NETFEED/SPORTS: TMX Makes Olympic "Goodwill Gesture"

(visual: TMX/Olympic flag rippling over Athenaeum, Bucharest)

VO: Telemorphix, Inc. has made what it calls a "goodwill gesture" to resolve its dispute with the International Olympic Committee and the government of the Wallachian Republic. Instead of "The Telemorphix Bucharest Olympic Games," as the corporation had initially insisted the event be known, the official name will be "The Bucharest Olympic Games, Sponsored by Telemorphix."

(visual: TMX VPPR, Natasja Sissensen)

SISSENSEN: "We respect the Olympic tradition of peaceful compromise, and we feel we've held out a major olive branch. However, the IOC should remember that nobody ever gets something for nothing. Not that I've heard about anyway."

The moon was only a fingernail sliver above the black Bahía de Barbacoas. The island, hedged by orange spotlights, glowed more brightly than anything in the sky. Dread smiled, It was a nest full of jeweled eggs, and he was the predator. He would take those lights in his jaws and crush them into darkness.

Dread brought up the Exsultate Jubilate, a piece of ancient music that throbbed like electricity and rang with joyful transcendence. He regretted using a piece of preprogrammed music, but he had too many things to do, and tonight there would be no time to build his own soundtrack as he acted out his starring role. Mozart would do well enough.

He fingered his t-jack, wolfishly happy to be off the fiberlink leash. He lowered his hands to his knees, intensely aware of the resistant neoprene of his suit and the tiny grains of sand adhering to his palms, then closed his eyes so he could see the important things.

"Track one, report."

A window containing a view of the choppy water from high above appeared against the blackness. "Listo," declared Track One's foreman. "Ready."

"Track two."

. . . Another window, filled by a dim shape which he recognized as a reflection-resistant boat only because he had purchased it himself. Before it, a group of shadowy figures lying prone on the sand. One of the figures moved slightly: night-goggles glinted. "Ready, Jefe."

"Track three."

. . . A stack of equipment against the bad-paint wall of a rented apartment, each box finished in the irritating matte-black that was experiencing a revival among trendy wareheads. Nothing else.

What the hell. . . ?

The pause lasted several seconds before a shaved head appeared and Celestino's voice reverberated in the bones of Dread's skull. "I was making a last-second adjustment, Jefe. I am now ready."

Having a last-second-terror piss, more likely. Dread sent a closed sidebar call to the room next to the gear tab. A woman's face appeared, round and pale beneath flaming red hair.

"Dulcy, what's up? Is he going to get it done?"

"He's an idiot, but he's competent, if you know what I mean. I'm here. Go ahead and light it up."

He was glad he had brought her in. Dulcinea Anwin was expensive, but not without reason. She was smart and efficient and could have walked right through the Battle of Waterloo without blinking. For a brief moment, he wondered what kind of quarry she'd make. An interesting thought.

"Track Four."

The observation center balcony, which he had occupied himself only a few hours ago, appeared against his closed eyelids. This man, unlike Celestino, was waiting for the call. "Ready to spike."

Dread nodded, although neither the heads in the data windows or the dozen other men with him on the dark beach could see his face. He opened his eyes and summoned up the site map, allowing it to spread itself in a neon grid on top of the real Isla del Santuario looming just a few kilometers away. Perfect. Everything in place.

Action.

He brought up the Exsultate, and for a moment he was alone in the Caribbean night with the moon, the water, and the soprano's silvery voice.

"Track Four—spike it"

The man in the beach house keyed up a security code, then spoke a word into his throat mike. At this signal, Dread's contact at ENT-Inravisión injected the program he had been supplied into the Cartagena telecom net, a simple—although criminal—action for which the employee would receive Cr.S. fifteen thousand and an offshore bank account to go with it.

The code sought out and connected with an unobtrusive resident parasite in the Isla de Santuario house system, a lurker which had been deposited for the sum of forty thousand by a disaffected employee of the previous security company during her last night on the job. Acting in concert, the two created a temporary data tap into the island's information system. Either the system itself or human oversight would be bound to spot the tap within ten minutes or so, but Dread did not need any longer than that.

"This is Four. Spike is in."

The Mozart lifted him. Pleasure ran through him like cool fire, but he kept his elation to himself.

"Good. Track Three, start pumping."

Celestino bobbed his head. "My pleasure, Jefe." The gear man closed his eyes and swirled his fingers in a complicated pattern as he began to make the input/output connections.

Dread kept his voice calm. "Give me a link and arrays as soon as you have them." He was developing what might be an irrational hatred of this poofting ex-military idiot. That was almost as bad as being too trusting.

He closed his eyes again and watched the seconds tick off on the time display. Except for Celestino conducting his invisible orchestra of data, seeming to Dread's jaundiced eye to mock the sublimity of the Exsultate, the other windows were static, awaiting his orders. He took a moment to enjoy the sensation. On the rare occasions when they spoke about their work, some of the others in his very small field of expertise referred to what they did as "art." Dread thought that was self-aggrandizing bullshit. It was just work, although at times like this it was exciting, satisfying, challenging work. But nothing this orderly and preplanned could be called art.

Now the chase—that was art. It was art of the moment, art of opportunity, art of courage and terror and the blind razoring edge of things. There was no comparison between the two. One was a job, the other was sex. You could be good at your job, and proud of it, but no one would ever mistake the best of one for the transcendence of the other.

Celestino was in the bones of his ears again. "The pumping station is up and running, Jefe. Do you want a line into the security net?"

"Of course I bloody well do. Jesus. Track One, report."

Track One's window showed more black water, this time from higher up. "Fifteen kilometers away and closing."

"Stand by for my call,"

A moment more and the music began to swell toward crescendo. An array of tiny windows blinked on at the periphery of his vision.

"Track Three, which one's the broadcasting channel?"

"Second from the left," Celestino answered. "Currently quiet."

Dread brought it up and checked, not because he thought the gear man was that incompetent, but because he was in that singular, high-flying and godlike mode—he wanted every spark, every falling leaf, at his fingertips and under his control. As Celestino had said, there was only silence on the channel.

"Track One, go."

The silence lasted for a few more moments. Then, he heard the crackle of a radio in his ear. To make sure, he shut off the volume of his own line to Track One, but he could still hear it coming in over the Isla del Santuario's security channel. He was listening with the target's own ears.

"Mayday! Santuario, can you hear me!" There was a brief lag between the supposed pilot's Spanish and Dread's system's translation, but he was already pleased—under a professionally macho veneer, the actor sounded quite believably panicky. The Beinhas had made a good choice. "Santuario, can you read me? This is XA1339 out of Sincelejo. Mayday. Can you hear me?"

"This is Santuario, XA1339. We have you on radar. You are too close. Please turn east and move out of our exclusion zone."

Dread nodded. Polite, but fast and firm. The island's new security firm was worth the money.

"We have lost our tail rotor. Santuario, can you hear me? We have lost our tail rotor. Requesting permission to land."

The pause was only a brief one. "Not possible. This is an exclusion zone, approved under the UN Aviation Act. Suggest you try for Cartagena, either the civil or heliport. It's only about five kilometers."

The captain's scream of rage was most convincing. Dread could not help laughing. "You bastards! I'm going down! I can't make Cartagena! I have four passengers and two crew, and I can barely keep this thing in the air."

The Isla del Santuario continued not to live up to its name. "I apologize, XA1339, but that is against my express orders, repeat, against my express orders. Suggest again you try for Cartagena. If you attempt to land here, we will be forced to treat you as an attacking force. Do you copy?"

The pilot's voice, when it came again, was flat and bitter. The loud noises that squelched some of his words sounded quite distinctly like a turboprop helicopter shaking itself apart. "I can't fight . . . damn rotor . . . can't any longer. We're going down. I'll try not . . . crash on your precious island. I hope . . . rot in hell."

Another urgent Spanish-speaking voice came on. Dread checked the blinking lights, assuring himself that this was one of island security's sidebar channels.

"Visual contact, sir. The rear rotor is damaged, just like he said. It's getting very near the water, moving erratically. They may go down on the rocks. . . . Oh, my God, there they go."

From a great distance away across the dark water came a dull clank like a mallet striking a held gong. Dread smiled.

"They've gone down within our perimeter, sir. The helicopter didn't catch fire, so there may be survivors, but the destroyer subs will be on them in a couple of minutes."

"Shit. Are you sure they're in our zone, Ojeda?" The commanding officer of island security obviously didn't like being put in this situation.

"I can see the helicopter, sir. It's still hanging on the rocks, but with the waves it won't stay there long,"

The officer brought up the first pictures from the camera drones, and when he saw his observer's words confirmed, cursed again. Dread thought he knew just what was going through the man's mind: there had been security on this island for twenty years, even though his own employers had only gained the contract recently. Twenty years, and nothing more dangerous than a few local fishermen threatening to stray into the exclusion zone had ever happened. He had just denied landing rights, however legally, to an aircraft in distress. Could he stretch that legality to the screaming point and let any of the helicopter's survivors be killed by the submarine security drones as well? And, probably more tellingly, could he do it in front of his men and hope to keep their respect for a real security emergency?

"Son of a whore!" He had wrestled it almost to the point where action would be too late. "Blind the subs—shut down the whole marine hunter-killer grid. Yapé, get a boat out there as quick as possible to look for survivors. I'll call the boss and tell him what we're doing."

Hook, line, and sinker. Dread jumped up. "Track Two, launch." He waved to his own half of the invasionary force, a dozen men in neoprene commando suits. By the time he had finished his gesture, they were already running the boat into the water. He sprinted after them. His own work had just begun.

The boat slid silently across the bay, slithering carefully through the dormant mines. Their search-and-destroy responses had been turned off, but that didn't mean one might not explode on accidental contact. Dread sat in the back, happy for once to let someone else take charge. He had more important things to do than steer a boat.

Where is it? He closed his eyes and turned off the music. The feed from the spike into the island's security system was still open: he could hear the security commander talking to the rescue boat, which was just now setting out from the far side of the island. No one had noticed the data tap yet, but that would shortly become academic, anyway: the security forces would reach the downed helicopter in only a few minutes. Unless it was very badly damaged, they would quickly recognize that it had been wired for remote operation. They would know they had been suckered.

Where? He let himself fall backward into his own thoughts, searching for the elusive first grasp—for that pulse, that electronic heartbeat, that would show him where to grip.

He had discovered his ability to twist, as he thought of it, in his first foster home. Actually, the twist was really the second miracle: the first was that he had been fostered out at all. At seven years of age he had already killed three people, all of them children about his own age. Only one of the murders had been acknowledged, although ascribed to a tragic but momentary loss of self-control; the other two deaths had been blamed on an accident. This was all nonsense, of course. On both occasions, Dread—who had not yet chosen that melodramatic name—had carried a hammer in the waistband of his pants for days, waiting. Pushing the pair of victims in the second attack down an iron stairwell after beating in their heads had been a last bit of anger rather than a precocious attempt to disguise his work.

Even without death in his background, the Queensland Juvenile Authority would not have found it easy to place the child. Just the fact of his parentage (his alcoholic, prostitute mother an Aborigine, his father a Filipino pirate who would be captured and summarily executed not long after the transaction that resulted in baby Dread) ensured that the Authority had to offer prospective foster parents cash on the side—a rebate, as it were. But moving young Johnny Wulgaru, the agency bureaucrats had quickly decided, was worth juggling the budget. Johnny was a disaster waiting to happen.

The moments leading up to the first time he twisted something had been surprisingly ordinary. His foster mother, infuriated by his cruel treatment of the family cat, had called him a little black bastard. He had knocked something off a table and she had grabbed him, intent on locking him in his room. As she dragged him across the living room, he had reached a crescendo of screaming anger and the wallscreen had abruptly wavered and gone blank.

Much to his guardians' unhappiness, the damage to the internal electronics proved irreparable, and they had gone almost a month without a link to the normal world until they could afford to replace it.

They had not connected the occurrence with their ward, although they knew him to be capable of other, far more prosaic acts of destruction. But Johnny had noted it himself and wondered if it might be magic. A few experiments had proved that it was—or just as good as magic anyway—and it was apparently his alone. A single day in his dark room with his stepfather's pad had taught him that he could do it even without being angry, if he just thought the right things in the right way.

He had not used the ability for much of anything—minor vandalism, spiteful reprisals—for several years, and through several more foster homes. Even as his secrets grew deeper and more terrible, he never thought of using his ability to twist things for anything grander than blanking security cameras at the site of one of his robberies—or one of his chases, for those had begun even before he reached sexual maturity. It was not until the Old Man, at massive expense, had maneuvered him out of young offenders' prison, and then into a succession of mental institutions, the last one of which the Old Man more or less owned, that Dread understood he could use the twist for bigger things. . . .

The boat bounced, and for a moment he was jolted back into the real world. Dread pushed away the sky, the water, the men crouched silently beside him. Where is it? Get it back. Hold it, now.

But this kind of use was much harder than the simple destruction he had practiced in the earliest days, or the later tactic of simply freezing electronic components. Tonight's sort of trick required skills he still had not completely mastered, despite almost a year spent in one of the Old Man's labs, going through exercise after exhausting exercise while white-coated scientists offered cheerful encouragement—a supportiveness belied by the fear of him they could never quite hide. It would have been hard to say which growing power he had enjoyed more.

Find it, then reach. He grasped the data tap at last, seized it with his mind, letting his thoughts slide around it and into it as he took its measure. The mechanical intrusion into the island's electronic nerve system accomplished by his gear team had been a crucial first step: he needed to be as far into the security system as possible before beginning his own work. Already, the fine control required was making his head ache. When he used his ability for more than a few moments, he thought he could feel the twist itself glowing hot and sore in his brain like an inflamed gland.

Like a hunting hound nosing for a scent, he searched through the inexplicable inner darkness of the twist until he found just the kind of electronic surges he needed, then followed their path backward, tracking the data stream to its source in the security system's main processors and memory. Processors were only electronic artifacts, not really that much different from simpler things like surveillance cameras or car ignitions—just electrical impulses controlling mechanical artifacts. Dread knew it would be easy to twist them hard, to give them a jolt so strong that the system would shut down, but if that had been all he wanted, he would have let that jackass Celestino have his data bomb. He needed to wade through his own pain to achieve something far more subtle, more useful: he needed to find the system's soul and make it his.

The system was complex, but its structural logic was no different from any other. He found the desired set of electronic gates and gave them each a little push. They resisted, but even the resistance told him something. He had lost everything but the data stream now—even the meaningless noises on the security radio and from the night and waves that surrounded his physical body were gone. He pushed the gates again, only one at a time now, doing his best to gauge the effect of each change before he made it. He worked delicately, even though his head was throbbing so hard he felt like screaming. The last thing he wanted to do was crash the system.

At last, in a blackness shot with blood-red migrainous lightning, he found the right sequence. As the metaphorical door swung wide, a dark joy swelled inside him, almost stronger than the pain. He had constructed an indescribable something out of his own will, a skeleton key to open an invisible, un-teachable lock, and now the Isla del Santuario's entire system was opening to him like a ten-credit whore, ready to surrender its secrets. Exhausted, Dread struggled back toward the other world—the world outside the twist.

"Track Three," he said hoarsely. "I'm into the mother lode. Hook it up and sort it."

Celestino grunted a nervous affirmative and began making order out of the streams of raw data. Dread opened his eyes, leaned over the railing, and vomited.

The boat was only a half-kilometer off the island when he could think coherently again. He closed his eyes—the sight of the data windows superimposed on the choppy waters was making him feel sick again—and inspected the results of his infiltration, the naked workings of Santuario's infrastructure.

The security machinery's various scanners and checkpoints lured him for a moment, but after the obsessive way he had mapped out what to turn off and when in the planning stages of the action, he doubted even Celestino could mess it up. He also glanced at the standard programs which regulated the estate's physical being, but none of that was important at the moment. There was only one thing out of the ordinary, but that was exactly what he was looking for. Someone—some two, actually, judging by the paired input sites—was hooked up to a LEGS, a low orbit communication satellite, and a huge amount of data was moving through it both ways.

Our target is on the net, I guess. But what the hell is he doing there that he has to move so many gigs?

Dread pondered for a moment. He had everything he needed already. Still, it didn't seem like a good idea to let such high-intensity usage go unexamined. Besides, if this busy little bee really was the target, maybe Dread would get some kind of idea about why the Old Man wanted Sky God dead. A little information never went amiss.

"Track Three, spike me into one of those hot spots there—I think it's the target's lab. If what he's receiving is VR, don't give me the full wraparound, just a POV window and audio."

"Certainly, Jefe."

Dread waited for a long moment, then another window opened up against the blackness of his inner eyelids. In it, a table lined with faces that looked vaguely Indian stretched before him. There was a monkey sitting on the tabletop halfway down, and the target's gaze kept flicking to it. Dread felt an almost childlike glee. He was sitting unnoticed on his prey's shoulder like an invisible demon—like Death itself.

". . . Most of these activities were being controlled by a single group of people," someone was saying next to him. The quiet, earnest voice was not his target's. One of El Patron's academic friends, perhaps. A group of self-satisfied scientists having a little virtual symposium of some kind.

He contemplated tuning out, but the next words jumped out at him as though they had been screamed. ". . . These people, wealthy and powerful men and women, were a consortium that called themselves the Grail Brotherhood. . . ."

Dread watched and listened with rapidly increasing interest.

"Track Three," he said after a few moments, "keep this open. Are we recording this?"

"Just what you are seeing, Jefe. I can try to copy everything going in and out, but I don't think we have that much memory, not to mention bandwidth."

Dread opened his eyes. The boat was almost within range of the perimeter lights. There were other things to worry about now; he could pick up most of the details once they had secured the target. "Don't worry about it, then. But there are a lot of other people at that gathering. Find out if they're sims, and if so, where they're coming in from. But first, be ready to initiate defenses shutdown, on my order." He checked on Track Two, who were waiting about the same distance off the island on the southeastern side. The reports coming in over the island's security band told him that the rescue team was just about to discover the helicopter trick.

"Track Three—shutdown."

The perimeter lights winked out. There was a squall of indignant protest over the security band, but with the shutdown sequence now begun, none of the radio locations were talking to anyone but themselves—and Dread.

"Track Two, here we go."

He signaled to the pilot of his own boat, who gunned the engine and sent them skidding across the bumpy surf toward the beach. As they hit the shallows, his men were already rolling over the side, the first to land sweeping the beach and house walls with ELF weapons. Those of the island's guards not wearing counterfrequency gear dropped, shaken into jelly, without ever knowing what had hit them.

As he followed his men onto the sand, Dread turned off all but the necessary pictures, but he kept the voices from the target's virtual conference going in his head. Already an idea was beginning to form.

The island was so dark that Dread did not even bother to crawl up from the beach. Three more sentries in anti-ELF suits appeared on the catwalk outside the nearest guardhouse, one of them holding a high-powered flashlight—probably on his way to find out what had happened to the island's generators. Dread gestured. The silenced Trohners sounded like a stick being dragged along a picket fence as the sentries fell. The flashlight bounced from the catwalk and blinked end-over-end down to the beach.

Resistance was stiff at the front portico of the main house, but Dread was not in such a hurry now. His target was still locked into his simulation, and since Celestino had remotely sealed the doorlocks and thrown a data blanket over the target to prevent incoming calls from security, Sky God had no idea that his castle had been stormed.

If nothing else, Dread admired Atasco's new security service for honoring their contract. They were fighting fiercely—the half-dozen pouring fire out of the hardened guardhouse beside the front door seemed capable of holding off an army far larger than Dread's. However, good security work required more than bravery: foresight was important, too. One of the assault team managed to jam an incendiary grenade through a gun port, although he sustained a fatal wound in the process. When it exploded a moment later, the heat was so fierce that even the steelplex windows softened and bulged outward.

The Track Two team, which had come in through the back of the complex to attack the main security office, was going to be a little while getting free, but Dread was quite satisfied. Out of two fifteen-man assault teams, he had only three units down that he knew of, and only one of those three killed, with the action 75 percent done. Against the kind of security package a rich bastard like Atasco could afford, that was more than acceptable. As his two bang men wired hemispheres of Anvax hammer gel to the massive front door, he allowed himself a few moments with his unsuspecting target.

". . . Brotherhood has built the most powerful, sophisticated simulation network imaginable." It was the calm, high voice again, coming from someone standing near Atasco. "At the same time, they have manipulated and injured the minds of thousands of children. I still have no idea why. In fact, I summoned you here, all of you, in hopes that together we might discover some answers."

Dread was getting more and more intrigued. If Atasco wasn't leading this little conspiracy, who was? Did the Old Man know things had gone so far?

The explosive gel was triggered. A flash of fire briefly illuminated the bodies scattered on the porch as the main door sagged and fell inward. Dread turned off the window feeding him the target's visuals; the audio channel was briefly usurped by an announcement of Track Two's successful conquest of the security office.

"This is it, gentlemen," he said cheerfully. "We forgot our invitations, so we'll just have to let ourselves in."

Once through the scorched doorframe, he stopped for a moment to inspect the piles of rubble and powder that had been a collection of Mayan stonework, installed by sad chance too near the front door. He detailed most of his crew to look for stray security and to round up the household staff, then took a bang man and two commandos and headed for the basement lab.

As the explosives man knelt in front of the lab door, Dread tuned in again to what had become a confusing welter of voices.

"Track Three," he said, "in just about a minute the target's line is going to be free. I want you to keep it open, whatever it takes, and to hold the rest of the guests in the simulation if possible while we figure out who they are. Is that clear?"

"Yes, I understand." Celestino sounded tensely excited, which gave Dread a brief moment of unease, but the Colombian was doing all right so far. It was the rare and exceptional person who didn't get at least a little worked up while participating in a large-scale armed criminal assault.

Dread and the others retreated back down the hallway, then the bang man thumbed his transmitter. The walls trembled only a little as the hammer gel bent the heavy security door into a curl like stale bread. They kicked it aside and entered. The white-haired man, who had been reclining in a pillowy chair, had apparently felt the vibration of the controlled blast and was struggling to his feet. His wife, on the far side of the lab in her own chair, was still submerged in VR, twitching gently.

Bolivar Atasco stumbled a little, still not completely separated from the simulation and its override on his exterior physical responses. He paused, swaying, and stared at Dread as though he felt he should recognize him.

You have just met the Angel of Death and he's a stranger. He is always a stranger. The line from some obscure interactive popped into Dread's mind and made him grin. As Atasco opened his mouth to speak, Dread flicked a finger and the nearest commando shot the anthropologist between the eyes. Dread stepped forward and pulled the jack out of Atasco's neurocannula, then gestured at the woman. The other soldier did not move toward her, but thumbed his Trohner to auto-fire and sprayed her down, blowing the cable out of her neck and sending her to the floor in a bloody heap. Mission accomplished.

Dread surveyed the two bodies briefly, then sent the two commandos upstairs to rejoin the others. He checked back in on the simulation in time to hear a new voice.

"Trying to leave would be a very bad idea."

It was an unfamiliar voice, processed through a translator. It took him several moments to realize it was Celestino's.

"I'm afraid the Atascos have left early," the gear man was saying through Atasco's usurped sim. "But don't worry. We'll think of ways to keep the party entertaining,"

"You shit!" Dread screamed, "you bloody idiot, get out of there!" There was no response: Celestino was not listening to the command channel. Dread felt rage expanding inside him like scalding steam. "Dulcy! Are you there?"

"I am."

"Have you got a gun?"

"Uh . . . yes." Her voice suggested she always carried one, but didn't use it.

"Go in and shoot that little bastard. Right now."

"Shoot. . . ?"

"Now! He may have just blown the most important part of this whole thing sky-high. Do it. You know I'll take care of you."

Already high in Dread's estimation, Dulcinea Anwin rose even higher. He did not hear another sound from her until after something had exploded loudly on the Track Three audio channel.

"Now what?" She was back on the line, breathing hard. "Christ, I've never done that before."

"Then don't look at it. Go back to the other room—you can override from there. I want to know who's in that simulation. Find the outside lines. Most importantly, I want one of those lines—just one—that we can spike."

She took a ragged breath, then steadied. "Got it."

While he waited, Dread examined the Atascos' lab. Expensive stuff. In other circumstances, he wouldn't have minded taking some of it with him, although it would have been strictly against the Old Man's orders. But he smelled a bigger prize. He gestured to the bang man, who was standing in the hallway smoking a skinny black cigar.

"Wire it up."

The man ground the cigar out on the floor, then began attaching nodules of Anvax gel to various points around the room. Once Dread and Dulcy had emptied out the contents of Atasco's hard storage, he would trigger the explosives remotely.

As he was making his way back up the stairs, Dulcy Anwin came back online. "I've got good news and bad news. Which first?"

His grin was reflexive, hunger rather than humor."I can take the bad news. There hasn't been much so far tonight."

"Can't get a fix on most of these folks. There seem to be several different setups, but most of them are trace-proof. They're not Puppets, I don't think, but they're using some kind of blind relay system—at least a couple of anonymous routers involved, plus some other even weirder stuff. If I had them all in one place for a couple of days, I might break something down, but otherwise, forget it"

"They're already starting to scatter. They'll probably be offline in a few minutes. But you said 'most.' Is that the good news?"

"I've got one of them in the crosshairs. Guested in by the target. No relay, no weird runaround. Spike's already in place."

Dread took a deep breath. "Great. That's perfect. I want you to do a quick trace, then pull up the user's index. Can you do that?"

"When do you want it?"

"Right now. I want you to use that spike to override and bump the user offline, then you hold the sim yourself. Browse the index—just quickly, we'll work up a better version later—and learn what you can. Whoever he or she is, that's who you are. Got it?"

"You want me to pretend to be this person? What about all the data work we have to do?"

"I'll do it myself. I need to do it myself. Don't worry, I'll get someone to relieve you in a little while. Hell, after I get the data squared away, I'll probably take that spike from you myself, too." The pain in his head, the residue of the twist, was almost completely gone now. Dread suddenly felt the need for music, and conjured up a swelling, martial air. He had something the Old Man didn't, had it firmly in his jaws, and he was going to hang onto it until Doomsday. "If any of the others at the conference or whatever it is stay in the simulation, you stay too. Keep your mouth shut. Record everything." He was already busily making plans. As soon as he knew where this user lived, he would have him or her investigated and sanctioned, not necessarily in that order. He now had a front-row seat—Christ, he exulted, a leading role—in some mysterious conspiracy that had the Old Man scared to death. Also, the conspirators seemed to know a lot more about what the Old Man and his friends were up to than Dread did himself. It was impossible to guess how valuable this little sleight-of-hand might turn out to be.

My time has come around at last. He laughed.

But he needed everything to be crystal clear, foolproof. Even the efficient Ms. Anwin could make a mistake in all this confusion. "Are you sure you got it?" he asked her. "You keep that sim working at all costs until I relieve you. You are that user. Don't worry about the overtime—I'll make it worth your while, Dulcy baby." He laughed again. His early thoughts about Dulcinea as quarry had been superseded by a chase more glorious than anything he could have anticipated. "Get on it. I'll be back as soon as I finish up some loose ends here."

He strode up the stairs and into the huge entry hall. There was data to sift, and a lot of it. He would have to take care of that before following up on the sim, monitor as much of it as he could before it went to the Old Man and his Brotherhood. He suddenly very much wanted to know what Atasco had been doing, as well as what Atasco had known. It would mean another night without sleep, but it would surely be worth it.

At the foot of the main staircase a stone statue of a jaguar, blocky and expressionistic, crouched on a pedestal. He patted its snarling jaws for luck, then made a mental note to add Celestino's body to the cleanup squad's list of things to do.