinating. It made it there, for a few seconds anyway. And then the line went dead.'

'The satellite would have fried the thing, Michael,' Schulz explained. 'That's what it's supposed to do.'

'I guess so.' He did see it, he was sure of that. A bristling array of dishes, antennae, and assorted chunks of military metal. He was right. It was ugly. 'We still got that video on the system, Irwin?'

'It's on the system.'

'How do I find it?'

'I can do that for you,' Mo said, looking interested. 'Any particular reason?'

'No.' He wished he could think of one. 'I guess I'm just feeling restless.' He looked at his watch. It was nine-fifteen local. If Helen and her people got lucky in Nevada, the satellite might be back under their wing within two hours. That gave them a little under an hour before zenith to take the thing down.

He got up, and Mo Sinclair followed him. They went back into the control room, and he didn't know why but there was some low buzz of interior excitement hanging around his head, like a cloud of flies. 'You find me that video, Mo. I got a call to make.'

He watched her bring the PC alive and dialled Helen's number. 'I'm waiting,' he said to the screen on the desk. But there was nothing there except blackness.

Then he turned back to the video. It was there, as he remembered it. The antenna on the satellite did move, like a dog cocking its ear to the call of its master, and he couldn't, for the life of him, work out why this bugged him.

'Is that important?' Mo asked, watching the brief flicker of the film before the floatcam was blown to pieces.

'I don't know,' he muttered. 'Or rather, yes. But I don't understand how.'

CHAPTER 52 Through the Night

'Hi. Jeff Green.'

The FBI agent stuck out his hand and grinned. In the bright, artificial light of the Nellis pad he looked small and insignificant. No more than twenty-five, Helen thought. Short cropped hair, a friendly, open face.

'Green,' Barnside said, and took his hand. The contrast between the two men could hardly have been greater: Barn-side big, older, darker. And Green just starting out, bright-eyed and optimistic. Larry Wolfit, by Helen's side, just coughed. This wasn't some nice, cool detached wildlife project in the Rockies. He really didn't like getting this close to the action.

'Mr Wolfit, one of our science guys,' Barnside explained. 'A touch shy. Most of them are. But not all. You're here to look after us?'

Green laughed. 'No, sir. You're capable of doing that for yourselves. But they said I should stick with you all the same. Like the man said, it's important you stay out of their way when they're going in. They're playing with some neat stuff out there.' He took a small metal canister out of his night combat suit. 'These flash grenades, for example. They make our job a lot easier. But you get one of those in the face without goggles on and you'll know it.'

'That's understood,' Helen said. 'The key thing for us is to get in as quickly as possible once you've secured the area.'

'Agreed. There's five of you in all?'

'Yes. The other two are already on their way with their gear. I heard what Collins said about clearing the farm first. I still want them in place as close to the dome as possible so we can get in there when it's free.'

'Sure. And you three guys?'

'I'm just going to amble on up front with the support people,' Barnside said. 'I could spend my whole life watching other people work. I guess the science people hang around talking formulas or something. That right?'

Helen did her best to smile graciously. 'We can wait our turn. Can we go now?'

'In our slot,' Green said. 'The other four machines go ahead of us. In formation. We make up a lone rear. That's the way it is, not my decision. We get down a minute or so after they land. They got half a mile to walk before they can enter. We can just follow along slow. We all got maps?'

They stared at the charts in their hands. Green was starting to take on the manner of a tour guide. 'Good. If you look at our landing position, you can see there's a track leads sideways from the site. That takes you to the foot of the ridge. Mr Barnside, you'll be able to follow in the footsteps of our guys who go ahead. I suggest we wait at the ridge itself. If you want fast access to the dome, once we can allow that, I suggest the rest of your people start to make their way there pronto. If everything goes according to plan, we'll be inside that place in a matter of minutes.'

'Understood,' Helen said.

'You mind me asking something?' Green really did look young when he came up with the questions.

'Fire away.'

'Just five of you? Is that enough?'

'Five or fifty,' she answered, 'it wouldn't make much difference. All we're trying to do is connect that system up to the network and check if it's still working. Most ten-year-old kids with a PC could do that, if you want the honest reply.

We hook it up, and then someone else works out how to control it.'

'Which,' Barnside interjected, 'is why I don't understand your need to be there, Helen. If this is admin, you'd have more resources back here.'

'We've been through that. The conversation's over.'

He shrugged and looked at Wolfit. 'Have it your way. I think Larry here would be happy to stay put. That right?'

Wolfit gave a humourless grin in the half-light.

'You guys going to kiss and make up or something?' Green asked.

'No need, Green,' Barnside said. 'We're professionals. We get on with it.'

She watched the activity on the airfield. Farther up the pad the turbines were getting loud, making the kind of noise that preceded takeoff. She looked up at the cockpit of their own machine and saw the co-pilot of their own helicopter staring back at her. The opaque night-vision mask he wore made him look like some giant insect. He stuck out a thumb, motioned to the inside of the craft. A crewman was waiting at the door, holding out a hand. Struggling up the little ladder, with his help, they climbed in, and when everyone was seated he slid shut the door. She was amazed. The sound of the outside world disappeared. The aircraft's interior was clean and shiny, with what looked like a telecom rig in the corner.

'Why's it so quiet?' she asked the crewman.

'This is an unusual ship. Command module. It means we have to rig it out with noise-cancelling stuff, make sure we can carry out normal voice conversations in the air. That way you people can communicate without going through us, or having to wear cans.'

She pulled out her pocket communicator, looked at the blank screen. 'You think this thing works in here?'

The man shook his head. 'No idea, lady. But if you want to make a video call, you can get through using the fixed comm centre over there. Just key in your ID and it will route your calls straight through.'

Somewhere ahead of them the noise level was rising. She peered through the small, high windows and saw one of the Sea Knights climb into the sky, a giant black form, rising on what looked like a single feathery wing.

'What's the light going to be like?' she asked Green.

'Poor, probably,' Green replied. 'Don't let what you experienced on the field down there fool you. The sky is absolutely clear but we have almost no moon. As soon as we're airborne, the lights go out in the cabin. It takes an hour for the human eye to acclimatize to darkness, so we won't be getting out in perfect condition. But it will be a lot better than going from full light to full dark.'

'You brought some goggles?' Barnside asked.

'Yeah. Probability is you won't need them.'

He started to throw around pairs of simple, tinted goggles to each of them. 'This isn't night-vision stuff,' Barnside said gruffly.

'No, sir. We're not going to be needing that. By the time we're going anywhere serious, the Cobras will be behind us lighting up that place like a football stadium. These are just for the flash grenades. If, by any chance, they're still in use when we get close to the house then we put these on. You need to be within twenty feet or so for the effect to be bad, so this is just in case.'

'Yeah,' Barnside barked. The noise level was rising inside the machine. They were close to takeoff. 'I'd really like some night goggles.'

'Like I said,' Green said, taking a small service flashlight out of his pocket. 'We don't need them. There's a clear division of duties here, sir. I hope you can go along with that.'

'Sure.' And Barnside gave a sour grin at Larry Wolfit, who looked ready to throw up. Barnside's big head lurched backward and forward on his shoulders as the machine began to move. With a soft, rising roar, the helicopter rose into the night sky. Seated opposite the silent Wolfit, Helen watched the lights of Nellis recede beneath them. Off to the south was the city, a bizarre tangle of fire and artificial illumination. She didn't want to think what the night would be like there: no certainty, no order. Vegas wasn't a place to be alone just then.

The machine levelled out and they felt it tilt gently forward as it moved into a horizontal cruise. The interior lights dimmed. Larry Wolfit, visible from the faint illumination of the emergency exit sign, stared back at her looking drained. S&T was supposed to be available for operational duties, it was written right there in the contract. But that happened so rarely. To be ploughing through the impenetrable night sky, heading for a rendezvous none of them could predict, wasn't really why you joined the club.

She sat next to Green, strapped into the bench seat, while Barnside, in the corner, stared mindlessly out the window, not saying a word. And she tried to clear her mind, tried to focus on the hours to come, to make sure every angle was covered. Then she dreamed. It was impossible not to dream, moving through the black velvet night in the belly of this giant machine, like some silent insect whirring toward its prey.

She was ready to nod off — so little sleep these last few days — when Barnside, his voice rising several decibels in volume, said, 'Hey, I think you got a call.'

She had, out of habit, rerouted her videophone onto the onboard comm screen by her seat as soon as she climbed in. Now it was flashing with an incoming signal. Green passed her the remote control, she pointed it at the screen, and Lieberman's face appeared, bright and animated in the gloomy, enclosed interior of the cabin.

'Good morning. Where the hell are you?'

'That's classified. You look… perky.'

'Yeah. I was wondering… how's it going there?'

'What?' she said, and wished this conversation could be more private. Everyone could hear it in this small, enclosed interior of the helicopter.

'Just asking.'

'Michael,' she said testily, 'we are in the middle of an operation. I really don't have time for small talk.'

Lieberman looked worried, uncomfortable, and it was so obvious even on the lousy picture of the video screen. 'No, it's just…'

She waited and it didn't come. 'Just what?'

'I just want you to know we're not sitting on our butts. We're still working on some ideas too.'

'Good ideas?' she asked, interested.

'Maybe. And anyway, you won't need them. You got Charley in your sights, right?'

She nodded. 'It looks like it. And for the record, Michael, I never imagined you were sitting on your butts. Not for one moment.' He seemed worried, and momentarily tongue-tied too. 'Now can we go back to work?'

'Sure. But if you do need some extra help, come calling. I might just have something extra in my bag of tricks. Nothing to trouble you with now, and I don't think you'll need it. You just get on with the job and I'm sure it will all be just fine.'

'We'll be in touch when we have news. These portable communicators ought to work on the ground. It's night here. She can't throw any of the storm at us.'

'Maybe she can throw other stuff.'

'Yes. We've thought of that. This is quite an operation. Maybe one day I get to break the rules and tell you all about it.'

The pale, bearded face nodded. 'That would be nice. Helen?'

She was looking at her watch. An annoying habit, one she hoped to lose. 'We need to keep this short, Michael.'

'I know. All I wanted to say was… be real careful out there. Charley just loves surprises.'

"Thanks for your advice.'

He winced. 'Oh right. There goes the ageing hippie academic telling Miss CIA what to do. Sorry.'

'No. I appreciate it. I apologize if it sounded like I didn't.'

'Right. I'm going back to my algorithms now. We'll talk on the other side of this thing.'

The screen went dead, and as it did the note of the helicopter's engine changed, dwindled down several tones.

'Some guy, huh?' Barnside grunted. 'What the hell was all that about?'

'He's just nervous, wanting to do something. Touching, in a way.'

'I guess so. But he's got an idea about something. He's soft on you too. You get that?'

She shook her head and groaned. 'You know, sometimes, Barnside, you start to remind me of the bad uncle I never had. The one who always embarrasses you at birthday parties.'

He roared out a laugh. 'Hey. I like that!' And even she couldn't stifle a stupid grin. Then the aircraft lurched. She held on to the passenger rail to steady herself and looked at Larry Wolfit. He was really close to throwing up.

Green pointed out the window. 'We're going in. You can see the first four ships on the ground already.'

'So,' Barnside said, 'I just go ahead of you people and follow the route marked on the chart?'

'Yeah, sir. There's a bluff right beneath the dome. You can wait there until they give you the all-clear to go into the farm. You ought to get a good view of the fireworks, provided they're not over by then. And we just work our way behind you, a little more leisurely, I think. I don't want to bump into those guys in the middle of the night. You should remember that too.'

The helicopter was hovering now, descending slowly to the desert floor. It came to earth with a jolt. Green had been right. Outside it was pitch-black. From where they'd put the Sea Knight down, it was impossible to see even a single other aircraft, though the stench of Avgas that came through the door when the crewman threw it open suggested they couldn't be far away.

'Ride ends here, folks,' the crewman said jovially. 'We all booked you on return tickets, so you take care.'

Then they were out in the night air, and Helen felt her breath disappear inside her. In the desert it was cold, a dull, sluggish cold that could sap her energy. And there was a smell too: of dry vegetation, something distantly rank in the air.

Barnside walked off into the darkness. The rest of the S&T crew headed toward the dome, a single grunted 'Bye' as they disappeared into the night. Green switched on his flashlight, though they didn't need it yet; the downward-pointing landing lights of the helicopter saw to that.

'A half a mile?' Wolfit asked.

Green nodded. 'All nice and straight and level. There's some rock cover between us and the farmhouse we can use to screen us. That dictated the landing site.'

'How are you feeling, Larry?' Helen asked. He seemed happier to be out of the helicopter.

'I'll be okay,' he said with a weak grin. 'I just hate those damn things.'

'Join the club.' Green grinned.

'That call from Lieberman?' Wolfit asked.

'What about it?'

'You think he's on to something?'

'He's one smart guy. We won't need it, though.'

'No,' Wolfit sighed, and she wished he weren't so tense, so scared by what was ahead of them.

'What if the farm has lookouts or something?' Helen asked.

Green shook his head. 'We'd have picked them up with the aerial scan. I guess everyone's in the house. That's nice. How it should be.'

Wolfit coughed loudly. 'Maybe we should be moving.'

Green nodded. 'Sure.'

And they set off, the HRT man in the lead, flashlight casting a lone yellow beam into the night. He'd been right about their eyesight, she thought. Once they moved away from the dim presence of the helicopter, once there was nothing in the darkness except the puny beam of the flashlight, you really could see a little more. The desert made its living presence known to you. There was life there: the high-pitched rustling of insects, and farther off the long, low howl of something larger.

'You been in the Bureau long, Green?' Wolfit seemed eager to talk. Nervous, Helen guessed. She was happy just to listen and think about what lay ahead.

'Two years, sir.'

They were out of sight of the helicopter now. It must have been a good four hundred yards behind. Ahead, looming larger in front of them, was the rock ridge he'd talked about, a small hogback that now stood solid black against the grey, starlit backdrop of the night sky. The team must have crossed it by now, she thought. Soon there ought to be some sign of the attack.

'Guess this must be the biggest thing they ever gave you?' Wolfit asked gloomily.

Green laughed. 'Nice try, sir. You know I can't talk about operations or that kind of thing.'

'Sure.'

Wolfit walked a little faster, left Helen behind, caught up with Green, put an arm on his shoulder. 'But we can talk in generalizations, now, can't we? This must be the biggest thing. It's the biggest I ever got, what with the President, our new President, breathing down our necks, huh?'

'I guess so, quite something, really.'

She caught up and touched Wolfit lightly on the shoulder. 'It's okay, Larry. We're just here to run up a network. Nothing dangerous.'

'Sorry. Guess my mouth was running away with itself. And me the nature lover. I'm supposed to feel at home in this place.'

Then he jumped as if he'd stood on a rattlesnake. The first flash had exploded on the other side of the ridge, and even partly blocked as it was by the solid mass of stone, it seemed incredibly bright, a veil of phosphorescence that put spots of colour at the back of their eyes. And no sound. The silence was strange, unsettling.

'It begins,' Green said, and laughed. The sky became alive with the dancing lights of the flash grenades, and Helen stared at the ground, trying to keep them out of her head, fumbling in her pocket for the goggles.

Green stopped walking. 'I think we should stay here for a minute or two. Stay in the lee of the ridge, try not to look at the sky. You see what I mean about the brightness now? And we don't even get a direct view of those things. We just stay out of sight.'

'I see,' she said, and worked the goggles onto her head in any case. They made the night go black again. What little detail there was disappeared except for the flashes overhead, and that made you want to look at them even more. She snatched the things off after a few seconds.

Green watched her. 'Yeah. They don't suit me either.'

'Fucking technology,' Wolfit yelled, loud enough to make both of them jump. 'You believe the stuff they make us work with these days?'

'It's a little late to get into that conversation, Larry,' she said, puzzled. 'I think you could pick another occasion.' And the thought came out of nowhere: Larry was really nervous.

There was a huge ripple of light in the sky, and noise now too, maybe gunshots, maybe just the popping of more grenades. It was impossible to tell.

'They give you Bureau guys all that stuff,' Wolfit continued. She tried not to listen; he was starting to embarrass her. 'Take those new P54S the Army is giving out. I mean, they sound real interesting.' Green's silence was palpable.

'You going deaf or something?' Wolfit asked flatly. 'I know guns. Sometimes when I'm out in Yellowstone they call on us to go shoot some wolf that breaches the area, kills some stupid cow. You believe that?'

'Sir, you can't expect me to calk about operational issues.'

'Oh no. Oh no. It's called culling, Green. You know that term?'

'Larry…' Helen murmured. 'Calm down. This is going to be okay.'

'Hell,' he rambled on, 'I saw the damn thing in his suit when we were climbing onto the helicopter.'. 'Sir. It's supposed to be classified.'

'I know that. I know exactly what it is too. The P54. Manufactured by Armstrong in Philadelphia. First workable handgun made entirely of composite material. Half the weight of a service-issue unit. Built-in silencer. Massive firepower at close quarters. A piece of shit if you want to hit anyone more than thirty yards away too. That's what I hear.'

'Okay,' Green said, a nervous edge to his voice. 'You know what you know. That fair enough? One more minute and I think we should be going.'

'That's not comradely,' Wolfit grunted.

'Enough!' She could hear how shrill she sounded. The desert scared her. The job scared her. Wolfit was starting to scare her too. She didn't need someone out of control right then.

'No,' he said, voice rising. 'It's not enough. All these damn secrets. All these damn people think they know everything there is to know. And the truth is they know nothing. Nothing. You going to show me that thing?'

'Can't do that, sir. Can't-'

And almost choked as Wolfit was on him, a single sharp punch in the stomach taking out his breath, hands running all over his night suit.

'Larry,' she yelled, walking over to the fight. 'What the hell are you doing? I am reporting this, you believe it. Even if the kid's too scared to.'

'Yeah?' She couldn't see his face properly in the darkness. He was hidden in the shadow of the ridge. 'Well, you go ahead and report me. Who gives a shit?'

Larry Wolfit felt the P54 in his hand and wished he weren't sweating so much. It was light, so light he could hardly believe it. A little big for most ordinary duties. And long too. The integral silencer seemed responsible for that. He lifted it up and down with his right hand a few times.

'This the kind of thing you like, Green? The kind of thing you approve of? Guess there's a little work to do on the size, but they'll get there. Thank you.' He turned the weapon around, held it by the long barrel, held the handgrip outward.

'I just wanted to look,' he said apologetically. 'Sitting around on the edge of things like this just makes me uneasy.'

'Sure thing,' Green mumbled. 'I think we should be going now.' Then he reached out for the gun. Larry Wolfit flipped it over in his hand, slipped his finger into the trigger guard, pointed it at the sky.

'Trick or treat?' he said. 'You should never fall for that one. Don't they teach you that in the Bureau?'

'Yeah,' Green said. 'But not with fellow agents.'

'Pity,' Wolfit grunted, and fired a single round. It made a noise like a balloon exploding underneath a pillow. Jeff Green was lifted off his feet, flew backward noiselessly, fell to the ground in a silent heap.

Then Larry Wolfit turned round to face Helen. He was out of the shadow now and he looked half-crazy. The dark shape of the gun was in his hand. 'Wasn't meant to be like this,' he said. 'Wasn't meant to be like this at all.'

CHAPTER 53 Entry

There were only a couple of lights on inside the farmhouse, and they threw little illumination onto the scene. 'Millfield?' John Collins said quietly into his voice mike, half-listening for the distant circling of the surveillance helicopter overhead. When they were in place, Collins could floodlight the scene. But they were late. An entry in half-darkness seemed inevitable. 'You read anything?'

'Negative,' the far-off voice squawked into his single earpiece. 'We got no sound, no heat indications since we started this thing, John. Either these people are gone, sleeping, or just plain dead.'

'Yeah,' he said. His team was stationed to the left of the front door, just out of range of the obvious infrared security trigger that had been fastened, like an amateur-hour burglar alarm, to the nearest stanchion in the frame. The farmhouse was wood, with a big open veranda, and stood in a flat patch of rocky ground. Behind it were a couple of agricultural buildings, a horse ring, and a yard with three or four cars in it.

What looked like a newly made path led off to the adjoining ridge. Somewhere on the top, no more than four hundred yards away, he guessed, was the dome. He could just make out the dark shapes of his men working their way into position. It had all been so easy, and that made him feel uncomfortable. Some snags were inevitable. It was best to get them out of the way as soon as you could.

'Initial plan,' Collins said. 'Flash goggles on. Team One goes in first, the rest of you in order. Keep your heads in there; I'd like to come out of this with no casualties on either side. And good luck, folks.'

Then he pushed the goggles back down onto his cheeks and nodded to the team. One of them walked up to the small downstairs window, sidestepping the infrared beam, and threw a flash grenade through the pane. There was a low tinkling of broken glass. Collins looked away at the ground, waiting for the first flash. It came like a brief bolt of lightning, with a soft puff of air behind it, and he led the team in a steady, fixed walk to the door. Then five more (counting, he kept counting, and listening for the yells, the screaming, but none came), and he was nodding at them, watching the one with the sledgehammer pull it back and start to thunder away at the big wooden slab. It fell in two, and they were through, screaming like crazy, hearing the sound of explosions and crashing glass from elsewhere in the building.

'Team One entered, contact not established,' Collins said, and paused while one of the flash grenades let off a late rogue blast that painted the entire room a harsh, stony white, drew everything out like some kind of bas relief that wasn't quite real, more a piece of strange modern art than a picture of something physical around them.

'Team Two entered, no contact,' said a voice in his ear.

'Team Three entered, no contact.'

'Team Four entered. Ditto.'

The last commander paused. 'What the hell is going on here, John?'

'Maintain vigilance.' Collins watched the room come back into normal focus. It was full of cheap desks, cheap furniture, a whole line of PCs still glinting and alive, the twirling picture of some screensavers rolling around their monitors. Somewhere in the corner one of the team was throwing up, a repetitive, physical noise that sounded as if it might never end. Fear made its presence known in the oddest of ways.

'Keep those goggles on, man,' Collins barked. 'And don't think this is over. Millfield? Have you seen anyone leave this building since we entered?'

'Negative, John. You guys went in, no one went out.'

'Right.' Collins walked through into the hall, met two of the other teams wandering in to meet each other.

'This place is empty, John,' someone said, invisible behind the flash goggles. 'Hell, it smells empty.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'I know.'

'There's food in the kitchen, dirty plates,' the Team Three commander said. 'But no clothes, no suitcases. They made it out of here.'

'Still rooms to go,' the Team Two man said. 'We'll take upstairs, constant vigilance, usual drill. Use the flash grenades. Don't take anything for granted.'

The four men in black ascended the narrow wooden staircase, machine pistols in their hands, and Collins could hear the popping of grenades up there, see the bright phosphorescent light chasing down the plain white corridors of the farmhouse. You didn't prosper in this business on your instincts, but just then John Collins knew his were right: There was nothing to be found upstairs.

'Fred,' Collins said to the Team Four commander. 'Get your guys seeing if there's any subterranean rooms in this place. A cellar or something.'

'But John, it's built on solid rock. What'd they use? Mining equipment or something?'

'Just do it, will you?' Collins snapped, and wished there weren't so much crankiness in his voice. 'And while you're at it, bring in some of the explosives guys. I want this place cleaned internally. Make sure we don't have any surprises waiting for us. We got a little extra time to spare. No reason why we shouldn't use it to make sure everything's safe here before going up that hill to the dome.'

'Okay.' The man shrugged.

'So where'd they go?' the Team Three man asked. 'They made it out of here already? And left us the keys to the safe?'

'I don't know,' Collins replied. Then called up the Cobra team and diverted them from the lighting detail to sweeping the area, looking for vehicles snaking their way out into the outside world. 'Get that S&T woman for me. Maybe they set this thing on automatic and ran.'

'Damn,' the Team Three man said, and ripped off his goggles.

'Keep those fucking goggles on!' Collins yelled.

'Sir,' the man mumbled, and struggled with the eyepiece.

The radio buzzed in Collins's ear. 'We got some traffic thirty miles distant, couple of cars,' the helicopter captain said. 'Could be anybody, that far away.'

'Pick them up.'

Team Two came back from upstairs. The leader stripped off his goggles and said, 'Nothing — '

'Put those fucking gogg-' John Collins heard his own voice rattling around inside his head. It sounded shrill and stupid. 'Never mind.'

"What the hell's going on?' the man asked grimly.

'This well sure looks dry,' Collins muttered, and shook his head. He walked over to the nearest terminal. The monitor was flicking over on the screensaver: mindless geometric patterns repeating over and over again. He punched the space key. 'You believe that?'

The screen cleared and Gaia's Web site sat there. 'I think these people have got some kind of live Net connection here. A Ti line or something. Those Agency people are going to be jumping up and down with glee.'

'John,' the Team Four leader said. 'We got the okay from the explosives people. This place looks clean. They're running through the path to the dome too, but it's slow work. They wired up some IR burglar alarms on the way. They feed into an audible warning system. No signs of explosive anywhere so far.'

'That's good. These guys really did think they'd pulled this one off, huh? Or maybe they didn't want to hang around to see the consequences.'

'Guess so,' the Team Four leader answered.

'It is so. Pretty soon I'm going to sign this one off to those Agency people. Let them get the geeks in and see if they can bring this thing on-line.'

'We got the dome team kicking their heels already,' the Team Four man said.

'Well, tell them to wait. They need the go-ahead from their own boss first. So?' John Collins ripped off his flash goggles and glared at them.

'Sir?' someone said.

'So where the hell is she?'

CHAPTER 54 In the Desert

The night was more visible now. Helen could see Larry Wolfit clearly, a tall, slim shape, his outline blurred by the shadow of the rock ridge. He waved the gun a couple of times in front of her face. Then, too quickly for her to anticipate it, he stepped right up and punched her hard with his free hand. She fell back onto the hard, dusty ground, clutching at her cheek, trying to think, to make sense of this. Wolfit stank of sweat and fear but for some reason she felt more puzzled, affronted even, then scared.

'J — Jesus, Helen,' he stammered. 'This wasn't supposed to happen. None of it. Why the hell did you take the job? Why the hell do you keep working at it like this?'

Scrabbling in the dust, all she could think about was Belinda Churton. What she would do, would be thinking in a situation like this. And why even her reactions, in the end, were just not good enough.

'Get up now, will you?' he snarled. 'It's pathetic watching you squirm on the ground like that.'

She rolled over, curled into a ball, waited for the next blow. Then, slowly, so he understood this was her decision, not his, she got to her feet.

'There,' he said. 'Now, that's better.' She felt the side of her head again. It was tender, beginning to swell.

'Decision time, my dear,' Wolfit said miserably. 'Decision time.' He pulled back his fist again. She flinched. Then he dropped it. 'Hey, just testing reactions.' And was on her in an instant, had hold of her hair, pulled it hard, yanked her face into his, his mouth a vicious, taut line in the half-light.

'Why did they choose you, Helen? You going to tell me that? It was supposed to be me. To save us all this trouble.'

He wrenched her ear; she screamed. 'Shut up!' he shouted.

'You're hurting me.'

Wolfit let go, pushed her viciously, kicked out with his feet, took her legs from under her. Back on the ground, she thought, and still nothing working quite right in the head.

'You just overreached yourself, you know,' he said, a little calmer now. 'We spent too much time on this thing to have it go to waste now. What with you and your friend in Spain thinking you just might bust this all up, you just might have a good idea. You got no ideas. You understand me? None at all.'

She thought of Belinda, dying in a roar of homemade explosives. And Wolfit, always quiet, always watchful. He was waving the strange, overlong gun as if it had some kind of special power.

'Go on,' she said, not looking at him, not even thinking about anything except how strange this was, how odd a way to leave this existence. 'Get this over with, Larry. One more for your list.'

'Your fault, Helen. Your fault entirely.'

'Sure. That's what all you people get to think. If Charley told you to walk over a cliff I guess you'd do that too, and blame me on the way down.'

He was standing over her. The tiny crescent of the moon hung above his head, a curtain of bright, shining stars around it (and she wanted to think about the stars, not about him, not him at all).

'You scared? I guess I'd be.'

'Oh my.' She almost wanted to laugh.

"This funny or something? You asked that kid over there to join in the laughter?'

'You're pathetic, Larry. Even with that big gun hanging out of your hand like a limp dick. Pathetic.'

'Really? Maybe you should ask Belinda fucking Churton about that when you see her again.'

And then she did laugh. 'You should hear yourself. Is that what the new tomorrow sounds like?'

'Stupid, stupid. You don't understand a thing. This is all about bigger issues than you can ever understand. You got to burn sometimes. You got to cull.'

There had to be people, she thought. People at the helicopter. People at the farmhouse. If this went on long enough, they'd come, they'd be looking. If they knew where to find her. If they got there in time.

'So tell me,' she said, reaching down, rubbing her aching leg, feeling, through the thin fabric of the combat suit, the thin, slow trickle of blood starting to dampen the material. 'Make me understand. Tell me what Charley told you.'

'Nothing I didn't know already, except I didn't want to face it. You got to unmanage things. That's the point. Turn back the clock, just put in the status quo as close as you can get it. And don't close your eyes when the tough decisions come.'

She waited, wishing she could hear something.

'This can't go on,' he said, and there was some nervousness there, some pressure for time, she could sense it. 'We're just fucking up the planet, fucking up everything.'

'So what's new?'

'What's new is the chance to start over.'

'Won't happen. However bad it gets, Larry. You're smart enough to know that.'

'That's bullshit. We figured it out.'

'Tell me about the "we", Larry. Tell me about the Children, and how the hell they got to someone like you.'

Wolfit's shoulder chucked up and down but she didn't hear him laugh. 'Two kinds of people. Those who get it. Those who don't. You just spent your whole life walking in darkness. Just like everyone else in Washington. You think I never saw things while I was working in that place? All the cruelty? All the cynicism?'

'You're talking about cruelty? Larry… did you take a look at Vegas?'

'People die in wars. You got to see the big picture.'

'You sound like Hitler.'

He laughed then. 'Like I said. You either get it or you don't. And now it's just too late for me to throw a little light on the matter. There's things moving out there, and I can't let you have even the faintest chance of stopping it.'

The gun rose, made a dark shape against the backdrop of stars. 'If you'd been a little less nosy, if you'd done as you were told, maybe you'd have lived to find out. We gave you every chance to back out. But no…'

Something moved, close to them, back near the ridge. She checked her breathing, shuffled slowly, as noiselessly as she could, into a pool of darkness cast by the higher rocks.

'Damn me,' he muttered. 'Damn me if that kid isn't still alive. A pop from this thing and he's still grunting.' He flicked the switch on the flashlight, swept the narrow yellow beam over toward the ridge. She had to watch. There was no choice. Jeff Green was curled up in a ball by a single hulking rock, a big dark pool of blood growing around his stomach. His eyes glittered in the torchlight, wide open, scared, like those of an animal. He was doing something with his hands, and some small inner voice told her not to stare too hard. It looked like he was trying to push his spilled guts back inside his body.

Wolfit, crazy now, she didn't doubt it, put on a phony Southern accent, like Foghorn Leghorn worked up on speed, all this nervousness bubbling over inside him. 'Boy. I say boy. You need some help over there?'

Green opened his mouth. Something liquid came out, ran down over his chin, dark and viscous, and no human sound, nothing but a low, physical gushing, rhythmic, fading slowly away.

'One more pop and then you can say night-night,' Wolfit murmured. The kid said something unintelligible. His hand moved again, and something small, something silver, glinting in the moonlight, rolled across the rocky ground toward them.

'Night-night,' Wolfit said, not seeing this. The gun jumped in his hand, making that sickening popping sound again, and Helen Wagner saw Green's head explode like a pumpkin, felt something hot and sticky rain in droplets on her face.

'Hey,' Wolfit said clinically. 'That's what it looks like. You think we can play that game now, Helen?'

And what Belinda Churton told you to do was think, Helen reminded herself. More than anything. Think. Of what they discussed in the helicopter, of the little silver cartridge rolling across the rock floor of the desert, winking in the moonlight. Something hissing, fizzing beneath the curtain of winking stars.

Flash.

This hurt. She was scrabbling over onto her side, mind racing, just realizing what the dying Green had rolled toward them when the grenade ignited. Her body blocked most of the brightness, but enough got through to throw her, fire some bright, white curtain across the back of her mind and make her, in an instant, blind, insensate, helpless. Somewhere behind her — yards away or just feet? these distances meant nothing in this white, dreamlike world — Larry Wolfit screamed in pain, an animal noise, of agony and loss.

Blind people can still kill you, she thought. Then rolled, hard and fast, across the ground, not minding the sharp rocks digging into her body, eyes screwed shut against the agony.

Flash.

Even with her eyes shut and her arm set against her head, the light came through, a livid red-tinged orange, the colour of flesh, the colour of blood.

'Fuck you!' Wolfit screamed. And somewhere to her left there was the low, soft whisper of the gun and a sharp explosion in the ground. Dust and rock flew up and battered the back of her head. Two more to go. She reached into the pocket of her suit, grabbing for the goggles, found the cheap plastic lenses in her hand, heard Wolfit's lumbering footsteps once more, rolled again, then carefully, slowly, so as to make no noise, pulled them over her head.

Flash.

She knew what Wolfit must be doing now. Standing there, the gun in one hand, his free arm covering his face, waiting for the grenade to run out of steam. She opened her eyes. And saw nothing. The world was pale white, no detail, no movement. This brightness was so strong it wiped out the senses for a time, like staring at the sun, and there was no telling how long it would be before they returned. Then something stirred in the whiteness, a shape moved, there was the sound of those big mountain boots crunching the desert gravel.

'I can see you,' Wolfit said, and she thought: Lying, he's lying again, he always lies, this dishonesty seeps out of his pores like sweat. And she stayed still, stayed silent. The dim white shape moved, a ghostly arm extended away from her. It jerked; the gun made a sound. Somewhere close by the ground exploded.

She almost had to bite her tongue to stay quiet. And that was what he wanted. To make her taunt him. Hear her voice, then turn, grinning. Eyes screwed shut tight once more, then she opened them, gingerly. More detail. Less light. Her eyesight was slowly getting back to something close to normality, the complex structure of the eye recovering from the shock of the first flare.

There are four, she thought. And tried to remember how many were already gone.

His outline revolved, arm extended; the gun jerked again. Wolfit was guessing. His sight was gone completely, she thought, and now he was just trying to listen, maybe even work methodically around himself in an arc, hoping to catch her.

Flash.

So near she could hear the sound of the phosphor fizzing in the air. And it hurt again, even through the goggles. She closed her eyes and wanted to scream. No, a voice (Belinda Churton's distant, ghostly) said. Correction, Helen. You did scream.

We heard you.

We all heard you.

And in that instant she became aware of the noise she was making: the loud, laboured sound of her breathing, the sobbing gasps that welled up in her throat, the constant, rushing roar of the blood through her veins. She forced her eyes open. Pain. His presence was overwhelming. She could feel him there, a huge black figure in front of her, see the shape of his legs no more than two feet away, and didn't dare look up, knowing what was there (long and dark and deadly).

'Women,' Larry Wolfit said slowly. 'Just can't keep quiet, can you?'

'What the hell are you?' she yelled, hearing the words trip out of her mouth automatically, not caring any more how they betrayed her.

Wolfit sounded as if he were offended by the question, as if she ought to have known the answer already. 'Me, Helen? I'm just a little piece of the mechanism, a little cog in the celestial machine. Nighty-night, now.'

And it was like the sound of a rapier moving through the air, so sudden, so full of force. She heard this rush of energy, heard too Wolfit groaning, then screaming, became aware of his presence diminishing, blinked, blinked again, found some vision returning, fought with her eyes, searching for some control.

He was gone. Something lifted him up, bulk and all, and threw him a good five feet away. Larry Wolfit lay, a crumpled heap, unmoving, on the hard desert floor. The sound of footsteps. A hand came down and fell gently upon her shoulder.

'Don't touch me, you bastard!'

Not her voice, this was not her voice at all.

'Okay. Okay.'

Something familiar. Memories flooding back into her head.

'Helen. It's me,' Barnside said. 'It's okay now. You're safe.'

'Safe?'

She heard herself laugh, and still the voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. Slowly, with no small degree of pain, her sight was coming back. The dry, dead desert floor, Wolfit's slumped body, all these were becoming real to her now.

'I don't know what the hell's been going on here,' Barnside said (sympathy, some kindness in his voice; she could recognize the presence of these things in the world). 'But he's gone. I'm telling you now. And we got work to do. It looks good in the farmhouse there. We need you.'

Kneeling on the desert floor, a dead man's blood drying on her face, full of pain, her vision a blur, Helen Wagner held up her right arm, rigid, fixed, the muscles taut like steel wire, and said, 'Help me up. I can't see yet.'

'Yeah,' he said.

She took his hand, then pulled herself to her feet, clinging briefly to his big frame. 'Wolfit's dead?'

'Oh yes.'

'Damn,' Helen Wagner said, and lumbered down the track.

CHAPTER 55 The Nevada Dome

'You can send your dome people in soon,' Collins said. 'We're pretty sure it's clear up there.'

'No.' Her eyes still hurt, but her vision was just about back to normal. 'I want you to check the exterior again. We were warned against these people. If they were smart enough to turn someone inside the Agency at Wolfit's level, they're smart enough to play other tricks too.'

'That's true,' Barnside said, and she couldn't escape the look in his eyes.

'Thanks, Dave. I forgot to say that.'

Barnside looked flattered. 'You don't need to thank me. It's my job. But I still don't get it. I just whacked one of your most senior guys in order to stop him whacking you. What was someone like Wolfit doing hooked up with these people? Didn't you guys have a clue what was going on there? Someone at a level like that?'

'I said thanks. Can we start moving now, please?'

'Agreed,' Collins intervened. Then barked into the radio.

'And I want to be there when they open the door. Tell them that.'

'Sure. I looked at the PCs. They all seem to be working. We could have done this for you. There's a generator out back, chock-full of gas, could run for another day or so.'

'Really.' She walked over to one of the computers, pushed the mouse, watched the screen come to life. 'And there's no one here?'

'No,' Collins replied. 'We've picked up some people on the road out. They look promising.'

'Charley?'

Collins shook his head.

'So where the hell is she?' Barnside grunted.

'Search me. She seems long gone. And the Katayama guy too.'

She pushed this to the back of her head. There was so much fighting for attention just then: Wolfit and the Children, Charley Pascal and Sundog. You couldn't fit it all in. You had to work on some priorities. She flipped open the videophone and placed it on the desk. The little LCD screen sparked, the speaker buzzed. Irwin Schulz looked back at her from the control room in La Finca, Lieberman by his side. Schulz seemed happy, confident. 'How you people doing?'

'We've got the base. We'll check the dome in a moment. It all looks good. Everything seems to be intact, not that I've got a link through to the dome yet. But there's nothing wrong with the network here. I can get you on-line to that soon enough.'

'That's great!' Schulz beamed.

'How's Charley?' Lieberman asked nervously.

'Gone.'

'Oh. In that case — '

'Not now, Michael. Let's take this one step at a time.'

She double-clicked the Net access icon on the screen. 'These people have got a fixed IP address, believe it or not. Can you come in on top of that?'

'You bet'

The screen cleared to show the home page of Gaia. She reeled off a string of numbers. 'Got it,' Schulz said.

After about ten seconds the image of the Gaia page disappeared from the monitor and was replaced by Schulz's face in a video window.

'You can see me?' he asked.

'Yes. Is that all you need?'

'Absolutely.' He turned to look at someone off screen. 'Mo? Can you take this over now? Helen?'

'Yes?'

'This will, to all intents and purposes, be our network in a minute or so. If you can re-establish the link with the dome, we can run it from here, straight through your connection.'

'You can't see the dome on the network either? I hoped it was just me.'

'No. But I can see the command application. Charley must have just ripped off ours down to the last byte. Which is interesting, since we didn't complete that until she was long gone from the project.'

'I may be able to fill you in on that later,' she said. 'But let me get this straight. All you need now is the physical link re-established to the dome?'

'Correct. From the aerial pictures we've seen, it must be through microwave dishes. If it's been deactivated, the likelihood is that you need to switch it back on physically, inside the dome itself.'

'Right?' She looked at John Collins. 'Your people up there are okay on this?'

He nodded. 'We can't find any reason not to go in. It all looks clean.'

She looked at her watch. 'Seventy minutes to zenith, Irwin. That give you time?'

'Oh yes. We're working on the program already. All we need is for you to throw the switch.'

She looked at Barnside. 'I'm going to the dome now. Contact Fogerty at Nellis. Tell him where we are. Tell him we were compromised in some way by Wolfit. He needs to assess that.'

'Done,' Barnside replied, and started to hit the numbers. She got up from the desk. Her leg hurt. She'd managed to wash some of the gore off her face but she still felt dirty, wounded, and soiled.

'We ought to check you over,' Collins said.

'Later.'

'Eglin. Hargrave,' Collins barked. Two of the HRT team nodded. 'You come with me and Miss Wagner up the ridge to the dome. We've had one scare tonight. I don't want any more. The Cobras are out looking for the Children. We don't have the lighting quite how I'd prefer it.'

'I don't think that's necessary,' she said.

'Well, I do. And security here is my job.'

She tried to smile. The man was like a rock. He walked to the door, held it open, and she was glad to be out of the place, out in the cold desert air, underneath the grey curtain, the stars winking. And somewhere out in space the planets queuing up for this celestial dance, standing in line with the high point of the sun.

'Damn,' Barnside said as she tripped over a rock, grazed her knee. He helped her to her feet, for the second time that night. 'I spoke to Fogerty. He's looking into it. You know, this would be a sight faster if these guys carried you. Or does your dignity preclude that?'

'To hell with dignity, mister,' she answered, and heard Belinda Churton's voice behind the words. Eglin and Hargrave came up on either side, strong arms reaching down, lifting her in a cradle movement. Collins shone a big bright flashlight beam up the path, and then the group began to trot up toward the great round spectre of the dome that stood against the night sky. The path levelled out at the top. The S&T team was outside the dome on a large, flat plateau, talking to the Bureau team. Her two carriers put her lightly down on the ground.

'Ouch,' she said softly. The leg was hurting more now. Collins was right. It needed looking at.

'Boss? You okay?' Jim Sellers, one of the S&T people, peered at her, concerned. 'Where's Larry?'

'Later,' she said. 'I'll be fine. The computer network is ours. We're all on course to get this thing done, Jim. We just need this end fixed. So let's get on with it, shall we?'

'We handle the entrance,' Collins said. 'No chances.'

She walked up to the dome with him. It was bigger than she expected. The Children had thrown a fifteen-foot-high skin around it so that, from the road, a passer-by might think it was some kind of water tower. But now that they were level with it the real shape was apparent. The geodesic rose above the fake panelling. It looked natural in the desert somehow, like a pattern on rock, or the skin of a lizard.

'We got the door,' one of the Bureau men said. 'One big plain padlock on it. You give the word, John, it's off.'

'Do it. And nothing personal, Miss Wagner, but while they're at this, we stay clear.' He took her arm gently and they walked back to the perimeter of the plateau and stood with Barnside. She glimpsed down. It was a good hundred feet to the farmhouse, the drop almost sheer from this angle. Her vision was back, all the way. The night was clear now, almost magical. It was hard to believe that there was so much pain, so much death enclosed in its soft, dark folds.

One of the Bureau men came up with a huge pair of cutters, attacked the metal fastening on the plain metal double door. It came away in an instant.

'Check for sensors,' Collins said. Two men raced to the door, flashlights weaving, instruments in their hands. 'Clear,' one said.

She pulled out the videophone and turned it on. 'Irwin?'

His face came up bright and pale on the. screen. 'You've done it?'

'We're going in now. We'll need your help understanding this thing.'

'No problem. It's just like firing up a generator or something.'

'I hope so.' Collins had left her, was by the door.

'Wait,' she yelled, and walked, half-shambled over to his side. 'I want to see.'

'Well, who am I to argue? Ben. Those double doors run outwards. You just open them up for us, huh? And then leave it at that. We take a good look inside before we take a step in there.'

'Sir.'

It was like opening Pandora's box, she thought. Like closing your eyes and waiting for someone to drop some present — good or bad — straight into your hands. The doors came back, groaning wildly in protest, a shrill noise in the night, and a small bell rang in her head: No oil?

The interior was black, opaque, impenetrable. 'Lights,' Collins said. Barnside walked up with a big field lamp, the sort they'd used around the farmhouse.

'Let me,' she said, and took it, parked it straight in front of the door, then hit the switch. She put the videophone on the floor, pointed the little camera on the top straight into the dome. 'You're getting this, Irwin?'

'What?' said a small, tinny voice from the speaker on the ground.

'This.'

Schulz's voice rang out uncertainly in the Nevada gloom. 'I can't see a damn thing, Helen.'

'No,' she said, staring at the vast, empty exterior. 'There isn't a damn thing. Nothing.'

No sound came from the little videophone. She picked it up, looked at the white, shocked face there. 'It's empty, Irwin. One desk with a PC on it. No transmission equipment. No scan system. No network. Nothing.'

John Collins swore quietly under his breath, saw what she was doing, saw she was moving too quickly for them. 'Hey. Don't go in there. Not yet.'

But she was through the door, staring at this complex structure from the inside, looking at this vast, vacant space, so perfect, so symmetrical. When she was three feet into the dome, the big flashlight behind her casting a giant shadow onto the crystalline pattern of the inner skin, the PC in the corner flashed once, came alive, the screen began to move.

'This whole thing,' she said to no one in particular, 'was just a blind. Martin Chalk and Vegas. They set us all up. The farm. Everything. Charley's not here. She never was here. It was all just a joke.'

With the sky about to fall down on the world, she realized.

The PC beeped and an image of the sun appeared at its centre. 'So where…?' she wondered, and the words wouldn't form in her head.

'Sensor triggered,' one of Collins's team said. 'We're sniffing something here, John. Maybe Semtex.'

'Shit,' Barnside said, and followed her into the dome, peering frantically around, scanning. It was at the apex. The place you looked last. A big brown suitcase suspended from the polygon at the peak of the dome.

'We're out of here,' Barnside yelled. 'Evacuate down the ridge. As fast as you can.' Collins was with him, inside the dome, tugging at Helen's arm. 'I'll deal with this,' Barnside said, and in one swift movement heaved her over his shoulder, turned, and started to run.

There was nothing in this outside world, she thought, nothing but the bobbing stars, the sound of frantic breathing, and this scrabbling, tumbling descent. Then the night turned to thunder, fire and smoke filled the air, and they were on the ground, coughing, choking, trying to clear the dust from their lungs.

Pain.

Something broken. Someone shouting. Barnside screaming, a long, loud animal howl. Then the sound of rotor blades in the sky, the bright, broad constant light falling from their underbellies.

Barnside's big, strong face came in front of her, looking concerned. 'I think I maybe broke your arm. When we fell.'

She tried to work out where she was, which way was up. 'It'll mend,' she mumbled automatically.

The physical world could stop you from thinking if you let it, she guessed. And thinking was really all that was left now. With her one good arm, she pulled the videophone out of her suit pocket, propped it up on the ground. 'Give me Lieberman,' she said swiftly, as Schulz came to the screen. In an instant he was there, looking troubled, older somehow.

'Michael,' she yelled. 'You knew this was going to happen.'

'I did?'

'Don't fuck me around!'

He looked lost, desolate. 'I'm sorry, I just told you what I knew — she's smart, smarter than us, in all probability.' Then he went quiet, let her get her head back. When he judged she was ready, he continued. 'I got around to some calculations on the receptor dish, based on the video we got from the satellite. I tried to figure out some position for the ground station from the way the dish was moving, where it was pointing. These are really rough, bear that in mind. But she can't be in Nevada. It has to be east of there. Way east, from what I could calculate of the angle of the dish.'

'Damn. You didn't tell us?'

He looked miserable, ashamed. 'I tried. But then I decided there's precious little point in standing in front of a charging elephant yelling at it to stop. Do you think it would have worked?'

She didn't speak.

'And,' he added, 'I could have been wrong. I was praying I was wrong, if you want to know.'

Finally, she said, 'Where is she? Where's Charley?'

'I don't know, Helen,' he said slowly. 'Really, I just don't know, and I can't calculate that with any degree of accuracy from the data we have. All I know is that it is a long way east of you, and probably somewhat north too. Maybe this side of the Atlantic even.'

'Then I guess she just won,' she sighed. 'We're an hour away from this thing going critical. I guess I just call the President now and tell him we're done here.'

'If you feel that's the right thing to do.'

'Give me an alternative.'

He was struggling with himself, she could see that. 'Yeah. I've been pushing an alternative at you all along. Why don't we stop looking where she tells us? And start thinking for ourselves?'

'Fine,' she said, and, for the first time, there was some sourness, some defeat in her voice. 'I'll tell that to the President.'

'Don't bother,' Lieberman said. 'I'll tell him myself, if you like.'

CHAPTER 56 Choices

Which he did. They set up a video conference on the system: Clarke at Nellis, Helen in pain on the ground at Cabin Springs, and Lieberman, Schulz, and Bennett, with Bevan watching over their shoulders and Mo Sinclair working the computer, at La Finca.

'Thanks, but I got people breathing down my neck trying to get me to sign executive orders on this one,' Clarke said grimly. 'If we really have no hope of stopping these people, I don't have much choice. From what I've seen of the damage before this thing peaks, maybe I ought to be doing that anyway, whether or not you people do have any luck.'

'We're missing something here, sir,' Lieberman said quietly. 'If we can just see it, I think we can get back in the game.'

Helen kept her peace.

'I'm not hearing the famed science people from the CIA,' the President grumbled. 'You care to enlighten me on your position right now, Miss Wagner?'

She tried to think straight through the pain in her arm. It wasn't broken, as Barnside had feared, but it damn well hurt. 'We have less than an hour before the cycle starts, sir. We also have clear evidence that our operation was compromised. They're worried, for sure. I guess that's why Wolfit attacked me. But I can't offer any hope that we can get back in the game.'

Jim Sellers was punching furiously away at a portable terminal a few yards away.

'We're running the scanning checks as thoroughly as we can,' she continued. 'But now we're told it could be a long way east of here. I can't get anything out of that. It's too big. We already know there's precious little chance of finding it through digital tracking alone. I can't — '

'Jesus,' Lieberman found himself yelling, 'do we all just give in that easily?'

'No,' Clarke replied. 'We've worked damn hard on this one, Mr Lieberman. People have got hurt. People have got killed, for chrissake. We don't give in at all. But sometimes we just have to cut our losses. If we really have no option except to wait and see what they can throw at us, then I ought to be signing these papers now. God knows, there's parts of the US that could use martial law at this very moment.'

'So what's new?'

'I don't have time for the smart-ass remarks, Lieberman.'

'I wasn't aware I made one. Sir.'

'Hell, get off the line, will you?' Clarke bellowed. 'We need people here solving problems, not making them.'

'No. You can hear me out. We've all fouled up on this one, me included. And you know why that was? We just didn't think. We treated these people like they were some crazy cult, not equals.'

Helen closed her eyes and listened, trying to still the pain in her head. 'I don't see where that gets us, Michael.'

'It gets us back to where we should have been all along. They've been putting up targets, we've been popping at them. Instead of asking questions, trying to think straight. I mean, what is the proposition Charley's put before us now?'

No one spoke.

'Okay, let me bury myself a little deeper,' he continued. 'First we tracked these people from San Francisco to San Diego. Then, after a lot of work, we tracked them through Vegas to this place we thought was Yasgur's Farm. Except we got it wrong. This whole thing was just a put-up job to lead us off the track if, by some chance, we got smart enough to detect a track in the first place. It looks like they were doing some Gaia work there, maybe erecting the Web site or something. But the real people, Charley in particular, they were elsewhere, just running some nice little virtual conspiracy across the Net.'

'You're not taking us anywhere,' Clarke said.

'No? So I ask again: What is the proposition we're being asked to believe now? What is it that Charley hopes we're thinking?'

Helen hugged her bad arm and tried to jog her brain into action. 'That somewhere else they have an identical set-up to this one, except that it has a working dome. And if we could find that, we'd be back on track.'

'Right. And the big question has to be: Is that true? Can that be true? Is it really possible?'

Clarke watched them, waiting for someone to break the silence. 'Well?'

'It's a hell of a job,' Schulz admitted. 'I mean, to be honest, putting together one control room and a single dome, even one with nothing inside it, that must have been tough in the time they had. Putting two together… it's possible, of course. But it wouldn't be easy.'

'Right,' Lieberman continued. 'So let's ask some practical questions. Did she buy enough material to build two domes?'

Helen shook her head. 'Not that we know of. The company we traced had just the one order. No other company dealing in dome material had anything that could count as a second one.'

Lieberman almost smiled. She could see something there. He detected a spark. 'Fine. So did she have the equipment to put inside it?'

Schulz made a pained face. 'We went through that one before, Michael. This is fairly standard telecommunications, satellite broadcasting kit. If you had the money and the know-how, you could put it together without having to breach any government guidelines or anything.'

'Yeah, I know. But this isn't stuff you buy off the shelf of Radio Shack. It's big and expensive. Someone must have kept a record somewhere. So. Did they?'

Helen shook her head. 'We have no trace of any equipment purchases in the US or Europe which could match that order. That doesn't mean she didn't get it somewhere else, maybe piecemeal to deceive us-'

'No,' he interrupted. 'But it does mean she probably never bothered.'

'Michael,' Schulz said, his voice rising to a whine, 'she had to buy it. What alternative is there?'

'You're looking at it the way she wants you to. "What's the alternative?" That's where she kills us. We know the alternative; we're just not considering it. She doesn't need a second dome. She doesn't need the equipment.'

'Not possible,' Schulz said flatly.

'It has to be. I don't know how. But that's what we have to figure out.'

'If I follow you,' Clarke said, a flicker of curiosity in his face, 'what you're proposing is that she has some way of tapping into an existing system and running Sundog through that?'

'Yeah. I guess that is what I'm saying.'

'Well, can someone tell me how?'

'Not possible,' Schulz said emphatically. 'No one can talk to Sundog except through the networks we created. Charley could copy that herself; she couldn't just impose it on someone else, not without them knowing, not without us knowing either. It's just not possible.'

Lieberman didn't let go. 'So, what is the answer?'

'Michael,' Schulz said, close to screaming, 'there isn't one. There were, as far as we know, only three domes in the world capable of controlling Sundog. No one else has that complete mix of technology, not even Charley herself, if we follow you. And those three domes are down. She did it herself. They're useless. End of conversation. End of story. Roll on the apocalypse, because I'm damned if I know how we can stop it.'

Clarke watched the two teams on the monitor. He knew despair when he saw it. They really had run out of options, out of ideas. 'I think you made my mind up, folks. You've tried your damnedest but I can't let this go on any longer.'

'They're wrong. You're all wrong.' Mo Sinclair blushed when she spoke, as if this weren't her place.

'Excuse me?' Clarke asked impatiently.

'She didn't take out all three domes,' Mo said. 'She took out the one in Kyoto and the one in California. But what she blew up here was the control centre, and that's a long way from the dome itself. We were there, Michael. Don't you remember? I don't recall seeing any explosions at the dome at all.'

Flames and noise, the helicopter bucking beneath them. He did remember. There was one image that stood out in his memory: the low, flat concrete control centre disintegrating in front of his eyes, and a sea of smoke and dust rising up toward the summit of Puig Roig. And somewhere inside that shroud, still golden, still intact, the dome, a good five hundred feet above the destruction.

'Shit,' Schulz said, eyes wide open. 'We assumed that bringing down the command centre took out the dome too. And it does for us. But if she could get a line in there… Are you sure?'

Lieberman wanted to hug her. 'Yeah. We're sure. We were there.'

The President glowered at them all. 'Someone want to tell me what that means?'

Schulz said quickly, 'If the dome here is still in one piece, all she needs is a microwave run up the ridge and they're in business. She's got the software. She's got the know-how. You don't need to build a damn thing else.’

Lieberman closed his eyes and thought of all the activity of the previous day, and the way the soldiers had been stood down, sent home with a shrug of the shoulders as if to say: Game over, go back to base, practise the crowd control. 'She's here,' he said. 'She's been here all along. And we just sent our men away, trailing their guns behind them.'

'You're guessing,' Bevan said defensively. 'This whole thing is just a wild guess.'

'Maybe,' Clarke said. 'But you got less than sixty minutes to find out, one way or another. After that I sign those papers. And God help us all.'

CHAPTER 57 Zenith

'I'll go,' Schulz said.

'You can't do that,' Helen said down the line. 'We have to have someone at La Finca who knows this thing inside out, Irwin. We can't spare you.'

Mo listened to the conversation and shrugged. 'You just need the network brought back on-line, Irwin. I can do it.'

'No, absolutely not.'

'Irwin,' she insisted, 'I want to go.'

'Mo,' Lieberman said, and he knew this battle was lost from the beginning. 'You have nothing to prove. Nothing to feel guilty about.'

'That's easily said.' She picked up a copy of the Unix handbook from the desk drawer, packed a pen down the spiral spine. 'I want Annie with me. They know her. She can't stay here on her own, and she may be able to help too.'

'These people — if they are there, and that I doubt — could be dangerous,' Bevan said. 'I don't want a kid around. We're cutting this fine as it is.'

'We go together or I don't go at all. They won't harm us. They're not like that.'

'But — ' Lieberman said, pleading.

'No.' Annie walked over, sat on her mother's lap, stared mutely at them all.

Bob Davis, the wiry helicopter pilot, came into the room, glanced at Lieberman, and said, 'I've looked and I've looked and this is all we have. One machine pistol. One nice and ladylike little Beretta. You' — he held one of the weapons out to Bevan — 'can take the machine pistol, I'll stick with the kid's stuff. I make this decision on the grounds that you are a better shot than me. I hope I'm not wrong.'

Annie stared at the gun, eyes wide.

'We won't need that crap,' Lieberman said.

'Really,' Bevan answered. 'I'm trying to regroup some forces from Palma but it's going to take an hour or so. If we do find something, we relay the position and wait for them.'

'We can't wait, Bevan. You know that.'

Davis looked at them. 'The girl's coming? You're kidding me.'

'Yes,' Mo said. 'Anyone else here speak Unix?'

'Oh wonderful,' Davis groaned.

He took a set of keys out of his pocket. 'Let's talk on the way. This is one old helicopter we're using here and I want it warming up a good two minutes before we attempt to levitate. Ready?'

Lieberman picked up the videophone, got ready to fold out the screen. Helen's face stared back at him. She looked hurt. It was hard to imagine her in pain, in darkness in the Nevada desert.

'Good luck, Michael,' she said, halfway across the world. 'It's my turn to say that now.'

'Yeah,' Schulz agreed, toying with the keyboard. 'You stay in touch. The moment you get an IP address, you let me in there. We can do this, I believe that.'

'I know.' He wished he could get rid of the image of Charley's face, wished he didn't feel such foreboding about just the chance of meeting her again. They went out to the dry flat ground of the helipad, climbed inside the purple-covered Squirrel that sat there, alone now.

'Three in the back, one in the front. And you' — the pilot pointed at Lieberman — 'are the front man. I need you to be my eyes. It's hard trying to fly this thing and scour the ground at the same time.'

Lieberman climbed into the left-hand seat feeling his guts start to churn already, thinking, all the time, how much he hated these things. Davis played with the controls, the engine whined, and slowly the rotors started to turn. Davis motioned for him to pick up the headset and put it on.

'Only two sets of cans in here, I'm afraid. So the people in the back will just have to lose their hearing for a little while.' The machine began to lift beneath them, rise and steady in the hot, unstable air.

Lieberman hit the talk button. 'Irwin? You hearing me?'

'Yeah,' said a distant tinny voice.

'And Helen?'

'Yes.' It sounded as if they were the same distance away, both trapped in some remote digital universe. 'So what am I looking for? Dishes?'

'Absolutely,' Schulz said. 'Maybe just one. Maybe several. It depends where they're based and what the terrain is like between them and the dome. This is line-of-sight. And they don't need to be big either.'

'Right.'

Helicopters and computers. These were, he was fast beginning to realize, his two least favourite things in the world. 'Irwin? You think they've been piggybacking off our network for some time?'

'Makes sense, if they tapped into the link. Even when we had control, we only used the network when we needed it. They could have used dead time, then locked us out when they decided to take control. Could have been messing with it for weeks.'

Lieberman shook his head. 'I still can't believe you wouldn't notice someone building an alternative microwave link up to your dome.'

Schulz sounded touchy. 'Really. Well think of it this way: If they have the protocols, and Charley seems to have taken them with her, all they need to get through is a dish the size of a satellite TV antenna. You tell me how easy that is to spot up there. And you're looking for it. Which we never were.'

'Point taken.' Lieberman watched the big mountain rise up in front of them. The dome was hidden from this angle. On the seaward side of the range, pine forest ran green and uninterrupted all the way to the water's edge, not a building, not even a track in sight. Davis passed him a large-scale map of the island. 'You work it out,' he said. 'Where are these people supposed to be based? In a building? In a cave? Or what?'

Lieberman pressed the transmit button. 'Irwin, what do they need to run a control centre like this? Power, obviously, but lots of space too?'

'Just what you saw here at La Finca. What they had in that place in Nevada too. We built that big command centre on the mountain underneath the dome because that was handling traffic from Kyoto and Lone Wolf on top of everything local and we did some R&D there too. That was like the server for the whole system. But if they're just dialling in, all they need is room for ten or so workstations and a line-of-sight microwave set-up.'

He still couldn't picture it. 'I'm trying to think of the kind of place we're looking for.'

'Michael, you're looking for Yasgur's Farm, surely. Only the real one this time.'

And then it came to him. He could almost see it. Schulz was right. Creating this simulacrum in the desert of their real home was just the sort of joke Charley would like.

'Fly to the top of the peak,' Lieberman said, letting go of the talk button. 'Let's check our base assumption first.'

The machine rose sluggishly in the hot, thin air. The day was bright and cloudless, the sun relentless. No interference. No shocks. More proof, if you needed it, Lieberman thought. Charley kept the island clear of attacks for practical reasons.

If she blasted La Finca, she could be blasting herself. The helicopter cleared a low col, spiralled upward, and, with a sudden lurch that left his stomach in midair, they crested the mountain. He looked down on the dome, and beyond to the blackened hulk of the command centre. He nodded at Mo in the back, then hit the talk button. 'The dome's perfect. Not so much as a crack in the skin.'

'I guess we were stupid,' Schulz said. 'Look for someplace within range where they could site a dish, Michael. The angle on the receptor at the dome is fairly shallow. My guess is they must have the last antenna at three thousand feet or more. Which means they probably have a line of dishes running back to their control centre. No one's going to find a place to build a base at that altitude without us knowing.'

Lieberman scanned the horizon through a pair of binoculars and glanced at the chart. The seaward side of the range had to be out. There was no obvious place for a base, and the forest was too thick. But on the landward side, the terrain ran away into a complex formation of sharp, dramatic valleys and long, bare headlands, tumbling all the way down to a plateau at around a thousand feet.

'Think about it,' Davis said, holding the helicopter in hover. 'We know they're not on the seaward side. We know they can't be on the island plain — that would be too public and the distance would probably be too great.'

'So they're somewhere in that mess,' Lieberman said, looking at the rolling, tumbling landscape in front of them. The machine dropped suddenly, lurching to one side. Davis struggled with the controls, brought it back to straight and level.

'Sorry. Turbulence.'

'My.' Lieberman stifled a gastric burp. Then he put the glasses to his eyes once more and surveyed a rocky spur that stood a good eight hundred feet beneath the summit of Puig Roig. 'Close in on that.'

The helicopter moved forward, starting to descend. 'Got it,' Davis said, and Lieberman found himself envying the pilot's eyesight. Even with the glasses, it still looked like a grey blur to him.

The machine moved swiftly to close the gap, then Davis put it into hover thirty feet away from the rock face. The dish had been disguised, a little half-heartedly, with some brushwood. Lieberman pulled out the videophone, pointed the lens out of the front of the helicopter.

'This look right, Irwin?'

'Yeah,' the remote voice replied. 'Where is it?'

'About half a mile southwest of the dome.'

'Got to be more in the line, Michael. There's nowhere to run a base close to there. Look for the receptor antenna. It's like a smaller dish, with a rectangular box in it. Where that's fixed on the thing, that's lining up with the next link in the chain.'

'There,' Davis said instantly. It was to one side of the main antenna, pointing down, back into a narrow valley. The helicopter turned away from the mountain and began to descend through the huge cleft in the rock.

'You know where we're going?'

'Just like a treasure hunt, old man.' Davis grinned. 'One clue leads on to the next.'

They watched the dark, narrow valley come up to greet them. The shadows embraced the little metal machine as it fell. Abruptly, the interior of the aircraft felt cold. Lieberman turned round, watched Bevan mutely hugging the weapon, Mo holding Annie in her arms.

'You two okay?' he said. They nodded.

'Don't throw up, Michael,' Annie said.

'Hadn't even occurred to me.'

'There!' Davis was pointing to another dish, half-hidden in a small clump of scrubby pine.

'We're still nowhere near something that looks like a base,' Lieberman said. The helicopter bounced up to the rock face, stopped ten feet from the dish, Davis peering at the thing, looking for a pointer.

'Like I said.' Davis smiled. 'It's a treasure hunt.' And then the Squirrel dived again.

'Why not?' Joe Katayama wouldn't let this one go. He was annoying her, there was no escaping the fact.

'Because I said so.'

'Eve just left. Everyone else is gone now. It's just you and me. If something goes wrong, if they do find us, they could turn this around.'

'Joe, Joe.' The dope was in her head, she could feel it, but that didn't make her weak or crazy. If anything, it strengthened her, made her sense what was happening more effectively than ever. 'Have you forgotten why we're doing this? Not to harm people. Not to harm the world. For Gaia. And she's with us. You can't feel that, I know. But you have to believe me. It's so.'

'I believe we risk jeopardizing everything by leaving this system open. Give me the code, Charley. Let me set the program in stone, then destroy the dish link. That way no one can touch it.'

'And no one gets to see this through, correct any errors along the way.'

He made a sour face, sat down next to her wheelchair, and folded his arms. 'Charley, if this is about being scared…'

She closed her eyes and let out a long, pained sigh. 'Scared? Joe. I am the woman who's turning the world on its head. I don't know how much blood is on my hands. Do you think this is because I'm scared?'

'I need the code. Please. Give me the code.'

'It's time for you to leave,' she said icily. 'I don't need you any more, Joe. Go. With my love. With my respect. Don't push this any further. I wouldn't want those things put in jeopardy.'

And you don't know how to do it without me, Joe, do you? she added silently.

It was suddenly plain to her. For all his skill, for all the work he put into setting up the fake dome, getting hot-wired into the real one, Joe was lost on the network. Without her, he could only watch.

'No. You're not a god, Charley. You're not always right. There's something happened in your head that means you don't see straight any more, and I can't allow that. We have to go through with this, all the way, and we have to make sure no one stops us.'

'You have no faith. You have strength, Joe. You have a terrible strength, like men do. But you have no faith. And in the end you're as stupid as the rest of them. You should go now. You don't understand those figures coming in about the storm. It's erratic. It's changing. I can't just leave it alone.' His cold Asian eyes watched her. He was quiet, and in this silence Charley Pascal tried to remember: Where did Joe appear from? And failed. Her head was running down into oblivion, like a clock unwinding, like a child's toy with a failing battery.

'Yeah,' he said unpleasantly. 'Stupid.' Then got up and walked for the door.

'It's your time, Joe!' she yelled.

Katayama walked over to the corner of the room. 'What the hell are you doing?' Charley screamed. 'Something you can't, Charley.' Rage, red rage.

'Fuck you, fuck every last part of you!' He stopped, looked back at her over his shoulder, and for a brief moment she felt afraid. 'You crazy bitch,' he said quietly. 'Just stay there, dying. If you want a shit from now on, crawl to the can on your own. I don't carry you any more. Understand?'

'Joe?' The old Charley, good Charley, scared Charley, watching the last person she would ever see in this world walk out of the room, a fog of seething anger around his head. 'Touch that fucking system, Joe, and I'll see you in hell, I promise that. You leave those things alone.'

'Yeah,' he grunted, going out the door. 'You come make me.' And was gone.

Charley Pascal wanted to scream, wanted to curse this iron frame that trapped her. But her thoughts felt messed up, the world wouldn't stay upright. Her head began to spin.

Somewhere overhead, soft and repetitive, was the beating of rotor blades, getting louder, getting nearer, falling from the clear blue sky like ghostly rain.

It looked like a miniature version of La Finca. When they got to the end of the line of dishes, down in the heart of the valley, still a good fifteen hundred feet above sea level, they found Yasgur's Farm — the real one, Lieberman knew that immediately. It was accessible only through a single dirt track and stood in a meadow of parched yellow grass, the odd poppy waving blood-red out of the soil. Golden stone, a four-square barn of a house, with a few farm buildings at its periphery. And no sign of life. No sign it was anything but deserted.

Davis peered at him.

He stared at the pilot and said, 'It has to be.' Then turned to Schulz and Helen on the video screen. 'We think we've found the place. We're going down.'

'Michael,' she said, 'take care. We can't get in support for a good twenty minutes or so.'

'Yeah.' He tried to smile. Then the Squirrel bobbed and wheeled, descended to the ground in a cloud of dust, and, with a solidity Lieberman adored, found its feet on the dry grass in front of the house. He pulled the cans off his ears, turned to Mo. 'You and Annie stay behind us. We don't know what we'll find here. We don't want you in the way until we need you. And when we do need you, it has to happen fast. You have to establish a network link straight through to Irwin, and he can take it from there. Right, Bevan?'

'Right.' He looked younger now, less confident. Maybe he was scared, just like the rest of them. Lieberman popped open the door and jumped down into the dry, thin air, took a couple of deep breaths, praying for his head to clear. The light was too strong, the day too hot. It felt like they had landed in an oven. Davis and the others joined him, staring at the house.

'Company,' Davis said. And they watched the tall, lean figure of Joe Katayama walk toward them, then come to a halt six feet away, between them and the house. He stood still, arms folded, staring with cold, quizzical eyes. Lieberman looked at every inch of this big, powerful man and thought: He's unarmed. Davis stood, tensely playing with his weapon, and Bevan watched this small drama unravelling, nervous too.

'Joe,' Mo Sinclair said behind them, and Lieberman could hear Annie let out a low, quiet whimper of fear.

'Hey, listen to me. We're going in,' he said to the imposing, still figure. 'This thing has to end now.'

'No.' When his big head moved slowly from side to side like that he looked wooden, like a statue, not quite human. 'You're too late. The zenith's nearly here. And we burned the link after we set the program. It's all gone now. You've got no pathway up there. You've got no hope. Like the woman said: Prepare. Now, why don't you go tell your bosses that?'

'Right. Well, that sounds nice and sensible. But you don't mind if we check for ourselves, now, do you? And me and Charley, we go back some — it would be a shame to come all this way without saying hello.'

'No, you can —'

'Mummy!' Annie's shriek brought Lieberman's head back down to earth, back from this image of the sky, dancing, wheeling, aligning, that filled it right then. A shadow passed in front of him, something following it. Mo was walking toward Katayama, her back to them, her hands out from her sides, fingers stretching, saying, 'No, Joe, it's okay, Joe…'

And Annie, screaming, ran behind, catching up fast.

'Hey.' Lieberman touched Mo's hair briefly. 'Let's all stay cool. Okay?' And didn't feel cool at all (this is some form of redemption, the inner voice said, this is Mo paying herself back).

'Joe,' she said, so close to him, a hand reaching up touching his cheek (a cold cheek, Lieberman thought, seeing, in his head, the picture of the girl with the snapped neck on the Web, and registering these big strong hands). 'We were wrong. Wrong. Can't you understand that? All of us. And when you get out of this place you'll understand that, you'll see it was just our closeness that made us crazy like this. We lost perspective.'

'Perspective,' he said, and in one swift movement reached forward, pushed Mo aside, snatched Annie by the hair, twisted her around with a single violent blow, and from somewhere there was a gun at her throat, the barrel glinting silver in the dazzling sunlight.

'No…' Mo said, scrabbling on the ground, close to sobbing (tears of rage, Lieberman thought, tears of fury).

'Shut up,' Katayama said calmly. 'You fucking people. You get back in that machine. You get out of here. Leave us alone. You understand that? And when this is over, when we see what's done, then you come back for her. If you can.'

Annie was tight in his grip, not struggling, eyes wide open. Flesh on flesh, flesh on metal, and the sky bore down on them all, like a heavy golden weight on their shoulders.

Screaming (no words, nothing you could understand), Mo Sinclair rose from the ground, took hold of his giant, muscled hand, and then tore at it with her fingers, tore at the tendon (the shield goes down, Lieberman thought, this is the way this big, cold man is thinking just now), her body was pulling him away from Annie, the silver shape moving, Annie ducking, getting free from his grasp, and behind the animal gasp of Davis's laboured breathing.

Then Lieberman was pushed aside by the small, frantic figure, gun rising, these figures moving so slowly in the hot, meagre air, like puppets dancing on strings, limbs jerking, mouths agape, all fear and fury. A sound, like the cracking of a whip. Then a second, different in timbre, from another direction. He looked at Katayama, who was exposed now, his shield had escaped, and slowly, with the agonized motion of broken film running wild through the mechanism of some ancient projector, a small red dot appeared in his cheek, grew, became a livid, pumping rose, the colour of blood, the colour of flesh, then opened, like a window into his head.

Someone screaming, Annie, racing back, not caring, not minding. And Mo Sinclair, slumped to the ground (two shots, he thought, two different sounds), a dark, intense stain spreading across her cheap white T-shirt, bubbles of blood appearing at her mouth.

Look.

You look, Charley. This is your doing. Not mine.

Look.

He ran over, was by her side, not knowing what to say. Annie was weeping, shaking uncontrollably. The red stain covered most of Mo's chest now, and it was alive, something pumped strength into it from inside her, stealing away her vitality by the second.

Her eyes rolled, so white, so open. 'Annie…' Her mouth was filled with blood, dark and pulsing. Hands trembling, Lieberman shook the videophone free, flipped it open, yelled for backup, yelled for a doctor, and didn't even wait to hear the answer. Bob Davis knelt by him, touched Mo lightly, touched her wrist, tried to hold the girl off.

'Be careful, Annie,' Davis said. 'She's hurt. You mustn't make it worse.'

'Where the hell did he get the gun?' Lieberman yelled, his mind racing. Ellis Bevan stood behind them, ashen-faced, looking scared. Lieberman joined Annie, kneeling by her side. 'Hey,' he said, holding her hand. 'You just keep calm, now. We can get help in here. We can call someone on the radio.' 'No time,' Mo said (the blood bubbling, boiling over her tongue, her teeth, her voice thick with the viscous blackness there). 'Michael, go…'

'We can carry you,' he mumbled, astonished at the flatness of his own voice.

'No,' Davis said, looking gingerly at the wound. 'We can't move her. It's too dangerous. She has to wait here for the doctor. It's the only way.'

'Michael, I'm cold…' Her eyes were losing their light, her skin seemed paler, thinner, and Annie howled, screamed and howled (in this place, Lieberman knew, you go mad, everything disappears, gets stripped from your soul). Mo's thin arm, the walnut tan already looking lifeless, came up slowly; a hand, a single finger, went to Annie's face.

Michael Lieberman closed his eyes, wished himself out of this nightmare, wished himself anywhere else in the world. Then felt her fingers close on his.

'Annie,' Mo said (voice so thick, Lieberman had to work to follow her now). 'You have to help Michael now. You have to leave me, go with him.'

'Mom,' Annie whispered, her face long and ashen, and they could feel her grip weakening, the life draining out of her.

He watched all this from some distanced, remote part of himself, and knew then that your mind goes crazy watching someone die. You go to some space, some part of the world where nothing is real, where a voice inside you screams: Take me, take me. But there was no way to change places, one life for another, even if he thought it the cheapest deal in the world to make. He watched Annie in her agony, watched Mo slipping away into the dark, his consciousness dwindling into this single, searing focal point of suffering. It was like kneeling in a golden, roaring ocean of heat and light screaming silently around them all.

'Michael,' Davis said (his voice coming from outside this world they had entered). 'Michael?'

He opened his eyes, looked at Mo Sinclair's prone frame, her colourless face, eyes closed, chest scarcely moving.

'I can't handle this on my own,' Davis said. 'The medics are on their way. There's nothing we can do here.'

'Annie,' he mumbled. She held her mother's hand, eyes closed, softly weeping. 'Annie. She's right.' He scarcely recognized his own voice. 'We've got to do this. You've got to help me try.'

The girl said nothing. He felt like a jerk. Ellis Bevan was over by Joe Katayama's body, searching through the pockets.

'Did you find anything?' Bob Davis asked him.

'No,' Bevan replied, scanning the horizon. 'There could be more of them. We should bear that in mind.'

'I don't think so,' Lieberman said. You could feel, from Katayama's presence, what kind of role he had in this place: one of strength, one of enforcement. 'They're gone. If we're going to do this now, we've just one more person to see.'

Annie watched Davis place his jacket over her mother, watched the small movement of her chest, wiped the tears from her eyes with her arm, not sobbing any more, not trying to avoid this sight. She looked at Michael Lieberman and took his hand.

'I can do it,' she said.

Charley Pascal sat in the wheelchair, eyes unfocused, drugged maybe, Lieberman thought, and said, 'I'm sorry about your mother, Annie. We're creatures of the dark. We all live in agony. You get to know that as you grow older, you get to understand its taste in your mouth.'

Annie tapped away at the keyboard, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes.

'Spare us this, Charley,' Lieberman said. 'You've done enough.'

Davis stood by the door, not letting go of his gun. Bevan was beside Charley, watching her like a hawk. And how much damage can a crippled woman do? Lieberman wondered. Ask someone in Kyoto. Ask those people struggling for life as this wall of heat and poison sweeps across the world with the sun. Ask Annie and Mo.

He propped the videophone on the desk by the side of the monitor, watched Annie typing away, and prayed for the thing to work. Slowly, hesitantly, the system made some contact with the outside. Schulz appeared, a little indistinct, Helen, even more shaky, in an adjoining window.

'Annie?' Schulz said, puzzled. 'Where's Mo?'

Lieberman pushed himself in front of the camera. 'We don't have time, Irwin. Mo's been shot. They're calling for the medics now.'

Schulz looked as pale as a sheet of paper. 'Oh my God — '

'Irwin,' Lieberman said, close to barking. 'We're here. This is your play now. You try and get in through the front door.'

'Sure. I'm sorry. All I need is the IP address. Do you know what that is, Annie? How to get it?'

'I think so,' she said quietly, moving at the keyboard, watching the screen.

'What happened, Michael?' Helen's flickering image asked, the concern obvious on her face, even through this less than perfect picture.

'Later. We're behind. Let's just work on this, okay?'

'You look — '

'Later!'

She was silent.

'Try it now,' Annie said.

Schulz seemed preoccupied for a moment, then beamed back at them. 'I think you did it, Annie.' They could hear the sound of the keyboard clacking down the line. 'Right. We're there. Well done. In a moment, the network's ours.'

Lieberman watched as the girl buried her face in her hands. Then the big monitor cleared, lines of geek commands scrolled up and down too quickly to read, and Schulz and Helen came up again, in separate windows, looking a little less flaky this time.

'What next?' Lieberman asked.

'The key,' Schulz said. 'She's put her own password on it, probably just an ordinary word, except it's encrypted so we can't read it directly from the system. Just give it to us, Charley. We can get it anyway. Save some time here.'

She sat in the wheelchair, not worried about this, Lieberman

thought, just waiting for the celestial dance to do its stuff.

'Don't be ridiculous, Irwin,' Charley said. 'Why should I do that?'

'Because we need it,' Lieberman said. 'Can't you separate what's going on inside your head from what's happening out here? This isn't some dream; these aren't shadows of your imagination. These are real people. This is a real world.'

'I know that,' she said sourly. 'I worked that out a long time ago.'

He shook his head. She looked a little scared, he thought. Maybe there was a chink of light somewhere inside still. 'No you didn't, Charley. You just saw what was happening inside yourself and thought this was some kind of mirror image of what the rest of us deserved. Well, you're wrong, and if you thought about it you'd know.'

'Still letting them fool you, Michael. Such a waste.' 'This isn't Berkeley circa 1971, Charley,' he said. 'Quit dreaming.' 'Go to hell.'

'I'm there already, I don't need directions. Also, I don't need you. Helen?'

Her head nodded on the screen. 'He's right. This is a standard Unix-based password. With the technology we have in Langley, and you're hooked right through to that now, we can blast our way through every one of those in a little under forty-five minutes. So you see we will get it. You won't stop us.'

'Go ahead,' Charley said.

Lieberman looked at Helen on the screen and didn't say a word.

'Why do you fight this, Michael?' Charley asked. 'If it wasn't us, it would have been someone else. This is Gaia working. It has to happen. We can't carry on like this.'

He stopped staring at the computer and wondered if it was worth pleading with her. But there was craziness in her eyes, a dead, fanatic certainty. This illness, and whatever else it brought, put her beyond that kind of appeal.

'Michael,' she said, 'this is crazy. You should be thinking about rebuilding this world after the storm blows over. You could lead them.'

'Jesus,' he yelled. 'Where did you get this from? Peace and love and corpses? Are you really still stuck in that vision? What do you think comes after this? Eden?'

'If that's what we want.'

'Bullshit! Bob? Where the hell is that medical team?'

Davis was going through the door already. 'I'll chase it.'

Lieberman looked at Bevan. All Bevan's confidence had disappeared. He was shocked, and scared. 'You too, Ellis. See what you can do for Mo. I can handle this.'

'Sure,' Bevan said lamely, and was gone.

Lieberman shook his head. There were too many images there. Mo's agonized face. The world winding down, like numbers flicking through the code program on the screen, so quickly you couldn't even recognize them. As this celestial ballet began in the sky, he felt drained and dead.

'We will get that code, Charley. But you could give it to us. You could do that for yourself, as much as anyone else in the world.'

'Just wait…' she said (and closed her eyes, saw the planets wheeling in space, felt this force moving within her).

'No. You're wrong. Sure, you can push those buttons, burn the earth badly right now. But what we all wake up to tomorrow isn't some new age of enlightenment. It's just human beings getting hurt, getting scared. You're worse than the people you hate, Charley. You're the dinosaur. Not us.'

Helen was staring at him from the screen and he didn't need words to understand the message. The monitor wasn't sparking with hits the way it should. Something was wrong.

'You can feel things, Charley. Things the rest of us can only guess at. Don't tell me you can't feel that too.' She wasn't listening, he guessed. She was holding tight on to the arms of her wheelchair, eyes closed, face taut with pain.

'I need my medication. They're on the desk.'

'Right.' He nodded. 'What kind of pills might they be?'

She stared at him. 'You'll give it to me? Is that meant to be some kind of a deal?'

He shrugged. 'No. You know me. I hate deals.' Then he walked over to the desk.

'Michael?' Helen said, a taut note of concern in her voice.

'You heard. She needs her pills.' He handed her the bottle without looking at it. She took it, opened the cap with shaking hands, poured several capsules into the palm of her hand.

'Thanks. You always were a good guy, Michael. That's why people take advantage of you.' She looked at the pile of capsules, took a deep breath, put them in her mouth, then swallowed hard. He watched her struggling, took a bottle of mineral water from a desk nearby, gave it to her to drink.

'Michael,' Helen said, voice rising from the monitor.

'Thanks.' Charley was looking at him, her face full of pain, so much older than he remembered. 'You can't get it, you know.'

'What's that?'

'The password. I'm not so stupid that I'd leave it open to some dumb number-juggling app like that. You're wasting your time. That's why she's squawking at you. Don't you know that?'

'Hey' — he shrugged — 1 kind of guessed. It was worth a try, though. We're desperate, Charley. What do you expect me to do?'

'I told you. Think about what comes after.'

'Sorry. That's the kind of crap that got us here in the first place. "Catch a falling star…"'

' "And put it in your pocket…"' Charley said, a lazy, drunken smile on her face.

'Annie?' She looked at Lieberman with old, tired eyes.

'You did well but I don't need you any more. Take Irwin off-line, will you?'

'You mean,' she asked, puzzled, 'cut them off?'

'Yeah. Just from the line to the satellite. I still want them to be able to talk to us.'

'Okay,' Annie replied, and hit the keyboard.

'Michael!' Helen's voice sounded shrill and piercing from the tinny speaker.

'Don't fret,' he said, and sat down next to Annie at the adjoining PC.

'What's going on?' Schulz asked nervously.

Lieberman looked at their pale, exhausted faces. 'Are you having any luck?'

'I don't think so,' Helen admitted.

'I thought not. Annie?' She was calm, but he knew what she wanted.

'Your mom will be proud of you. You go to her now.'

It had been a long time since he'd punched these particular keys in anger. He kept getting things wrong. And it was years since he'd designed those big solar wings now hanging over the world.

'What are you doing?' Charley asked, her voice a blurred smear.

'Remember. Lone Wolf around 1982. You were there. You recall that too?'

'No,' she drawled, a line of taut anxiety behind the slurred voice.

'But you do. And you know something? Maybe there is some kind of god around. Because yesterday, and I didn't even know it at the time, something came back from that time, and I didn't even know it until right now.'

Sitting by the sea at Half Moon Bay, on a warm July afternoon, the two of them happy (this was when they were just friends, colleagues), full of the confidence and optimism of youth. Shading their eyes and looking up at the sun, thinking how they could help everyone by putting a piece of silicon and metal in the sky to leach a little of its power and make the world whole.

'What do you recall of that time?' he asked absentmindedly, working at the keys.

'Naivete. Dumbness,' she said.

'Yeah,' he muttered. In his mind's eye he was back with their old selves then; he could see them, bright-eyed and full of enthusiasm, arguing about the right lock to put on the system, the mot juste that would keep it safe from prying eyes.

He turned and looked at Charley. 'You remember.'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' she answered, some dim form of fury behind the statement.

He looked at the screen and it was like peering at a past picture from his life. All Schulz's stuff was state-of-the-art visuals, like a video game made for the military. But back in the eighties, when he and Charley had been putting the satellite together, the original one, it was just command-line material, string upon string of impenetrable, inconvenient codes that brought forth impenetrable, inconvenient responses. It amazed him the way they still lived inside his head.

'What are you doing?' Charley said icily.

'The right thing,' he said, and watched the screen clear, throw up one single question: password?

It was a playful argument on the beach that day, one that amused them at the time, trying to find a lock for the bold, brash scheme that would give mankind a nice little push into space. And they both came up with the answer, kept it secret between the two of them, knowing that there was nothing more apposite under the circumstances.

He typed in the word: phaeton. And closed his eyes.

Dumb kid, hapless kid, stupid kid, he thought. But, hey. The moron was a trier.

Charley had used something to lock this new system up, and even though the situation wasn't the same, was full of black poisonous toys they had never envisaged back then, it was still appropriate.

'It heard you,' Schulz squeaked out of the monitor, sounding like a teenager. 'I saw the screen. Dammit, Michael. It heard you!'

'Yeah,' he answered softly, and wondered why there was something like shame hanging around the back of his head just then. Some of the old Charley was still there, he guessed. It made her lock this new, bright, fiery Sundog with the same key they used on the old one, the good one, as if it were some kind of incantation, full of a deep, mysterious power.

'I can take it from here,' Schulz said. 'Just plug me back in.'

'I know that.' Lieberman wasn't looking at anything but the screen. 'But this is my baby, Irwin. Mine to play with.' He was typing furiously now, astonished by how much came back to him.

'Michael,' Helen said very firmly, 'what are you doing?'

'I remembered, yesterday. Out of nowhere. Or maybe out of somewhere. I wouldn't care to guess. What do you think, Charley?' He turned to look at her and it was like staring at someone on the point of death. Her face was grey and lifeless; her eyes had lost that bright Charley spark.

'Don't, Michael'

Lights started to move on the monitor. Familiar windows began to appear.

'We can take it from here,' Schulz repeated.

'I heard you the first time. Like I said: This is my baby. You just get that damn helicopter here.'

He looked at Charley. Her head was in her hands. 'Correction. Our baby.'

Schulz watched what was happening on the screen and said, 'Michael, no…'

From somewhere, Helen was yelling, loud, angry, and more than a little scared.

In under thirty seconds it was done. He watched the confirmation codes come through. Then he walked behind the desk, found the power cables, ripped them out of the wall, relished the dying hum of the hard drives spinning down into stillness, the silence that was descending on the room.

'You didn't listen,' Charley said, her eyes almost closed now. 'The god's not out there. It's inside us. Inside everything. The earth most of all.'

'Didn't I?'

'No,' she said drowsily, eyes half-closed, some softness in her voice that reminded him of the old Charley. 'And no devils, Michael, you never did understand that. There are no devils. Only the ones we make ourselves. We make our own crosses. We hammer in the nails.'

'Yeah,' he muttered, looking at the distant shape of Annie, who was now out in the yard with the pilot, both of them crouched over the still, small figure on the ground. 'I wouldn't argue with that.'

'I don't want to see this,' Charley Pascal said. She grabbed the wheels of the chair, tried to push, and lacked the strength.

'Where to?'

'Over there. My bedroom.'

He pushed her slowly toward the door, and recognized the white, plain room and the part it had played in the deadly little drama he'd watched in horror on the Web. She wheeled herself inside, turned round, and watched him reach for the door. Charley's face was bloodless. Her eyes were wet.

'Don't hate me,' she said.

Lieberman looked at her, then turned round without speaking.

The monitor was dead and grey. The job was done. Somewhere high above them in space those giant wings were wheeling into a new position, opening their eyes to stare the sun straight in the eye without blinking. And whether it worked or not was really beyond him. This was the final act. Time and the storm growing in the sky had taken everything else away from them.

He left Yasgur's Farm, strode out into the burning sun. The day was like a furnace, no wind, no oxygen in the air. You could be on another planet, he told himself. You could be in hell.

He walked over to Mo Sinclair, a still form in the blazing heat, the red on her chest drying to a dust-caked ochre that moved almost imperceptibly with each faint breath.

'We need the medics right now,' Davis said, and looked at the sky. It was the colour of gold and empty. Bevan was scanning the horizon desperately. 'We can't just wait out here like this. I think we ought to get her out of this heat.'

Annie touched her mother's hand. It was dry and cold. Lieberman bent down, picked up Mo's body in his arms, lifted her off the ground, and began to walk, slowly, carefully across the dusty ground, letting the thoughts run out of his head like water overflowing from a pail. Davis and Bevan watched and stood beneath the sun, waiting for the sound of blades to cut through the day.

In the darkness of the barn, the air hot and swimming with flies, he laid her on a bed of straw, not looking anywhere except her face (which is where the soul resides, a stubborn memory told him that; the rest of you, the blood, the physical mechanics of your body were all, somehow, irrelevant).

They sat down next to her on the soft, brittle straw, watched the world outside through the stone doorway, a rectangle of burning light, getting brighter, more intense by the minute. Annie touched his hands, held both of them together, in a shape that was so close to prayer. The air grew thin; the buzzing of the insects gave it a febrile, relentless power.

Zenith.

An odd word, he thought. Like an incantation from some occult rite, or the secret name of God. Too small, too weak to describe this celestial alignment that stood above the head of the world, bore down on it with all the dead, heavy weight of the stars. There were no words for this, only the relentless, surging beat of the universe, pumping through your blood, hammering on the walls of your skull.

In silence, clutching each other for comfort, they watched the day turn to fire.