Greg Bear - Mariposa

Rebecca stopped in front of the glassed-in inspection station to retrieve her purse. Just for good measure, she was subjected to another pat down and sent through the imaging gates. Blake looked away while she went through, but she saw herself in the station monitor: gray, ghostly naked, and awful, like a lumpy corpse.

"You're an unexpected gentleman, Mr. Blake," Rebecca said as they returned to the parking lot. "Quinn's under suicide watch. He's surrounded by guards. What could happen to him?"

"Someone in the federal system pulled a chain and flushed him out of McNair," Blake said. "There was nothing wrong with security there. He's not afraid, but I am. Neither of us knows how it will happen. But it's going to happen. The Secret Service detail is perfunctory, at best, and even that will be withdrawn in a few days."

"Where's the threat to his family?" Rebecca asked.

Blake shook his head. "The president gets shot. You and everyone else in the Los Angeles Convention Center get hit with some clever new type of bomb, targeting-maybe-an undersecretary of Homeland Security and forty or more active and retired federal agents. Someone seems to want to destabilize what little government we have left-which teeters on insolvency. The Secret Service is in disarray. Morale is shot. The FBI is in transit-or limbo. Half the remaining security in Washington has ties to private contractor firms. Based on past performance, whoever writes the biggest checks has the most say. Quinn's onto something. He won't tell me, either. But my firm did our own research before we took on his case. He had interesting contacts, and apparently he utilized their services."

Having accompanied her across the parking lot, Blake stood beside Rebecca with hands folded as Baumann opened the limo door.

Rebecca paused by the open door. The defense attorney's close presence made her uncomfortable. "So?"

Baumann focused on Blake's shoulders, his arms-what he could see of them.

Blake looked around, then leaned in to speak softly. "Someone's working down a list. I have absolutely no idea why."

"But you know who, don't you?"

Blake pulled back. "It's going to come out. It has to."

When Baumann looked away, distracted by a passing car, Blake pressed a folded piece of paper into her hand.

"Do what you can to get Quinn moved back to McNair. He has useful information, it'll just take time. Don't call me or my firm. When it all comes out, this is going to be pure poison and we do a lot of business around here."

Rebecca sat in the limo, lifting her leg and swinging it into the car. She watched Blake return to the visitor's center entrance.

"Anything interesting, Ms. Rose?" Baumann asked as he prepared to close her door.

"I don't know, Roger. Not yet."

"Was that crack he made supposed to be some kind of a threat?"

"Good ears, Roger. I don't know that, either."

"I can have him hauled in," Baumann said, looking back at her in the rearview mirror, eyes narrowed.

"Don't bullshit yourself. You'd be yanked faster than a pit bull in a chicken yard."

"I was on Quinn's detail," he said a few minutes later. "Jesus. A veteran and war hero-a real family man. No marital problems I ever saw. Ms. Rose?"

"Yes, Roger?"

"No more going out on your own."

"I'll let you know, Roger."

She opened the folded piece of paper. All it said was "Talos."

The rest of the day seemed routine but Rebecca was looking for any and all connections between the former vice president and Talos Corporation-or CEO Axel Price. She used tailored searches to process millions of archived White House emails, sent over from the National Archives.

Nothing of interest. White bread politics, not even whole wheat.

And nothing about Talos.

Washington D.C.

Rebecca unlocked the door to her hotel room. The clock on the wall glowed 1707.

She took the pot from the hotel coffeemaker and poured a cup before sitting at the desk, leg stretched out to ease the ache. She opened Tom's manila envelope and laid its contents on the desk. One sheet of zip paper.

She thumbed the tab.

The first entries from the dattoo, arranged in indexed pages, were people she had met at the COPES conference. Next, Tom had arranged fragments of degraded files, a mess of keyboard symbols that meant nothing to her. He had annotated some of the lines of code, suggesting, in parentheses, what they might mean. Most were names-again, people she had met at the conference.

But Tom had also written, on the third page, "Sound file encoded and fragmented. Can't reconstruct yet. Still working. But name is recoverable: 'Confession of VP.'"

Rebecca finished her coffee, then touched the zip paper's right arrow to access the fourth page. Tom had prefaced this new list of names, marked off in a matrix of lines, with "Not dattoo files. Separate single Excel formatted file, recovered complete. Analysis of this file gives a machine ID, Microsoft license and serial number, location of store where software was purchased eight years ago-Trig Medical Office Outfitters, Bethesda, Maryland. Name of installer or licensee-Madeline Paris, doctor. Simple hacker shit. You're welcome. Sorry about the delay on the sound file."

Rebecca looked over the names. Tom had underlined two without comment: Edward Quinn, listed on the entry as "Primary, First Patient List, Mariposa 01"; and near the bottom, third from the last, "Rebecca Rose, Fourth Patient List (outlier), Mariposa 03."

She frowned, moved her finger down, scrolling the zip page, and read the thirteenth name: "Nathaniel Trace, Second Patient List, Mariposa 02."

Mariposa was butterfly in Spanish. By itself, that meant nothing to her. But Nathaniel Trace, Edward Quinn, and Rebecca Rose all had something in common. That something was in-or had been in-Bethesda, Maryland.

Rebecca had only one connection to anything in Bethesda. She had gone to a clinic there to undergo treatment for delayed PTSD.

The same PTSD that had gotten her indefinitely furloughed from the FBI-not retired, not shitcanned, but furloughed, because she knew too much, and keeping 'em on the payroll was standard practice at the time for alcoholic, drug-addled, or otherwise defective agents who knew embarrassing things.

Or who broke into a raging, paper-tossing fury in a case meeting at a simple challenge from the then-director.

She took a deep breath. The meeting with Nathaniel Trace meant that someone had known even before she did that the president was going to ask her to investigate the VP.

The White House had a leak.

Nathaniel Trace was connected with that someone-friend or foe, who could tell? As for the list of names…

Quinn had secretly gone for treatment at the same clinic-hush-hush in the extreme. Mariposa. Quinn. Trace.

Rebecca Rose.

Quinn had gone off his nut and killed his wife. Not drugs in his doughnuts, not a surreptitious injection or contact poison. Side effects of Mariposa, perhaps. Very possibly.

Likely.

Rebecca closed her eyes and sat for a long, long cascade of steady breaths, against the sincere wishes of her ribs.

I'm part of the problem.

This information had to go to the president, delivered personally. But the president was in the Catoctins, at Camp David. She had been there for three days and no one could reach her-not even Rebecca.

The room's old landline phone rang. She never used it. She picked up the wireless handset and searched for the talk button.

"You don't know me, Mrs. Rose," said the voice on the other end-masculine, soft and steady. Her brow furrowed. No one was supposed to know she was staying here. Despite the voice's mildness, something was wrong-and not just because he called her missus.

"No, I don't," she said. "Who are you?"