DALE BAILEY

SHEEP'S CLOTHING

I have never much admired assassins. Their methods -- subterfuge and unexpected
violence -- possess little appeal for me; in those rare situations when action
is necessary, I have always favored direct confrontation. Anything less seems
unethical.

Certainly I never aspired to be one.

I saw some of that kind -- or so I have always imagined -- in the Brazilian
Conflict. The steambox, we called the place, and on a still night you could lie
wakeful in the equatorial heat of the Cuiaba barracks and listen to the
detonations of sniper fire bat away through the dark, humid air. And, of course,
there were more than a few of the type on our side, as well. Types, I should
say, for if you have devoted any thought to the matter at all -- and during
these last months I have thought of little else -- it is evident that no two
assassins are driven by precisely the same motives.

Not that there aren't broad categories.

I can think of three. There is the madman, most common I suppose, fired by the
blaze of his own obsessions. He hears the voice of God or he is anxious for the
warrior's paradise. He is the crazed fan, the car bomber.

There is the killer motivated by greed. He works for the highest bidder, and
takes pride in his skills. He is the mercenary, the hired gun, the hit man.

Finally, there is the man driven by the genuine belief that he is committing
violence for utilitarian purposes -- that his small evils are counterbalanced by
a greater good. Of the three, he is most rare, most dangerous.

And of course, he always runs the risk that he is one of the other type, and
simply hasn't the wisdom to see it.

"Senator Philip Hanson of North Carolina," Napolean Thrale said. He sat behind a
polished mahogany desk, impressively barren, refulgent in the luminous halo of
the floor-to-ceiling windows that formed the outer wall.

"What do you think of the man, Mr. Stem?"

The question took me by surprise. I'm not sure what I had expected when the
creamy invitation had been hand-delivered the previous afternoon to the door of
my Annapolis home, but certainly it wasn't this.

I say invitation, but it was a summons really, for what else can you call such a
request from one of the most powerful men in the country? Certainly I was in no
position to refuse. Every other semester or so, I teach a course at the Naval
Academy in virtual remote warfare, but I do it on an adjunct basis. The rest of
the time I do not work, and as a result I live with a certain austere economy,
nibbling away at my small inheritance and waiting for my military pension.
Economic realities, if nothing else, compelled me to attend.

Now, however, I found myself uncertain how to proceed. I glanced at the two
people sitting on the couch opposite, an owlish-looking young man in
silver-rimmed glasses, and a slim middle-aged woman with graying hair pulled
severely away from the angular planes of her face. Neither of them spoke, so I
turned to look at Thrale, to look past him.

Thrale's desk, the couch, and the chair where I sat formed an island of
furniture in the center of the large high-ceilinged chamber. The windows beyond
Thrale commanded a magnificent view. From my chair, I could see the immaculate
grounds of the house drop abruptly to the turbulent rim of the Chesapeake Bay. A
gull wheeled through the clear sky, and for a moment

I imagined how it would feel to soar through that lofty emptiness. Free, I
thought. That's how it must feel. And suddenly I wondered if the man behind the
desk ever thought of birds, and if he envied them.

Napolean Thrale did not appear to envy anyone. He sat rigidly erect in a
motorized wheelchair, his hands folded on the desk. His upper body was broad and
heavily muscled beneath his tailored shirt. Though his legs were hidden beneath
the desk, I knew that they were shrunken and useless -- his badge of honor from
the Brazilian Conflict. Mine is engraved upon my heart.

The owlish-looking fellow cleared his throat, but Thrale spoke first, his voice
carrying the tone of quiet authority I have come to associate with men
accustomed to unquestioning obedience. "Please, Dr. Truman. Give the man time."
Thrale turned the terrific weight of his regard on Truman, and with the movement
afternoon sunlight gleamed against his clean-shaven skull.

Truman fell silent.

Out the window, the seagull dived toward the dark water. It rose through spray,
a fish clutched in its beak. I suddenly realized that my hands were shaking.

"Senator Hanson." I clenched my hands into hard fists. "Perhaps it would be most
diplomatic to say that I am violently opposed to his politics."

Thrale studied me out of eyes as green and depthless as the eyes of a snake. I'd
seen that unwavering gaze before -- any soldier who's been in combat has. They
call it the thousand yard stare. "The question is, Mr. Stem," Thrale said, "just
how violently opposed are you?" He emphasized the word "violently" in a way that
I didn't necessarily like.

"Why is that the question?"

Thrale re-adjusted himself in his chair with a movement suggestive of a
deliberate attempt to be casual. Had he been able, I feel certain, he would have
pushed his chair back and stretched out his legs. Instead he contented himself
with slumping his powerful upper body and tenting his long fingers atop the
desk. "My people have looked into you, Mr. Stem. You are a man rife with
contradiction, did you know that?"

"So I've been told."

He nodded, almost imperceptibly, and the woman stood. I had the sense that I was
at the heart of some elaborately choreographed dance. She crossed the space
between us and clasped my hand with a brief masculine intensity. "Dr. Elise
Pangborn," she said, and with a gesture at the couch, "Dr. Gregory Truman." The
other man dipped his head. Without looking at the Bay, Pangbom circled the desk
to stand behind Thrale. She placed her hands atop his broad shoulders with a
gesture at once proprietary and maternal.

"You've quite an impressive background, Mr. Stem," she said. "Forty confirmed
kills in the Mato Grosso, instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy, a leading expert
in virtual remote warfare."

"And yet," said Thrale, "in your published writings an outspoken advocate of
disarmament."

This was all true, yet I could not help but agree with Truman when he coughed
theatrically and said, "For Christ's sake, the man knows his own resume." He
stood and crossed the room to study the giant Picasso affixed to one wall.

"But what do you want with me?" I said.

"That brings us back to Senator Hanson," Pangborn said.

"There's a proposal for a sizeable new weapons program that's been locked up in
committee for some time," Thrale said. "Hanson has the swing vote on the thing
and he's dithering -- not out of civic responsibility, you understand, but
simply because he wants a larger piece of the action."

"He's about to get it," Pangborn said. "One of the companies that stands to
benefit has proposed to build a major facility in the senator's district. You
see the implications, of course."

"Hanson's going to give it the green light, I suppose," I said. "So what? It's
hardly the first weapons initiative, and I'm sure it won't be the last."

Thrale smiled a thin unpleasant smile. "Of course not. However, the proposed
facility is not a factory, Mr. Stem. It is a laboratory designed to engineer
tailored viruses amongst other things. Just like Brazil, only this time right in
the middle of downtown Asheville."

Thrale's words sent an icy blade skating along my spine. No one had known about
the biological agents being used along the Xingu -- not until too late. It was
the biggest scandal in U.S. government since' Watergate; heads rolled at every
level of the intelligence agencies, but that didn't stop the rot.

It didn't keep my daughter from dying.

"Not that Hanson gives two shits about the danger," said Elise Pangborn, and the
profanity was shocking here in this formal room with the Bay, scrubbed and
unpolluted, crashing on the rocky shore beyond the windows.

"For him it's essentially pork," Thrale said. "But accidents happen, we can both
attest to that, Mr. Stem."

"There's one other thing," Pangbom said. "Our source on the senator's staff has
informed us that he intends to introduce new legislation this term." She walked
around the desk and sat on the couch, fixing me with an earnest gaze.
"Quarantine camps, to keep the rot from spreading. We hoped that if nothing else
convinced you, that would."

"Convince me to what?" I said.

But the answer, when it came, was spoken not by Pangborn or by Thrale, but by
Truman. I had almost forgotten his presence, but during the course of the
conversation he had moved soundlessly across the plush carpeting to stand behind
me. I could scarcely believe that he had said the words I thought I'd heard, and
when I turned to stare at him, he was standing with his hands shoved in his
pockets and a startled expression on his face, as if he too was amazed at the
idea for the first time spoken aloud.

I could not see his eyes. The glare from the afternoon sun across the Bay made
bright metallic discs of his spectacles, as if his humanity was but a sham, and
probing out from the rubber mask of his disguise were the alien beacons of some
terrible intelligence.

"What did you say?" I asked him.

And when he repeated the words, they came out just the same. "They want you to
kill him," Truman said.

There is an image that I hold always in my mind, an image I will forever
associate with my daughter's death.

Even now, of course, no one is certain what causes the rot -- no more than they
were certain that HIV was responsible for AIDS back in the early '80s. All that
can be said for certain is that it was first diagnosed during the Brazilian
Conflict, among the soldiers who served in the Mato Grosso. Its spread was
random, ugly, and exponential; it continues to this day. You have undoubtedly
heard the pathology of the disease described a hundred times. You probably are
aware that scientists have isolated any number of pathogens and tailored viruses
--most of them deriving in the biological agents released in the jungle --that
might be responsible. Certainly, you know there are still no answers.

If you're interested, blood tests have confirmed that I am infected with most of
the suspected agents. Nevertheless, I have yet to get sick. Some people never
do.

Others aren't so lucky.

After the war, Anna and I remained in her native Brazil. We did not return to
the States until several years later, when black pustulant sores began to erupt
in our five-year-old daughter's flesh.

I can never forget the stench of the hospital room where she died -- a noxious
odor compounded of the sterile smell of the hospital corridors and a fulsome
reek of decay, like rotting peaches, inside the room itself. At the last, my
eyes watered with that smell; Anna could barely bring herself to enter the room.
My daughter died alone, walled away from us by the surgical masks we wore over
our noses and mouths.

Afterward, I had to face the reporters.

You may remember that year: the rot beginning to make headlines, Senator Philip
Hanson fighting for his political life in a North Carolina senate race. People
remembered the AIDS pandemic, and Hanson turned that fear to his advantage, as
politicians will. Using my daughter's illness, he transformed his election into
a referendum on the tough immigration legislation he had proposed -- legislation
that denied even infected foreign-born citizens admission into the U.S., never
mind the hypocrisy of such a policy. Lisette died in an Annapolis hospital
before that proposal became law, but not before she became a cause celebre
during those last painful weeks.

And not before Senator Philip Hanson won his fourth six-year senate term.

After I talked to the reporters I walked down the long tiled corridors to
Lisette's room, and there, despite the terrible stench and the sound of Anna
weeping in the hall, I sat with her for one last time. The television was on,
post-election coverage of Hanson's celebratory round on the links.

That is the image I can never forget: Hanson, smiling his rugged smile as he
teed off on a North Carolina fairway hundreds of miles away, while I sat with
the corpse of my daughter and held her small cold hand in mine.

After truman spoke, he shook his head, turned away, and began to pace.

There was a silence in the room that I can compare only to that of the Mato
Grosso following a frenzied exchange of gunfire, when all the birds and insects
and jungle creatures are still. No one spoke. I could hear the discreet whisper
of air-conditioning, the crash of waves along the shore.

"Oh, Christ," I said.

Truman lowered himself to the couch with a sigh. Elise Pangbom leaned forward
and placed her elbows on her knees, directing at me a speculative stare. Without
even looking over at Thrale, I could feel the hot points of his attention.

"Can I have a minute?" I asked.

Truman sighed, but Thrale lifted his hands in assent.

I walked to a distant comer of the room and stared out at the Bay. The afternoon
sun carved a scintillant path through the swells. Far out, three sailboats
bobbed like toys atop the water, and the gull, diminished now to a dark speck,
wheeled in the cobalt sky.

I knew something about Napolean Thrale -- the basic facts most people know, I
guess, for the story has passed into contemporary folklore: how he left school
to enlist in the conflict over ecological policy in the Mato Grosso; how he
returned a paraplegic; how he built a communications empire that rivaled
Time-Warner. Thrale Enterprises owned over seventy broadcast networks, ran
countless online and multimedia services, had pioneered applications of virtual
reality in the entertainment industry -- impressive achievements for a phys.ed.
major who left College Park in his sophomore year.

Recently, however, he had entrusted the management of his holdings to the
bureaucracy that accretes about such institutions. I had seen speculation that
he had fallen ill or retreated into self-pity, but I didn't think either was the
case.

I thought I knew what had occupied his time. He wasn't the first man who had
sought to prevent violence through the use of violence, but I wasn't sure I
liked the idea.

I wasn't sure I didn't like it either.

There had been a point in my life -- shortly after Parris Island -- when I
looked to the war as a glorious adventure. I didn't know myself well then. I had
never killed a man.

Without looking away from the sea, I asked, "Why me?"

I turned away from the window and walked back across the long expanse of carpet
and sat in my chair. "Why not the mob or a professional assassin?" I stared
right at Thrale as I spoke, right into his glazed eyes.

"There's a certain symmetry to your involvement that appeals to me," he said.

"Perhaps you should understand our objections to the policy," Pangborn said.
"It's important that you understand. This isn't a vendetta."

"Then what is it?"

"It's the policy."

Momentarily my eyes met those of Truman, round and liquescent behind their
silver cages. "Murder a tool of diplomacy?"

"Save us the charade of innocence," said Napolean Thrale. "If it happens that
you wish not to sully your hands through the use of such a tool, that is very
well, and you may reject our offer. But save us the charade."

"I'm sorry," I said, and then, turning to face Pangborn again, "but it's
important that I understand."

Pangborn pressed her thin colorless lips together for an instant. In the slow
patient way you might explain something to a child, she said, "Hanson has a
daughter -- Amanda Hanson Brewer. Same party, same far-right agenda. She's
presently serving in the North Carolina senate, but she's certain to be
appointed to her father's office in the event of his death. We hope to prevent
that if we can. Our goal is not merely to eliminate the senator. It is to
eliminate his objectives."

"And that's where Dr. Truman comes in," Thrale said.

Truman shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat. He would not meet my eyes.
"It's really a matter of your experience in the Amazon basin. You were the best
with the spiders. No one else even came close."

"Oh?"

"Have you ever been to the virtuals, Mr. Stem?"

"No."

"What do you know of the technique?"

"Not much."

"Essentially," Truman said, "it's a full sensory array that plugs you into a
pre-designed cyberspace fantasy. It utilizes a more sophisticated version of the
virtual reality technology that allowed you to ride the spiders in Brazil."

"That wasn't fantasy," I said.

"No, no, of course not. I'm not explaining this well, am I?" He rubbed his
forehead. "The sophisticated sensory array of the virtuals, together with the
use of virtual remote vehicles in the Amazon basin, suggested new avenues of
research, new applications of virtual reality. What I'm trying to say --"

"What he's trying to say," said Pangborn, her voice dry, "is that we've
pioneered a technique to inject nano-machines into the bloodstream of a human
being. The machines propel themselves to pre-determined points in the nervous
system -- the base of the brain, visual and aural centers, other sensory centers
-- where they lodge and become active. At that point, a broadband transmitter
and receiver-array should allow a second individual to access the host's sensory
data, and briefly supersede her neural commands."

"Not her consciousness," Truman said. "That's impossible -- but her nerve paths
and motor functions."

"You see the implications," Pangborn said.

For a moment I could not speak. "I'm not sure," I said, but I thought maybe I
was lying.

Truman confirmed my suspicions with his next words. "What you've got is a living
breathing marionette -- a human being you can control just as you controlled the
spiders in Brazil." He glanced nervously from Pangborn to Thrale. "Of course the
applications of such technology are manifold."

Thrale said, "In two months Amanda Brewer will be visiting the senator in his
D.C. home. With your help we hope to apply it to framing her for her father's
murder."

"We've had some success with experimental interfaces," Pangborn said. "We feel
sure we can do even more with an operator of your skill and experience."

"You'll be well compensated for the risk, Mr. Stem," said Thrale.

And that was when I realized that I had no choice in the matter, not immediately
anyway. If I refused to go along with them, they would never allow me to leave
the estate alive. Or there would be an accident during the limo ride home. Or
something equally dramatic.

But that wasn't really the issue. They would never have approached me in the
first place if they hadn't been almost certain that I would go along. And even
as I listened to Thrale speak, I knew that I would. Not out of any personal
antipathy for the way Hanson had used my daughter, though I would be lying to
you if I told you no such antipathy existed. And not out of any sense of greed,
though I knew I would be well paid. Mainly, I suppose, it was out of some sense
of responsibility to all the people who had died -- not just Lisette and Anna,
and not just the friends I had seen killed in combat, but the thousands who had
died as a result of the tailored viruses released in Brazil. All the thousands
more who would die before the madness ended.

Still, I could not quite suppress a thrill of excitement at what Thrale said
next m for it meant freedom forever from the occasional class at the Naval
Academy, from the house in Annapolis where I had lived since returning from
Brazil.

"Two million new-American dollars." Thrale touched a button on his desk. A
screen rose from a recessed panel, and numbers flitted by. "Placed in numbered
Swiss accounts by electronic transfer. The first now, the second afterwards.
What do you say, Mr. Stem?"

"You've just bought yourself a wolf," I said.

The next two months passed swiftly. I closed the house in Annapolis and moved to
Napolean Thrale's estate, where I slept in a small suite with an ocean view. I
took my meals alone, and I did not communicate with anyone but Pangborn and
Truman. The only people with whom I might wish to speak were dead. It was almost
a relief to spend my time working and studying.

The biggest problem with running a spider was the difficulty of translating
human thought-commands into a form that could be assimilated by a host mechanism
with a significantly different body shape -- for instance, when you command a
spider to run, that command must be translated into a sequence comprehensible to
a machine with not two legs, but eight. The engineers had essentially solved
this problem by side-stepping it altogether. The operator's command does not
actually guide a spider; rather, it triggers an autonomous subroutine of
pre-programmed movements that sends the machine scurrying in the chosen
direction.

Theoretically, with a human-to-human operator/host link, such problems should
not exist. In reality, other problems -- every bit as complex-cropped up.

"Once the interface is established," Truman told me my first day in the lab, "it
will be serviceable only for twenty minutes or so before the nanomachines are
metabolized by the host system. And the transmitter is limited to about a
kilometer. We'll have to be almost on top of you."

Then there was the problem of muscle-tissue strength. As a thirty-seven year old
man in better-than-average physical condition, I could conceivably shred Amanda
Hanson Brewer's musculature just by walking her across the room.

"In short," said Pangborn, "you must learn to walk again."

I sat naked on an ice-cold steel table, having just undergone an uncomfortably
thorough physical examination; neither doctor seemed the least perturbed by my
discomfort.

Truman touched a button on his clipboard and a curtain on the far side of the
long room swept back to reveal the metallic figure of a vaguely human-shaped
hostmech.

Truman crossed the room to stand by the machine. "We've programmed the hostmech
to simulate the musculature responses you can expect from Amanda Brewer. It's
not going to be perfect -- we could only learn so much even by hacking private
medical files -- but we've recreated it as closely as we can."

"In one respect, anyway," said Pangborn, "you're lucky."

"How's that?"

"She's in good shape. She runs two or three miles a day and works out on the
machines twice a week. Good looks don't hurt a political career --her father
taught her that."

"The differences between your own muscle responses and those you encounter when
you take over the host system shouldn't be prohibitive," Truman said, "but
they'll be big enough to be problematic. So we'd better get started."

With the help of the two doctors, I donned a skinsuit hardwired for full tactile
sensation and then reclined on the table while Pangborn adjusted the helmet
array containing the goggles and 3D speakers that would allow me to share Amanda
Brewer's visual and auditory input. In the darkness that followed, I felt a
sharp needling pressure at the base of my skull as Pangborn inserted the probes
that would re-route my neural impulses to the broad-band transmitter. On the day
of the assassination attempt, all of this equipment would be packed into a van
parked outside Hanson's home -- a calculated risk. For the practice sessions,
however, we used the more expansive lab.

"Ready?" Pangborn asked.

"I guess."

"You're going to feel some brief discomfort when I give you the injection, and
then you'll experience a moment of disorientation as I activate the interface."

I felt the sharp bite of a needle as Pangborn injected the neural buffer that
prevented my own body from trying to execute the commands being relayed to the
hostmech, and then a wave of dizzying vertigo, as if I had been swept into the
maelstrom of a whirlpool.

There is no way to adequately describe the sensation of a virtual remote
interface. I have read descriptions of after-death experiences -- the ones where
the victim finds himself hovering at the ceiling and staring down at his own
inert body -- and in some ways, I imagine, the experience is not dissimilar.
Certainly there is a feeling of disembodiment and momentary disorientation that
will only diminish with repeated interfaces.

However, it had been years since I had experienced the virtual interface. Not
since my last battle-field sessions, just before the Rio Accord, had I
experienced anything even slightly similar. When the momentary disorientation
passed, the darkness flickered with ghostly telemetry; then the image cleared.
With a shock of recognition, I saw my inert body strapped to the table across
the room. My head and face were obscured by the bulky mass of the helmet array,
and for a single panicky moment it looked as if some bizarre metallic creature
were devouring me from the head down.

Pangborn stood at a nearby console, monitoring the data from the skinsuit's
biofeed. Truman glanced quizzically at his clipboard. After a moment, he raised
his head to meet the hostmech's gaze.

"Well, good," he said. "Let's try to move, shall we.?"

I consciously cleared my mind and directed the hostmech to take a step. It
lurched forward, tottered for a long uncertain instant, and collapsed to the
floor with a crash.

During the next two months, I saw Napolean Thrale only twice. The house was
huge, and both the lab and my suite were -- with Truman's -- off a single
corridor in the west wing. I did not know where Pangborn slept, and I had little
opportunity to find out, as I rarely entered another part of the house. I passed
long days in the lab, gradually gaining proficiency in the manipulation of the
hostmech's weaker musculature. Nights I spent alone in my suite, studying
Thrale's extensive dossiers on Hanson and his daughter. And frequently in the
cool autumn dusks, I let myself out for long runs along the beach. It was during
one such excursion that I finally saw Thrale again.

I was running wind sprints along the rocky shore when I happened to glance up at
the house, dark as some gothic pile against a sky tinged bloody by the westering
sun. High up in the central facade, the floor-to-ceiling windows of Thrale's
office were glaringly ablaze. Two figures were limned against the light, staring
eastward toward the sea: the half-familiar shape of Elise Pangborn, and the
unmistakable silhouette of Napolean Thrale, stout and indomitable even in the
frame of his wheelchair.

I stood there a moment, arms akimbo, trying to catch my breath in the
salt-tinged breeze. The waves broke clamorously against the rocks behind me, and
far away in the darkening sky I heard a gull scream. I could not help but
remember the day when this had all begun: the gull turning and turning in all
that flawless blue, and the thought I'd had then. Did Thrale think of birds and
did he envy them.?

I suddenly wasn't so sure that he did not.

I waited an instant longer, until finally I could breathe easy again, and then I
lifted my arm in some kind of greeting -- a salute or an acknowledgment of the
man and his pain over all the long shadowy distance between the house and the
beach, between his prison and my own.

Thrale did not lift his hand in response, and a moment later the light went out,
plunging the house into darkness.

One evening when I returned to my rooms following a run, I found a package
waiting for me -- an addition to the Brewer dossier, two readerdiscs labeled as
further biographical data and a videodisc with a slip of paper affixed to one
side. Thought you might enjoy this, the note said, and it was signed Elise
Pangborn. Swabbing sweat from my forehead with a hand-towel, I plugged the
unlabeled disc into a viewer and sat down to watch it.

The screen dissolved with static, cleared, and I found myself looking at a black
and white image of a hotel room, obviously photographed by hidden microcam. At
the bottom of the screen, the time and date of the recording glowed --
eleven-thirty-seven p.m., two days previously -- but I barely noticed them. I
was watching the two women writhing in the bed. Their intertwined images
possessed none of the self-conscious histrionics I have come to associate with
professional pornography, and the uninhibited spontaneity of the participants,
together with the unaccustomed thrill of voyeurism, made the whole experience
simultaneously disturbing and arousing. I had watched for some time before a
shift in positions revealed the dark-headed slim woman as Amanda Brewer, her
heavy blonde partner as a trusted advisor. I wondered briefly why Pangborn had
bothered to send this to me -- and then I stood up and turned the thing off. I
had not made love to a woman since Anna's death, and even a cold shower was not
enough to drive those images from my mind.

After I had dressed, I walked across the corridor to the suite of rooms Truman
occupied. He answered the door with a reader in one hand -- some tech journal I
imagined -- and he did not seem pleased to see me. I had never been to his suite
before, and his few visits to my rooms had been limited and purposeful in
nature. Nonetheless, he invited me in and waved me to a chair in the sitting
room.

"What can I help you with?" he asked.

"Information," I said.

"What do you want to know.?"

"I've been looking over the Brewer dossier. It's . . . pretty thorough." "And?"
He studied the reader with one eye.

"And I was wondering how they chose me?"

Truman laughed and set the reader aside. "You're wondering if they invaded your
privacy the way they've invaded hers."

"I guess."

"Rest assured, they did. They invade one's privacy with impunity."

"I was wondering, too, how you knew I would go along with this."

"Well, we didn't know, obviously." "But you had a good idea."

"They had a very good idea." Truman propped his legs atop the coffee table.
"Your psych profile was exhaustive and unambiguous, Stem. They know you better
than you know yourself. I remember two especially pertinent remarks."

"And those are?"

"That you've perfected the art of rationalization. And that you are a very angry
man."

I didn't reply. I like to think I know myself, and I was trying to reconcile
Truman's description with my own self-image. Truman picked up the reader.

"Why are you involved?" I asked.

He pretended to study the reader. "I'm the brain."

"Pure research?"

"That's right, it's the glorious quest for knowledge. That's why I'm here, at
the very center of the scientific universe."

I felt a surge of almost atavistic dislike for this condescending man. I could
not help myself. "Have you ever read anything about the scientists who built the
bomb?"

He set the reader down to glare at me. "You're hardly in a position to
second-guess me."

"I'm not in a position to second-guess anyone," I said, "but neither are you."

Though his features colored, Truman met my gaze squarely for the space of a long
heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was icily cordial. "Well, now that we've
clarified that, I think you were just leaving?"

"I want to know where Pangborn stays. How come her rooms aren't on this
corridor?"

"I wouldn't get too interested in Pangborn."

"But where does she stay?"

"You have to be kidding."

"No."

"Are you blind, Stem? She stays with Thrale. She sleeps with him, she eats with
him, she shoots him up when he needs a fix."

"Thrale struck me as fairly independent."

"I hope you're a touch more observant when it comes to Amanda Brewer. Take a
look at the man's eyes. They practically glow." Truman sneered. "There are three
things that keep Napolean Thrale going. Morphine, Elise Pangborn, and the
precious military discipline that allows him to pretend the first two don't
exist. Anything else?"

I stood to go. "No, I think that'll do it."

And then there was the dream.

It began a week or two following that glimpse of Thrale and Pangborn as they
looked out over the Bay from the office windows, several nights after I had
found the unlabeled videodisc waiting in my room. It had been an especially long
and frustrating day in the lab. I seemed to have hit a plateau in my work with
the hostmech -- I could control the thing, but only with a kind of shambling
clumsiness akin to that of a wind-up soldier -- and I was growing equally tired
of Truman's smug condescension and Pangborn's humorless efficiency. I had been
drinking -- just three or four rum and cokes, nowhere near what I had been
drinking in the days and weeks following Anna's death -- but enough. Enough to
get that pleasantly numb sensation in the nerves of my face, enough to derive a
kind of giddy adolescent excitement from replaying the disc of Amanda Brewer and
her blonde girlfriend.

It must have been around midnight when I finally snapped the viewer off and
stumbled through the darkness to the bedroom, already dreading the day to
follow. During the endless vigilant nights of my stay in Napolean Thrale's home
I had mastered a certain technique of staring wakefully out through the bedroom
windows at the moonlit surf that crashed against the broken beach beyond.It was
not exactly a cure for my insomnia, but it was a relief nonetheless, for after
an interval of timeless staring, it seemed as if my consciousness was drawn from
my body and cast out over the restless ocean. I can recall very clearly the dark
house receding around me until there was only the heaving water, moonlight
coruscant along the foaming edges of the waves, and my own consciousness,
wheeling free above the swells, like the lone gull I had seen my first day at
Thrale's, haunting the vacant sky.

This night, however, there was no need for fantasy. I fell immediately into
fathomless drunken sleep, and somewhere in the poisonous hours before dawn,
sleeping turned to dream.

It began with physical sensation -- the rocking jostle of an ATV as it ripped a
path through the lush undergrowth of the jungle. I sat far back in the cramped
vehicle with a support technician, the anemic sheen of her complexion
sporadically flushed by the ruddy pulse of the emergency beacon. Through the
carbonized stink of overtaxed equipment and the intermingled stenches of sweat
and mold, the electric tension that preceded combat was palpable. The air rang
with the cacophony of the vehicle jolting over rough terrain and the constant
chatter of the driver as he relayed position markers to HQ. With a metallic
screech of protesting gears, the vehicle ground to a halt.

In the sudden silence, I could hear the distant babble of the radio, the hiss of
pressure valves, the surging boom of blood through my temples.

"We're here," said the tech in a somehow familiar voice, dopplered with the
agonizing distortion of dream.

The emergency beacon pulsed red through the interior, and in the succeeding
gloom, the driver turned to face me, his flesh waxen as that of some
cave-dwelling amphibian in the green backwash of his tactical displays.

"It's time," said Napolean Thrale.

Even as I opened my mouth to protest, servos whined, and the helmet array was
lowered into place. I felt the needling lance of the probes in the flesh at the
base of my skull and then the swift painful jab of the hypo as the tech injected
the neural buffer.

In the moment before the tech established the interface, I listened to Napolean
Thrale chant maniacally -- "Let's go, let's go, let's go --"

-- and then I was plunged into night and silence, all tactile sensation
obliterated. Ghostly telemetry flickered in the darkness; with a whoosh of
hydraulic pressure, a door hissed open in the metallic belly of the ATV.

Jungle.

In my dream, I was riding the spider, chasing the beacon of an intelligence
comsat through the labyrinthine jungle. Luminescent tactical data flickered at
the periphery of my vision. Antediluvian vegetation blurred by on either side.
Small terrified creatures flashed through the tangled scrub. The forest
reverberated with the raucous complaints of brightly plumed birds, the thrash of
contused undergrowth.

How I loved the hunt.

I had always loved it.

Razored mandibles snapped the humid air as I drove the spider through the
shadowy depths, emerging at last through a wall of steaming vegetation into a
hotel room, dropped whole into the tangled Mato Grosso.

I stopped the spider short. Servos whirred. High resolution cameras scanned the
area.

The sun penetrated the clearing in luminous shards. The jungle symphony swelled
into the stillness. Two women writhed on the bed, oblivious to everything but
one another.

"It's time," said the voice of Napolean Thrale.

I urged the spider forward. Whiskered steel legs clawed the moist earth, the
bed-sheets. Just as the mandibles closed about their fragile bodies, one of the
women turned to look at me, her features contorted in the involuntary rictus of
orgasm.

She wore my daughter's face.

I screamed myself awake, sitting upright in the soured sheets, my penis like a
stiffened rod against my belly.

On the eve of the assassination, I spoke with Napolean Thrale again. It was
night, the room incandescent with light. I could see the four of us in the
reflective sheen of the windows, the Bay invisible beyond a mirrored tableau
executed on the template of our meeting two long months ago.

Napolean Thrale sat in his wheelchair, his hands flat against his desk. There
Gas a preternatural stillness about him, as if he had been hewn from stone. Only
his mouth moved as he directed his attention to Truman, sitting restlessly on
the couch by Pangborn. "Is everything in readiness?"

"I suppose."

Thrale shifted in his chair. "Let's hope so. We have a unique window of'
opportunity. Brewer leaves her father's home to return to North Carolina in
three days."

Pangborn glanced at her clipboard. "Our people in D.C. tell us that Brewer
usually leaves the grounds to jog between five and five-fifteen a.m. She returns
to breakfast with her father at six."

"There won't be anyone else in the house?" I asked.

"Servants. Hanson's wife should be sleeping. As we had expected, Brewer's
husband remained in Asheville. He doesn't care for the in-laws."

"Brewer runs the same course every day." Thrale touched a button and a
holographic map appeared over the desk. A thin purple line stenciled in Brewer's
route; a cursor pulsed over one isolated stretch of road. "A sniper will be
waiting here. The hypodermic dart will be less painful than a bee-sting. She'll
brush it away. As soon as the nanomachines reach their activation points, she's
all yours."

The map disappeared.

Truman stood abruptly and crossed the room with the jerky movements of an
automaton. Momentarily, I met Thrale's glassy eyes over the expanse of burnished
desk, and then Pangborn began to speak again.

"There are some things we should go over if Dr. Truman feels up to it," she
said.

Truman turned. He had gone very pale. "For God's sake, we've gone over this.
This is hardly necessary --"

"It is quite necessary," Thrale said. "We must be sure that every variable has
been considered. Please join us."

Truman returned to the couch and sat down, clasping his hands between his knees.

"Let us consider the technical limitations," Thrale said.

"He knows the technical limitations."

Pangborn sighed in exasperation. "The link will last only twenty minutes at
most. It's best if you can time it just before the interface decays," she said.
"That way you won't have to deal with the mess."

"After the objective has been accomplished -- and make sure that it has been
accomplished, Mr. Stem, it will not do to have the man survive --afterwards, you
will proceed to the parking garage in Baltimore where the van will be met by a
disposal team. Three cars will be waiting there. You are free to go wherever you
wish. Do not return here."

"And the money?"

"It will be transferred to your Swiss account." He allowed himself a grim smile.
"Is there anything else?"

No one spoke.

"Then perhaps you should get some sleep. You leave well before dawn."

There was no sleep.

Truman appeared at my door not ten minutes after the meeting. I showed him into
the sitting room.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about this."

"About what?"

"This whole thing." He snatched a floor-plan of the Hanson home from the
end-table and began to turn it in his hands. "I'm having second thoughts."

I thought of that first interview, of the somehow startled expression that had
passed over Truman's face when he had finally spoken the words that must have
been in his mind, unspoken, for a long time -- "They want you to kill him."
They, he had said.

"It's kind of late now, don't you think?"

"I don't know. Don't you have doubts?"

"Sure, I have doubts."

"We're bound to get caught. There are too many people involved --"

"Most of whom don't know what's going on. Only the four of us know everything."

"People still talk about the Kennedy assassination, even now. They won't let it
die."

"But that's not what's really bothering you, is it? Getting caught?"

His fingers trembled as he began to tear the floor-plan into long strips." I
read something about the scientists who built the bomb," he said. "After what
you said."

"And?"

"Oppenheimer once wrote, physicists have known sin, did you know that? He wrote
physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

"I guess we've all known sin," I said.

He continued as if he hadn't heard me, his fingers separating the floor-plan
into surgically precise lengths. "And Rabi -- do you know Rabi? --he said that
scientists had abdicated the responsibility that came with knowledge. Do you
know what that means?"

He did not even look up, did not want a response. I could sense the frustration
building in him the way you can sense a kettle getting ready to boil. His hands
flew up in a gesture of futile anger and the strips of paper fluttered to the
carpet like wounded doves.

"I know you don't like me, Stem. I haven't devoted much time in my life to
making people like me. Maybe that's why I'm here -- maybe that's why we're all
here. But I'm not saying anything overtly romantic. I'm not saying that there
are things we shouldn't delve into."

"What are you saying?"

He leaned forward. "Just that you shouldn't abdicate responsibility. You ought
to take some responsibility for the way things are used."

"Maybe that's what we're doing," I said, and that image of Lisette, her cold
features disfigured with suppurating lesions while Hanson waved from the links,
passed unbidden through my mind. "Have you ever seen someone you love just rot
away before your eyes? That's what people like Hanson did before, that's what we
have to prevent."

"Is that why you're doing this? Is that really why?"

I didn't have an answer. I just sat there, looking across at him, at his
distressed face. "Why are you?" I asked finally, the same question I had asked
him before, when he would not or could not answer.

He hesitated. "Nowhere else to go. I was at MIT for a while. There was an
incident, an instance of academic dishonesty."

"That's all?"

"I was fascinated I suppose. The technical challenge was intriguing."

"And now you've done it."

"So it would seem." Then, at last, he met my gaze, and his eyes had the look of
a hunted animal. "But maybe it's not too late."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean this whole thing is in your hands. Just yours. You can call it off any
time -- right up to the last moment."

I did not answer. What he had said was true and I had thought of it before and I
did not know what to say.

Truman sighed and stood. He paused with his hand on the door knob. "I just
wanted you to think about it," he said, and then he went out and pulled the door
closed behind him.

In the night, as I lay restless in the silent bedroom, I heard the door into the
corridor open and close gently. I heard the sound of footsteps in the hall.

Pangborn came into my bedroom. In the moonlight her body shone sinewy and lean,
almost masculine in its dearth of flesh. When she kissed me her tongue was
rough, the sex that followed brusque and fierce, contusive as an act of
violence. Afterwards, we were silent for a long time. When at last she spoke,
the dry sandpaper rasp of her voice in the gloom was almost shocking. In all the
time I had known her, not once had she violated her iron reserve. Not once had
she revealed a single vulnerability.

"I was in Brazil," she said now. "I saw my fiancee die."

I did not have to ask her how, for though I had not recognized it, I had seen it
a hundred times when I returned her inscrutable gaze. It is astonishing to me
how people live through fracturing events, how afterwards they piece together a
life from the shards, how those lives are like houses built on unstable
foundations, sliding irrevocably into the past.

"Do you think of them often?" Pangborn asked. "Your wife and daughter?" I
thought then of all the times I had lain awake in this very room, staring
wakeful at the ceiling, wishing to commune with the dead. "Every day," I said.

She nodded, moved close against me, and sometime in the night I felt her slip
away into sleep. But I did not sleep; I could not, for fear of dreaming. I lay
wakeful through the night, watching the surf, relentless along the shattered rim
of the continent, and at some point it seemed as if Pangborn and the bedroom,
the house itself -- everything -- began to recede slowly into the blackness, and
there was only the night and the restless water, and my spirit like a seabird,
hunting the endless dark.

At four AM, two long hours before rush hour began, the Beltway was virtually
deserted. The van's headlights sprayed diminishing cones of incandescence across
the southbound lanes. Occasionally, eighteen wheelers lumbered out of the fog
like the unquiet spirits of prehistoric beasts, and once an ambulance whizzed
by, its revolving lights slashing bloody streaks through the darkness.

Pangborn drove, her knuckles blanched around the wheel, and I rode beside her.
Truman had been waiting for us when we slipped out to the garage earlier that
morning, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. Now he rode in back, silent,
secreted with the equipment behind the dark curtains that occluded the van's
interior.

Pangborn steered the van from I-495 to a secondary highway. Yellow earth-moving
machinery had been abandoned by the exit, and the van jolted over a patch of
rough road, reminding me of the dream, the jolting ATV, my daughter. Then we
were speeding through residential areas on the outskirts of the city. The sky
began to brighten, lights to gleam in the small houses that scrolled by the
windows.

"Nervous?" Pangborn asked, her voice low-pitched.

"Absolutely," I said. I thought of Lisette, dead four long years; of Anna, dead
two.

Pangborn took us through a series of tums, over a concrete bridge where brown
water churned sluggishly through a narrow channel, and onto a broad avenue lined
with stores, shuttered behind aluminum security gates.

I thought of Pangborn, of last night, what it might have meant. "The disc," I
said. "Why did you send me that disc?"

Her eyes didn't deviate from the quiet streets. "It's going to come in handy.
It's going to put her away."

"But why did you send it to me?"

She spared me an annoyed glance. "It was part of the dossier, that's all."

"The note wasn't part of the dossier," I said, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam
cup on the dash.

Pangborn braked at a yellow light, signaled left, and gazed impassively into the
gray morning as the light cycled through to green. "I don't know why," she said,
touching the gas. The van surged through the intersection and her face took on
an uncommunicative facade, the mental equivalent of the security gates
protecting the stores we had passed.

Once again, I had the feeling of being at the center of some elaborately
choreographed dance, each seemingly random move leading into the next series of
positions. Your psych profile was exhaustive and unambiguous, Truman had said,
and now it occurred to me to wonder what that profile might have said. That they
could best approach me with simultaneous appeals -- to an ethical rationale, to
the poisonous anger I nursed within? That Pangborn's disc and the seduction that
followed were both avenues to an unacknowledged need, some fundamental weakness
at my core? That I loved the hunt?

That I missed it?

Glancing out the window, I saw that we had entered a neighborhood of tree-lined
boulevards littered by drifts of fallen leaves; wide sidewalks; and large houses
set well back from the streets, half-hidden beyond screens of shrubbery, beyond
walls and verdigris-stained fences. Pangborn pulled the van into the shadow of a
brick privacy wall, some fifty meters short of a pair of blackened iron gates,
and killed the engine. Truman brushed aside the curtain to peer out between us
at the breaking day.

Presently the gates swung open and Amanda Hanson Brewer emerged. She did not
even glance at us as she turned away and moved down the street at a slow jog her
breath smoky in the chill air.

This is where it had brought me, that intricately choreographed dance of sorrow,
grief, and need that Pangborn and Thrale and even Truman had swept me into. I
had come to kill a man, I had one million new-American dollars securely stashed
in a numbered foreign account, and I could not get Truman's words out of my
head: This whole thing is in your hands, he had said. You can call it off any
time, right up to the last moment.

The interior of the van was dark and still, lit only by the pale glow of the
instruments. I lay uncomfortably flat, strapped to the narrow table, Truman and
Pangborn's faces seeming to float over me, pale ovals as alien and disembodied
as abandoned Halloween masks.

The radio crackled and a voice I had never before heard and could not identify
said, "Green light."

I heard the hum of machinery as the helmet descended from the shadows above, and
it occurred to me suddenly that I was infinitely vulnerable, that it was
possible, even likely, that I might never wake up. In the last instant before
the helmet cut off my field of vision, Truman leaned forward, his eyes wild and
uncertain. "Twenty minutes," he said, and I found myself hoping Amanda Brewer
would be wearing a watch.

Then darkness, the faint uncomfortable sting of the neural probes, a more
painful jab in my upper arm followed by the hiss of the hypo.

"Good luck," Pangborn whispered, and in the moment before all feeling departed,
I felt her squeeze my hand.

Vertigo.

I fell into a void of night.

Presently, my vision cleared. I was leaning against the bole of a large tree,
bark rough against my back, breath fiery in my lungs. Dry leaves drifted over my
sneakers. An unusually sharp smell of perspiration tickled my nostrils. I could
feel the sting of sweat in my eyes, the tight pleasant pull of taxed muscles in
my thighs and buttocks. I could feel the soft weight of breasts, round and
unaccustomed, and I had to stifle an urge to touch them.

Time, I thought, time.

I glanced at either arm -- thin, downed with light brown hair -- to see if
Amanda Hanson Brewer wore a watch when she exercised. She did not.

I looked around to get my bearings. I stood on a quiet tree-bordered street
about half a mile from the senator's home. I could not see the van. I could not
see my body. I could see nothing but this strange street, strange trees and
leaves, and lucid morning light, the whole scene tinged with slight distortion,
colors subtly wrong, as if I were staring through an imperfect lens of ice.

And I was running out of time.

Telling myself to ignore the panicky syncopation of Amanda Brewer's heart, I
took a halting uncertain step. Just like the hostmech, I told myself, and I took
another step, almost stumbling. Then I had the rhythm of it, the old rhythm of a
well-toned body -- anybody's body -- in accustomed exercise. The soft beat of
feet against the sidewalk, breath coming easy now, pulse steadying down.

What could she be thinking.?

But it did not matter. An old lesson from the marines came back to me, a lesson
from the hunt: you must never empathize with the enemy. You must kill him
without fear or emotion, because if you do not he will certainly kill you. You
must believe this, even if it is not true.

I tumed a comer and began the final leg of the run, in the shadow of the privacy
wall. Muscles pulled and loosened easily. I had the rhythm of it now, though I
drove her hard out of fear of time. She would be sore later.

It would be the least of her worries.

I kept her head lowered, her vision on the pavement a few steps ahead of me
(her? us?). She must not see the van, Pangborn had said, and she did not, though
I could sense it as I passed.

Then the gates, and then we were within.

I did not know how long I had stood beneath the tree, confused, exploring the
sensations of this new body. I might have ten minutes left, I might have five.

I crossed the manicured lawn at a jog, twisted the knob on the front door, and
stopped dead. The door was locked. I paused, panting, and thought back on the
run. I could not remember the jingle of keys. The running shorts had no pockets.
No key was strung around my neck.

I felt a rising wave of panic -- my panic this time t surge through Amanda
Brewer's body, and I forced myself to take long slow breaths.

Think.

I glanced at my feet, saw the key knotted into the laces of the left shoe, and
sat abruptly on the concrete stoop. The laces were double knotted. The manicured
nails got in my way. At last I freed the key. Without bothering to re-tie the
laces, I stood, drove the key into its slot, twisted it, and opened the door.

Flat air-conditioned air, tinged with the lemony scent of furniture polish and
the faint flowery odor of potpourri, like the smell of a funeral. There was not
a speck of dust. No books lay open on tables, no glasses rimmed with ice-melt
stood abandoned from the night before. Morning light lanced through windows in
clinical shafts, illuminating buttery patches of furniture and hardwood floor.

No one seemed to live there. The rooms were so perfect that velvet rope might
have been strung along brass posts to keep you from entering them.

I paused a moment to recall the floor-plan of the house. The kitchen and
breakfast nook should be in back along this hallway. I could hear faint sounds,
the rattle of crockery. I started back, knowing there could not be much time.

The breakfast table was set for two. Croissants lay heaped in a basket in the
middle of the table. I could smell bacon frying.

Hanson was not there.

A slim black woman, very pretty, entered the room, carrying a carafe of orange
juice and two crystal glasses on a sterling tray. "Your father's having his
coffee in the office, Mrs. Brewer," she told me.

I thought about speaking, decided not to risk it, nodded curtly, and left the
room. There could not be more than five minutes remaining, probably less.

The office lay on the eastern side of the house, looking over the gardens. I
spent two minutes finding it, rapped at the open door, and went in. It was like
stepping from an impossibly perfect magazine layout into a real living space. My
cursory survey revealed worn leather appointments, books, scuffed in their
leather bindings; plaques and awards affixed to one wall; tastefully unobtrusive
photographs of the senator with three Republican presidents. I could smell the
rich pleasant aroma of fresh-brewed coffee, faint scents of leather and tobacco.

Senator Hanson had been standing at the picture windows, studying the well-kept
lawn beyond. He had turned at my knock, and now he smiled, his steaming mug held
aloft in his right hand. The morning light revealed his craggy face, still
handsome after decades of circumspect intemperance. For a moment he was still,
his face half-limned by golden light in a tableau as subtly magisterial as a
campaign photograph.

Then he took a step forward. "Good morning" he said, placing his mug on a desk
as resolutely untidy as Napolean Thrale's had been obsessively neat.

I crossed the room soundlessly to stand before the desk.

For years I had imagined this moment, and now that it had come, I experienced a
sudden re-evaluation of all that I had believed, all that I had intended to do.
Had I come to kill a man dangerous in his power, or a man who somehow, in my
mind, had gotten tangled up with the touch of Lisette's cold hand, the note I
had found scrawled on a sheet of paper by the bathtub where Anna had slit her
wrists: Forgive meg?

The senator was handsome and charismatic, and in the long silent interval
following his words an expression of genuine concern crossed his face.

"Amanda," he asked, "are you all right?"

At that moment the interface began to decay. Amanda Brewer's fingers twitched
with a movement I had not commanded. I had perhaps a moment more, and all I
could think of was Truman, his eyes wild and uncertain behind the silver sheen
of his spectacles.

"Dad?" said Amanda Brewer -- not me -- in a voice halting and fraught with
panic.

The senator started around his desk, his expression veering from concern to
fear. His hand struck a framed picture I had not noticed, and I saw that it was
a photograph of himself, triumphant on the links, and that old rage, corrosive
as acid, welled up within me.

With a swift movement I swept up his mug and dashed the steaming coffee into his
face. He screamed, took a quick step backwards, and screamed again when I
smashed the mug on the rim of the desk.

And then, even as the interface decayed further and dark spots began to expand
across my vision, the senator stopped screaming, for I had twisted a razor-edged
shard of the shattered mug into his throat.

His fingers clawed at his neck and an almost comic expression of dismay crossed
his face. He staggered and collapsed explosively into the windows. I was on him
in a moment, sawing at his throat with a jagged edge of glass, and then there
was a bright arterial pulse, warm across my hands.

Amanda Hanson Brewer screamed.

I fell into darkness, began the swift vertiginous plunge into myself.

There are any number of reasons to prefer the Cayman Islands to Switzerland, but
the principal ones are the bank privacy laws and the climate. The employees of
the three-hundred-plus banks on Grand Cayman, the largest and most populous of
the three islands, surpass even the Swiss in their discretion, and in the
Caymans, taxes are unknown. The days are hot and clear, the tropical humidity
leavened by a breeze that sweeps endlessly from the sapphire waters of the
Caribbean. On the whole, it is a very comfortable place to hide two million
new-American dollars.

From the cottage where I sit and write this, I can see the lucid waters; the
surf eternal on the unsurpassed ;beach; far overhead, some dark bird, turning,
turning.

You almost certainly know the rest of the story. You have seen the disc --
leaked to the press within hours of the crime -- that police officers discovered
on Hanson's desk. It was in an open envelope postmarked the previous morning,
but I do not believe Philip Hanson had yet seen it. In the long run, it doesn't
matter. Rumor has it that prosecutors intend to introduce it as evidence in
Amanda Brewer's upcoming trial, but I don't guess that really matters either. It
has suppressed the inevitable conspiracy theories; it has given the
investigating agencies the motive they sought.

As for me?

Six months on Grand Cayman have left me dark and trim. For a while it was women,
always available when one is wealthy. For a while it was rum and Red Stripe
beer.

But I cannot escape the dreams. Frequently, it is that dream of the hunt, begun
so long ago in the home of Napolean Thrale -- riding the spider through the Mato
Grosso, the hotel room, the clearing, my daughter's face as the mandibles close
about her.

Sometimes -- on the good nights -- there is another dream. I walk along a broken
strand with the sea restless beside me. In the wind that rushes across the water
there are voices. I can hear Lisette and Anna, I can hear them call to me.

In the night I sit on the beach and watch the tide break against the shore, and
sometimes it seems as if all the world recedes and there is nothing but the
night sky and the waters and my spirit, haunting the dark reaches between.
Often, I think of Pangborn and Truman and Napolean Thrale. I think of myself,
too, and at such moments I cannot help but believe that our lives are like some
swift ocean current, bearing us inexorably toward the shattered continent of the
past.

The ocean beckons to me.

In a matter of mere moments I will finish this document, seal it in its
envelope, and dispatch it to Amanda Brewer's defense attorneys -- my penultimate
act, perhaps the only one that Napolean Thrale's psych profile could not
foresee. The daughters have suffered enough.

And then I will enter the dark water and strike off toward the horizon, where I
can hear the voices of Anna and Lisette, calling to me like the sirens of myth.
I will have no fear, no regret. I have never much admired assassins.