Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow

to be dead by 12 noon today, New York time. 18.6 meg per head. That's 280 million dollars in total. Whatever the reason for staging this hunt is, it's worth paying over a quarter of a billion dollars for.'

'You say that we all have to be dead by 12 noon, New York time?' Schofield said. This was the first he'd heard of the time limit placed on the hunt. He looked at his watch.

It was 2:05 p.m. here in Afghanistan. That made it 4:05 a.m. in New York. Eight hours till crunch time.

He fell silent, thinking.

Then abruptly he looked up.

'Mr Knight, now that you've found me, what are your instructions from here?'

Knight nodded slowly, impressed that Schofield had asked this question.

'My instructions are very clear on this point,' he said. 'From now on, I am to keep you alive.'

'But you haven't been told to keep me imprisoned, have you?'

'No . . .' Knight said. 'I have not. My instructions are to allow you complete freedom of action—to go wherever you please—but under my protection.'

And with that a piece of the puzzle fell into place in Schofield's mind.

Whoever was paying Knight to protect him not only wanted Schofield kept alive, that person also wanted Schofield to be active, to do whatever this bounty hunt was designed to stop him doing.

He turned to Knight. 'You said you knew where Gant is. How?'

'The MicroDot aerosol charge that Rufus dropped onto the turnaround area before the Demon's boys got there,' Knight said.

Schofield had heard about MicroDot technology. Apparently, it was the Next Big Thing in nanotechnology.

MicroDots were microscopic silicon chips, each about the size of a pinhead but with enormous computing power. While many believed that MicroDots would be the basis for a new series of liquid-based supercomputers—imagine a liquid ooze filled with supercomputing particles—at the moment they were mainly used

by prestige car manufacturers as tracking devices: you sprayed the bottom of your Ferrari with MircoDot-loaded paint, then the Dots, and your car, could be traced anywhere in the world, and no car thief, however persistent, could wash them all off.

The MicroDot charge that Rufus had detonated on the turnaround area had released an aerosol cloud of about a billion MicroDots over the area.

'The Demon, his men, his vehicles and your girl are all covered in MicroDots,' Knight said. He pulled a jerry-rigged Palm Pilot from his belt. It bristled with home-made attachments and antennas, and looked a little chunkier than a regular PDA, as if it were

waterproof.

On its screen was a map of the world and superimposed on that map, over Central Asia, was a set of moving red dots.

Demon Larkham's team.

'We can trace them to any point in the world on this,' Knight said.

Schofield started thinking, tried to order his thoughts, to weigh up his options so he could arrange a plan of action.

Then at last he said, 'The first thing we have to do is find out why all this is happening.'

He pulled out the bounty list, analysed it for the hundredth time. Mother and Book II read it over his shoulder. 'The Mossad,' Mother said softly, seeing one entry:

11. ROSENTHAL, Benjamin Y. ISR Mossad

'What about it?' Schofield said.

'That Zawahiri guy said something about the Israeli Mossad down in the mine, before he lost his head. He was crazy, shouting about how he'd survived Soviet experiments in some gulag, and then the US cruise-missile attacks in '98, and then about how the Mossad knew he was invincible, since they'd tried to kill him a

dozen times.'

'The Mossad . . .' Schofield mused.

He keyed his sat-comm. 'David Fairfax, you still there?'

'So long as there's coffee around, I'm still here,' came the reply.

'Mr Fairfax, look up Hassan Mohammad Zawahiri and Benjamin Y. Rosenthal. Any cross-matches?'

'just a second,' Fairfax's voice said. 'Hey, got something already. A match from some US-Israeli intelligence swap. Major Benjamin Yitzak Rosenthal is Hassan Zawahiri's "katsa", or case officer, the guy who monitors him. Rosenthal is based in Haifa, but it seems that only yesterday he was recalled to Mossad's London headquarters.'

'London?' Schofield said.

A plan was beginning to form in Schofield's mind.

And all of a sudden he started to feel alive.

He'd been on the back foot all morning, reacting —now he was getting proactive.

'Book, Mother,' he said, 'how would you like to pay Major Rosenthal a visit in London? See if he can shed some light on this situation.'

'Be happy to,' Mother said.

'Sure,' Book II said.

Aloysius Knight watched this exchange casually, uninterested.

'Oh, hey, Scarecrow,' Fairfax's voice said, T was going to mention this before but I didn't get a chance. You remember that US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command paper I mentioned earlier, the "NATO MNRR Study". Well, that thing is out of my reach from here. It was deprioritised two months ago and deleted from the USAMRMC's files. An archive copy exists in some warehouse in Arizona, but otherwise all other copies have been shredded or deleted.

'But I did find something on the two guys who wrote it, those two fellas on your list who worked for Medical Research Command: Nicholson and Oliphant. Nicholson retired a couple of years ago and is now living at some retirement village in Florida. But Oliphant quit USAMRMC only last year. He's now chief physician in the ER at St John's Hospital, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon.'

'Is that so?' Schofield said. 'Mister Fairfax, would you like to be a field officer for a day?'

'Anything to get out of this office, man. My boss is the biggest

asshole on the planet.' 1

'When you get a chance, then, why don't you go down to St John's and have a chat with Doctor Oliphant.'

'You got it.' Fairfax signed off.

'What about you?' Mother said to Schofield. 'You're not going to stay with this bounty hunter, are you?' She shot Knight a withering glare. Knight just raised his eyebrows.

'He says I can go wherever I like,' Schofield said. 'It's up to him

to protect me.'

'So where are you going?' Book II asked.

Schofield's eyes narrowed. 'I'm going to the source of this bounty hunt. I'm going to that castle in France.'

Book II said, 'What are you going to do? Knock on the front

door?'

'No,' Schofield said. 'I'm going to collect a bounty.'

'A bounty?' Mother said. 'I, er, don't mean to be devil's advocate, but don't you need a . . . head ... to collect the reward?'

'That's right,' Schofield said, looking at Knight's modified Palm Pilot, the mini-computer that depicted Demon Larkham's progress. 'And I know just where to get some. And at the same time, I'm going to get Gant back.'

10. POLANSKI, Damien G. USA j

BERLIN, GERMANY

22 OCTOBER, 2300 HOURS

ca1 nJ at fUCk K 8,rls u fr° m behind' P umP-g ®" * ,ackhammer and calhng out cowboy shouts. And he was an ass man, too. He loved young twenty-somethings with tight little bottoms.

She d discovered these facts from the prostitutes of Berlin's red hght district, whose services he engaged often

Damien Polanski's career had seen better days

An Eastern Bloc expert during the Cold War, he was now

stauoned m the ISS's Berlin field office, growing older and more

irrelevant every day. His daring conquests of the '80s-th TZ-

•on of Karmonov, the discovery of the Soviet 'Cobra' files-long

forgotten by an intelligence agency that didn't love you back

An old dog in a new world.

She caught his eye easily enough. It wasn't hard. She was stunning to look at-long slender legs, muscular shoulders small perfectly-formed breasts and those cool Eurasian eyes