Greg Bear - Mariposa

Mallom turned his back. "Hell with it, come on in. I'll get coffee."

William reached into his windbreaker and removed a small cylinder of Spray-Cuff.

Mallom was not completely oblivious. He looked over his shoulder just as the quick-setting gray cord crazy-tangled his upper body. The strands instantly tightened and bound his arms to his torso. William pointed the nozzle down and webbed the man's legs as he hopped around, then muffled his last few grunts with another discharge around the face and eyes.

Trussed like a fly, Mallom toppled. William caught him and eased his fall, then made sure the man could breathe by spreading two air holes in the nylon-tough strands around the man's nose and mouth. Mallom couldn't see much and could do little more than squirm and make strangled complaints, not very loud, since he couldn't draw a really deep breath.

"Relax," William said. "Just go limp."

Mallom's single visible eye was puffy and glaring, but he stopped struggling.

"Ooo hhuck aw ya? Cri own kimee."

William dragged him into the short middle hall and then into a bachelor-filthy bathroom: pee stains around the toilet, greasy hair tangles in the corners, underwear poking from the ratty laundry hamper.

He made sure the narrow window over the shower stall was latched shut. A quick search in the kitchen turned up a plastic drink jug from the local Cactus Stop. He filled it with water. The wide green flex-straw went into Mallom's mouth.

"Don't let yourself dry out. Pee if you have to. It might be a day or two before someone comes to look for you. Sorry about that."

Mallom now suspected he wasn't going to be murdered, so he grunted an expletive.

William found the man's employee uniform, cap, and equipment hanging on a valet and the bedroom dresser, put them on-not a great fit, but good enough-and stuffed his own clothes into a plastic bag. The house was a mess but not Mallom's uniform; shirt and pants had been neatly pressed, the shoes polished to a high sheen.

William made sure to lock the front door behind him, and returned to the car to get the black case.

The dawn was brighter now and the rooster was starting to prance before belting out a cockcrow. Across the street, a portly truck driver in a red jacket walked around his rig with a step a little like the rooster's. He cleared his nose into a kerchief and waved at William.

At this distance, he was reacting to the uniform. The gray early light obscured features.

"Going to haul Little Jamey's ass down to Huntsville?" the trucker asked.

William nodded under his cap.

"Screw Washington," the trucker said, and spat. "Screw the FBI. Screw Larsen and all the tax-hiking sons of bitches. Screw the New York press. Serves the bastards right."

Lion City and the Texas Department of Corrections, headquartered in Huntsville, in recent years had become a law unto themselves and so, as the trucker said, screw the FBI and screw New York.

William shrugged, lifted one hand, and climbed into Mallom's transport van. He slipped the black case between the van's seat and the engine cover.

The van recognized the recently implanted chip in his arm, a duplicate of the one issued to Mallom-good beginning. Everyone in Lion City was chipped. One big, happy family, almost all of them eager to execute Little Jamey. He started the motor, let it idle for a minute, backed it out of the driveway, and drove along Farm to Market Road, then swung east, toward the Lion County Correction Center.

Right on schedule.

The clandestine grid had been silent for a while.

No doubt Kapp and Curteze had been as busy as William.

Then, in his ear, a calm voice from Washington, D.C.-Jane Rowland, as he had suspected all along. She had taken over this part of the operation and was running it for Alicia Kunsler.

"Old Pap is frantic for news. What'll I tell him?"

"Tell him Jim's got his raft," William said. "We're heading for the river."

Shortly, he would have to ditch his spex. Talos tracked nearly all communications around Lion City and the campus-and if they couldn't ID any particular signal, they sent out employees or sheriff's deputies to locate the source-just to make sure.

Pendleton Reserve, California

The morning trip south from Los Angeles was swift, peaceful, without incident. Nathaniel Trace was glad he could drive like a normal human being and not draw attention.

The Quiet Man had left a message-a series of numbers. The Mind Design circuit was still working. The original Turing Seven still had their EPR phone accounts, and the Quiet Man had one as well, but the display showed only three phones logged on.

The phones would not work for anyone but their assigned owners. While it was conceivable that their codes could be cracked-Nathaniel had a number of ideas how that might be done-the circuits would tell them if someone unauthorized was listening in.

So far, nobody was.

The Quiet Man was very fond of EPR technology.

Nathaniel drove down Camino Del Mar, then stopped at a coffee shop to pick up Humphrey Camp. He was alone. The right side of his face was paler than the left, and his left hand showed an intermittent tremor. iHis Hi

Driving south in light fog, Camp opened the window and waved his fingers in the cool, moist slipstream. "I can't think straight for more than five minutes," he complained. "My stomach is ruined. I still don't know what to eat-I'm starving to death and I don't even care." He touched the pale side of his face, then pinched it hard. "Feeling comes and goes. It's like someone's put a voodoo doll up to a mirror. Bork's gone into hiding-won't say where. Jerry Lee seems happy. He's stalking women in Santa Monica. I don't feel guilty knowing that, either. But look at you-you're driving a Hyundai, Mr. Sober and Responsible, for Christ's sake."

Nathaniel had bought a nice, safe car, unlikely to encourage him to explore the wild limits of his new abilities-and had paid cash. That evening he had filled the tank, stopped over for a few hours at a beach motel, then driven in the dark to downtown Laguna Beach, where he had received his last call from the Quiet Man, telling him where to pick up Camp.

Camp rambled on. "You think Talos blew up the LA Convention Center to kill Plover, right?"

"I don't know," Nathaniel said. "Seems a bit extreme, if you ask me."

"But you stuck around. You did what Plover asked. Why?"

"He seemed sincere."

Camp pulled in his hand and scratched his nose. "Okay. You hung around for no good reason. Why?"

"Checking out the weather. A hunch, call it."

"Hunches seem different. You know why Jerry Lee is stalking women?"

"No idea," Nathaniel said.

"Maybe it's a hunch. After the blast, the Quiet Man told me you went right back inside, to check up on a woman you just met."

"Seemed the thing to do," Nathaniel said.

"Maybe you were stalking her," Camp said.

The Quiet Man's numbers needed to be broken down into groups of seven. In his head, Nathaniel stacked them and ran them through the most likely coding algorithm-one with seven steps-and recovered what appeared to be a set of coordinates. There was one last step, known only to the Turing Seven-what the Quiet Man called an "acciditional" twist or renormalizing of the results.

Without looking at a map or engaging the nav system, Nathaniel visualized where the first set of numbers would take them: out to Mind Design, near the beach in La Jolla.

That was too obvious, too dangerous-why even bother with encoding? If the Turing Seven were a threat to Price, wasn't Mind Design one of the first places they would look?

Seven numbers. Seven programmers.

Seven stations of the crossed.

Then he renormalized, using the "acciditional" twist.