Greg Bear: Mariposa

She then paused her finger over the ENTER key, waiting for the precise second…

Now or never.

Lion City, Texas

Talos Corporate Campus

Footsteps echoed hollowly down the Buckeye main hallway to the central instructor lounge. Fouad Al-Husam was alone. The building seemed deserted.

He had finished his afternoon class teaching regional Farsi and Arabic to a select team of Haitian troops destined to serve as mercenaries in Middle Eastern theaters.

Normally, at the end of each day he returned to his apartment in Lion City and ate dinner alone. His free time he mostly spent reading or watching Islamic history on cable, hungry for another place, another time.

Remembering his strange return to the hot, pure air of the Hejaz-his visit to Mecca.

This evening, he had reserved the central computer annex for half an hour to conduct academic research over the Talos infranet.

The Haitians had surprised Fouad with their intelligence and devotion. Talos was paying for their education. They sent more money home to their families each month than many in Haiti earned in a lifetime.

They reminded Fouad of the Janissaries he had commanded in Turkey, it seemed an age ago-but was just two years.

Two eventful, deceitful years.

It could be said about Axel Price that he was a powerful man, a strange man, even perhaps a corrupt man, but he paid generous wages and maintained strict military discipline in his company and his people.

Fouad was ten times better paid now than he had ever been as an agent.

The Buckeye main lounge surrounding the annex was also empty. Evening classes resumed at eight.

The annex-a smoked glass hexagon on the north side of the lounge-served both faculty and advanced students. It gave access to online instructional materials and teacher/adviser briefings, as well as a host of information services equal or superior to anything available to CEOs of other major American corporations.

Of course, all searches were logged.

The classrooms in Buckeye radiated in eight spokes from a central rotunda, forming a wagon wheel. Three similar wheels in other quarters of the campus were devoted to particular collections of Talos customers.

Each was named after a regional butterfly.

Axel Price loved butterflies. He had the largest collection in the world-hundreds of sealed glass cases, so it was said-but showed it to no one.

Price's other hobby was collecting rare antique cars. They were kept in a huge garage near the Smoky, his ranch and principal residence.

Fouad's fingerprint and arm chip logged him into the annex. The lock took a small DNA sample from his skin oils. Micro-PCR and pore sequencing technology within the lock took less than ten seconds to confirm his genetic identity and compare it with the information on the chip.

The annex's glass and steel door unlocked with a smooth click and slid open. Had he been denied, alarms would have sounded throughout the building.

The chip also enabled Talos to track him anywhere on the ten thousand acre campus. Every few feet, the chip was queried by sensors imbedded in walls and sidewalks, grass, and asphalt. Millions more sensors were scattered over the training fields and surrounding lawns, gardens, and tracks, maintaining a tightly woven net of constant surveillance.

Around Lion City, planes and helicopters had dropped enough sensors to saturate the entire area with the thin disks, two centimeters in diameter-one or two per square yard.

All in the interest, so it was said, of preventing illegal Mexicans from causing trouble.

Fouad carried ice in a cup from the cafeteria to cool his hands. He applied it briefly to his forehead. Within any of the campus buildings, Talos security could record his heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature for face, hands, and feet. The ice in the cup reduced his blood flow and brought his stress profile more in line with normal activity.

The hexagonal space was equipped with three chairs. There were no tables or monitors. The entire room served as a display. The neutral gray walls were equipped with hundreds of tiny lasers.

Fouad sat in the middle chair.

In a few minutes, a general ripple in the dataflow would pulse through selected servers regularly utilized by the Talos infranet. That would cause no damage, but it might give him a few minutes of deep, unfettered access into the corporate goody bag-without the access being logged.

The ganglion of Talos's network had a specific pattern of behaviors outside of its recorded design specs-what Jane Rowland called "excess personality." During a universal dropout and reacquisition of external servers, the Talos library would likely suffer a "momentary lapse of confidence," as Jane had described it, and-like an infant looking around to see where Momma was-it might open a point of entry for a technician to check up on all systems.

This point of entry would be brief, but it would require neither an identifier nor a password other than the original programmer's-which was known to Spider/Argus but not to anyone at Talos.

That password was "Nick72TuringHorta."

The original programmers had created and then concealed such portals, perhaps to allow them to make last-second upgrades and improve their chances of getting the rich Talos contract. Or perhaps because they did not trust Talos any more than the Bureau did.

The blip would be brief and the system would easily recover, so no technician would come calling, but Fouad would be there, ready and equipped with a new way to steal and export data.

He sipped from the melting ice and waited.

Spider/Argus

Tyson's Corner, Virginia

Jane pressed ENTER.

The ripple began to run its course. For the next ten seconds, Talos servers would try to access their familiar gateways, and fail.

She sipped her white tea and noted with satisfaction that Nabokov now had an opening-a receptive command node in the Talos infranet, awaiting instructions from a local programmer.

Jane could not get information out of that portal-no one she knew of could breach the Talos firewalls from outside-but if Nabokov was in place, for the next five minutes, the campus servers just might become an open book for him.

The infranet returned a simple bit acknowledgment it was being inspected.

Technician on duty.

Then a little gong went off-a simple oriental chang.

Jane sat upright.

That spooky presence again, in a place it definitely did not belong. She swiftly drew a number in the air, then a slash, initiating her visual dialer.

"Give it a miss," she murmured. "Don't go in."

The Spider/Argus call center connected her to Alicia Kunsler in Quantico.

Kunsler picked up on the first droning buzz. "Hey, Jane. He's in?"

"He's in, but here's a hash query search-a patch on the portal. He may be tagged. Something else strange-an analog signal has been laid over the feed, available through the firewall-which would be doubly peculiar, but not really, because it isn't coming from Texas. It's coming from a source I can't trace."

It's coming from that watcher who always knows where I am and what I'm doing.

"Analog? Who in hell sends analog?"

Jane looked over the diagnostics and pathways. Names popped up, hypotheticals:

San Luis Obispo.

San Francisco.

Corpus Christi.

Pendleton Reserve.

"Could be random garbage from a discontinued coastal junction," she said. "A ghost from a TV show or something. It's just odd it popped up now. I don't like it. I think they've made him."

"Recommendations?"

"Yank him, whether he's got what he came for or not."

"Shit. You know there's no way I can reach him. Can you?"

"No," Jane said.