Greg Bear - Mariposa

"Of course not." She smiled brightly, eyes measuring relevant distances with saccadic micro-movements. "May I come in?"

She wore a coat over a short red dress. Sensible walking shoes, no high heels or pumps. "I took a bus and then walked," she said. "Good for the legs." She lifted her bag, catching the hem of the coat and revealing fit calves. "I brought high heels. If you want, I can put them on."

"I am putty in your hands," Nathaniel said.

Her eyes turned sharp, like a cat about to leap.

Crazy confidence flooded him. At the last instant, he decided nobody would die. He would escape, they would have no idea where he had gone, and the team they had assigned to catch or kill him would survive-mostly intact. He could see it, almost experience it-run it through on a loop.

Edit the mistakes.

Just for fun. But there's something else, isn't there? You're free of every human emotion but two: pride-and curiosity.

The woman stepped around the screen door with the quick grace of a dancer-or a trained Navy Seal.

"Hold on a moment," he said. "That's my phone."

He let the screen door go and it started to swing shut.

She dropped her bag, blocking it. Her left hand flew toward the bridge of his nose. He feinted. Her right hand, edge on, came around to wedge him in the throat or fist him behind his jaw-or failing that, drop and hit him just below the sternum.

She missed.

Time slowed-nothing new. He had seen it before in in Iraq and Arabia Deserta. What astonished him was how much slower time seemed now, slower even than it had been at the LA Convention Center -and how much more it hurt at a deep level as he almost instantly burned through the ATP in his brain, the energy in his nerves.

He increased his heart rate to replenish blood flow.

The woman avoided his first rounding kick, which would easily have knocked her legs out from under her-but not the higher, faster second. His slippered foot took her under her raised arm, emptying her lungs with a whoosh and slamming her into the left doorframe.

She slumped like a sack.

His groin muscles wanted to spasm. He didn't allow it.

He was now exposed to the street, but jumped back and to his right. A bullet shnizzed just under his extended arm and blew a tan puff of splinters from a beam.

He kept going.

The white curtains drawn across the front windows covered his movement, but the sniper followed a probable trajectory and sent three more shots through the glass.

Close, very close. But seeing it all as if in film previews, Nathaniel had dropped to the floor-so fast he almost dislocated his hip.

He could feel his arm muscles start to rip.

No brakes.

His internal narration-the amused, wise old professional voice said, He lands in a crouch, drops, and slithers into the dining room, away from the backdoor, where others now enter.

The large bay window in the dining room reached over the walkway on the left side of the house. He lifted aside a chair, silent as a snake, and crawled under the heavy table.

One man's denim-clad legs appeared in the swinging door to the kitchen. The man pushed the door wide with one hand. The other hand no doubt held a gun-a pistol.

Nathaniel heard quiet movement down the middle hall-coming in on another route from the back porch. Heavier footsteps sent quivers along the wooden floor boards.

These two would form a pincer.

He squatted, braced, and shouldered the entire table like Atlas, tilting and shoving it into six rapid pistol shots from the man in the kitchen door-one of which penetrated the table's dense wood and grazed his shoulder.

The table pressed the shooter's arm against the door frame, bending it until it snapped it like a tree branch. Pinned, the man would not move-certainly not for the next few seconds.

Nathaniel was now exposed from the rear, but the man in the hall had not yet reached the living room-no doubt taking a couple of crucial seconds to assess the condition of his female colleague outside.

Nathaniel moved flat along the wall that paralleled the middle hall and retrieved an iron elephant bookend from the top of the built-in cupboard. With a bent grin, he watched the assailant's hand come into view, guessed the height of his head, and round-housed the bookend not into the man's face-no fatalities-but level with the jaw and the neck.

The man was fast but the elephant dropped him like a brick.

By now, the sniper and other team members would be up on the front porch.

Nathaniel returned to the dining room, lifted the oak table by its central pillar-ignoring another blaze of pain-rotated the three hundred pounds, easy-peasy, and heaved it through the bay window.

Broken arm released, the pinned man fell with a scream. The kitchen door swished back and hit his head.

He grunted and stopped screaming.

Nathaniel jumped after the table, through the shattered panes of glass. Table and body landed in the side oleanders in a painful tangle. He extricated himself and lurched to the right, around the back-behind other houses, through other yards.

One last bullet cracked, a wild shot inside the house.

Some blocks away, limping toward Long Beach Boulevard and a city bus or taxi, Nathaniel assessed the damage.

Not good.

He was thirty-seven years old, not in prime condition, and this was going to hurt like hell for days, maybe weeks. Nothing broken, however, and no bullet holes-just a few cuts in his forehead and arms and a graze that had already caked over.

He stopped by a curb and leaned on a signpost and started to laugh. The laugh sounded like a leopard's cough in a bad jungle night.

No ordinary humor-not even satisfaction at having survived an attempt on his life. A man who took no heed of pain or fear was in real danger.

He had to find a place to lie low and recuperate.

Los Angeles, California

"Rebecca!"

Rebecca swung into her hospital room on new crutches.

Three men and a woman stood by her empty bed. She knew Hiram Newsome, former director of the FBI and her onetime rabbi and mentor in the Bureau.

His friends had always called him News, even during his tenure as director.

She recognized Deputy Director Alicia Kunsler from their earlier days in the FBI, when they had worked together several times. Kunsler looked mannish and frumpy-short-cut dark hair, pale skin, small, discerning eyes, square in all her angles.

The short, long-armed and short-legged forty-something male was Ruben Scholes, Deputy Director of the Bureau in Transition West. His friends reportedly called him Monk, but a slippery grasp on power was losing him most of those friends.

The true-blue grapevine-backed by an extensive series of articles in NYT Online-told of bad blood between the Scholes and Kunsler, not surprising, since they were jockeying for ultimate control of the Bureau.

The second woman, a thin-faced, aquiline blond in her early thirties, wore a green pantsuit and pale gray shoes. Behind her thin and impressive nose followed a sharply attractive face.

They had never met and Rebecca did not recognize her.

News stepped forward and hugged Rebecca gingerly. She pulled in her crutches, looking in puzzlement over his shoulder at Kunsler.

"You're on God's payroll now, Rebecca," News said. "I hear a truck flipped over on you."

"And part of a roof," the blond said.

"I'm okay," Rebecca said. "Just a few cracked ribs and a sprained ankle."

News pulled back. "I don't believe you've met Shawna Prouse, JTTF Los Angeles, SAC of the convention center bombing investigation." SAC-he pronounced it letter by letter-meant Special Agent in Charge. "Agent Prouse, Rebecca Rose. You know our east and west coast directors."

"Pleasure," Rebecca said. "I wasn't expecting a reception committee. They serve Jell-O in fifteen minutes."