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  "Detective Lieutenant Henry Carmaggio," he said.

  There was an awkward moment of silence while the waitress brought their coffee: cappuccino; they were north of Canal Street, in an area where Italian was slowly giving way to Asian. He sipped, relishing the familiar bitterness.

  "So. You wanted a meet?"

  Finch nodded a little jerkily. "Highly unofficial," she said.

  Henry grinned. "Your brass doesn't like weird shit either, hey?"

  "We—Special Agent Dowding and I, my boss—got the reports on your homicides because there seemed to be a repetitive pattern, might be a serial killer. We put out a flag on it. Sure enough, we got a repetition of the MO."

  Henry felt himself tense. "Where?" he whispered.

  "Through the DEA. Cali, Colombia."

  "Shit, they get twenty homicides a day there, sometimes."

  "Not this way. A couple of goons cut up—street-soldiers for one of the drug operators. Crushed like dixie cups, killed with their own knives. Then a bank executive, found in his apartment a lot like your Stephen Fischer. And a disappearance, a flight attendant named Dolores Ospina Pastrana. All associated with a woman matching the description of the one seen with Fischer. Operating under the name of Smith."

  "That's original," Carmaggio grunted. "Was the bank in Colombia dirty?"

  "In Cali?" Finch said.

  "Point taken," Carmaggio said.

  "Outside our jurisdiction," she went on. "And some time ago, now. But you see the implications."

  "Money. We've got someone who drops into a major buy, kills twenty men, and walks out with . . . call it a million plus in very dirty bills. They stop over at an apartment for a few hours. Then at another for a week, a killing at each. There may have been another—"

  "What?" Finch leaned forward.

  "Lowlife named Jojo Jackson, down around Times Square. Did false ID, among other things; we found him in an alley. Somebody grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face into the wall, real hard.

  "I don't like this," Henry went on softly. "I don't like this at all. Because it says learning, to me. Learning about things, killing the teacher to clean up, moving on."

  "And laundering the money," Finch said, with a tight controlled nod. "Which means that whoever it is now has a million dollars—call it half that after the cut the cleaners take—in untraceable funds."

  She cleared her throat. "Its not a serial killer in the conventional sense. Not a drug thing under the DEA's mandate. Not just a homicide."

  "It's very fucking strange," Henry said quietly. "Let's stop beating about the bush."

  The agent hesitated, tapping her fingers on the linoleum, then came to a decision:

  "Our esteemed friends at you-know-where near D.C. grabbed the arm," she said. "My guess is they're studying the hell out of it somewhere and want the lid very firmly in place. Word's come down from above that it's a national security matter. Drop it, forget it, it never happened. The Company and Military Intelligence have whole sections dedicated to woo-woo stuff; TV to the contrary, the Bureau doesn't."

  Henry tapped a finger on the table.

  "Who specifically?" he said. "You wouldn't happen to know about a couple of thick-ears, one of 'em twenty-five, brown hair, blue eyes, the other—"

  "Andrews and Debrowski," Finch said. "Yes. They're wet-work specialists, operating for a new branch. Bioterrorist threats. Mostly Company people."

  "Them," he said. "I would have thought NSA. You might be interested to know that they paid a call on a friend of mine. They weren't real friendly themselves, and they picked up something important."

  "It's a joint operation, which is why technically they do have domestic jurisdiction. Not that that ever stopped you-know-who from doing you-know-what."

  "The Company," Carmaggio said. "Let me tell you about the spooks. Guy I know—this happened back in seventy, I met him years later in a VA hospital, Navajo guy—was in the Special Forces, his unit was up in the Highlands, running a Hmong camp. Seems there was an encryption group, Company people, operating out of the camp. Good men, with some equipment that was high-tech back in those days. They were reading local enemy signal traffic better than Victor C."

  Finch's eyes turned intent at the policeman's tone. Carmaggio's voice went low and tight. He'd never been there himself when he was in-country, but he could see it—down to the feel of the heat, the black-pajama'd Montagnards, the long lean pigs rooting among the sandbags, chickens clucking, naked brown kids.

  "So they get Elint that the enemy's going to attack the camp. Do they pass it on? No, they do not. They ask permission from Langley. And Langley decides that it's a higher priority to keep the fact that we're—they're—reading the signals secret. So it goes back and forth between Langley and this pissant little firebase for days, until the guy in charge of the listening post takes out his .45 and shoots up the radio and tells the Special Forces officer running the place what's coming down—only by then it's real late, and four hours later two battalions of NVA hit their wire. Couple hours after that, they were calling in strikes right on top of their own position."

  He forced his fingers to relax on the thick china cup. "The Navajo guy got dusted out with an AK bullet through both knees. And that," he said softly, "is what I think of the spooks. And they're doing it again.

  "Isn't it a coincidence," he went on in a lighter tone of voice, "that your people at Quantico can't tell us any more about that skin sample we got from under Marley Man's fingernails, or return it?"

  "Yes. Remarkable coincidence. The Bureau didn't object, and normally they wouldn't spit on the Company if they saw 'em dying of thirst in the desert, for fear it would give them the strength to crawl to water."

  "And the spooks don't much care about the unsolved homicides, do they?"

  The FBI agent cleared her throat and spoke, in her polite, barely accented voice: "We do, Mr. Carmaggio. It may sound strange, but we feel a certain responsibility to the American public. And whatever else we have, it's a pattern killer. I'm not ruling anything out, including mutants and space aliens, but whatever it is—it kills."

  Carmaggio nodded heavily and finished the lukewarm remnants of his cappuccino. "My gut tells me the pattern's not going to stay down in the land of coffee and nose-candy, either."

  "We did . . . retain the DNA pattern when the other people took the skin sample," Finch said. "Unofficially, and just in case. You know the passport setup the Canadians have nowadays?"

  "Bring in $250,000 and get their equivalent of a green card? Yeah. Getting a lot of heavy traffic out of Hong Kong that way."

  "It's also a natural setup for various sorts of crime, not to mention espionage, so we have some contacts with the RCMP," Finch said. "My boss called in a favor and had them run a computer check on their applications. They do a DNA fingerprint—just satellite-DNA, not the deep stuff. They didn't see anything strange, but it did match the pattern markers I sent them."

  "Ahhh." A vast hunter's satisfaction warmed Carmaggio's belly.

  A fax slid across the table to him. He felt his eyebrows rise at the picture. This was what had wasted Marley Man? He looked at the high-cheeked sculpted face. Looker. Maybe it was his imagination, but there was something wrong about it . . .

  "Gwendolyn Ingolfsson," he read. "Colombian citizenship . . ."

  "Which you can buy retail," Finch said.

  Henry shrugged assent. With the amounts of money washing around down there, everyone was dirty and pretty well everything was for sale. The down side of that was that local ID was a trouble-flag to half the police forces on earth. Canadian papers were nearly as easy to get and not nearly as likely to arouse suspicion.

  "And resident in the Bahamas," she said. "They don't like people asking questions there, not without very good reasons. We can't do anything; officially that skin sample no longer exists and never did. But . . ."

  Another piece of paper followed the picture. The header and signature had been blanked out when it was photoc
opied, but he recognized the style.

  ". . . damage to cranium is congruent with beam weapon. Laser is unlikely due to explosive deformation upon penetration. An energetic-particle or metallic charged-plasma beam, with the latter being the higher probability. Guide mechanism unknown. Effect indicates a power source in the multiple-megawatt scale; the effect could not be duplicated without capacitors and other equipment weighing in the seven- to twelve-tonne range . . ."

  "I'll be goddamned," he said. "It was a ray gun. No wonder the spooks are all over it."

  Carmaggio leaned back and hooked an ankle over his knee. "Now, Special Agent, that leaves one question. Why exactly are you coming to me about all this?"

  "They're probably thinking in terms of some foreign connection," Finch said. "We—my boss and I—don't think so. We don't know what, but it doesn't fit espionage."

  "The problem with setting up an organization to find bio-terrorists . . ." Carmaggio said.

  ". . . is that they will find bio-terrorists. Whether they're there or not. And my boss is convinced that if they do find"—she tapped the picture—"her, they'll try to deal. Sure as fate, they'll try to deal; they want that stuff that badly. The only thing we're confident of is that there'll be more bodies."

  They looked at each other for an instant. Somebody had walked into that warehouse and killed twenty armed men with a knife and bare hands. The picture didn't look like someone who could do that . . . but nobody could, anyway.

  "Not Rambo on his best day," Carmaggio said, and the FBI agent nodded. "I do not understand this." Finch nodded again.

  "We don't need to understand how, right now," she said. "What and who will do just fine."

  "So we stay in touch," Carmaggio said. "And we get ready; getting those papers smells like preparation for another try at the U.S. to me."

  Whatever lived behind those eyes was getting smarter.

  Getting ready.

  "We can help each other with this," Finch said. It sounded as much like a prayer as a statement.

  "I certainly hope so, Ms. Finch," he said. "Because we both need all the help we can get."

  He looked down at the picture. The rest of the data on the sheet was probably fiction, but the face was real. The eyes, green and level, with a hint of mockery in them.

  Chapter Six

  Immobilized in gel, breathing thick oxygen-rich fluid, Kenneth Lafarge was one with the machine. It was deceptively simple in appearance, an egg two meters long and one-and-a-half at its broadest point. The color was a soft matte black, the material a complex ceramic assembled atom by atom. Inside were the mechanisms that maintained him unknowing as it coasted in through the outer planets to a precisely calculated meeting with the third.

  The machine woke him. Approaching Earth/2, it said/thought, passive scans reveal no overt enemy presence.

  He activated the exterior sensor feed, and the chill immensity of space snapped into being around him. Below was a view he knew only from ancient holographs and long-distance scans; the blue-white shield of Earth, turning in majesty. Now he was near it, one of less than half a dozen of his people since the Exodus, four centuries before. It was like and unlike Samothrace in the Centauri system. Blue of water, white of cloud, brown-gray-greens of land; more water than his native planet, less land surface, slightly bigger overall, the shapes of the coastlines completely different. Samothrace was a world of many islands, many continents scattered among shallow seas, none larger than a few million square kilometers.

  Earth.

  Earth/2, he reminded himself. Four and half centuries before, in a history that was probably very unlike the one that had led to his world.

  Input analysis, he commanded.

  Data flowed in; from radio and vid broadcasts, from the sparse satellite traffic. There's a United States here, but no Domination, he realized. Getting ready for a Presidential election. Amazing. Dozens upon dozens of sovereign countries, few of them large. So much for the theory that planetary unification is inevitable in an industrialized world. There was hardly anything in space, which was even more amazing. Plenty of electromagnetic traffic, neutron output from fission plants, the atmosphere showed a lot of industrial byproducts, more than anything in the prime line's history. But none of the lunar colonies and orbital habitats his 1995 would have shown, nothing out in deep space or the asteroid belts.

  How do they maintain that density of population without materials and energy from space? he thought. From the looks of it, there must be more than five billion people down there; his Earth had never reached even half that, and by the late twentieth century it'd been dependent on space-based inputs.

  The first tenuous wisps of atmosphere buffeted the egg. It plunged more steeply, and outside views degraded under ionization and the peeling of layers of ablative covering.

  Detection, the machines told him; he could feel the microrays stroking at the outside of the egg, like sun on skin through the linkage. The stealthing would handle it easily; it was quite a primitive system. Not as good as what the Alliance for Democracy had had at the time of the Final War. Would have had. This whole multiple-world thing was enough to warp your brain. At a guess, this history hadn't had the sort of relentless competition that had driven technology in his.

  Lucky bastards.

  Gravity pushed at him, building, even in the liquid cocoon. At sixty thousand meters the drive kicked in, slowing his descent. That many energetic ions ought to cause some sort of a stir, but he doubted they'd know what they were looking at. It lasted exactly twenty seconds, and by then he was moving at only slightly more than the terminal velocity of the half-ton egg. North America opened beneath him, dark with night, starred with cities and roadways.

  He felt his throat tighten, emotion unexpected and intense. The ancient homeland, the lost and lovely. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had been born here . . . or at least this was another version of that place. The land of Jefferson, Washington, Douglas, Evrard.

  Minutes passed. The machine sensed the proper altitude and the exterior of the egg disintegrated, returning to its primary constituents and dispersing silently on the wind as molecular dust. The wing deployed; he steered it effortlessly on the currents of air toward the cornfield below. It set his feet down between two rows and disappeared itself, a rain of particles far too fine to feel against his skin. He pulled the breatherfilm off his face and spent a moment coughing the liquid out of his lungs.

  He was naked in a cornfield in . . . Illinois, the comp built into his skull prompted, drawing a map. The same political division here as in his history. But Mexico and Canada are separate countries. Events must have diverged early in the nineteenth century; Canada had been annexed to the U.S. in 1812, Mexico in 1848, Central America and Cuba during the 1850s.

  It was fairly chilly, a cold March night; much like the high country around his family's ranch in Galatin State back on Samothrace. He opened the flat case at his feet and took out overalls and boots, both neutral colors with archaic zip fasteners. Nothing there that any detection apparatus would find interesting, but he'd ditch them as soon as possible. The rest of his equipment stayed inside the shielded suitcase, except for a smooth dark oblong he slipped into one pocket. That would shoot a slug of ultracompressed gas, very effective at close range, and not at all conspicuous.

  He cocked an ear. Traffic sounds from about two klicks away; a highway, and transport.

  Mid-eastern coast, North America. That was all they'd been able to learn about the enemy molehole; that, and that it was probably an accident. Typical Draka brute-force-and-massive-ignorance science, but it could work. If they had the time. He was probably within three or four years of the original penetration, certainly within a decade. No overt sign of the Draka's activity.

  The corn rustled about him. A sleeping continent . . . a sleeping world, and something terrible loose in it. A worm in the bud, eating and burrowing and preparing to riddle it with the deadly spawn of the Domination.

  He picked up the suitc
ase and began to walk toward the road.

  ***

  Ken Lafarge snapped a fist into the elbow. It broke with an unpleasant crackling sound, and he released the knife hand.

  The other two muggers fled down a darkened alley, hauling the injured one along. Ken stooped and picked up the weapon one of them had dropped when snap-kicked in the gut; he turned it over in his hands, ejected the magazine, worked the action and disassembled it.

  A little primitive, he thought, putting it back together. Semi-automatic slugthrower, no guidance system at all. He reloaded and dropped it into a pocket, then reluctantly added the money from the criminals' wallets he'd taken. They'd probably stolen it themselves.

  This section of Chicago was unbelievably shabby and run-down. It stank, of urine and uncollected garbage. Everyone else he'd seen here was black—rather like what he'd read about parts of the South, right after the Civil War. Not many blacks had been among the refugees to Samothrace, and the population had homogenized by intermarriage in the centuries since.

  Didn't they free the slaves here, or what? he thought, turning and walking north, farther away from the bus station. Wait a minute. No Domination here, ever. So there'd been no place for the irreconcilables of the South to go, after whatever version of the Civil War this mutant history contained. That could mean . . . Wait until you've got the data.

  More of the internal-combustion vehicles passed him along the rain-sodden street, splashing through puddles in the cracked pavement. He stopped beside one that was resting on the bare rims of its tires and popped the hood open, shining a pencil-light on the interior.

  Interesting. Spark-ignition piston system. A fuel-air mixer that looked for all the world as if somebody had developed it from a perfume-bulb atomizer. Lots of electrical auxiliaries, and even a compchip monitoring system. He called up schematics of autosteamer engines from the historical files. Nothing even remotely similar. Oh, this thing would work, it probably even had a fairly good thermal efficiency, but it was absurdly overstressed for a civilian road-vehicle at a twentieth-century level of technology. Not to mention the toxic byproducts of high-temperature combustion.