Greg Bear - Mariposa

"Then he takes the risk."

Kunsler hung up.

Jane's machines automatically extracted the analog signal, cleaned it up, and played it through her earpiece.

It sounded like a young boy weeping.

Her hands went cold. She cradled the tea mug for warmth.

When she suddenly felt she was about to get dizzy, she let out her breath with a low, agonized whoosh.

Talos Campus

Fouad leaned back in the chair.

He had carefully planned his masking search-downloading updates to Yemeni academic and literary e-journals, accessing slow, ancient university servers half a world away.

He had been watching the friendly, scampering images of network busyness flow around him. The incongruity of manic cartoon characters in full battle gear was not lost on him.

The images flickered and froze.

A black rectangle appeared, seeming to hover about a foot from his face. A simple green cursor blinked on its upper left side.

Fouad reached into his shirt pocket and removed the four-pronged connector in its plastic packet. To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a thumbtack.

He stripped off the plastic and shoved the tiny prongs under the cap into his forearm. Then he clamped a digital sensor to the plug, raised his arm to eye level, returned his attention to the screen, and keyed in the six-number technician identifier.

Almost immediately, without knowing whether he was in or not, he ran his true thirty-line search code, memorized months ago under Jane's tutelage.

The figures began to scamper again. They sped up-and then the records he sought floated into view in ranked folios.

The folios opened and pages began to flip. He caught a few frames as they flew past-financial records for accounts in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China; transactions with federal employees in Virginia; payments to anonymous vendors in Idaho, California, Iran, Iraq, the new state of Arabia Deserta.

Then, lists of Web news organizations and other media, accompanied by figures that seemed to represent the amount of corporate debt owed to offshore institutions.

Fouad could get only a general impression of all the corporate and international connections: banks, holding companies, big investors-many of whom worked for the oil cartels-and several chairmen and CEOs of the International Financial Protection Organization, organized a few years ago to oversee the distribution of the huge U.S. debt.

More lists followed: heads of state and government ministers from the Middle East, Singapore, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Beijing; lobbyists, lawyers, and licensed foreign representatives working for China and Russia.

They comprised just a few of the hundred or more names that had apparently received a direct invitation from Axel Price himself.

Three retired generals, an admiral, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve were also invited.

Joining them would be political agents from nearly every nation that used Talos services or held American debt. Conspicuously absent was Israel-which seemed more than odd, given Talos's many past contracts there.

A line of question marks was followed by the designation: "HR undecideds." Fouad could not pause the flow; HR might refer to the House of Representatives, members of congress.

Many of the modern masters of world finance, politicians, world leaders, and even a few prominent military figures were about to come together at Price's call, a gathering of eagles and moles-and weasels.

But where and when?

Fouad tried to pick out the location and date, and then realized he already knew.

Price was sponsoring a big gathering in Lion City in two weeks. Ostensibly he would be showing off the Talos Campus and hawking his wares: reviewing cadres of mercenaries, along with spectacular displays of new security and military equipment in which Price had made substantial investments.

Something else flick-paged by-a cluster of references to MSARC. Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control. The central MSARC computers were supposedly buried deep inside mountains in Switzerland.

All part of the new world economic order.

The acronym seemed to him reminiscent of Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the working strategy of the decades-long nuclear stalemate during the Cold War.

Perhaps it was meant to be. Just as the split-second decision whether to launch nuclear weapons was once regarded as too important to hand over to mere humans, the challenges of international finance were now too fast, too big, and far too complicated to entrust to flesh-and-blood managers.

The tipping point for another, even deeper decline might occur in hundredths of a second.

More flickering pages, then multiple references to "Jones," either a man or a network possibly linked to MSARC.

All throughout, like obsessive-compulsive little fruit flies, buzzed sections of text from a rambling treatise by Price himself about "fiat" currency and its strategic disadvantages.

Fiat currency-currency defined by a government rather than backed by physical assets-was a pejorative among believers in the gold standard.

The area around his spiky interface began to grow warm. Terabytes of data were now flooding from the open Talos servers into Fouad's arm.

Too long a connection might actually sear a blood vessel, but this was important.

Axel Price was not the man Fouad would ever visualize at the center of a high-powered conference on international finance. He was not trusted in Europe. His connections to Israel had long since grown stale, mirroring the return of a general disenchantment with Jews inside the extreme American right.

Any connection between Price and MSARC would be very interesting in some circles.

The button was causing pain.

The dataflow abruptly ended with a cartoon grunt face-a Talos security guard in full armor and regalia raising night-vision gogs, spinning his assault rifle, and winking.

Done!

The black square of the maintenance window closed.

Records of Fouad's access instantly vanished.

All the data-the reason for his entire mission-now suffused through his blood, downloaded at the source of the plug into thousands of microscopic data stores, amalgams of protein and silicon called prochines. The prochines would spend the next hour exchanging data with their blood-borne fellows, performing a kind of bio-backup, until millions of copies spread throughout his body.

Security at Talos was comprehensive and superb, but so far, nobody knew about prochines, nor, had they known, would they have been able to detect them without drawing and analyzing enough blood to kill him.

Fouad needed to get this information out of Lion City quickly. Given the conditions of constant surveillance and the county-wide blanket of sensor chips, and given that his contract did not allow for vacations or travel outside of the campus, the original plan had been for him to be informed of a family emergency within the next few weeks-the timing to be widely separated from this intrusion, in the unlikely event it were ever detected.

But the conference was scheduled to begin in fourteen days. He needed to communicate with his handlers immediately.

And there was only one way he might succeed at doing that, undetected-something almost as antiquated as carrier pigeons, of which he had none.

Fouad left the cage, which locked its door behind him with a confident, steely chunk.

Dubai

The hours passed. The dust storm blew over and the color outside the window blinds went golden, then dark.

Nathaniel Trace flew in and out of a hypnogogic fantasy… Trees and roads all around, wind in his hair, and then a chingaling in one ear, like chimes, pretty but not at all soothing.