Greg Bear - Mariposa

Nothing popped-nothing visible.

Back to the fog creeping in from the ocean, dark and wet and black.

Now for the dangerous part.

Washington D.C.

Neither the president's chief of staff nor Thalia Ripper was returning Rebecca's calls or emails. She had been working in a near-vacuum of authority for almost four days; there wasn't much she felt she could do until the president heard the full story of what she had learned so far-along with her own personal revelation or confession.

None of it looked good. Rebecca suspected the president would ask her to remove herself from the investigation.

Roger Baumann met her outside the hotel door and escorted her under the front awning to the armored limo.

"My room was unguarded for a time last night," Rebecca said.

Baumann winced. "We hoped you wouldn't notice."

"I noticed."

"Any problems, ma'am?" Baumann asked.

"No."

Baumann seemed preoccupied-unhappy and unwilling to say more. Rebecca decided not to push it.

The limo took an unusual turn on the short trip, not toward the EEOB but right on H Avenue Northwest. Rebecca leaned forward.

"What's up now?" she asked.

"You've got an appointment."

"With the president?"

"No, ma'am. My boss."

The limo came to a stop in front of Secret Service headquarters. Baumann got out and opened the door. She sat back and braced herself for a moment, never happy with obscurities, then emerged with her usual swivel and push up, and some courteous help from the agent.

"An apology for the lapse?" she asked.

"No, ma'am. My boss would like to spend a few minutes with you before I drop you off at the EEOB."

"Does the president know?"

Baumann shook his head.

"Relevant to my investigation? And in no way compromising the president's trust in me?"

"Yes, ma'am, and Yes again, ma'am."

Rebecca lifted her hand, lead on.

They took an elevator to the basement. He led her down a corridor lined with closed doors to a corner office marked with a temporary standee sign: "Incident Investigation. No Admittance."

Baumann brushed past the sign and opened the door. He held out his arm and a low, clear voice inside welcomed her into the cramped room.

Stacks of media-discs and portable drives-filled open cabinets on one side. Three humming servers sat in a corner on a square metal table, looking small and lonely.

Sitting on a tall-back chair before a small desk, a short, muscular, very bald man turned to face her as she walked in. She recognized the shining dome. She had seen him once before, in a hallway in the West Wing: Daniel Haze, director of the Secret Service.

Haze stood and welcomed her with a tight smile and a handshake. "Glad to finally meet you, Ms. Rose," Haze said.

"Let's be quick," Rebecca said.

"Yes, ma'am." Haze pulled out a folding chair and offered her the tall-backed chair.

Rebecca demurred.

They both sat. "I hear you did a pretty good number on Quinn."

"I tried."

Haze's eyes were light gray and his face was chiseled and square, a prominent chin giving him the look of an actor destined always to portray Nazi generals. He lifted a piece of paper covered with handwritten notes. "But he didn't give you what you wanted."

"You listened in?" Rebecca said.

Haze shrugged. "This is the first time anyone I've protected has been shot-and it is sure as hell the first time for something like Quinn."

Rebecca made a sympathetic "Hmm."

"It's still possible we can help each other."

Rebecca looked into his gray eyes. "I'm happy to cooperate-if the president agrees."

"Have you spoken with the president in the last four days?"

"No," Rebecca said.

"Nobody I know has spoken with her. I hate being out of the loop. Something's wrong, and nobody tells me anything now." Haze leaned his chair back. "She's going outside for her security. Private executive protection services. A really terrible idea. We're still the best in the world at what we do."

"Hmm," Rebecca said again.

Haze lifted a bag and pulled out a broken pair of spex-the same color as the pair Rebecca had been wearing in the Los Angeles convention center. "The EMS folks tossed these into a recycle bin at the hospital where you were treated. My agents retrieved them."

"I'm impressed," Rebecca said as Haze dangled the glasses by a temple piece. "You were already vetting me-before the explosion. Must have been awkward-the convention center bombing wasn't your turf."

Haze nodded. "You'd had these for a few months before the bombing. You downloaded personal data from an older set of FBI gogs a year ago."

"Did you retrieve those, too?" Rebecca felt her face heating.

Haze wrinkled his forehead. "You told investigators someone came up to you at COPES before the blast and introduced himself. Used the name Nathaniel Trace."

"That's right." Rebecca met Haze's gray look. "He wanted to talk-I brushed him off."

"What you didn't tell us was that your spex tagged him as someone you'd met before."

Rebecca looked puzzled. "I was getting a lot of that at the convention. Is he someone of interest?"

"Not to the bombing investigation-not yet, at any rate. But we've done our duty and passed this material on to ATF. May I tell you a little about Mr. Trace?"

Rebecca nodded.

"We ID'd him based on fingerprints from the business card he gave you-"

"You went through my personal effects?"

"It was in the trash, in a bin right next to the spex-along with your ruined clothing. Using that, we confirmed the ID using facial tags from our Homeland Security airport database. He last entered the country under the name of Robert Sangstrom-a very ornate cover identity. Deep detail throughout our system. But that's not your problem, not yet, at any rate. He's a software engineer-something of a pudgy bright boy, according to his employment record. He enlisted in the National Guard, was called up to serve in Iraq-Signal Corps, no combat action-between 2006 and 2008. After that, he returned to the Middle East as a subcontractor for Talos Corporation. He spent a few years working for them in California, then in Jordan and Arabia Deserta. May have been injured in a rebel event in Arabia or Jordan-private evac and medical treatment. Here the trail goes blurry-we can't get into Talos, and nobody's talking. He could have had a legitimate reason for being at COPES, under his own name-but he wasn't registered either as Sangstrom or as Trace. None of the survivors we've interviewed knows anything about him."

"Sounds pretty conspiratorial," Rebecca said.

Haze nodded. "Talos was represented at COPES by three salesmen, but not by Trace. All three of the Talos reps departed the convention center just before the blast. Lucky for them. Has Trace tried to contact you since?"

"No. Do my spex tell you where I met him before?"

"That's lost. Can you remember?"

"I draw a blank." That much was true. This meeting was both unexpected and dangerous. Haze certainly had the power to arrest her, for any number of reasons, and hold her indefinitely-with or without the president's approval.

"Why would Trace want to talk with you? Did he already know about Quinn? Was he trying to warn you?"

"Warn me about what?"

"We got DNA from the business card. We spectro-analyzed Trace's skin oils for chemicals-drugs. Yours, too. Interesting results." Haze held out his hand, dangling the cracked, broken spex. "We're finished with these."

Rebecca took the spex and slipped them into her pocket. "That's it?"

"Both you and Trace tested positive for residues of a metabolite known to be associated with an experimental cancer drug called Seraprixoline. If you have cancer, that would show up in other traces… you don't. There's another use, off label, so to speak. It's been used on a limited basis to treat PTSD. Quinn has the same residues, by the way. I'm tracking down information that Talos might have funded this research."