There are only three ways to get into Beverly Hills.

The first, the easiest, is to be a citizen. You just broadcast your ID to the border guards on your way through the gate and you'll get a polite wave and a sincere greeting and some sort of elaborate complimentary chocolate, just for being rich and therefore deserving of random nice things.

The last, the hardest, is to try to sneak in. You will quickly be reduced to your component molecules and, if you're lucky, some of you might drift into the city's airspace, technically achieving what you set out to do. They take their security very seriously in Beverly Hills and the rumor is that they're going to start running high-grade HEPA filters soon, just to eliminate the technicality.

The only other way in is on a tourist visa, a day pass, and in order to get one, you have to wait in the longest line in the world that doesn't end with someone offering either sex or drugs or some particularly creative combination of the two. Because everybody who is a citizen considers everybody who isn't part of the same churning, undifferentiated mass -- Not-Citizens -- the line at BH Immigration is one of the last places in Los Angeles that you can still find people from different economic and ethnic backgrounds standing next to each other without actively firing weapons.

People even interact, a little, standing there; tentatively, as if they remember some point in the distant past when a nod and a half-smile wouldn't be taken as an invitation to deliver a bullet or a bodily fluid. Since Beverly Hills treats everybody the same -- as dirt, of course, but the same -- we do as well. The guards with the big guns and the stern looks help, but the great seething wad of humanity waiting to mingle with their betters actually gets along, is polite, acts as if the world works and courtesy wasn't a laughably archaic concept, like the curtsey or respect for human life.

The woman behind me was live-in domestic help for someone in the Beverly Hills senate. We chatted for half an hour or so. She lived in the city -- slept, ate, worked there -- but had to make the trip outside and wait in this line every day to renew her pass. Her boss had voted for the 24-hour limit on visas and failed to see how this could possibly be construed as an inconvenience. He also docked her pay for the time it took to be here. She had spit in his food every day for two years.

The guy behind her was African, in a full length robe made of some fabric that allowed for pattern control. He had the color damped to a flat gray now, but before he had been bored enough to cycle it through a nice Madiba pattern, some animated and stylized savanna animals, and what I could only guess was a controller crash. Since nobody in Africa actually wore traditional dress anymore, he was either a well-off tourist making it widely known that he was a well-off tourist, or he was someone's guru, on his way into the city to relieve them of the spiritual burden of a lot of their money.

Behind him was a shambling, shaggy derelict, or a college kid dressed like one. He would be politely invited into the sanitization room, drugged from behind and transported to Las Vegas later today. He would be dumped in any of half a dozen transportation hubs, making him, officially, somebody else's problem. It wasn't legal, but the only panhandlers -- or people pretending to be panhandlers -- who tried to get into Beverly Hills anymore actually wanted the free trip to Vegas, so it all worked out.

And behind him was another couple of thousand people, snaking between red velvet ropes in a space the size of an airplane hanger. Everybody wants into Beverly Hills.

Even President Madhumalati would stand in this line when she made her visit. BH authorities made no exceptions -- the President of the United States was still a Not-Citizen -- and so she'd end up having someone wait in line for her, and then trade places with them at the last minute. The sanitization would probably be skipped as a courtesy. Probably. In the line into Beverly Hills, we were all the same.

Except for guy in front of me.

He was just an asshole.

Everything about him said, in a bell-clear baritone, "Loathsome little prick." He was the type of person you instinctively wanted to set on fire. He was a businessman, important, wanted everybody to know it and was willing to be as obvious and obnoxious as it took.

I'd left everything but the bonegun at the office to pass customs, but, man, did I want to kill this guy and kill him violently. Kill him, clone him and kill him again. And that was three hours ago.

He'd spent most of the morning failing to buy his way forward in line. He'd started with flattery; moved on to sympathy; took a small, failed detour into wildly obvious deception; and finally fell back on flat-out, cash-flashing bribery. None of it made a bit of difference. The only thing he received from the hunched old woman that stood in front of him was a dismissive scowl. At one point, he tried to sneak past her, on a turn, and then simpered and wheedled and somehow managed to make it her fault when he got a gun pointed at him.

Eventually, maybe an hour ago, he gave up -- "Fine. Bitch." -- and started making calls on his implant. Against every probability, this actually made him more annoying. There's a sociologist out there who will make his reputation explaining why some people speak out loud to their implants.

Subvocalizing is not a hard trick. You talk low and keep your mouth closed and the implant picks up the audio from your throat, filters out a lot of the muffled low end and transmits it. Simple. Quiet. And the people standing around you don't have to hear the ugly details of whatever financial, romantic or gastrointestinal trauma you're currently undergoing.

Not Businessman, of course. Social conventions are for the unexceptional. He was important. He had things to do and places to be, and if he couldn't be in those places and doing those things, well, he was going to talk about it, loudly, in a confined space with a lot of tired, irritated people standing around.

He apparently started at the low-end of his to-do list, because his first call involved getting so angry while issuing a subordinate beat-down that he put half a mouthful of spittle into the hair of the old woman in front of him. Over the next hour, his tone softened from sputter rage to fury to anger to displeasure to mild irritation to a flat, diplomatic neutrality. For the past five minutes, he'd apparently called ahead to whoever he was headed into Beverly Hills to meet, because he'd ramped up to fawning obsequiousness and artificial hearty laughter.

Finally, the old woman in from of him reached the head of the line, and stepped away from the rest of us to the interview station. She spent a few minutes having scans taken, tokens checked and orifices probed and then disappeared into the city.

Businessman said -- to himself, the person he was talking to and the rest of us behind him -- "Finally," and crossed a bright yellow line painted on the floor. This marked the electromagnetic damping field that surrounds the interview station. His implant immediately went dead, dropping the call.

"Hello?" he said, startled. "Hello?"

"Sir," said the BH Immigration officer said from behind a heavy composite desk, fully intending it to mean, "Hey, shithead."

"Hello?" Businessman said again, a note of desperation crawling into his voice.

"Sir."

He held up a finger at the officer, and said again, "Hello? Goddammit! Fuck!"

"Hey, shithead," the officer said.

"Why did my call hang-up?" Businessman said to him. "I need to finish my call!"

"If you would just answer a few questions, you can continue your conversation inside the city."

"No, no, no," he said. "I need to finish my call now."

"Then please exit through that door to return to Los Angeles."

"I'm not waiting in that line again!"

"Sir--"

"I need to finish my fucking call now, asshole."

"Sir."

"Shit!"

The immigration officer unfocused his eyes -- he was hopefully using his implant to requisition a savage beating -- when I stepped up to the desk and said, "Excuse me."

Businessman spun on me and said, "What he fuck do you want?" The officer said the same thing, only he pronounced it, "Yes, sir?"

"I think I can be of some help," I said. "I've seen this kind of problem before." I motioned at Businessman's head, the side where the implant was. "Can I see, just for a second?"

"Um," he said.

"It should be easy to fix," I said. "It'll just take a second."

"OK, yeah, sure," he said. "I really need finish to my call."

"You don't say?" I said.

He leaned towards me, and I bent forward to examine the small scar behind his right ear where the implant had gone in, maybe fifteen years ago. I put one hand on the back of his neck to steady him.

"Ah," I said. "Here's the problem." And I brought his head down as hard as I could on the desk, leaving a very shallow dent in it.

The immigration officer arched an eyebrow and waved off the sudden attention of the guards. I pulled Businessman back up by the collar of his shirt, and he said, "Buupf."

"Smup. Hrr."

A long streamer of drool ran out of his mouth, down his very expensive tie and mingled with the urine that was collecting around his shoes.

Urine is playing an entirely too prominent role in my life lately.

Businessman said, "Zub."

"That should do it," I said, and slapped a datacard with my passport on it onto the desk.

The officer looked at me steadily for a moment, then at Businessman, then back at me. He picked up the card, dropped it into a slot next to him and said, "Is the purpose of your visit business or pleasure?"

"A little of both, now," I said.

I lurched towards him, and stabbed at his chest with a finger. "Sorry's not going to do it, Koizumi. There's a hell of a lot more you need to tell me. I took this assignment because of certain promises and each and every one of them has turned out to be a lie. I've been misled. I'm sick of stumbling around in the dark, bumping into things."

"Again," he said. "I have nothing else to tell you."

"So Yukio Koizumi is a message boy?"

Koizumi brought his hand down to his sides and stood a moment in the rain. "Yes," he said. "More than you can know."

"Pathetic," I spat.

Koizumi smiled a small sad smile. "Yes," he said.

"Not good enough," I said. "I need to know more. I need to know everything."

"I have nothing more to say, Mr. Baxter. You have everything I know about Mr. Danning, his plan, his methods. I'm sorry."

"Forget Danning. Danning isn't what I'm talking about. He's the tiny part of this whole thing that's poked out into the light. I want to know about your bosses."

Koizumi twitched suddenly, slightly, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He ignored me, turned and spent a very long time looking out over the L.A. basin, watching the light squirm.

The rain turned heavy for a moment, and cold water ran down the back of my neck, clammy and unpleasant. The coat was working hard to pull it off my skin and failing.

I pulled the pulsegun from its holster and put it to Koizumi's head.

"Does this make you any more talkative?" I said.

He didn't even turn to look at me. "No," he said.

I thumbed the primer and the gun whined as it powered up. "You sure?"

"Mr. Baxter, if I hadn't reconciled myself to a sudden, violent death a long time ago, I would be comfortably sedated in an asylum somewhere. You can do nothing to me that cannot be done many, many times worse."

The high whine of the pulsegun hung between us for a moment, but Koizumi didn't back away at all. Didn't even move.

"Damn," I said, and powered the gun down, dropping it back in its holster.

The way I usually dealt with people was to either kill them or threaten to kill them. It kept things nice and simple and I almost always got what I wanted as a result. But Koizumi didn't seem to care all that much. What holds sway over a man more than his own life?

I knew the answer to that question. Before, in my apartment. It wasn't anger that was driving Koizumi's little tantrum, it was fear. He was afraid of something.

Danning. Or Danning's death, or Danning's life. The job. The only thing that I had ever seen shake Koizumi was the idea that Danning might go on living, that he wouldn't be killed. That I wouldn't kill him.

I didn't have any idea what that meant, but that didn't mean I couldn't use it.

"OK," I said. "The gun isn't as scary as I thought. You're not afraid of me. Fine. But there are people you're afraid of, and unless you're willing to let me in on a few things, they're not going to get what they want."

Koizumi's jaw tightened, just a little, but he kept looking out at the city, ignoring me.

"Out of this whole mess, the only thing I know for sure is that it's very important to you -- to your superiors -- that Danning die, and that I be the one to kill him. I don't even care why. All I know is that it's something you want. So I'm using it."

I took a step towards him, but he didn't look over. "Either you tell me about your bosses or I walk. I'm sick of being ignored, led around like a puppy. You tell me what I want to know or I go back to my office right now and spend the next two weeks looking for my deck of cards."

He ignored me.

"I feel a mean solitaire streak coming on," I said.

Koizumi sighed and raised a hand to wipe the rain from his face. "Very well," he said. "I would like time to speak to my sup--"

"No," I said. "No speaking, no superiors. If they frighten you, they scare the shit out of me. But I'm sick of being the last to know about who I work for and who is going to be throwing furniture at me and who is going to kill the President. Either you talk right now or I'm gone."

"I hesitate to speak, Mr. Baxter," Koizumi said. "They will hear of it. I will be punished."

"That's not my problem," I said. "Tell me."

Koizumi's head dipped slightly, and he nodded. He had shrunk somehow, seemed smaller, seemed scared. Whatever was holding him up, whatever made him Yukio Koizumi, was collapsing, folding up, disappearing. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped.

"Now," I said. "Tell me everything."

He nodded again. "I was born in Osaka--"

"OK," I said. "Not everything."

"--after the Eastern Crash, in a slum. My mother died of starvation, so my sister and I could eat. By rights, I should still be there--"

"I know your history."

"What you don't know, Mr. Baxter, is that I had very little to do with my history." He turned to me, and I saw anger flare in his eyes, suddenly and unexpectedly. "My entire career, my entire life, has been the work of my superiors. I have done nothing. Koizumi Extranational has been built on information that they provided. I am told what to say, and I say it. I am told what to do, and I do it. That is all, that is all it has ever been." His jaw was set hard and his fists were clenched at his side. He was furious, almost shaking. "I am a puppet," he said.

But as quickly as it had risen, his anger curled and turned inward. I can recognize self-disgust when I see it, from all those mornings looking in the mirror. "Days or weeks or years later, it seems prescient, even brilliant," he said. "But it is not me. I am an actor, an automaton, a pretty face on an ugly truth."

"That doesn't make sense," I said. "You--"

"With due respect, Mr. Baxter, shut your mouth. Spare me your protest. I have lived this way for half a century. It has been a very comfortable life, but what once seemed like extraordinary luck has turned sour." He swung his arms wide, in the most sarcastic way possible. "Yukio Koizumi! Corporate titan! Exemplar of the new Japan! As you said, pathetic. I am sixty-eight years old, Mr. Baxter, and I look back on what I have done with my time and see only toadying and subservience, a joyless life spent being dragged forward by something I cannot see. I build what I am told to build, destroy what I am told to destroy. Kill who I am told to kill. That is all. I am free to choose when I use the toilet," he said. "Most days."

"You don't know who they are? Who you work for?"

"I have no idea. Each time they communicate, it is different. A messenger, an implant upload, notes hidden under plates in my refrigerator, dreams. They give me information and tell me how to turn it into money, into power. Fifty years ago, I was told to ally myself with a currency trader in Osaka. Three weeks ago, I was told to hire you to kill Danning. I do as I am told. I always have. I always will. Until the day I die."

He wrapped his arms around himself and turned away. He might have been crying. I pulled my hands out of my pockets and leaned my elbows on the wall, my turn to watch the light. The Emitter clanked and shifted again, and an ad for a retroviral deodorant swept across the sky.

"I thought I was in over my head before," I said.

Koizumi said, "Ha," and before the word could linger, be mistaken for cheer, bile rose up and over it, swallowing it, like an island consumed by the sea. He turned slowly to face me, anger, shame and fear fighting for his expression.

"Good night, Mr. Baxter," he said. "And if I may offer you some advice: Forget who you work for. Forget what I've told you. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters but the job. You must kill Roland Danning before he fires on the President," he said. "Get it done. Just do as you are told."

The scoot crested the hill and the Emitter came into view, the building restored to the original Art Deco and lit from below. It was startlingly beautiful. Koizumi was standing, collar turned up against a weak rain, under the statue of astronomers out front, one of the last, few vestiges of what the place used to be.

What the place used to be was the Griffith Observatory. It fell into disrepair as light pollution and L.A.'s persistent cloud cover left it unusable. Fifteen years ago, the city sold the site to a group of advertisers, on the condition that they restore the building and maintain the exhibits -- pendulum, Tesla coil -- in the lobby. They agreed, tossed the telescope and installed a big diffusion laser. They paint the underside of the clouds now.

I parked and got out and Koizumi came over to meet me. No security, no Oaks. That wasn't right. Yukio Koizumi should quite simply not be out in L.A., alone, at night. Robbing him would be profitable. Kidnapping him would be enormously profitable. Killing him would earn you mind-bogglingly lucrative pay-offs from every competitor he had, for the rest of your life, which would be about three weeks.

Maybe it was a trap, a sniper somewhere on the building waiting to clean up a mess. But then why not just off me in my apartment and be done with it?

Koizumi bowed slightly and said, "Please accept apologies for my outburst, Mr. Baxter. I am under enormous pressure."

I pulled my collar up against the rain, too. It was slightly sticky. "Forget about it," I said. "I never apologized for killing you."

"That is correct. You did not."

"Nope."

"You don't apologize for much, do you, Mr. Baxter?"

"Sorry about that," I said.

Koizumi smiled, then raised a hand toward the Emitter and we walked together, up the side stairs and out onto the back balcony. The entire Los Angeles basin lay below, almost explosively bright, a churning sea of illumination. The city pulsed without dimming, the light a skin stretched tight over something moving beneath it.

Koizumi leaned his elbows against the top of the balcony wall and said, "Do you believe in God, Mr. Baxter?"

I laughed. "No," I said. "No, I don't. People in my line of work tend to take a dim view of anything that promises justice."

He nodded and stared out at the view, his mind very far away. He looked older here, his hair damp and limp and the light cast by a cocaine ad overhead harsh and unpleasant.

"Do you?" I said. I didn't quite know why.

He sighed, heavily, from somewhere deep. "Yes," he said. His hands came up, palms open, to catch the raindrops for a few moments, then clasped together again. "Or, at least somebody is fucking with me."

I shuffled my feet against the wet concrete, and let Koizumi think his thoughts. It was unsettling to see him in doubt, anywhere even remotely close to lost. Worse than out of control, even. At least then he was acting. He and his kind ran the world -- the part of the world that worked, anyway -- and empires and economies rose and fell on their say-so. Even a rumor of one of them standing in the rain, looking at a city view and mumbling about God could cause a regional recession. If Koizumi Extranational was in trouble, so were goodly portions of Los Angeles, Seattle, Honolulu and Osaka. I was in way over my head.

Somewhere out in the city, the green flare of an ATS missile stood out against the ocean of light.

"What am I doing here?" I said.

He straightened up and the blank, polite mask of professionalism descended. "I have instructions for you. We do not know where Danning is now, but the point is moot. Two weeks--"

"I'm still on the gig?" I said.

"Yes, Mr. Baxter. If I did not make that point clear enough the last time we met, let me emphasize it again: you, and only you, must kill Roland Danning. Despite your incompe-- inability to perform the task yesterday, you are still very much on the gig.

"Now, please. Allow me to finish."

I gave him a hard look, then waved him on.

"Two weeks from yesterday," he said, "on the eighteenth, Danning will be in a small office, on the fifth floor of a building on Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills."

"Excuse me?"

"Two weeks from--"

"I heard you. I just don't understand you. How do you know that?"

"I know it because I was told by my superiors."

"And they know it how, exactly?"

"That," he said, "I do not know."

"You don't know?"

"No."

"You didn't think to ask?"

Koizumi clasped his hands in front of him. "I do not ask questions, Mr. Baxter. I do as I am told. It is a virtue you might wish to study."

I silently counted to ten, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. I should have brought an adrenaline suppressor.

"OK," I said. "Sure. Didn't mean to interrupt."

"Mr. Danning will be armed with a LV-426 pulse cannon and--"

"This time I do mean to interrupt. How the hell does he get a pulse cannon into Beverly Hills? They've been a no-fire zone since succession. You can't get a bad attitude into Beverly Hills."

"This I do know. It was left there for him when the building was assembled."

"Excuse me?"

"Two years before the city broke away, the building was commissioned and the 426 was placed in an electromagnetically inert container, between support struts for an office on the fifth floor. When the walls were poured, the box was hidden. Post-secession weapons sweeps failed to find it."

"The cannon was put there twelve years ago?"

"Yes."

"This is another place where you didn't see fit to ask questions, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"OK, then."

"At 2:17pm, Danning will use the 426 to ambush a motorcade moving down Rodeo. He will succeed in killing his target, President Madhumalati."

The rain filled the gaping silence with tiny pit-pats. The building suddenly vibrated beneath our feet as the Emitter clicked off and the dome rotated a few degrees. The laser sparked up again, and an ad for implant games came on.

"Um," I said. "What?"

"Danning is going to kill the President of the United States, in thirteen days. Madhumalati will be in Beverly Hills attempting to negotiate the return of the city to the U.S. The first shot will kill her, so it is vitally important that you eliminate Danning before he takes it."

"Wait a minute," I said, having completely failed to notice the point when the world slipped out from under me. "Wait a fucking minute! What the hell are you talking about? Danning is going to kill the President? Roland Danning? He makes a good getaway, sure, but what the hell is he doing playing assassin?"

Koizumi sighed. "As I have said, Mr. Baxter, I have only limited information. I have been told only what you will need to complete your assignment. The location, the weapon, its age and condition, the target. And, now, the fact that Danning is an assassin, quite a good one. He was engineered that way, when he was in the military. He has been a sleeper for the past three decades, waiting to be called upon."

"Jesus," I said, and something cold crawled slowly across my spine. Danning wasn't lucky to be alive. I was. Military assassins give people like me the same nightmares I give to normals. They're what's in the boogeyman's closet.

"He is only partially sentient now, conditioned to respond to orders encoded in his implant. The opponents of my superiors have put him on this course, and he will not stop until it is done."

"Or he's killed."

"Or he is killed."

"What happens after he assassinates the President?"

"I do not know."

"Who are the opponents of your superiors?"

"I do not know."

"What the fuck is going on here?"

"I," he said, "do not know."

I threw my hands up in frustration. "Oh, come on!"

Koizumi unlatched his hands and spread them wide, palms up, surrendering. "I am sorry, Mr. Baxter."

By the time I'd been at the office an hour, I was already profoundly drunk. I had started before Koizumi's goons had shuffled out of my apartment, continued through the shower, ran out on the drive to work, and re-started with enthusiasm as soon as I reached my desk and fresh reserves. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and it hurt to breathe. I'd already had a gun to my head and a vase thrown at me by one of the most powerful men on the West Coast. And he wanted to meet in less than twelve hours, in the dark, out of the way. You're damn right I was drinking.

The front office buzzed, and the overhead display sprang to life, showing Chet out in the hallway, hunched more forward than to the side. He went through his particular access ritual -- I turned my head so I wouldn't see what I had been licking for the past two years -- and the front door slowly ground open.

I swung my feet off the desk, picked up the bottle and tottered out to see him. He lurched through the door and we stared at each other, bleary-eyed and blinking.

"You look like crap," I said.

"You look even more like crap than usual," he said. "What's wrong?"

I raised the bottle and tapped it. "Analgesic isn't working. What's wrong with you?"

He put a finger to the right side of his head. "Virus," he said.

The first implant virus was a quarter of a century old, the product of a Palestinian anarchist group and the remains of a captured U.S. Army private. The cryptography now shot-through implants was largely a result of that fiasco -- it shut down most of the military for the better part of a week and continued to cause problems for months afterward. The virus payload was nothing sophisticated -- it identified targets in order-protocol messages and substituted a random, nearby location -- but friendly-fire and unintended non-combat deactivation statistics exploded. A cascade of bad messages led a platoon of Marines to invaded a supermarket in Ohio instead of the red-team terrorist camp on their live-fire test range. Over sixty people were killed, many for wielding baguettes, back when you could get real bread.

Another reason that implants are so tightly protected now is that the public has always been a bit hinky about the idea of someone taking them over, getting in their head and doing unhappy things. A lot of rumors went around before the government started standard issue -- Mind control! Mind control! -- and a lot of effort went into debunking them. There were outside auditors, calming voices and lots and lots of P.R.

The weird thing is, most of it was true. Implants can't do much of anything to your mind -- control it, read it, certainly not improve it -- that a small computer stapled to your forehead couldn't do. They're not magic. They've got audio and video interfaces, just wired in a little deeper than they used to. They're off-the-self parts powered by blood glucose.

Which doesn't explain why Chet suddenly winced, wrapped his arms around his head and fell to his knees, grunting in pain. "Oh, shit," he said. "Oh, shit. Not again."

"What?" I said. "What?"

I squatted down and put a hand on his back, but he didn't acknowledge me. He was doubled over, rocking slowly, letting out little punctured breaths and muttering a pretty impressive list of violent obscenities to himself. "Chet?" I said, patting him. "Chet?"

No response. I poked him a couple of times in the side with a finger.

"Hey, Chet?"

Nothing.

I wet an index finger with my mouth and stuck it in his ear.

He raise his face to me, sweat slicking his forehead, and said, "Jesus fucking Christ. Gimme a second." His eyes unfocused, he closed them, and near as I could tell, he went back to screwing with his implant. OK. Not a good time. I get it. Don't bother the geek when he's passing a kidney stone.

"Geez," I said. "Touchy."

Chet thrashed around on the floor for another half hour, at one point sobbing to himself, at another letting out a sort of primal, guttural roar. He ran through a list of technical babble -- implant hacker jargon, near indecipherable to me -- while punching himself in the side of the head. He rolled onto his side and lay very, very still for a while, and then suddenly began gritting his teeth so hard that I swear I could hear them creak and pop under the pressure. I finished my bottle, got another, and waited.

Eventually, finally, Chet's body slowly uncoiled and went slack and he lay panting, on his side, in the center of the room.

I got up, nudged him with my foot and said, "You've been spending an awful lot of time in your own urine lately."

He pushed himself up, and slumped against the side of his desk. He ran his hands over his face and pushed a sweat-heavy mop of hair back out of his eyes. He moaned a little and ran a sandpaper dry tongue over his lips.

I squatted down next to him, handed him a cup of water I'd had waiting and said, "What the hell was that?"

He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't manage it. He raised the glass and sipped some of the water, gagged a little and let it cascade down his chest. "You couldn't... find... a clean glass?" he said.

"Your history with liquids isn't good enough to be lecturing me," I said. "What the hell was that?"

He put a finger to the side of his head again. "I said. Virus."

"Oh, come on," I said. "You may not have been paying attention, but I saw what just happened to you and there's no way that was an implant virus. They can't do that."

"Didn't think so either," he said. "This is... different." He let the cup of water fall out of his hand and took the bottle from me and drank a long pull. Chet doesn't go in for the booze all the much, but you could see it relax him top to bottom as it burned down his throat. "I've been attacked half a dozen times like that since I left your apartment last night. Each time it's something new."

"Worse than that?"

He drank again, swallowing hard, his strength returning. "Not worse. New. Seizure inducement. Subliminals. Visual and auditory hallucinations. Ultrasonics. This thing..." -- he waves his hands feebly around the office. "All-sense feedback loop, everything deafening and blinding and... Jesus. Man. Whoever designed this thing is an evil son of a bitch."

"Is it gone?" I said.

"Don't know. No. Each time I think I've shut it down, it comes back. The hallucinations really shook me up. They integrate into the environment and then jump out. Awful stuff. Nightmare stuff."

"Well, shit," I said. "When's it going to happen again?"

"Now," Chet said and he grunted as he climbed into his chair. "There's an attack going on now."

"What?"

"Here. Feel the side of my head. The virus has overclocked the implant, and it's heating up. It's at 38.3 C now. If it hits 40, I'm in a lot of trouble. I've tried a couple of things, but running a lot of light-weight jobs has worked the best so far. Steal cycles from it."

His head was weirdly hot, like he had a localized fever. "Brain damage?" I said.

"At 40 C. I'm working on it. I've got a couple of days. I've slowed it down a lot."

"Well, what the hell, Chet? I thought you were careful about this stuff."

"I am. I run black I.C.E. and--"

"What?"

"I run black--"

"Ice?"

"I.C.E. Intrusion counter-measure--"

"Oh, God. Shut up. I swear you guys can't change a set of batteries without giving it an acronym and making it sound like part of an S&M starter kit."

"That's not true!"

"'Black I.C.E.,' Chet," I said. "It's like the unholy union of exclusionary jargon and impotence fears."

"Fine. I run security. I log everything. I asked a few friends to take a look at the traffic dump for last night and they only thing they can find is some encrypted stuff in the protocol handshake I got from Danning. It's documented for extensibility, but nobody has the keys. You can't use it."

"But Danning did."

"But Danning did. He must infect everyone who queries his implant. The guy's Typhoid Mary."

"So why aren't all his co-workers doing spastic little jigs? How does he get through a day?"

"I suspect it had something to do with you shooting at him, Boss. I checked the logs and I got an emergency-band broadcast of encrypted data while I was... Uh..."

"Catatonic."

"Upset. Just after you tried to kill him."

"Hm," I said.

"And, hey, nice job with that, by the way," Chet said.

I grabbed the bottle back. "I already took enough of that from Koizumi," I said. "For a nobody, Danning has a lot of contingencies and convenient hobbies."

"The guy's not a nobody," Chet said. "He's connected. This is black box stuff. He kicked your ass. He kicked my ass. Koizumi's been lying to you."

"I know," I said, and dropped the bottle in the trash, to dispose of itself. "I've been meaning to ask him about that."

If you list all the things that people care about, the things that we think we can't live without, the most fundamental are always at the bottom. Light. Gravity. The physics of the world. Forget food and shelter and alcohol and pornography. They mean nothing without the sun to power them and invisible forces to keep them anchored to the ground. The things that we swim in every day -- the things we truly, physically need to survive -- barely rate a mention.

Except after a bad night, when the fundamentals of survival seem so much closer at hand.

I could feel the dirty gray light of a Los Angeles mid-morning pounding against my face when I woke up, every photon landing with a discrete dull thud. I considered opening my eyes, but they were sort of stuck together and I didn't like the idea of letting light ricochet around the inside of my skull.

Instead, I moaned, and that hurt.

I tried to raise my left hand, but my shoulder was restrained, bound up. I'd had medical attention. Chet must have come out of his little coma at some point on the drive home, hauled me upstairs and done what he could. My right hand was free and reluctantly crawled up my body, taking an inventory as it went.

Crotch: check, seemed OK. Magnum gone from my belt: probably put away. Ribs bound but hurt like hell: expected that. Lots of dried blood on chest, chin, lips. A couple of plump leach-packs on my cheeks: Chet must have put them there to lessen the bruising. Nose was puffy and raw but mostly straight. Gun muzzle at my temple.

That shouldn't be there.

Wake up with a gun to your head enough times and you learn a few things. First, they're not going to kill you. If they were going to kill you, they would have done it already, while you were asleep. It's simpler that way, and avoids the possibility that you'll try to do something dramatic. Second, you should move very, very slowly, because they don't know that you're not going to try something dramatic.

I gently pushed the gun away and said, just above a whisper, "Gimme a second, OK?" I rubbed my eyes -- they made crunching noises -- and managed to get them open. Light flooded into my head and made lots of racket. I moaned again.

Three of Koizumi's paramilitaries were crowded into my bedroom, looming over me, each with their rifles on-line and pointed at parts of me I wouldn't want holes in.

The one to the right, with the muzzle-contact fetish, said, "Mr. Koizumi would like to speak with you."

"OK," I said, and tried to sit up. "Let me just--"

"Now," he said. His weapon retracted -- the other two re-aimed their guns to higher priority targets -- and he pulled a small rod from a tube on his arm. It broke apart vertically and unfolded into half a square that he held in front of me.

The air between the arms of whatever it was shimmered as waveforms started to interfere with each other, an image of Koizumi resolving out of the mess.

"He could have just sent a fruit basket," I said.

"You're live, sir," the grunt said into his comm.

Koizumi looked stern and focused, like the last time I had seen him, up on his desk. His eyes -- even semi-transparent -- were the same piercing brown and his mouth was drawn and serious, his jaw set hard. He looked -- and I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the situation -- like a man bent on delivering a reprimand to an underperforming flunky, and delivering it with a measure of dignity and reserve.

He failed.

"You dog!" Koizumi exploded, his grim seriousness dissolving into a sputtering rage, his image not quite keeping up with the audio. "You half-wit! You simpering, slope-headed, wall-eyed buffoon!"

"Good morning, sir," I said.

He fell into Japanese and I lost track of what he was saying. He knocked a few things off his desk and threw something at the transmitter, the display doing its best to show it -- a vase? -- coming at me.

"Boss is sure grouchy today," I said to the grunt.

Koizumi had stalked out of the transmitter's range, but I could hear him thrashing around his office. A chair came in one side of the frame and went out the other.

I tried to sit up again, but a heavy, armored hand landed on my bad shoulder and I grimaced and laid back down.

Koizumi reared back onto the screen, tendons and blood vessels and sweat popped out all over his face. "One simple thing," he said, "and you couldn't manage to do it! One simple thing!"

"Hey, now, wait a minute," I said. "Danning is dead. There's not even enough of him left to clean up."

"Danning is not dead, you pathetic amateur," Koizumi said. "You killed a hover, a lot of people on the ground and just about any chance left of actually doing what you were paid to do."

"But--"

"He was flying it remotely, bakayarou! If you had bothered to run decodes on the drone frequencies, you would have known that!"

Oh. Drone. Damn. No response to that.

Except... Except L.A.P.D. drone protocols had military-grade cryptography and there is no way anybody could decode them without a week's computer time and a lot of luck. "I--" I said.

"Shut up!" Koizumi spat. "If I want to hear from you, sanpai, I will ask you a question. Is that clear?"

"Ye--"

"Shut up! Shinkan! Shut up!"

Something was wrong here. This wasn't the way Koizumi was supposed to be. It didn't match with his psyche report at all. This guy was crazed, out of control. Once you got past the anger in his voice, there was something else there, and it was driving him. Driving him hard.

Koizumi was gritting his teeth and methodically pounding his forehead with his fists, muttering in Japanese. He'd realized the same thing I had -- he was giving too much away -- and his shoulders rose and fell as he breathed deeply, trying to collect himself.

He turned, planted both hands flat on his desk and leaned into the transmitter.

"You have been manipulated, Mr. Baxter. You did everything Danning expected you to do, and he did it on his terms and his timetable."

"Well, hey," I said. "Thanks for the heads-up about the ninja shit. It didn't help that he could walk on walls."

"Walk on walls?"

"Or, y'know, swing from pipes. It sounds more dramatic the other way," I said. "And don't change the subject! The son of a bitch knew I was coming and he didn't get that information from me. Your security leaks like a cheap suit!" Unresponsive got his information from somewhere.

Koizumi dropped his head for a moment, then raised it. He had softened, and looked a little pained. Apologetic. That was unexpected. "I did not know about the ninja shit, Mr. Baxter," he said.

"Oh, come on. You've got some reason to be pissed off at this little zero and you hired me to kill him. That's not something that gets done lightly, or without you knowing exactly what you're getting into. I play the fool much better than you do, Mr. Koizumi."

A faint, sad grin appeared on his face, barely visible against the water stains on my apartment ceiling. "Your mistake," he said, "is in assuming that I don't have superiors who keep me in the dark as well."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Tend to yourself, Mr. Baxter. I have people to talk to, but I would appreciate it you would meet me tonight, at the Griffith Emitter. I'd like to speak to you, face to face."

I slapped the scoot's controls and the engine spun up immediately. The steering wheel unfolded from under the dash like a large plastic spider and slid over to where I was sitting, nubs on the floor rising under my feet. Manual.

I mashed the accelerator flat and skidded out into traffic, the other cars braking and swerving like a flock of birds. I hit 75kph, the high end of the motor, and blew through the intersection at Balboa, against traffic and ignoring the warning that went up on the inside of the windshield. The car should have taken control back and stopped automatically, but I'd overridden the safeties and it would show up as a ding against my liability rating.

I had a very bad liability rating.

At Havenhurst, I swung left, north, and barreled towards the Van Nuys airport. Danning worked there, had access, knew where to go and how to get where he needed to be. He spent ten hours a day, goofing around with plane and hover engines, waiting for the moment he'd have to leave town in a hurry. God damn it. Stupid, stupid.

He didn't need to keep contingency supplies locally -- he could just walk off with a plane, fly fifteen minutes into the desert and pick them up. Even with a bullet hole in him, if he could make the airport, he could get away.

I slid a finger across dash again, and found the airport control broadcast. It exploded out of the speakers, a confused and angry pile of voices, crawling over each other, kicking and biting.

Something was wrong. Airport control is inevitably calm, the audible equivalent of something either running smoothly or hiding it well. But now half a dozen voices were competing for the primary audio channel, and the data lines where flooded: telemetry, infrared, DNA scans. Tons of junk.

"--say again, Hazmat, secure the fuel dump. Secure the fuel dump."

"--police and military is aware of the situation and is on-site. County and federal notification is in progress and--."

"--is in charge here? I need to talk to the--"

"Clear the line! Clear the line!"

"Hazmat, I can see you, you dumbshit. Put on your fucking suit and secure the--"

"--a drill! This is not a drill! This is not--"

"--don't care if he's the fucking Pope, he's going to sit on the pad until--"

"--locked down. I say again, civilians are locked down. Non-essential airport personnel should be in green zones and broadcasting ID. I say--"

"--have confirmation. Shoot-to-kill orders are in effect--"

"--come down there and kick your ass, then stuff it into the suit--"

I lifted my foot off the accelerator and slowed as the riot of activity at the airport entrance came into view. Cops, transport security, even some permanently-assigned military -- they were all scrambling wildly, just inside the gates -- crashing into each other, staggering back and then rushing on.

The airport was in lock-down. Passengers were corralled into a single building and it was sealed up. Airport personnel were restricted to a few well-documented safe zones. Out-bound flights were grounded and in-coming transports either circled or shunted off to LAX or Burbank. Security had found something scary.

Or someone.

This was for Danning. He couldn't have gone through main check-in because of the wound. Secure facilities don't like employees showing up bleeding, out of breath and without explanation.

So he must have hit a tripwire sneaking in and been ID'd. His psyche profile would suddenly look like a worst-case scenario -- loner, socially maladjusted, police activity at or near his address -- and the airport had gone on alert. It's always the quiet ones.

I dropped the car into automatic, and the steering wheel crawled back under the dash. I tapped the map and the scoot politely signaled -- visually and as an auto protocol broadcast -- and swung a wide U-turn and headed south, back down Havenhurst. I wasn't going to get into the airport tonight. The only thing I could do was watch.

Back at Victory, the car turned east again and halfway down the block reluctantly crawled off the road and into the Leave. The scoot didn't like abandoning the pavement, one, and distrusted entering a place where non-decomp stuff went to die.

The Leave had been used to play a ridiculous game called golf until four or five decades ago, back before I was born. The block had been a vast stretch of green grass and gently sloping hills, improbably squatting in the middle of Van Nuys, and funded with city money and the enthusiasm of several council members. In the third month of a garbage strike -- this was before self-disposal and rapid decomposition -- residents had started taking the festering mounds of crap that had accumulated on their porches and driveways and streets and hauling it to where they thought it might get noticed.

The city tried everything it could think of to get them to stop -- guards, fences, ultrasonics, landmines -- and all sorts of untested and experimental technologies to empty the site. Nothing worked -- usually made things worse -- until some low-level accountant pointed out that residents had been hauling their own garbage for free for the past fifteen years. The next council meeting, the city quietly and unofficially abandoned the golf course reclamation and gave over the land to the citizenry, to function as an open-air shitpile and gurgling environmental nightmare. It was still listed on federal land surveys as a recreation area, because that sounded better than "biohazard site."

I pulled to a stop at the crest of largest hill I could find that faced the airport. I checked Chet's pulse -- the patch was working, and he was in a solid commuter sleep -- turned the radio way up and stepped out.

I sank into half an inch of thick, gray muck. Whatever had been dumped here over the years had long ago stopped being individual things and had melted into a single phlegm-thick mass. It smelled yeasty, the air sour with digestion. The ground would only reluctantly let go of my shoes as I walked around to the front of the car and looked out at the airport through a pair of mags.

I kept shifting my weight, afraid that if I paused too long, I'd suddenly find my shoe gone, eaten away, and whatever had consumed it starting in on my foot. I could be standing on gone-bad nanotech, choked on its own byproduct, or on the upper-end limits of whatever they put on stuff to make it self-dispose. Or worse things, things I didn't want to think about. The Leave was no longer a problem of sanitation so much as zoology.

The airport blazed, the perimeter lit up bright and floods sweeping the sky. Multiple security teams were running grid searches, all the way out to the fence. That meant that they were confident Danning was still there, though he must have turned off his ID broadcast. If and when they caught him, I'd either have to hit him from long range, or find a way to get to him inside the system.

I sat down on the hood, scraped the bottom of my shoes along the bumper and rested them there. I felt like I was inside someone's stomach, and I had no desire to see what the intestines were like.

The search went on. The teams would clear a section of the grid and move to the next. They varied the pattern to keep it from being predictable, someone up in the tower organizing the whole thing.

It might take all night for them to get through the entire airport, and I pulled my coat tighter around me, hunkered down and waited. If they caught him, I might be able to get a shot off. If they didn't, then it was back to whichever plan was the plan before this one. C? D? Something like that. It hadn't been a good night.

A light rain opened up, and I watched small pores on the ground dilate, taking the water in. I pushed myself further up the hood. Maybe spending the night here wasn't such a good idea.

But something at the airport caught my eye. There, again. The roof of a hanger bulged suddenly, like the building trying to stand up. A shudder ran through it, something on the inside straining to get out, and a couple of cops ran from their posts, shouting and pointing back.

The hanger torqued awkwardly, and the walls flexing in, the top bowing upward again. A crack appeared along the peak of the roof and it slowly tore open, a black L.A.P.D. hover scraping its way out of the hole. Sparks began to strike off it as the security teams and police converged, firing uselessly.

Danning wasn't dumb, I'll give him that. There's nothing that local law enforcement or regional military could throw at an armored hover that would do it any damage. They might bring it down with another hover, but getting someone to volunteer to crash two of them together would be a neat trick. Even the missiles the hovers carried were effectively useless against anything that wasn't on the ground.

The air beneath the hover roared and boiled, the hanger shaking itself apart in the downdraft. Danning banked slightly and dipped the nose, and the hover edged out over the tarmac, towards me.

That was a little unsettling. With the hover, he could basically go anywhere he wanted, as long as he got there before the Feds scrambled something heavier and he stayed over populated areas, obscuring the heat trail they'd use to track him from satellite. The cloud cover would help, too. So why come at me?

No, that was stupid, paranoid. He couldn't see me. He didn't know where I was.

The hover titled further forward, now lit up with a burnt-sodium fire, the faint plink-plink-plink of DU bullets and shattershells carrying over the whine of the engines. The radio was going nuts.

"--Bring it down! Down! I don't care how! Just--"

"--Force has been notified. Catalina is scrambling. Would advise you not be anywhere near target in--"

"--tention L.A.P.D. hovercraft DZ-015, attention LAPD hovercraft DZ-015. Land immediately, or you will be fired upon. Repeat--"

"--already firing at him, you jackass! You're not--"

"--put on the goddamned fucking suit, or I'll come down there and shove it so far up your ass that it will be wearing you--"

"--armed! Repeat: ATS has armed! Pull back! Pull--"

It's a funny thing, having a missile pointed at you. Your arms and legs get very cold, very quickly, and your testicles head north with disquieting enthusiasm. Your scalp tingles. And your heartbeat suddenly gets loud, very loud, making sure you notice that it's performing a vital function here, ticking off the moments you have left to live.

A small hatch had slid open underneath one of the wings of the hover, and a spindly white thing had quietly lowered itself into the space.

Without thinking, without breathing, before the thumping boom of another heartbeat, I was off the hood of the car, and onto one knee in the muck, the pulsegun out and priming. I brought it up, sited the hover and squeezed the trigger just as the missile dropped away from the wing and its engine flared.

The light hit me, blinded me, whited out the airport, the Leave, the night sky. Half a second later, the blast wave picked me up and threw me against the car's windshield, spiderwebbing it. The sound of the explosion roared past, bouncing the ground, causing it to convulse and squirm.

The world washed in and out, scurrying away and only reluctantly returning. I couldn't see -- eyes open, eyes closed; it didn't make a difference -- but I could hear the occasional heavy crash as pieces of the hover came falling out of the sky. My ribs, even through the traction vest and the patches, keened in agony. In the distance -- again, again -- were sirens. There was probably a hole in the airport tarmac the size of a meteor impact. Anybody on the ground within a few hundred meters of the explosion would need to be mopped up and poured into a body bag, and anybody within a few thousand meters would need to find any stray limbs lying around and have them sewn back on. Fire, military, national security, local militia, anybody with the legal ability to run stoplights and rough up civilians was converging on the airport. They'd want a few questions answered right off: how could someone penetrate airport security? How could they steal an L.A.P.D. hover? And who the fuck was the guy with the pulsegun?

I was way too high on that list of questions.

I rolled off the hood of the scoot and crawled into the driver's seat. I couldn't see the dash, so I gestured an emergency code and let the computer handle the rest. The windows would blacken, ID codes would cycle at random, and the car would take a very long, very confusing route home.

I felt the engine wind up and the wheels struggle slightly against the goo as the car started to roll down the hill. With any luck, we should be able to get out onto the street before the cops make it around to the south side of the Leave. More than likely, anybody with a car that wasn't on fire was hiding in the back seat. And nobody would be dumb enough to investigate in a hover.

I fumbled with the supply box and found another couple of patches. They were texture marked as well as color-coded -- somebody deserved a nice bonus -- and I tore off the two that were already on my neck and slapped new ones in their place.

The pain was caught by surprise and fled, taking my consciousness with it. The steady hum of the car blurred against the womb-quiet of a good drug-induced stupor, and I faded into black with one happy thought failing to find a solid wall to echo off of:

Roland Danning was dead. The job was over.

The sirens were close now, but it sounded like they were lost. The wail would rise as they shot up Victory, then fade as they missed the turn into the neighborhood. They'd circled, then miss it in the other direction. Stupid macho cops wouldn't let the cars drive themselves.

I holstered the mag-gun, limped back to the front of the house and found the pulsegun in the dirt, in the dark. It was still set on strafe, so I torched everything along the side of the house out to where I'd been in the alley. There was a lot of DNA to clean up. I didn't have a file -- that I knew of, at least -- but leaving a reference sample is the first step on a long, dark road.

I kicked the pulsegun over to broad spectrum, dropped the power and swept the front yard and porch. Organics in the dirt caught fire and flamed up, and the paint on the house bubbled and split. The inside was glowing cheerily.

Rounding the corner, I found Chet, tightened into an impossibly tiny ball and shaking violently. I nudged him with my foot. "C'mon. We've gotta get going."

He gave a small squeak, half way between a whimper and a cry, and went right on shaking. He looked like a duffel bag full of nervous dogs.

I squatted next to him, laid my good hand on his back and said, "Chet. We've gotta go now. The cops are coming. Danning got away. Chet. Chet?"

He responded by losing control of his bladder. At least he was starting to relax.

I holstered the pulsegun, picked the Magnum up off the ground and stuck it in my belt. I grabbed my dangling left wrist, swallowed hard and gave the arm a sharp tug, popping the shoulder back in place. The world swam unsteadily -- everything turned a murky gray -- and I sat down on Chet and put my head between my knees for what seemed a very long time. The sirens swelled, very close now. It sounded like they'd found the neighborhood and were trying streets at random. I could hear tires squealing as they took corners.

I stood, grabbed the back of Chet's shirt and started dragging him towards the car. Halfway through the neighbor's yard, I pulled the pulsegun back out, lit up the side of the house and kept on going.

The cops swung wide as they came around the corner and slammed broadside into a parked car. The driver accelerated away, lit the floods as he came up to Danning's house and bounced onto the curb. I pulled Chet back behind the trunk of a leafless tree, deep into the shadows cast by the lights, and hunkered down.

The driver jumped out, drew his gun and made two-fingered chopping motions at his partner. The partner unholstered his gun and rolled his eyes.

My car was across the street and I keyed the combination to unfold it and pop the hatch in the back. Getting over there unnoticed would be tough dragging Chet and casting shadows. I could leave him here, but after they figured out what happened at the house, they'd canvass the neighborhood, find him and start asking unfortunate questions.

I could kill the cops, but that would bring a lot of heat down and there were already too many goddamned unknowns for my tastes.

I could hit their car with the pulsegun, but they'd return fire as soon as they got up off the ground and I'd be stuck half way across the street, lugging catatonic office help.

Or I could wait until Danning's next door neighbor stuck an old-fashioned chaingun out of his window and put lots and lots of holes in the partner.

The muzzle flash was visible even over the floods, angry red flame tearing through the blue-white of the sodium lights. The cop jerked and twitched, not so much keeping his balance as being held up by mass with a vector that gravity did not approve of. He danced, almost, propelled backwards and away, towards his car. Light shone through him, his chest more a memory than a wound. One of his legs finally folded -- or was severed -- and he went down, his body collapsing into a loose pile of scrap. He wouldn't weigh in at his autopsy at any more than two-thirds of what he was when he got out of the car.

There are lots of reasons to not like cops -- I've got a few -- but I can only think of a couple that would prompt someone to ambush emergency responders like that:

The guy with the gun could an be unlicensed drug dealer and has heard perhaps too many of the horror stories that come out of federal tax prison. Or he's a member of the civil defense section of some unacknowledged autonomous zone and way too enthusiastic about his job. Or maybe he's completely, clinically insane, and the little firefight next door put him on an edge that the meds wouldn't bring him down from. Or, hell, he could even be a Republican, one of the last few, hoarding guns and waiting for the black hovers to come.

Or maybe he's involved in this whole thing somehow. There was a hell of a lot going on here that I didn't know anything about, and it seemed appropriate to be a little paranoid.

The chaingun continued to scream at the mushy pile of what was left of the cop. The driver gaped for half a second, raise his gun to return fire, and then lowered it and dove behind the car as the muzzle swung towards him. Lead bullets won't do much to modern armor plating, but it sure made a hell of a racket and brought a hail of hot metal scrap down on anything within a radius of a hundred meters.

Good enough. I adjusted my grip on Chet's shirt and dragged him out into the street. The cop had rolled himself under the rear bumper of his car and was screaming to himself -- to his implant, and to his dispatcher -- "I need back up! Officer down! Back up! Godammit!"

Air support would arrive in a couple of minutes. I squatted over Chet, put my hands under him and sort of rolled him the last few meters. I heaved him into the back, slammed the hatch shut and opened the far door. I leaned into the car, but stopped and took one last look at the cop.

"I don't care if I'm out of my jurisdiction, you asshole! I need back up! Officer down! All over the place!" he wailed. "All right! I'm sorry! I didn't mean 'asshole'! Please!"

I ducked into the car and the engine started quietly. As casually as possible -- just out for a drive, maybe headed up the coast -- I backed down the street, around the corner and out on to Victory, pointing east.

A couple of hovers came in low, the thumping engines buffeting the car as they passed. I switched the dash to rearview and watched them slow and grind the air over Danning's neighbor. Rounds sparked off the bottom of the lead plane and it responded with a missile that sent a tower of greenish-white flame into the sky. The video damped the intensity to keep from blinding me, but shadows suddenly shifted, swinging around to flee the explosion.

So much for leaving a DNA trail.

I put the car on autopilot -- current heading, no destination -- and reached around behind me, fumbling at a box I kept in the back. Chet moaned slightly and I ignored him. My ribs screamed, threatening to do unhappy things to my lungs if I didn't just sit straight. Where the hell were they? First goddamned thing I was going to do tomorrow was organize these goddamned supplies.

There. I found a couple of pain patches, peeled them open and slapped one on each carotid. I also popped a stim and crushed it with my teeth. My ribs reluctantly quieted and the world sharpened up a bit.

At the bottom of the box was a traction vest. I struggled out of my overcoat, let it fold up behind me, and pulled the vest on over my head. It inflated and pushed my ribs back to somewhere close to where they belonged.

My nose was a crumpled mess, blood flowing freely down my face and into my lap, and a dark black bruise, the rough shape of an end table, was rising on the right side of my head.

I took a deep breath, pressed both hands against the sides of my nose and snapped it back in place. A sharp spike of pain made it past the drugs, but they quickly beat it back into my unconscious, where it would fester and give me bad dreams.

Chet whimpered again and I found a trauma-level commuter patch in the box for him. He wouldn't unfold enough to let me at his neck, so I just stuck it on a forearm. His breathing slowed and evened out. His next check was getting docked whatever it cost to get the stench of urine out of my car.

Up ahead, the stutter-flash of a fire truck's lights appeared out of the post-midnight L.A. glare and the scoot let off a small beep and pulled over to the side of the road. I tapped the dash, and the faint whir of the engine shut down. I needed time to think, and a moving vehicle is no place to be drunk and aroused.

I pulled a bottle out of the small dry storage compartment in the back, next to Chet. I'd gotten the commuter scoot -- hatch and trunk, mini-fridge, full seat recline, media console and 'plant feed, catheter -- for stake-outs, but managed to use it mostly as another place to keep booze as close as possible. I took a hard pull, the alcohol washing away the sharp metallic taste of my own blood.

Half a dozen emergency vehicles shot by, headed to the remains of Danning's neighborhood. They were early. The fire department's contract with the city only requires a fifteen minute response time, and they could use any leeway doing whatever they saw fit. Quick response was a profit opportunity. The trucks would pull onto Danning's street, conduct a spot auction, and start putting out the house of the highest bidder. Ten, eleven minutes from now, they'd start on whatever was still burning. Danning's place -- whatever was left of it -- and all his worldly possessions were about to become a sticky puddle of plastic and ash.

That was good news, at least. He was out on the street with just the shirt on his back, and that had a bullet hole in it. His back had a bullet hole in it.

But Jesus. He had kicked the shit out of me. That shouldn't have happened. Danning was a tubby, sad little man, not much of a threat to anything other than a bucket of something that was supposed to taste like chicken. Me, I'm a paid killer. I've ended the lives of more people than I care to remember. You put the two of us at odds, where I've got guns and he's got an ottoman, and it should take me longer to transfer my fee than do the job. Even if he did have a warning.

And even if a couple of cops were on a little extra-jurisdictional field trip to his house. And even if his neighbor was waiting to ambush the cops. Maybe. Or not.

This had gotten complicated.

I took another drink. You're not supposed to when you're on painkillers or stims and especially not when you're on both. But the stim was only making my senses alert, not my brain, and the patches just kept me from curling up next to Chet and crying. They were keys to doors, letting me open and close them as needed. The booze, though, was -- delicately put -- a cognitive aid. It marched through my bloodstream, looking for my brain, to give it a good punch in the gut.

Danning only had a few of options: run, hide, fight.

Fighting -- the volume and scope of drugs I was on notwithstanding -- probably wasn't a good choice. Unresponsive didn't have the resources he claimed, because otherwise Danning would have been under protection, or at least armed with something other than furniture. With the jump he had on me, I should rightfully be a very surprised corpse; arms and legs and a torso and a hollowed out head. But I'm not. So fighting back isn't in play.

Hiding wasn't a good idea either. If he knew I was coming, then he knew who hired me and knows what kind of money and power is lined up against him. Finding one person out of eighteen million isn't all that hard if you give the right people the right incentive. Danning was near as you could get to an invisible man, but that's just because nobody had ever had a reason to find him. I could drop twenty percent of what Koizumi was paying me and he'd turn up in a couple of days.

So he was running.

He'd need to get to medical help soon, but couldn't afford to do it anywhere near L.A. -- it would go out on the local police feed and I'd be able to find him before the sun came up.

He could go to Unresponsive -- or Unresponsive could go to him -- but there was something strange going on there, something I didn't understand. If Unresponsive was so keen on protecting Danning, why not run before tonight? Why not get him across the border into Canada and let the Canadian military do the protecting for him? If he already knew so much about this job -- that Koizumi had hired me, that Danning was the target -- then he also knew where I can and can't go. An incident in Quebec back during the Separation put my DNA on file with the provinces, and any scanner in the country would bring the entire weight of the government down on me. Canada had assumed all of Quebec's absentia judgments when they let them back in, and it put half of North America out of my reach.

The thought that Unresponsive didn't help Danning and he beat me fair and square nosed up out of the fog, but it was just too depressing to consider so I consciously ignored it.

No friends, no money, no resources. He didn't even have a car. Any of them might be stashed away somewhere, but as long as his implant was ID'ing him as Roland Danning, he wasn't going to be able to get at them. Roland Danning didn't officially own anything that wasn't currently on fire.

He was screwed. I took another drink and relaxed a little. The night had been far and away the worst of my career, a near-complete disaster, but at least now I knew what I was up against and would be able to find him and finish the job. Danning was out there, somewhere, probably hiding in an alley, trying to stop the bleeding. Maybe he was getting woozy already. He didn't have anywhere to go, and no way to get there even if he did. It's not like he could get up and... fly... away.

Oh, shit.

The scoot noticed Chet coming down the street before I did, and lit up a small warning on the dash. I reconfigured the seat for two and popped the door open. He slipped in, his head nearly resting on my shoulder.

He pulled the headkit onto his lap and opened it. The display was off and he was piping the results to his implant. I couldn't read them as well as he could anyway.

"We need to get closer," he said. "Unless you want to announce yourself, we're going to have to use maintenance power levels."

"OK," I said and popped the doors again. We climbed out and the car collapsed, folding in on itself, making a tight quarter-ton package sitting against the curb. It armed.

We crossed the street and slowly made our way towards Danning's house. A couple places had perimeters set up, but anything in the neighborhood worth stealing had been stolen, fenced, re-stolen and thrown away by now. Hopeful dreams of a better life didn't die here so much as get aborted, morning-after.

Cutting through some bushes, we huddled under a glass-glazed window and Chet opened the kit again. "Good enough," he said, and started running cracks on Danning's implant.

Headbugs were another post-D.C. idea, and a year or two after the crisis the government released a general-public version of the standard military's cochlear implant -- storage, fixed-distance transmission, ocular interface. Standard stuff for a vet, but only gadget freaks and the massively self-satisfied had the old civilian version. If you could keep a datacard in your pocket, why bother stuffing it in your brain? A lot of vets used to deadhead their implants after being released from the service, because of the awkward, uncomfortable silences that greeted people who sent data with nothing in their hands.

The government had a lot of excuses why they were suddenly willing to pour a couple of hundred bucks into the skull of everyone in the country: network effects, economies of scale, promote the general welfare, blah, blah, blah. They were "expanding the vistas of citizen interaction," they were "building a network substrate for the next century," they were -- this last from a Whig Congressman -- "raising all boats, and even the rats on those boats, and whatever the rats eat, too. Filthy things, rats. But we're raising them."

They were full of shit. The whackjobs had a different, better, suggestion: the government was going to track everybody, everywhere, all the time. The evangelicals started ranting almost immediately -- "Mark of Satan! Mark of Satan!" -- and where only beaten out the gate by the few people who still thought that privacy didn't mean being too boring to spy on.

A lot of caveats and a very large ad budget went into countering the conspiracy theories: nobody would be required to get an implant, you could deadhead or radio-silence them at will, a warrant would be needed to perform a search of the 'plant or its backups. And, over the next half-decade or so, it worked. The vast majority got fitted. There was a general vibe that it would be a good idea, sir, if you went and got your implant. Then we wouldn't have to book you and spend forty-eight to seventy-two hours confirming your identity. Or check your taxes. Or start that file that will go with the rest of the uncooperatives.

Decades on, it was now part of everybody's fifteen birthday: get drunk, get implanted, upgrade the software and start downloading porn.

Not that the whackjobs weren't right, of course. The standard install came live lit up like a Christmas tree. Most people never got around to turning off their ID broadcast, much less learning how to silence or deadhead the thing. They never read the manual. They could have it projected onto the inside of their eye, and they still never read it.

The government provided backup facilities, but anybody with data more sensitive than pictures of their sex lives considered them insecure. Standard procedure on law enforcement matters started to include a sweep through the state implant archives, warrant or no. Private alternatives appeared, but the rumor goes that the government quietly bought them up, and is now turning a profit on illegal searches. The only way to be safe is to run your own backup.

Or skip the implant altogether. I don't have one because it would complicate my work. The fact that everything in my head was there when I was born is pretty much an admission that I lead a criminal -- or religious, or dissident: all equally bad -- life, but the trade-off has worked so far. It keeps me out of polite society and I can skip the endless broadcast chatter that goes on every time people with 'plants get together. I get hassled a lot and it's inconvenient, but I make up for that by killing people who annoy me. It balances out.

"Damn," Chet said. "He's patched. All the holes are closed. He's been upgrading."

"What? Really?"

"Even a couple of things that haven't been officially announced yet. He's got newer stuff than I do." Chet was an upgrade whore, and installed anything that got released, officially or not. He spent two weeks blind in his right eye once because the data background on a patch hadn't been set transparent. The echolocation hack it added was apparently worth more than his depth perception.

"That can't be right," I said. "This guy doesn't upgrade his underwear."

"His implant is giving an old version number -- thirty, thirty-five years old; pre-general release -- but it's not running software that I've got a crack for. I've tried everything I've got and didn't make it past the protocol handshake."

"Is he auto-upgrading?"

"Shouldn't matter. I've got three or four cracks for the last official release. Nothing."

What the hell? I thought. Unresponsive?

"Give him a call and see if he's filtering alerts," I said. "He should be entering a R.E.M. cycle now."

Chet squinted slightly as he pulled up Danning's casefile, found his public ID and put a query in. A few seconds later, his eyes refocused and he said, "Didn't even change the out-going when he was discharged. Standard military issue -- different channels for private messages and orders. He's either ignoring calls or asleep."

OK. Asleep. He hadn't varied his schedule in three weeks. He was asleep.

I took a deep breath and ran over everything in my head: Danning was inside. He gave every indication of being the easiest target I've ever had. The trouble with his implant was strange, but there could be half a dozen reasons for it -- an out-of-date military-proprietary protocol, software so obscure that Chet didn't have cracks, whatever -- and none of them outweighed the other information I had. I'd been through the house twice while Danning was at work, and knew the layout -- fire-lines, exit routes.

Risk versus reward. The reward was huge. The risk was insignificant. With the potential for new information dwindling to zero, it was time.

I rose into a squat and pushed my back against the side of the house, directly beneath the window. I pushed my overcoat aside, reached under each arm and pulled two handguns from their holsters.

Chet said, "You're gonna do it now?"

"Yeah."

"OK. Let me shut down."

I use two guns for a couple of reasons. First, it looks awfully good. Second, the type of people who have assassins sent after them are acutely aware that they're the type of people who have assassins sent after them. They defend themselves. Usually very well. They use layers of defenses -- paramilitaries, metal detectors, bio and chem scanners, violence suppression systems, mag doors. To get to someone, you've got to pass through layer after layer, and whatever trick you find to get through the first isn't going to work on the second. A single weapon is only going to last until you hit something it can't beat.

One gun was a refurbished .44 Magnum, the clip alternating between depleted uranium and ceramic slugs. Chemical propellants were old-fashioned, but they couldn't be defused at a distance. Most projectile weapons these days were railguns and they work great if you're shooting metal and the electronics work. If not, well then, you're screwed.

The other was an Boris pulsegun, and something I wasn't supposed to have. It would get me arrested and executed long before the murders. It's not even legal for local or corporate law enforcement to use them anymore, given the damage they've caused. I primed it and checked the power cell.

I had others, too: a couple of small chemical pistols strapped to my ankles and a magnetic handgun hanging against the small of my back. The bonegun had been reinserted and new skin grown over it. But the Magnum and the pulsegun were what I normally worked with. I wasn't quite to the point of naming them. I know guys who did and it was always a bad sign.

"I'm done," Chet said and folded up the kit.

"I'll meet you back at the scoot," I said and stood up just in time to catch the ottoman that came through the window full in the back of the head. I went pinwheeling away from the house, arms back and fists clenched. Both guns fired. The Boris burrowed a hole in the ground six or seven feet deep, turning the dirt to vapor as it went. The Magnum put a ceramic round into the house maybe four inches from Chad's head. He yelped, collapsed in on himself and huddled on the ground, arms wrapped up over his neck.

I hit the dirt face first, rolled onto my back and fired the puslegun through the broken teeth of the window. The room lit up for a split second as the charge passed through the far wall near the ceiling and started a fire somewhere in the attic.

I pulled my feet underneath me, leaned in and sprinted towards the house. I sent a DU slug through the window to test for a mag door. Clear.

I planted a foot on Chet, heaved myself up through the window and was hit directly in the face with an end table, swung from the right.

Both guns went off again -- Chet tightened his fetal ball, well on his way to becoming a diamond -- and I could feel the tip of my nose make contact against my cheek. I came down hard, arm underneath me, and my shoulder dislocated with a crunching, popping sound. I screamed like a little girl.

"Son of a bitch!" I bellowed, my breath blowing dirt. "Shit!" I bit down on a back tooth and pain supressors flooded into my mouth.

I hauled myself to my feet again, the Magnum lost, dropped, gone somewhere. I hugged my loose arm to my side with the hand that held the pulsegun and staggered around the front of the house, and up onto the porch. I put a pulse into the lock on the cheap plastic door and it bored a hole as big as my head. I kicked at the door, but it didn't move. Around the edges of the damage, it had fused to the frame.

I screamed in pain and anger and frustration, and let loose with the pulsegun. The door disappeared, along with a good portion of whatever was behind it. A fire erupted deep in the house, casting crazy flickering light out into the darkness. I took a step back, off the stoop, and strafed the front of the house, left to right and back. I heard Chet yelp again. The pulsegun was getting hot in my hand.

I stopped, still held the gun at the house, and listened. Took a deep breath and held it.

Around the side, Chet was whimpering to himself. Inside, the fire was growing, and there was the hiss of gas ejection as cheap plastic furniture melted and bent. Way, way off in the distance, sirens. Getting closer.

It was too early for sirens. Neighborhoods like this, even assuming that somebody bothered to call as soon as the shooting started, have a mean response time of over fifteen minutes. The assistance request would have had to gone in as soon as I pulled onto the street and parked my car.

Goddamned motherfucking Unresponsive. I was going to kill him next. I was going to finish this job just out of spite.

I heaved myself back up onto the porch and had one foot over the threshold when two hundred and fifty pounds of Roland Danning swung down from the ceiling, his hands wrapped around a retrofit hydrogen pipe mounted over the door and his feet aimed directly at my chest.

I heard my ribs crack more than I felt them. I was thrown back six or eight feet, landed hard and skidded as far again. I tried to draw in a breath and it felt like the air had turned into broken glass.

Danning dropped to the ground, fixed clear, sharp eyes on me for a moment, then ran off, around the side of the house opposite from where I'd tried to go through the window.

"Son of a bitch," I wheezed.

I raised my arm to fire, but the pulsegun had been knocked clear, lost somewhere in the dark. I staggered to my feet, pulled the backup from my lumbar holster and tottered after him.

There was an alley behind the house, lined with garages turned into apartments and yards in various states of defense against squatters. I lurched out from the side of the house and swung left, firing randomly. The gun gave a quiet whisper as it spit each bullet. I spun around, and caught a glimpse of him, sprinting through the night.

I raised the gun, wished I had my other arm to steady it, and aimed, head cocked down and both eyes open. I waited half a second -- between heartbeats -- exhaled, and pulled the trigger.

Danning caught the slug in his upper back, between his shoulder and spine. He spun, momentum changed, and went down.

And then, in one continuous motion, he rolled and got right back up and kept running. He reached the street the alley intersected and disappeared around the corner.

Well.

Shit.

That could have gone better.

Killing someone isn't all that hard to do. The human body is a fragile thing, a delicate balance easily upset. A heart beats and lungs breathe and blood flows and nerves pulse and you interrupt any of them -- even for a few minutes -- and what was once a walking, talking, eating, excreting, taxpaying person -- an honest-to-God human being -- is now just a loose collection of meat and bone, piled in a heap on the floor. A blow to the right place, a cut at the right angle, and someone -- someone's child, parent, spouse; someone that somebody, somewhere loves -- is dead.

Killing someone isn't all that hard to do. Getting it right, though, that's a bit trickier.

Any buffoon with a knife can commit a murder: You steel yourself with a couple of gasper hits, walk up to the person that's being inconvenient and stick the blade in their gut. That's all there is to it. Oh, sure, the victim will stagger around, bleeding, screaming, flailing, maybe tripping on their own intestines if they pulled away from you sideways instead of straight back. But they'll die. A slice to the throat, a couple to the chest, one thrust into a kidney and most of the blood will drain out of them before modern medicine even gets a seat at the table. But you, unfortunately, will also get caught. You were ruled by your passion, your anger, you let it get a hold of you. You acted without a plan and you are stupid and you will be convicted and executed.

If you put a little thought into it before hand, though, the odds improve. You might fake a robbery, or pull a drive-by, or lure your target to someplace out of the way and witness-free -- some place where you won't be seen standing next to the body with a bloody shiv in your hand. So far, so good.

But what about the victim? Do you know how he's going to react? How badly he wants to live? How likely he is to shrug off whatever wound you manage to inflict and come after you? The instinct for survival is a powerful thing -- for most people anyway -- and coming away from your first hit with anything less than an instantly fatal wound leaves the possibility that you might be facing someone who isn't exactly human anymore. People devolve, become feral, savage. They will kill you with their bare hands, their teeth, anything they can get into you. They will beat you to death with their own heads if they have to.

And if you do manage to kill someone, there's revenge. Even if no one saw you pull the trigger, break the neck, spike the meal, there will still be talk, suspicion, a search for a motive and an opportunity, and not only by the cops. The L.A.P.D. will put in a cursory job, but unless your victim was somebody rich or important, they've other things to worry about. But family, friends, lovers -- depending on who the target was, there are upwards of a couple of dozen people who are now looking for you, driven by rage or greed or, in the odd case, justice. People bind together for a reason, and when you kill someone, you shatter whatever little world they had created and were a part of. The survivors will hunt you and find you and kill you, just to try to undo what you did. It makes no sense, has no logic, and that's what makes it relentless.

To kill someone and get away with it, to end a life and disappear without repercussion or consequence, requires research. It requires surveillance and planning and input. You study and you plot and you don't move one fucking finger against the target until you have identified every variable you can, their values and have at least some vague idea of what you'll do for every possible outcome. What if the vic is wearing body armor? What if the vic is a double? What if you dated her in school? How many bystanders are you willing to kill? What are your escape routes? What if the first three are blocked? What if you're ID'd? What if someone is expecting you? What if it's a trap? What if the poison fails, the knife breaks, the gun misfires? What if you drop the bonegun because it's covered in blood? What if they have a backup heart? Self-sealing lungs? Ruggedized skin? What if they've got some magic military-grade voodoo that you haven't even heard rumors of, much less seen?

You can have answers to all those questions and hundreds, thousands more, and it still won't be enough. More research, more watching, more waiting, more thinking, sometimes the kind that doesn't involve booze and porn. Any amateur can get lucky once or twice or a dozen times, but it never lasts. Eventually, the stupid or the reckless are culled and the ranks thin and if you're any good, you're left standing, alone, on a pile of corpses that keeps growing and growing and growing.

You need to reconcile yourself to the fact that one day you're going to screw up, too. You need to know that you can't control all the variables all the time. You need to recognize that at some point -- tomorrow, later today -- a coin toss is going to go the wrong way and you're going to get caught and you might get tortured and you're going to get killed, and killed messily.

You need to hate yourself. And you need to know that you're going to get what you deserve.

If someone cares enough to have you killed, it's a good bet that you've led a pretty interesting life. You've got at least one criminal, financial or sexual quirk that's far enough off the mean to make someone -- usually someone you know -- go to the risk and expense of making you go away. Boring people, as a rule, don't get assassinated. It just works out that way. Boring people are safe.

Except Roland Danning. Koizumi was right: nobody could possibly care one tiny little bit about this guy. He was -- and I'm just guessing here, but I'd be willing to put money on it -- the single most uninteresting person alive. I had spent the past three weeks digging into his sad little life to confirm that fact.

He was white, 57, balding. Judging from his build, he hadn't done any voluntary physical activity in at least three decades. A threadbare moustache clung desperately to his upper lip, and his eyes were heavy-lidded and dull, the sort of thing you see in daily hype users or people who live in the suburbs. I didn't know why Koizumi wanted him dead, but it looked like life had already done two-thirds of the job for me.

He lived in half a decaying, century-old house in Reseda. He had no apparent domestic or decorative skills and spent his home time attached to a cheap beer and whatever input his implant was excreting into his eyeball.

We'd need his media habits for the psyche profile and Chet was due with the kit soon. You crack the implant last, after you've finished all the non-invasive surveillance, to minimize the chance you'll get caught. Tricky business, rooting around inside someone's head, though my guess was we could use a hatchet instead of a headkit and Danning wouldn't notice the difference.

He worked at the Van Nuys airport, doing low-level maintenance on skiffs and runabouts, the kind of stuff that a monkey could do, but didn't, because they were too expensive. Van Nuys ran intra-atmospheric flights, just a patch of ground for suborbitals to use on afternoon trips to Sea-Tac or Mexico City. Rich joyriders, down from the Santa Monica mountains and on the wrong side of the tracks, also kept their planes there. Part of the berthing fee was on-going system administration and tune-ups, and Danning spent his days running diagnostics and poking a screwdriver in the parts of the engine he couldn't damage. It was one step up from janitorial.

He woke at 5:30 every morning, weekends included. He showered, dressed and walked the three or four blocks to the airport. If it was raining -- and it was, more often than not -- he'd grab a Red Line. He bought lunch from an autopilot vendor that stopped by at 12:15, ate alone, and arrived back at his house by 7:30. His job performance was baseline acceptable, and at some point in the past, his boss had taken to just changing the date on his review and resubmitting it. His twentieth anniversary on the job was three years ago and he'd never received more than a cost-of-living raise and promotions forced by seniority.

He never went out after work. He had no visitors. He never gave any external indication that he got or gave calls on the 'plant. No wife. No children. No human contact of any sort, save a casual wave to the guy who lived in the other half of the house, a broad-spectrum property-rights claim to chase occasional squatters out of his yard, and nods at co-workers who had trouble remembering his name.

There was no evidence that Unresponsive had contacted him or was working on his behalf. He wasn't panicked, he wasn't running. He wasn't even moving.

Roland Danning barely existed. If you pushed on his chest, it might collapse, a shell of paper and ash. He was a nub, what was left of something after the important parts had been ground away. There were billions of people like that out there -- the cold gray mass that oozed and seeped into corners, that functioned mainly as carbon dioxide emitters -- and here, in his comfy chair and probably plugged into something popular and stupid, was their king. No one could possibly care if Roland Danning lived or died, Roland Danning included. And yet one of the richest, most powerful men in Los Angeles had it out for him. In the worst possible way.

That didn't make sense.

Danning did have one distinction, actually, but it couldn't possibly explain Koizumi's part in all of this: he'd served in the military for four years, during the invasion and occupation of Colombia. He had joined to learn a trade -- doing system administration and tune-ups on military skiffs -- and been deployed to Caracas from the first days of the fighting.

It had been an ugly, embarrassing war. Colombia had finally stamped out the Brillante Perdido and shut down the production of the genetically engineered cocoa that had cut huge, bloody swaths through world drug markets. Colombians had tired of the carnage, the chaos and the politics that come with having something that everybody wants and plenty are willing to kill for. So -- suddenly, unexpectedly -- they had opted out, shut it down. In a sort of collective spasm of exhaustion, near the entire population decided that they wanted no part in it anymore, thank you, and would you just please leave us alone? It was an unprecedented act of social cohesion, and it had worked. Their economy stabilized, Phrohibista terrorism ended and the country wasn't an open, running sore for the first time in as long as anybody could remember.

But it left the U.S. with a problem. Whole classes of narcotics had been legalized just a few years before, and the luxury tax that applied to G.E. cocaine and other high-end stimulants were funding fully a quarter of the government. There was a surplus for the first time in living memory. Budgets into the next century were based around the insatiable American desire to get very, very high.

So Philadelphia panicked, and requested that Colombia put the farmers back in business. But Colombia wasn't interested. It was a nice, quiet, third-world country now and wanted nothing to do with the United States ever again.

So, of course, we invaded. Danning, four hundred thousand other grunts and over a million experimental mechs landed at strategically important spots across the countryside and set about de-pacifying the population. A more cooperative government was installed. The cocoa fields were replanted. The Phrohibistas went berserk, but the supply resumed, the FDA maintained quality and Congress got what it was looking for. Everybody was happy. Except the Colombians, of course, but they didn't matter all that much.

A couple hours later, after Koizumi's Human Commodities department had finished rolling me around its mouth, I was spit out onto Alameda, at the western edge of Little Tokyo. Since I didn't have an implant, they'd given me a datacard with seven or eight terabytes of straight text on it -- the employee manual, in American English, Japanese, Normalized Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, United Korean, Russian, half a dozen others -- and sixteen characters of ID number. I dropped it into the half-gone self-disposing cup that sat in front of a homeless guy, begging at the corner. "Show up there tomorrow," I said and jerked a thumb over my shoulder, "and they'll give you a paycheck at the end of the week."

"Hey, man," he said. "I'm just lookin' to get high."

"Yeah, well," I said, "where I come from we earn our drug money."

It was well past lunch, and without a paramilitary shadow, the streets were crowded with the kind of people who are out well past lunch: they couldn't muster a sense of urgency to find a bathroom much less something constructive to do. Since propelled transport had been banned inside the Center, downtown had calcified, plugged up like a heart that wasn't allowed to have blood flowing through it. In the aftermath of D.C., the theory went that it would bring people together, that actually walking places would expose us all to each other and we'd rediscover our common purpose, our common destiny.

There was a lot of that kind of talk after D.C. The second person plural got a workout. It's been ten years since the military wing of a Republican splinter group detonated a pocket nuke in Washington -- "Federalism by any means necessary!" -- but people are still going on about it, endlessly. Shut up already. It's done, over. Net result: Two million dead, some nobody in Florida wakes up to find out that he's President and you can't walk through central L.A. without stepping in shit, some of which will curse at you when you do it.

It was a stupid idea, of course; most of the post-D.C. ideas were stupid. But now it would take bulldozers and riot squads and maybe twenty or thirty years of eminent domain lawsuits to clear the streets. Downtown looked like the ebb of a particularly foul tide, with detritus and scum coating the asphalt, clotting and thickening in the corners. Nobody actually lived here, like in the shanty town four blocks west, but that didn't mean any of them moved much.

So I just made my way through the muck with the standard Center push -- head down, shoulders hunched, aggressive and indifferent at the same time. My reputation was enough to keep most people out of my way and there were enough other targets that the Deniers left me alone.

A couple of blocks up Alameda, I passed whatever they had done to Union Station. That was another change from after D.C.: A central transportation hub in every major city in the country had been commandeered by the military. They had swooped down, set up a perimeter and disappeared the building into the night. A curtain of darkness, a full city block, hung over whatever was going on inside, extending all the way up out of the atmosphere. People had tried lighting it up, of course, but weird things happened when the beams hit the gloom. Mag doors were strong enough to throw a little distortion into light as it passed through, but whatever could swallow it up completely -- without taking everything else in the neighborhood with it -- was beyond anything I'd ever heard of. It was a portable, configurable black hole and if that was the face of the work they were willing to show, I didn't want to find out what was going on in secret.

Another block past Union Station was Phillippe's. It's been there forever, a century and a half, and hasn't changed all that much during. They couldn't afford to use beef anymore, of course, but they faked it pretty well, and I got a dip and sat at the long counter downstairs.

Unresponsive appeared next to me -- quite literally appeared, again -- and awkwardly climbed onto a stool. He wore the same shabby suit he'd had on yesterday.

"Half?" I said.

"Oh, no, Mr. Baxter. No thank you. I don't eat," he said, "that."

"Suit yourself," I said and bit the sandwich.

"Have you met with Mr. Koizumi?"

"Yep," I said. "I'm now an employee of Koizumi Extranational."

"Oh, Mr. Baxter. That was a terrible mistake."

"I get free coffee," I said.

"I warned you yesterday, Mr. Baxter, that you should not deal with Mr. Koizumi."

"And, hey, have you ever heard of health insurance?"

"Mr. Baxter, I say this to you with all available force: do not fulfill the contract that Mr. Koizumi has put on Mr. Danning."

"I think the receptionist likes me."

"Mr. Baxter, are you listening to me?"

"Hm?" I said. "What?"

Unresponsive sputtered a little, and seemed to vibrate on his stool. Different parts of his face stopped matching up -- his eyes were out of sync, and small changes came to his mouth and chin fast enough that he sort of blurred and went indistinct for a moment.

"Mr. Baxter!" he said, "Are you listening to me?"

"Yeah," I said. "You're hard to avoid."

"I am threatening your life!"

"And you're not very good at it, Eddie," I said, turning to him. "You're not physically imposing, you perturb easily, and if you were really backed by all the high-end power you claim, you'd either dress better or I'd already be dead."

"I--" he said.

"Look. I appreciate the effort and your confidence-in-the-face-of-all-available-evidence bit works pretty well for a newber. But you've obviously got no idea what you're doing, and between spastic little you and Yukio Koizumi, I'm going with Koizumi."

"I--" he said.

"The fact that you know there's going to be a hit doesn't impress me. I'm an assassin. I met with someone. Not a big leap. That you know his name is interesting, but only confirms how bad Koizumi's security is."

"I--" he said.

"And, besides, he asked me first."

"I..." he said, and trailed off. "What?"

"I'm old fashioned that way," I said. "If you want to wait, I'll be happy to kill whoever you want when I'm done."

"I want you not to kill someone, Mr. Baxter. Unless you can manage to unkill Mr. Danning when you are done, then we have no further business and you have just made many powerful enemies."

"Tell them I say, 'Hi,'" I said.

"Good-bye, Mr. Baxter," Unresponsive said, sliding down from the stool and leaning in to me. "And I mean that in every sense of the word."

"Hey, that wasn't bad--" I said, but he was gone. Poof. I scanned the dining room, half expecting to see him scuttling away, gracelessly trying to pull off a dramatic exit and failing; half knowing that he, somehow, was already gone.

And for a brief moment -- just half a second -- I wondered if this was how Roland Danning felt. The movement of weight could be sensed, from miles distant, and weight was moving against Danning. He couldn't know what was coming, but the air might shift in a certain way that would leave him uneasy; the ground he walked on might feel slightly less secure. Mass left a signature, an imprint, across time and space, and what was being brought to bear against this one man would leave him just the slightest smear on the hammer that was coming down. He had no idea -- he couldn't -- but deep down, in his gut and in his bones, he must know.

The thing was, I could feel it, too. Weight. Mass. Moving.

But it was coming in the opposite direction.