Greg Bear - Mariposa

Someone had picked it up and scrunched in it in a fist, then tossed it down again.

Mind Design's logo was a paper airplane with its nose pointed skyward-merging with an illuminati pyramid and all-seeing eye.

Nathaniel picked up the airplane, shook it free of dust, and unfolded it. One wing's inner surface was covered with scribbles-penciled rows of numbers.

Seven groups of seven.

"Hell," he murmured, but more out of concern at the fascination that now flooded through him. He was being jerked around like a bloodhound pushed down a trail of funky rags-but this bloodhound was a number geek from way back, and the Quiet Man, or somebody, was perfectly happy to play with his oh-so-genius-class head.

The numbers presented little difficulty. In essence, the relation between the first three sets solved most efficiently to a half circle, or 180 degrees. The next two solved to any rectangle wider than it was tall, and the last two strings easily converted from ASCII to a word: DEADMAN.

Seven letters.

The Quiet Man had probably spent years of his youth playing video games. So had Nathaniel, of course, and most of the Turing Seven. He looked around the cabin. Nothing else of interest; heightened edge perception made sure of that, even in the shack's semidarkness.

His eyes burned as if they were on fire, so he shut them for a few seconds.

"You okay?" Camp called.

"Fine," Nathaniel said.

Nathaniel stepped back into the cloudy sunshine. The air was still cool, still moist. He had always liked southern California autumn weather, particularly near the coast. Fog might roll in from the ocean soon, as high or higher than this small plateau, about four hundred feet above sea level. It would leave everything moist and dripping through the night.

He waved for Camp to join him. "We're supposed to go to the blockhouse."

"He could have told us that right off," Camp suggested.

The breeze shifted and wafted a mild stench-stale but still foul-from behind the shack. Nathaniel's body stiffened. He had smelled death before-in Iraq and in Jordan and of course in Arabia Deserta.

Day-old death in dry, dusty air.

This was death many days old, in moist, cool air.

Nathaniel stepped gingerly through the yellow, dew-moist grass to the rear of the shack, again on alert for tripwires.

Three bodies had been laid out in a row in the grass. The bee vision outlines of shocking red and electric blue were totally unnecessary.

"What is it?" Camp called.

He was slunching through the grass to join Nathaniel.

"Watch your feet," Nathaniel said. "Three dead people. All men, I think."

Camp stood beside him. "Holy crap. Who are they?"

The bodies had lain out in the open for at least a week and a half. The clothing was stained with bloat and bursting. Maggots still wriggled in a desultory fashion around a series of small thoracic holes gnawed by some animal through the clothing. Raccoons, maybe.

Raccoons might not like the taste of human flesh, but they knew how to farm a corpse: they chewed holes in a body and waited for maggots to cluster, then ate the tasty, high-protein morsels on a steady basis for several days, until the maggot food and thus the maggot supply chain gave out. Nathaniel had read about that in a crime novel years ago.

He recognized an MIT class ring on one brown, leathery finger. "That's Harvey Belton," he said.

Harvey "Bourbaki" Belton had been the eldest of the Turing Seven, a world expert in nested and recursively competitive algorithms. He had practically invented acciditional functions, finding a use for so-called accidental numbers-until then considered one of the most useless ideas in math. He could have won a Nobel, but went for the money instead.

They hadn't spoken in months.

"Three of us?" Camp asked in a plaintive voice. "Just dumped out here?"

Nathaniel stooped down and tried to guess the corpses' statures: 5-4, 6-1, 5-10 respectively. Their weight and build were more difficult to judge.

He had a bad feeling about one of them. The face, though crusted and shrunken, still looked familiar. Wispy grayish hair was slicked down by blood and dew. A sheen of something gray and cheesy coated the cheeks and nose-what was it called?

Adipocere.

He had read that in a crime novel, too.

Strange. Bee vision gone. The colors had dropped right back into normal. His subconscious was as stunned as the rest of his brain.

"We should check out the blockhouse," Nathaniel said, rising.

"What can we learn that we don't already know?" Camp asked. "Someone's killing us. I knew that already."

Nathaniel looked again at the middle of the three bodies. A ruck of checked wool poked through a gap in the muddy leather jacket. "I think that's Stan Parker," he said. "Fits his taste in shirts."

"All right," Camp said. "Seven little Indians. How many does that leave?"

"You, me…" He looked again at the third body and felt sweat break out. He did not want to say who this was, because it was impossible. He had heard the voice. The voice had been giving him instructions for days.

"You. Me. Jerry Lee. Bork," he finished. "Maybe that's it."

Lion City

William drove the PerpTrans van off the road and behind a deserted, boarded-up gas station garage. To Little Jamey's slack-jawed astonishment, the two DOC officers riding with him in the back pulled jeans and sweatshirts from a knapsack and started to peel off their uniforms.

William unlocked the driver side door and Kapp came around to insert his plug into the van's security port, just below the dashboard.

Kapp was short and stocky, with thinning brown hair and a fine, patrician nose. "Four minutes, then we smash the GPS tracking unit. That'll take the van off any grid."

Curteze unlocked and pulled open the garage door and stood before a rancher's old Tahoe-stashed here three weeks ago under a tarp. Curteze was tallest, rangy, with thick black hair slicked back from his forehead.

He pulled away the tarp. The Tahoe was still equipped with the rancher's radio frequency ID transponder. Texans were serious about immigration reform. Unchipped vehicles were pulled over and searched by all local police agencies.

As well, Talos security birds flew over most of West Texas and could also ping vehicles.

This part of the plan had been particularly difficult to carry out. The RFID chips were custom programmed in Midland and shipped around the state. In the end, someone in the Bureau had purchased the SUV at a farm auction from the owner's widow and paid her extra not to report her husband's demise to DMV or the local police.

The widow had assumed the purchasers were going to ship Mexicans north. No skin off her nose-she was getting the hell out of Texas and moving to Florida. An extra five thousand dollars would spend just fine.

Curteze unlocked the driver's door and got in. The engine started quickly enough but idled rough for a few seconds. When it settled down, all three agents broke out of their frozen postures and returned to the tasks at hand.

"Good to go," Curteze called to Kapp and William.

Jamey Trues watched with goggle eyes through the open rear doors.

Kapp took a hammer, bent down, slid under the transport van, and slammed the tracking transmitter until pieces clattered on the ground.

"How's that for finesse?" he asked.

They took out their keys and approached Jamey. The boy was starting to come around.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Friends." William did not want to provide any more hope or encouragement than he felt was deserved, since for now he thought their chances of getting away were slim to nonexistent. He removed the cuffs and bars and helped the boy down from the back of the PerpTrans van.