

All Greek To Me

I. C. Springman

Copyright © 2013 I. C. Springman

Smashwords Edition

DEDICATION

To Edward Snowden,

Chelsea Manning,

and all those who risked so much

to give us a snowball's chance...

CONTENTS

BEFORE - Came Back Haunted

1 Song of the Dispossessed

2 Somewhere Near Texas (I Lost My Man)

3 You Are a Tourist

4 Lately

5 The Glory of Economy

6 Roses for the Dead

7 This Charming Man

8 Hard to Explain

9 Breaking Into Cars

10 Bizness

11 Via Con Me

12 People Like Us

13 Trust

14 Hidden Systems

15 Ghost in the Machine

16 Reboot the Mission

17 You Can Leave Your Hat On

18 Things Ain't What They Used to Be

19 A Mansion and a Yacht

20 Serve Them Well

21 London Calling

22 The Palace Guards

23 Step Into My Office, Baby

24 Of All the Gin Joints

25 The Killing Type

26 Riding Shotgun Down the Avalanche

27 Lost in Hollywood

AFTER - If I Didn't Care

"It turns out that 730 top shareholders are able to control 80% of the operating revenue of all TNCs (transnational corporations). Furthermore, combining the knowledge of the topology with the ranking of shareholders, it is revealed that the 1,300 nodes in the core are comprised of the most powerful nodes in the network: the top economic agents are interconnected and do not carry out their business in isolation."

\- James Glattfelder, "The Network of Global Corporate Control"

"I think it's fine to talk about those things - in quiet rooms..."

\- Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, January 2012

BEFORE - Came Back Haunted

February 2011. Fort Meade, MD. Deep inside a boxlike office building that mirrors the world darkly. The door whooshed open, then whooshed shut behind the man in the impeccable suit. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. To the left, the glass-enclosed conference room was coldly lit by a blue-white radiance that bled into the rest of the shadowy chamber. A video wall to the right, bright with data and livestream feeds from all corners of the globe, provided the only other illumination.

"That you, Steele?" The question, dry and clipped, came from the center of the room.

"Yes, sir." The hour was late. Even the general's private secretary had long since joined the slow snake of headlamps bound for suburbia and the few hours of unconsciousness that did double duty as sleep and free time.

"You know why you're here?" An overhead light flicked on, beaming crassly down upon the back of a balding head, shoulders broadened by epaulettes and military braid, and a stainless steel swivel-chair with leather upholstery that was an exact copy of the captain's chair familiar to all Star Trek aficionados (original series).

"I have an idea, sir." James remained by the door, having been warned the interview would be brief.

"You're a lucky son of a bitch, that's why. Somebody up there likes you. It isn't me. Despite your reputation, I'm not convinced you're all that sharp. This woman for instance." He fell silent a minute, then crooked a finger. James slowly descended the few steps into the command center, stopping when the general signaled halt.

"They're officially dead, Jim. The US Defense Department says so. We told the papers and the families today. So that's that. I'm under orders to say that your two-year probation is up and you're being reassigned. Being kicked upstairs and across the pond with a fancy new title: Global Counterintelligence Liaison."

"Thank you, sir." The face of the man in the impeccable suit reflected neither joy nor relief and his tone was dead even. The general swiveled to confront him, cold piggy eyes avid for some expression or response out of place.

"We're almost there, Steele. Forty years we've been building this thing. Brick by brick. And nobody on the outside the wiser, aside from a few crackpots and radicals nobody listens to." He paused, as if waiting.

"Yes, sir." James gazed stonily at the various monitors. A drone strike obliterating a wedding party in Afghanistan. Detainees in Guantanamo, heavily shackled, shuffling past a guard tower. Armed camel riders smashing into a fevered crowd in downtown Cairo.

"There are no third chances, Steele. Not at this level."

"I understand, sir." In obedience to a dismissive flick of the general's wrist, he pivoted and marched for the doors.

"One more thing."

James stopped short.

"I want heads. On platters. Assange, Brown, Swartz, Hastings. It's them or us, boyo. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Got it?"

James contemplated the ghost of his reflection in the polished metal portal.

"Got it, sir."
1 Song of the Dispossessed

Being dead comes with its own set of problems. Signing a lease for instance. Even if the landlord isn't too picky about references and likes the idea of a cash transaction, particularly if you shell out for six months in advance, you might find yourself in the middle of a global financial crisis where banks fail, mortgages foreclose, and the landlord apologetically comes home to roost. With his entire extended family in tow. And without any mention of a refund.

"How can I put this," Jane said, standing on the threshold and pretending to think deeply. "What's Greek for 'No'?"

" _Όχι."_ It sounded like "Okay."

"Okay," Jane echoed. And shut the door.

When the knocking persisted, she simply ignored it. Until she couldn't. This time there were two men on the doorstep. The landlord _and_ a police officer. A number of children had broken containment and were shrieking up and down the garden path. The inevitable spidery grandmother sat huddled beneath the pergola, like an elderly oracle retired from Delphi in her head-shawl and winter coat. Mrs. Landlord looked benumbed and anxious standing beside a van, hugging a quilt. Further down the rocky hill, in the narrow street, a knot of teens and twenty-somethings leaned against cars or mopeds, glancing up at the cottage and muttering, their breath and cigarette smoke fogging the February air.

"We signed a lease," Jane objected.

"I sent an eviction notice."

"I never got it. This can't be legal."

The policeman spoke for the first time. Jane cursed herself for slacking off on her Pimsleur. Then she cursed John, who spoke Greek like a native. Or like an Albanian at any rate. She glanced at the landlord.

" _έτσι μου μηνύσει,"_ the landlord repeated. He coughed a little before translating. "So sue me."

Which was of course out of the question. Dead people - or at any rate people who are presumed and/or pretending to be dead - don't go to court in the best of times. And these were not that, as the landlord and his merry band could attest. For Jane it was something of a bad joke, with a punch line that was getting old. Before this, in Ireland, it was a tweedy registrar who had come knocking at the rented door, with a tale of investor default, receivership, and trickle-down consequences. Perhaps because eviction was his business, he wasted no time on guilt or remorse. "It's under six months on yehr lease yeh are, so out yeh go, no warnin', no recourse, yeh're done here. And I'll be taking none of the lip off the two of yehs, as it's yehr own Mr. Geithner yeh can be thanking, with his bailouts for some and not for t'others, so 'tis."

OK. Jane mentally tossed in the towel. It was just one of those things. Another one of those things (they were piling up). Without another word, she walked away from the open door and into the bedroom. John had pretty much cleared out his things when he left, so she had only her own belongings to gather and she was travelling light, as the dead tend to do. She swept clothes, cosmetics, computer, a slim coil of piano wire into a single suitcase and in less than ten minutes she was done. The tiny bureau was empty, the cupboard built into the whitewashed wall was bare. She gave the room one last sweeping glance. Aside from fingerprints and DNA, you'd never know they'd been there.

She emerged to find that the Greek legions had already established a beachhead in the tiny living room. Under the direction of noisy, pushy elders, a bucket brigade of younger family members was conveying an escalating jumble of boxes, bags, and naked piles of anything and everything from the cars to the cottage floor. The spartan space was quickly occupied and overrun. The police officer had gone. Someone had switched on the radio:

Έκαψα το χθες νύχτες μου παλιές

όνειρα και εφιάλτες ρίχνω στις φωτιές

Δάκρυα καυτά ψέμματα πολλά...

[I burnt the past, my old nights

Dreams and nightmares I cast into the fire

Burning tears, too many lies...]

When they got to the chorus, everyone sang, "OPA!" Until they saw her standing there and fell silent. From a chair in the kitchen, one little girl and the grandmother continued to sing, an oddly pure and quavering duet:

Βάζω μια φωτιά

σ'όλα τα παλιά

όλα θα τ'αλλάξω

[I set on fire

all past events

I'll change everything]

Picking her way through the debris of other lives, sidling past the suddenly motionless line of others to whom the debris belonged, Jane ignored the landlord, who came forward with a piece of paper in his hand. It was the clinic report with her test results. She didn't remember dropping it. Oh well.

"Missis, I didn't know. You should have said. Συγχαρητήρια _!_ " ["Congratulations!"]

Jane reached above the front door to grab the Uzi cradled there on two hooks. Behind her, she heard muffled cries of alarm and terrified whispers. She didn't turn around, just lifted the weapon over her head as she marched down the garden path. One faint, derisive word came floating back, echoing the song that had not quite ended. The ghost of a word: "OPA!"

2 Somewhere Near Texas (I Lost My Man)

As the daylight drained out of the sky, the dead buck on the picnic table turned a darker shade of black.

"Oh. Fuck."

"Yeah," John said, leaning against the side of a Chevy pickup many moons past its better days. Vinnie for once was speechless. John smiled, wincingly. "What, no high five? Who was it used to say I oughta kill that lying bitch."

"That was before. Holy shit. How bad is it?"

John bowed his head, shifted the piece of hay to the other side of his mouth, and stared into the dented truck bed, which was rapidly becoming a bottomless well on that moonless night. "Pretty bad."

"OK, for those of us just tuning in, are we talking - 'I want to hit a strip club, get shit-faced, and things will probably look better in the morning?' Or - 'I'm going to sleep with every slut from here to Detroit and if you're my pal you won't let me sober up until the divorce papers come through?'"

"She doesn't know about Detroit. Correction. She refused to consider Detroit."

Vinnie did a double-take. "That's - that's like Princess Leia refusing to consider the Rebel Alliance."

John shrugged and quoted Jane quoting Sun Tzu: "'He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious."

"Oh right, advice from a dead Chinese guy."

"Ummm - you can kinda see her point? It was a whole lot easier when we were wearing white hats for the empire. In and out of countries hassle free, best hardware money can invent, and if all else fails, the Marines have your back." He tossed the piece of hay aside. "All of that is gone."

"You mean - 'all that is on the other side'," Vinnie corrected him.

"I mean 'just who the fuck do we think we are?'" John said. "So, for the record and for the sake of what remains of my marriage, I'm here because of you and the 'rents. If anybody asks."

"Uh huh. I see. And if saving the world is no longer on the agenda, you're supposed to spend the rest of your lives doing _what_ exactly."

"My dear Watson, there you have the situation in a bally nutshell."

"That guy was so gay."

"Bi maybe."

"Not that there's anything wrong with that," they repeated in unison.

"Brooo - mance, if I loved you more I might be -" Vinnie stopped short mid-refrain, feeling a presence at his elbow.

"Julio," John stepped to one side to acknowledge his friend, little more than a shadow on the chalky road.

"John Whitehorse," the shadow replied, by way of greeting. Half his face glowed dead white with phosphorescent paint. He wore an eagle feather in his hair.

Vinnie tried to explain. "We were just getting into bachelor party mode."

" _We_ were just getting into war party mode." Julio nodded over his shoulder toward the village that sat maybe a quarter mile away across dry, flat land. A bonfire in front of the traditional bent-branch houses tongued the desert night. Stick figures etched themselves against the flames as the chanting rose and fell. The women began to keen, and beneath it all beat the hypnotic tempo of the drums. It was a song of loss, catastrophe, collapse. Far from Europe, where affluent societies were breaking down, far from Tahrir Square and Tunisia where people were defying the unjust order of their human universe, there was this ancient music. To John it sounded like the soundtrack to the end of just about everything.

"Ow!" Julio yelped. Behind him, a deep voice spoke slowly and at length, in Algonquin. Julio rubbed the spot where a sharpened stick had gone drilling for his ribcage. "The chief says I am a bad host and a worse liar. Also that you must walk with Wisaka, John Whitehorse, for there are no deer left in this country."

"I was thinking that Wisaka sent the deer as a gift for the chief," John said, returning compliment for compliment, as his father had taught him. "We got his truck out of hock and brought along some supplies. Flour, coffee, the usual." The chief limped to the picnic table and let his hands wander over the fifty pound sacks heaped like so many big-bellied white sows beside cardboard boxes of canned peaches and corn, cartons of Lucky Strikes, a 5-gallon stand of lard. He nodded his approval, the white stripes on his face moving quickly up and down. The eagle feathers of his war bonnet were the palest whisper of white above his head. "But the deer ran across our path just outside of town," John added.

"One shot," Vinnie said. Not too archly. Not too De Niro.

"One shot is what it's all about," Julio agreed, without cracking a smile.

"I like the trees, you know?" Vinnie said, getting into it.

"I ain't gonna hunt with no assholes." Game, set, and match to Julio, who had gone line for line and capped out with an insult. "Ow!"

The chief and his stick had hobbled back and wanted to begin another speech. A long one this time. He spoke in careful, measured sentences underscored by the drums and the ritual wailing of the women. Julio faithfully translated, and John listened politely, with Vinnie following John's lead. As if they were not two ex-pat desperados itching to run the border. As if they had all the time in the world.

"The chief says you know our history. Our tribal name means 'he who wanders from here to there.' We came from a northern country of forests and lakes, forced to move many times over many seasons to reach this final home, far to the south. And even here we have no peace, for land that once was open is cut by fences, the deer have run beyond the farthest hill, and since the miners began to take the water we can no longer irrigate our fields. Our people believe they were placed on this side of the Earth to take care of the land through their ceremonial duties, just as other races have been placed elsewhere around the Earth to take care of her in their own ways. Together, we have held the world in balance. The old ones have always said when we can no longer do these things, when we can no longer fulfill our tasks as guardians, a great purification will come to destroy this world, as previous worlds were destroyed. Today we have welcomed the New Year. It was the smallest gathering in the chief's lifetime. Two clans have died out in the past six months alone and today their sacred bundles were buried forever. This is sadly in keeping with the prophecies."

John listened with a sinking heart. Well, here was another fucking reason to celebrate. He knew his father, a full member of the tribe, would take it hard. About the clans, that is.

To Vinnie it was just so much mumbo-jumbo. He looked impatiently and inquiringly at John, who gently nudged him with the toe of his boot. The chief went on.

"You wonder why I bend your ears with an old man's tale. It is not for the sake of my people, who have kept the old ways and have been promised a place in the next world. We have kept to the path of nature and of spirit law, while your people have pursued technology and material things. For a little time remaining, there is a bridge between these diverging paths. If everyone on your side will cross that bridge and join us here, we can use the best of your science and the best of our ancient learning to make a paradise for all. It will take a great turning among your people to change course in this way. It is said that a man from the south and the east may arise to lead them. We do not know his name. Or the hour of his coming. So I tell every stranger I meet. Until the message, like an arrow, finds its mark."

"Don't look at me," Vinnie said. "I'm from the Bronx."

The chief examined Vinnie critically as Julio translated. When Julio had finished, the chief crossed his arms and sighed.

"But - speaking of paradise," Vinnie said, more to fill the uncomfortable void in conversation than anything else, "we're headed for your casino. On the other side of the Rio Bravo." As if Julio and the Chief needed that piece of information. "Maybe the Chief would like to join us. Top-of-the-line VIP treatment, all expenses paid, right there on the Texas side of the reservation, convenient to hearth and home. Broads. Booze. Blackjack. We were already planning to party like there's no tomorrow." Struck by a sudden thought, he said to John, "Is it me or is getting married like some kind of total fucking Apocalypse?"

"The case can be made," John acknowledged, remembering Jane's face when she entered the kitchen. The shocked disbelief.

"And you didn't tell me?"

"Misery loves company." For the hundredth time, he took his phone out of his pocket and checked to see if she had answered his ninety-nine previous messages.

Julio repeated Vinnie's invitation and the chief laughed outright, a short sharp bark. He said a few words to Julio and got into the truck. On the passenger's side.

"Was that a yes?" Vinnie wondered.

"Climb in," Julio said. "There's a tarp back there you can hide under when you get to the river." He began to walk away.

"You're not coming?" John asked, straddling the side of the truck bed.

"Someone's got to dress that buck."

"But - who's going to drive?" For answer, the pickup truck shuddered, coughed, and sputtered to life. "Uh, not to be a total ingrate or anything, but in town they told us they impounded the truck because he was caught _driving while blind_ ," John lowered his voice, not wanting to offend the chief.

"Yeah, they took his license a while back," Julio conceded carelessly. "But he doesn't let that stop him. Besides, he's going straight across the river so you don't have to worry about him driving off the bridge or anything."

"And then there were two," Vinnie grumbled. "I don't think you can have a bachelor party for two. It's against the rules."

"Tell that to Hugh Hefner," John said.

"I'll be there," Julio insisted. "A couple hours behind, riding drag, just to make sure the coast is clear. And the chief is coming. He said he wouldn't miss it for the world."

"He said that?" With a hellish grinding of gears the truck lurched forward. Stalled out. Lurched again. Julio walked beside them as the vehicle struggled to gather momentum. In answer to Vinnie's question, he grinned and gave a half shrug.

"I think his exact words were: 'Remember when the white man used to get _us_ drunk and take _our_ money?' You might want to brace yourselves against those hay bales. 'Cause he may be blind -" Almost before the words were out of Julio's mouth, the truck spat gravel, fishtailed, and seemed to make the jump to light speed, John and Vinnie bouncing in the back like popcorn. Julio watched as the taillights disappeared in a white spume of dust and remarked to no one in particular, "But he does like to drive fast."

3 You Are a Tourist

Tens of thousands of Greeks were rioting outside the parliament building, but a mile away all was calm and quiet in Exarchia.

The tattoo parlors, bookstores, second-hand emporiums, and coffee shops were shuttered in solidarity with the general strike. A few Japanese tourists wandered the narrow avenues examining the graffiti scrawled across every wall and many first floor windows. All around, the balconies of the funny apartment buildings, tiered like ziggurats and shaded by threadbare awnings, were practically deserted. Jane had the place pretty much to herself.

The cold and the damp had followed her from the cottage in Evia. Fortunately, when Exarchia rolled up the sidewalks, it did not remove all the tables and chairs essential to its 24/7 street life. Jane found a seat outside a bar called _Kypos Tis Kalashnikof_ [Garden of the Kalashnikov] where she could nurse the cup of coffee she had purchased in a nearby park. Under a palm tree, the shivering Nigerian had a traditional Greek pot, a briki, set up on a hot plate that drew electrical current through a series of extension cords snaking many yards away and up the side of a building papered with about a hundred years of protest posters. As she watched him measure out the coffee and the sugar as if he were measuring her fate, Jane reflected that she could have made coffee in her hotel room up on the Strefi Hill, with its view of the Acropolis. There was a compact machine along with the requisite filters and foil packets of Nescafe. But that had seemed just too fucking depressing for words. So when her morning nausea and general lack of appetite gave way to a craving for some form of creature comfort, she had goaded herself out of bed and into the wider world. Which was how she found herself listlessly wandering the seediest neighborhood in Athens, subject of US State Department warnings, dear to the hearts of anarchists everywhere, with no agenda other than living through however many minutes, hours, days it took for the jagged incessant pain to go away.

Because it would go away, she thought, taking a sip of the boiling hot coffee. Too soon. She could feel her tongue blistering. It was worth it though, to dispel the Nigerian's anxiety and to give herself something real to cry about.

" _Όχι πραγματικά. είναι καλό, σας ευχαριστώ,"_ she assured him, with difficulty, her eyes filling. ["No, really, it's good, thank you."]

Because nobody could feel like this forever, she assured herself as she walked away, sucking air between her teeth.

Not that she had an extensive basis for comparison. Men had always come and gone, plentiful as air; but from the time she first understood what men want - in the orphanage, the foster homes, reform school - the rule was: keep it light. Do not freak out. Do not become attached. Do what you must. Get what you can. Then move on. As the Andover lady had advised. The poised and perfect mystery lady who got Jane's files expunged, and got her into Andover, and was never heard from again. But the most important thing, the thing that Jane remembered, was the way the Andover lady said those things out loud, coolly and matter-of-factly, distilling into a few not unsympathetic words what Jane already knew from harsh experience. And after Yale, after a brief stint in the Corps, after SAD training, the rule simplified, sharpened, clarified. Boiled down to this: do not fall in 'love.' Like a clueless, uninitiated civilian. Like a First-World bubble-wrapped teenybopper.

Because there was no such thing. Outside of sloppy songs, silly novels, and sentimental movies. Love? Pffttt...

And then along came John.

She swallowed more scalding coffee. Dropped into the chair outside the bar. Glanced at the books on the window-ledge. One of the many free libraries scattered throughout the neighborhood, in this case a line of paperbacks. A muddle of graphic novels and political philosophy. The citizens of Exarchia were a literate bunch. She made a selection. Laid it aside after the first page.

All she could think about was John. Which made her crazy. What the fuck? Let it go already, she berated herself. It was doomed from the start. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, government tries to annihilate boy and girl - what were they thinking? How could that scenario ever turn out well? It wasn't possible. Nine years all together, the last two spent on the run. The past was irretrievably gone, the present intolerable, and they could not agree on a viable future. When he left Evia last week, he was drinking like a fish and anger was her new favorite color. No, if she were honest, she would admit that 'The Jane and John Show' was done for. She didn't need to find him kissing a village idiot to know the score. She was surprised, alarmed even, when he didn't call or text immediately after the little episode with the kitchen wench. At first. Not so much now. She looked at her phone for perhaps the millionth time.

Nope, nothing. Oh well. Everything had an expiration date. After all, she told herself with grim irony, the standard marital contract did stipulate 'until death us do part.' And both technically and officially, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, they _were_ dead, the two of them. So there was a certain cock-eyed logic to finding themselves in this last of all forsaken places - absolute Splitsville.

On a balcony across the street a radio or iPod was playing:

You made me love you,

I didn't want to do it,

But you made me do it.

A half-dressed couple, a slim boy and wraith of a girl who looked too young and tattooed to know how, were ballroom dancing in the tiny space. Jane closed her eyes and groaned silently.

The Kid sat down without asking.

Slouched in her chair, hoodie up, hands thrust into the pockets of her leather jacket, her pale face dominated by dark glasses, Jane's beauty was carelessly but effectively shrouded. There was absolutely nothing that said 'come hither' in either her attitude or her combat boots. Her demeanor was the opposite of welcoming. And when the Kid sat down, the sociability meter swung into the '10-seconds to whoop-ass' zone. He seemed to sense and dismiss his imminent danger.

"We don't have much time." He was clean-cut handsome, his short hair dyed peroxide blonde, piercings in both ears. A kind of punk Clark Kent, complete with 50's-style horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He wore an odd grey sweater with a leather strap over one shoulder, which for some reason made Jane think of an old Star Trek episode. His sneakers were bright red and the scarf around his neck was a black and white keffiyeh. He set a small green coke bottle tied with a rag on the table and pulled an envelope out of his messenger bag. He was thirty, possibly, something like six to eight years her junior, but he seemed far younger. His aura of hope maybe. He came complete with dog.

"What you mean we, Paleface?" Her tone fell somewhere between a rasp and a growl. She hadn't been doing much talking lately. The dog, a large sandy-colored mutt, cocked his head.

"Here's your ticket to Detroit. And the ID to go with it. Plus," he held out the envelope, "a fully loaded debit card."

Jane did not move. The dog sat down and scratched a flea.

"Apparently somebody didn't get the memo," she said at last.

"Au contraire. It's why I'm here. Because you have to come to Detroit."

"You people are fucking amazing."

"Somebody has to be."

The dog snuffed gently at Jane's boots. John loved dogs. Wistful, then annoyed, Jane pulled her feet away and snapped, "That wasn't a compliment."

He put the envelope down beside the book she wasn't reading. "Inside Wikileaks." Someone had defaced the cover, scrawling _'Malaka!'_ ['Asshole!'] and _'Prodotis_!' ['Traitor!'] in gold ink across the faithless author's name and jacket photo.

"Obi Jane Kenobi, you are our only hope," he said.

"I've done my part. Accent on 'done.' You made it quite clear that my particular skill set is not what's needed at this juncture. Unless of course you've changed your collective mind and decided to kill them all." She raised both eyebrows in inquiry.

It was his turn to be silent.

"That's what I thought. Look - you should be dancing in the streets. With a couple million of your new best friends. Tunisia, Egypt, now Greece," she nodded toward central Athens and right on cue came the muddled sounds of bullhorns, sirens, and minor explosions mixed with the hullabaloo of a vast and angry crowd. "You got your revolution. What's left is not my department."

A tight-knit group of Greek teenagers jogged by, shouting a warning toward the rooftops. A blur of arms and legs. The dog ran after them, barking in delight. The Kid spoke with an urgent intensity. "And if I told you that revolution is included in the blueprint?"

"Their blueprint? No shit. IMF riots are always baked in. They practiced this for decades in Africa and South America before they started in on the rest of us. This thing is barely out of the egg. Years of repression and arduous struggle await. It's a process. If you don't believe me, go re-read what's-his-name. Gene Sharp. Damn." Her coffee was ice cold. "Go do some yoga or something."

An uneven blob of middle-aged men and women lumbered past. Also shouting. Teachers, bus drivers, postmen, matching yellow t-shirts pulled over their windbreakers and sweaters. The dog frolicked among them. A few mopeds wove in and out. Swerved to miss the dog, who stopped to inspect a wad of gyro wrapping. A whiff of tear gas sharpened the air.

"Revolution is covered on page 13. Not even half way through an interesting little document with an interesting little title: 'Beyond Global Structural Adjustment: The Brave New World Order and Expediential Fascism.'"

"They wrote it down? Just like that?" He had her attention, but she recovered quickly. "How very Third Reich of them..."

She had to raise her voice as the street flooded with Greeks on the run. Tractors driven by farmers in bib overalls chugged up the middle of the road. Women in high heels decorated the edges. A brass band in full regalia jostled miners with their hardhat lights switched on.

The Peroxide Kid tossed a familiar object on the table - a black USB drive imprinted with a skull-and-crossbones. John again. "Swash-buckle our way up around the Hamptons?" Souvenir of their original pirate adventure. Purloined Pentagon data. The explosion that should have killed them. And for what? An unhappily-ever-afterlife in the global underground. Everything, _everything_ down the toilet. Yo-ho-ho.

"It was one of the last files we cracked. Super strong encrypted. But confirmed by purloined NSA phone taps and Bilderberg transcripts. It's not just about taking down the global economy on purpose and shredding social safety nets. We're talking shit that goes way, way beyond this," he waved an arm scornfully at what was rapidly devolving into a public melee. As he spoke, a protester stumbled against their table, scrambled up, tripped again just a few feet away, and was immediately set upon by a tide of baton-wielding police in riot gear. Other men and women stopped to intervene, yelling, holding out their hands, dodging repeated blows. The dog bounded joyously into the fray, barking and dashing at the aggressors.

Jane half rose from her seat. "Uh - that cop just kicked your dog."

"Zat iz not my dog," the Kid said, in his best German accent.

" _Und ist dass dein benzinbombe?"_ Jane pointed at the coke bottle.

"No, I liberated that from someone who was too young to know better."

"At last! Something we can agree on," Jane said, pushing the ticket and flash drive firmly away with one hand and fingering a zippo lighter, unseen, with the other. She shook her head at the coke bottle. "That is an accident waiting to happen. For optimal results you want to cap the bottle and rubber-band a gas-soaked tampon around the neck."

The Kid frowned. "By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle in which the oppressors nearly always have superiority." But, accepting defeat, he scooped up the envelope and flash drive, and replaced them in his bag.

"If you say so," Jane said, without conviction, reaching for the coke bottle and the book as she and the Kid stood up to dodge a runaway _souvlaki_ cart. The speeding cart sideswiped their table and knocked it, clanging, into the street, where two black clad protesters picked it up and carried it like a battering ram toward the line of peace officers that had fallen back behind plexiglass shields at one end of the street. "Of course," she postulated, as the cops were joined by more cops, "under certain circumstances a little oppressor-on-oppressor action might be seen as a sort of grey zone. Speaking as a former oppressor, mind you."

"Asimov said 'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.'" The Kid's gaze was fixed a few yards away on the sandy-colored dog, who was happily gorging on meat and _tzatziki_ sauce behind the overturned _souvlaki_ cart. Like the dog, the Kid seemed unaware that the riot police and a host of plain-clothes thugs had engulfed the street again.

"Was he watching a bunch of nazi wannabes beat some poor bastard like a drum when he said that? Some poor bastard they knocked out of his wheelchair, mind you. And some poor Nigerian coffee guy just trying to help?" she wondered, unable to keep the rising edge out of her voice. A flying wedge of anarchist youth entered from an alley at high speed, pitching themselves bodily at the armed invaders and yelling like Comanches. The dog abandoned his feast and galloped back to stand among the mismatched combatants, barking and snarling like a canine possessed. Or a really talented stunt dog.

"Non-violence is a practical strategy as well as an ethical decision. It negates the moral authority of those who attack the unarmed and defenseless." Jane could not tell whether the Kid's air of objectivity was genuine or if he was deliberately baiting her.

Having distracted the police from their more vulnerable prey, the anarchists were now themselves absorbing the worst of the beatings. One asshole cop clearly had it in for the riot dog. He seemed to be getting his jollies lunging at the animal with a truncheon and trying to crack its skull, which the dog clearly mistook for fun and games. Beside himself, the cop went for his holster.

"Uh huh," Jane said. She had already lit the Molotov's rag and was taking careful aim at the cop with the gun. "I hear you. Don't ever change, Boopsie. And don't try this at home."

4 Lately

The private room had a private bar wide enough to dance on. And the girls were dancing, two of them, in cowboy boots, big black Stetsons, and not much in between. Strutting, gyrating, shimmying, leaning in to share their cleavage, shaking their booty. It was totally hot. And, well into his third beer, John was totally not interested.

The chief, in all his tribal paint and feathered glory, was ensconced in front of a big screen TV watching "Little Big Man" while a nubile young thing fed him Spanish peanuts from an over-sized bar bowl. He seemed happy enough. In another part of the sunken living room, Vinnie was finishing up a lap dance.

"That poor kid," Vinnie said, sliding onto the bar stool next to John. "She's got a PhD in physics but colleges aren't hiring and she doesn't want to work for Wall Street so this is what she does to pay off her student loans. How 'bout you, sweetheart?" he waved a twenty dollar bill at the bartender, who was flaunting some major pole-dancing skills. "You look like you know a thing or two about quantum mechanics."

"I was a NASA flight engineer until about a month ago," the bartender acknowledged, flipping right side up again.

"Oh yeah? Rocket science? Duce egg if you can prove it in the next 30 seconds," Vinnie said, ogling the dancers, who were boot-scooting in review just inches from his upturned face.

The bartender whipped out a pen and doodled on his cocktail napkin. Which was not exactly what he had in mind.

"What's that?" He leaned in to take a closer look.

"Static friction equation." She backed off to twirl two tequila bottles and pour Vinnie and John each a fresh shot.

"Now I was thinking more along the lines of a kinetic friction equation. Me plus you?" His eyebrows did push-ups, double-time.

John cringed, but she just smiled at Vinnie and twitched the twenty from between his fingers. "Break time, gents. See you in a few," she promised. Sashaying and giggling, the girls filed into the next room. The chief stopped eating peanuts and listened intently as Dustin Hoffman encouraged General Custer to go play with the Indians one last time. The bartender switched the Musak from Southwest Strip Club to Intermission Rhythm-and-Blues. First song up: "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone."

John groaned and put his face on the bar. Vinnie shook his head. "OK, we need to deal with this. Not to be insensitive or anything, but this _is_ my bachelor party and as best man you're supposed to be making sure it's a totally mind-blowing, over-the-top, no-holds-barred experience of debauchery and sexist indulgence that I will be able to remember and treasure down the long dark years of marital imprisonment when I'm wondering why my wife has custody of my balls and if we'll ever make whoopee again and if I even _want_ to. It's my last night on earth as a free man and you, my friend, are totally screwing it up."

"I'm sorry," John's voice was muffled, but profoundly contrite.

"Whatever is eating you, you need to get it off your chest and I mean pronto. When those babes come back, they should find not one but two of the most hard-drinking, womanizing, take-no-prisoners party animals this shitty excuse for a world has ever known. Together again. If only for this one night. When they carry us out of here, we should be legends, if only in our own minds. If only in my mind. After that, you can dissolve in a puddle of beer-soaked self-pity and it's your funeral. Not really - but you need to snap out of it. If you won't do it for you, do it for me. Do it for my sake. OK? This is me, begging. Can you possibly, just for tonight, get past whatever is making you an absolute sorry-ass killjoy and for once in your life pretend it's all about me?"

"I suck," John admitted, sitting up again.

"Well, as a wingman, you're a great little tea cozy."

"Ten years of marriage will do that."

"You have about ten _minutes_ to tell me what's wrong."

"What isn't wrong? Lately we can't agree on anything. She's back to being impossible. I can't do anything right. Everything is 'no.' No, she doesn't want to go to Detroit, they're a bunch of fucking amateurs. No, she doesn't want to try and get back on the circuit and do hits under a new identity. No, she doesn't want children..."

"Wait. You want children?"

"Don't you?"

"Knowing what we know?" Vinnie tossed down the rest of his Tequila and reached over the bar for the bottle. "That's one for Jane. Go on."

"We argue all the time. If I so much as breathe, she's on my case."

"If you so much as drink too much?"

"I am drinking the same as ever," John bridled. "She used to drink me under the table. No more."

"Uh huh." Vinnie was refilling his empty shot glass. Poured another for John. "And who'd you fuck?"

"Oh, come on, I'm married to Jane. Even you have a thing for Jane." John bolted his shot, suffered the consequences.

"Do not." Vinnie looked disgusted. John waited, exhaling hard, skeptical. "Alright, I've had the occasional involuntary wet dream - which you will _not_ hold against me if you guys reconcile. And I notice you changed the subject. Five minutes, dude."

"It was nothing."

"It never is. Was she gorgeous? Which, weird as it may sound, can be better than if she's not, because I've noticed good-looking women get really pissy if they're replaced by a chick who's just so-so. And if she was downright ugly you're a dead man."

"Picture a young Angelina Jolie," John admitted.

Vinnie whistled silently. "We talking before or after Brad Pitt? Because I always thought he was the beginning of her high classical period and now you mention it, I always thought that Jane was the spitting image of - oh shit. You know age gets to be a thing - "

"She was just some kid," John broke in, clutching his head in exasperation. "We felt sorry for her. The entire village is unemployed, so we gave her a job. She was delivering groceries, for god's sake."

"How does that even happen?" Vinnie clearly stood in awe of this further proof of John's effortless success with the fairer sex. "'Here are your bananas, sir.' 'Why thank you, young lady, do you like bananas?' Does Greece even have bananas, the way things are?"

"I can't explain it. I didn't ask for it. I open the door, I take the groceries, like I've done week in, week out, time and again, I wave at the taxi in the driveway which is there to take me to the nearest airport, and all of a sudden, this sweet young thing is hanging from my neck giving me mouth-to-mouth."

"Zorba effect," Vinnie postulated. "Zorba the fucking Greek. You were this exotic stranger, giving off this crazy mid-life crisis vibe -"

"I'm telling you, it wasn't me. And it was just a kiss."

"But Jane walked in. And you're still walking around. I'd say that's positive."

John wasn't so sure. "Too many witnesses. The kid got out just ahead of a kitchen knife. And the taxi was waiting."

"Timing. Timing is everything. So this was just before you left?"

"I was on my way out the door."

"You kissed and ran? That is, you kissed someone other than your wife and ran? John, John, John. The new me is all - 'that's the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever heard.' The old me is like - 'you couldn't do this two months ago, _before_ I signed up for the old ball and chain?'"

"Ladies and gentlemen, first off, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my best friend and bosom buddy for his undying, unconditional support," John said, speechifying into the mirror behind the bar. Then he dropped his sarcastic tone to confess, "She hasn't called. She hasn't texted. And she won't pick up when I call. Her voicemail is so full it just hangs up on me. It's been over a week."

The music ran out and the room fell silent, except for the TV, where the onscreen Indian chief was on top of a mountain saying good-bye. "Come out and fight! It is a good day to die." The chief on the sofa seemed to have fallen asleep. His chin was on his chest. He sighed deeply and drew a ragged breath.

"I thought - I thought the Klingons started that. 'Today is a good day to die.'" John repeated. Then gave the Klingonese, one of the 20 languages with which he had at least a nodding acquaintance: _"_ Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam!" And slammed his hand on the bar for good measure.

"Now you're talking," Vinnie leaped at the chance to change the subject. He slammed his hand on the bar in agreement. _"_ _DaH SojlIj!"_

He had to raise his voice because the door had opened, the lights had been turned out, and the women were returning, with flaming batons this time. "Fire on the Mountain" blared from the speakers. "Eat, drink, and speak Klingon," Vinnie proclaimed, sitting back as the bartender deftly spilled vodka down the length of the bar and tossed a match in it, whereupon blue flames opened out like a field of bluebonnets for the baton dancers to stomp on. "For tomorrow -"

"We go see my mom," John finished, almost yelling over the music as he accepted a flaming B-52 from a waitress who stood at his side wearing little more than a smile and a halo of sparklers invisibly wired to the back of her head. "

5 The Glory of Economy

"Careful with that baby." Startled, Jane froze, looking right-left-right, up-down-around. Like a fucking civilian getting ready for the dash across Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. No baby. She was back in the kitchen of the Greek cottage, with the doors open and the cold pouring in. But no baby, thank god.

The old woman at the table was a dead ringer for the Greek granny who had sung 'Opa!' on the day of the eviction, but Jane was not fooled. It was her mother.

"You're one to talk," Jane said. The granny had a Molotov cocktail, which she kept huffing like a pro. Getting high on gasoline fumes. Not what you want to see in your mother. But the granny had an excuse.

"This isn't about me. I'm just an oracle. Inhaling the divine vapors and relaying messages from beyond."

"Not that I have any reason to care about anything you have to say? But the least you could do is speak for yourself." Jane felt she was being a bad hostess, but she couldn't remember if her mother preferred coffee or tea. Oh wait. Having never met her, how could she be expected to know? And anyway, the cupboards were all nailed shut. "I thought you were dead, by the way."

"I probably am. We all are. The problem remains. You've lost your way."

"That might have been helpful _before_ I re-wrote the CIA assassination guide. Now? Not so much."

"Too many MBAs. Not enough super-heroes. End of marriage - er, message. Beep!"

"Now you sound like John. What tripe." But her mother was gone and it was John sitting there, half worried, half pleading.

"No, no, you've got it all wrong. Let me explain. Jane, sweetheart, put down that knife."

"Okey-dokey," she said cheerfully, aiming at a spot just shy of his left ear.

She missed on purpose and he made a beeline for the door, not just to put physical distance between them, but because he had to catch a taxi, because he had to catch a plane, because he had more important things to do than stand there and try to mend what two years of hardship and hopelessness had broken. "Remember," he said, keeping a wary eye on her shaking hands, "violence is never the answer. Vandalism, violence, and destruction have no place in a democratic country and Greece does not have the luxury of such protests in such difficult times."

A tired nurse in blood-stained scrubs paused beside her, looking up at the television screen and cursing in Greek, which Jane understood with bell-like clarity. "Listen to him, Mr. Malaka, bloviating. With his mama's Swiss bank accounts and me pushing patients out in the street, ready or not. Mind the baby, Missis. Who let that dog in here? Oh wait, is that Louk? I see you brought your friends with you." There was a commotion up the hall and she scurried to join a fresh scrum of paramedics and protest casualties.

And now there _was_ a baby. A real one. Peering sideways from a featherless pillow, Jane found a newborn nestled next to her in a worn blanket mottled by pink bunnies, sleeping like an angel and totally oblivious to the commotion made by a young woman shrieking, sobbing, struggling, and looking tearfully back as she was frog-marched away by a couple of burly security guards. The baby appeared to be similarly deaf to the blaring of dueling announcements in Greek and Albanian that issued from the public address system, and was wholly unfazed by the cacophony of a waiting room crammed with injured or ailing Greeks. Jane herself was lying on a gurney in a hospital hallway a few feet from a big old-fashioned casement window with a leaky sash. A draft of arctic air benumbed every inch of her that was not covered by a skimpy patient gown. A warm wet tongue rhythmically lapped at a minor cut above one eyebrow. The riot dog was ministering to her wounds.

"Oh good, you're awake," the Peroxide Kid said cheerfully, from above. He was peering at her upside down, over the head of the gurney.

"Doesn't anybody in this damn country take 'no' for an answer?" Jane thought about sitting up but decided against it. The room was spinning and the lump on the back of her head was throbbing like a drum machine. "Could I get my coat, maybe? I'm guessing someone forgot to pay the electric bill."

"Actually, the IMF/EU-installed government transferred hospital funds to the banksters, who apparently get their healthcare elsewhere. In other bad news, your clothes seem to have walked away while I was fixing your phone."

"Thanks so much. Next time please remember to save the Burberry and to hell with the burner."

"I can see where you might feel that way. Been missing many calls lately?"

"Hard to say. My life is such a gay social whirl since it supposedly ended," Jane rhapsodized, sardonically. Yeah right. Aside from a few Anons, only one person in the world had her number. The only person in the world who mattered, the only one who had ever mattered. And that person had made no attempt - zero, zilch, NONE - to contact her since leaving in the midst of a shouting match eight, nine, no ten days ago. The bastard.

"Because your sim card more or less died two weeks ago when they outlawed anonymous phone accounts in these parts." He handed the phone back to Jane, who sat up suddenly enough to jar the sleeping infant awake. "You're all right and registered now. I put it under Brown."

"For craps sake. You're saying the problem is -?"

"Was. Your phone. And Europol. It's a surveillance thing. Not aimed at you specifically. Terrorists in general - meaning anyone who objects to the goals and methods of the big boys. That would include most of the city of Athens today, if you get my drift."

Jane could hardly believe it. "They couldn't tell a person? Like every time you try to dial or something? Like, 'I'm sorry, but we're destroying your phone service in order to save it?'"

"The whole phone thing is a little touchy around here. They killed off a Vodafone engineer awhile back, a little misunderstanding over illegal wiretaps. It was in all the papers. The Athens Affair?"

Jane's hand was shaking, her heart beating wildly. Damn trauma. Fucking meds. She willed her hand to stop. Stop. And for the hundredth time since John's ugly and chaotic departure, she checked her messages. And there - where all had been dark and blank and silent before - they were. Miles of text messages. Days of phone-mail. John, John, nothing but John.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like these I held her in my arms.

I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.

Well, Neruda. Her eyes were swimming and no scalding coffee to blame it on. Goddammit.

But it was the baby who cried. Finding itself surrounded by strangers, assaulted by too much noise and light, and feeling somewhat peckish though not perhaps understanding what hunger was, it set up a sharp cry of distress. Being a sympathetic soul, the dog felt compelled to investigate. With an icy wet nose. Jolted, the baby threw its little arms up and wailed in earnest, a dismal bleating that throbbed in time with the aching in Jane's head. Jane looked down in dismay. The baby began to turn an interesting shade of red.

An elderly gentleman, who had been arguing with his daughter that it was a waste of time to sit there, since he had already been told there was no insulin today, that he should try again tomorrow, stopped his own amplified ranting to address Jane.

" _Πόλεμος μέχρι θανάτου εναντίον των πλουσίων, ο Λένιν είπε. Για πενήντα χρόνια δίδαξε πόσο λάθος ήταν και αυτό είναι το πώς τελειώνει. Θα πρέπει πραγματικά ήσυχο παιδί σας, κυρία,"_ ["War to the death against the rich, Lenin said. For forty years I taught how wrong he was and this is how they repay me. You should really quiet your child, madam."]

His daughter concurred, approaching the gurney apologetically. _"Ναι, αν δεν σας πειράζει. Δεν μπορώ να ακούσω τον εαυτό μου ότι_." ["Yes, if you don't mind. I can't hear myself think."]

Other women gathered, and Jane found herself the center of a clucking and essentially tribal form of solicitude.

_"Σήκωσε το, αυτό είναι όλο."_ ["Pick it up, that's all."]

" _Κακή πράγμα, θέλουν να γίνει όλο το χρόνο ή τουλάχιστον φασκιωμένα."_ ["Poor thing, they want to be held all the time that young, or at least tightly swaddled."]

" _Έχει αυτή την τροφή ακόμα?"_ ["Has she fed it yet?"]

Jane looked around for a nurse or other responsible party. Even the Peroxide Kid seemed to have disappeared. And still the baby cried. Jane drew a deep breath and picked the baby up. Badly.

" _Ω!,"_ the women rushed forward as one. _"Δεν είναι έτσι! Λίγο κεφάλι της."_ ["Oh! Not like that! Her little head."]

"It's not my baby," Jane tried to say. The baby drowned her out.

The women looked at each other. The clucking resumed.

" _Αμερικανός."_ ["American."]

" _Αμερικανός ή όχι, αυτή είναι αρκετά μεγάλος για να γνωρίζω καλύτερα_." ["American or not, she's old enough to know better, surely."]

" _ξέρουν πώς να αγοράσει τα πράγματα."_ ["All they know is how to buy things."]

" _Ή να τους πυροβολήσει."_ ["Or shoot them."]

They glared at Jane with naked disapproval and things were about to get ugly when the window behind Jane swung wide open, giving _carte blanche_ to the winter wind. A chorus of objection from all sides drowned out the shrieking of the baby. The Peroxide Kid stood on the far side, with the woman the guards had escorted from the building and a young man with a thin, tense face.

"Right. Where's that baby? Where's she at?" the Kid demanded. Behind him, the young woman held her arms out, and immediately the tide of opinion turned.

" _Αχ, αυτό είναι δικό της. Εκείνη δεν μπορούσε να πληρώσει"_ ["Ah, it's hers. She couldn't pay."]

" _Δεν θα αφήσει να το πάρει; Αυτό είναι απαγωγή!"_ ["They made her leave it here? That's kidnapping!"]

Jane was more than willing to convey the red and squalling infant to its rightful owners, but the window was at an odd angle behind her. She was afraid to pass the baby over her head and none of the bystanders stepped forward to assist. Then there was the little matter of the IV and it's drip lines and three-wheeled pole, not to mention the wooziness that accompanied swinging her legs over the side of the gurney. But the heightened noise and activity had attracted unwanted attention. As Jane struggled to dismount the gurney, a self-important man in a white coat, a doctor or administrator, waded through the crowd to intervene.

" _Όχι δεν το κάνετε."_ Flanked by the aforementioned burly security guards, he swept the baby away from Jane. " _Πολιτική Νοσοκομείο. Το μωρό δεν μπορεί να κυκλοφορήσει μέχρι που ο λογαριασμός εξοφλείται, τουλάχιστον εν μέρει."_ ["No you don't. Hospital policy. The baby can't be released until the bill is settled, at least in part."]

The mother screamed. The crowd went berserk. Well, verbally.

" _Ο διαχωρισμός της μητέρας και του παιδιού. Τι είμαστε εμείς, οι σκλάβοι πρέπει να ανταλλάσσονται και να πωλούνται?"_ ["Separating mother and child. What are we, slaves to be bartered and sold?"]

" _Δεν θα αφήσει να το πάρει. Αυτό είναι απαγωγή_." ["What these bastards won't do. Give her the child."

The crowd began to chant. _"Δώστε στο παιδί! Δώστε στο παιδί!"_ ["Give her the child! Give her the child!"]

" _Σώπα, σας πολλά. Οι περισσότεροι από εσάς ήδη χρωστάει περισσότερα από ό, τι μπορείτε να πληρώσετε. Σήμερα η κυβέρνηση πήρε κάθε δεκάρα στους λογαριασμούς μας, και έδωσε στις τράπεζες. Αυτό που πρέπει να κάνουμε; Πρέπει να χαράξουμε μια διαχωριστική γραμμή κάπου_ _,"_ the doctor said testily. ["Be quiet, you lot. Most of you already owe more than you can pay. Today the government took every penny in our accounts and gave it to the banks. Without asking. What are we to do? We have to draw a line somewhere."]

"No, no, no," Jane found herself demurring, in English, and in no uncertain terms, "Children. Belong. With their mothers." Fluid as water despite the after-effects of concussion, Jane un-holstered one guard's Smith & Wesson and motioned for his partner to freeze and put his hands in the air. A gasp flowed around the room as everybody's hands went up. "Now," Jane continued evenly, switching to flawless if parroted Greek, _"Δώστε στο παιδί."_ ["Give her the child."]

" _Θα πρέπει να πάρετε το όπλο του, πάρα πολύ,"_ someone suggested shyly, pointing and giving the second guard a shove _._ ["You should take his gun, too."]

" _Και κλειδώστε τους στην ντουλάπα,"_ another helpful soul suggested _._ ["And lock them in the closet."]

When the man in the white coat obstinately held his ground, the tired nurse cursed fluently and parted the crowd as easily as Moses parted a certain body of water. Ignoring Jane, she walked to her boss and stood before him, head to one side, hands outstretched to relieve him of the child. When he bridled and refused to surrender the baby, she rolled her eyes at Jane and helped herself to the other guard's gun. The administrator visibly blanched.

" _Ω ναι ότι οι αλλαγές τα πράγματα λίγο. Επειδή μου που από το πρωί και σήμερα είναι η τελευταία μου μέρα. Τι με νοιάζει εμένα, ε? ρε?"_ The baby, who had not ceased crying the entire time, made a safe and speedy transit out the window. Mother and father beamed with joy and relief, as the Greek audience broke into applause. Including the guards. ["Oh yes that changes things a bit. Because you laid me off this morning and today's my last day. What do I care, eh? Eh?"]

Jane meanwhile ripped off the tape and needle holding her hostage to the IV pole, fumbled for her cell phone, and backed toward the window. Baby & co. were already beating a hasty retreat toward a battered Lada. The Peroxide Kid was fiddling with some handheld gizmo, apparently unconcerned about reprisals or pursuit.

"Guess I'm coming with you after all," Jane said, mounting the sill.

"It is your destiny," the Kid joshed. He was typing on a keypad and did not look up.

"If I want to live?" Jane's bare feet landed in near freezing mud, up to her beautiful ankles. Somewhere below a water pipe had broken.

"If you want to live with yourself." He glanced at the gun in her hand. "You know, you could have just offered to pay, right? Rich American?" They were walking backward together at a rapid clip. Jane took a quick 360 to make sure the coast was clear. Then they were at the car.

"You know, I am escaping without my pants, right?" The door to the back seat of the Lada was open. Jane scooted across the ripped upholstery and alighted gingerly on a pile of blankets. My god, they probably sleep in here, she thought to herself. "No wallet, no passport," she continued aloud.

"No worries," the Kid insisted, getting in. "We've got your back. And we can pick up your luggage on our way to the airport." He tossed the envelope on her lap. "Ticket, ID, debit card. Who could ask for anything more?"

"A real fairy godfather? To magic away all the pictures all those nice people are taking?" Jane grimaced toward the hospital, reflecting that the last thing they wanted was to headline the evening news. "Damn technology!"

The kid flashed his gizmo. "Magic? We don't need no stinking magic. Not when we have geo-fencing and application-blocking." He waved to the amateur paparazzi hanging out the window behind them, phones busily trying to record the action. A few potentially less admiring individuals began to spill out through the hospital's front entrance, shaking their phones - or maybe their fists. The man in white led the way toward a couple of ambulances, thinking to block their escape or mount a car chase. "It's too late for baseball to save us, but technology just might."

"We go?" the tense young man asked from the driver's seat, torn between rapture over his wee daughter and dread of what might next befall. So far the ambulance drivers were balking. Jane spun the chambers of her gun, checking for ammo, just in case. "You close door?"

As he spoke, the riot dog flashed into view. Breaking from the human pack, he bolted for the Lada at a dead run and bounded into the back seat, ricocheting off the Kid's groin to land with love and lavish kisses on Jane's lap.

"Uh, negative Houston," Jane sputtered, her mouth full of dog hair. The Kid was bent double; whether in agony or laughter was not immediately apparent. "We have a problem."

"Is no problem," the young father said more cheerfully, burning what little rubber remained on the Lada's rear tires. The car door obligingly slammed itself shut. "Is Loukanikos. The Riot Dog. Everybody knows. Is good luck. And famous!"

"Do tell," Jane said, nose to nose with her newest ardent admirer, and trying to juggle gun, phone, envelope, and outsized muddy paws.

"Like Brad Pitt," Papa insisted. "Only moreso."

6 Roses for the Dead

"So what is it with you and your mom?" Vinnie wondered, swatting at palm fronds with his eyes closed. He was lying on his back on the floor of the van, nursing the mother of all hangovers. "Moms are great."

" _Your_ mom was great," John affirmed.

"Well, she was. But if it's that bad, just stop at the nearest Post Office and send the stuff COD. Or, shit, stay in the car and I'll go."

In the front of the van, dwarfed by a bowl of long-stemmed roses, John shook his head. Irritably. Watched the unvarying Oklahoma prairie unwind like an endless tan and grey diorama outside the cracked window. Oklahoma. He hadn't been home in years. But it felt like one big dead zone, being here. OK, he couldn't get a cell signal and he had lost his charger. But still. "Nah. Besides, there's my dad. He's getting up there."

Vinnie groaned. "Aren't we all. So what's her problem?" The van hit a hole in the road. Hard. The 'Farewell Too Soon' and 'All-American Tribute' bouquets fell sideways out of their boxes, sending a minor flood of water coursing toward the 'Sacred Duty' funeral spray - and Vinnie. Who yelped in sodden surprise and sat up indignantly. Caught Julio's eye in the rearview mirror. "What the fuck?"

Julio grinned. "Two more and I'm an ace."

Vinnie was not amused. "That was some of the best flying I've seen - right up to the part where you got killed." But he got the point and changed the subject. "Long way for a flower delivery."

"Not in these parts," Julio said. "Welcome to Nigeria, USA. Land of the resource curse. Oceans of oil and gas under your feet and a quarter of us living in poverty. Add a recession and bake until almost everyone is busted. I'm still standing because I got tribal council backing. And I'm in hock up to my tom-toms. Like your dad," he said to John.

"Not any more," John said. "He got shut down a couple of weeks back. The bank cancelled his credit and equity lines. Took all three of his long-haul rigs and auctioned the building out from under him. They're going after the house next."

"What's up with that?" Vinnie wondered.

"Called his loans," John shrugged. "Quicker than you can say 'rehypothecation.' 'Tis the season."

"Might have a leettle something to do with where the money went," Julio observed over his shoulder, slowing the van as a house or two popped out of the brown landscape, squat cinderblock affairs, painted a dingy white.

"You think?" John asked cynically. He turned to look at Vinnie. "If he'd lost it at poker or roulette, they would have left him alone as long as the payments came in. But he borrowed to the max and then he - they - turned around and gave it to the Tar Sands Blockade legal defense fund. All $200 K."

"Earth first, man," Julio said. "Your folks rock, John-John."

Vinnie's mouth made a silent O. "I get it. Yeah. Never, never do that. You never want to get between a banker and the object of his affections. I take it your dad's bank is financing the pipeline?"

"From Cushing to the Texas border. Deal of a lifetime for a small town S&L. Jippy Mo cut them in. Nothing like community support."

"The best that money can buy."

"Gentlemen," Julio interrupted, as they slowed for a yellow light that marked the outer limits of a small town. "Two minutes to target. Do you know where your hats are?"

In response, John resettled the deerstalker cap on his head so that the grey-streaked beard and unkempt hair attached to it covered his face. Vinnie's artificial ponytail hung down from an Oilers baseball cap. They were driving along the main drag of the town, with its old timey storefronts and ghost town feel. Up the side streets you might see a truck or two parked, but the sidewalks were empty and nothing anywhere was moving.

"Got tumbleweeds?" Vinnie joshed.

"Yeah, don't blink," John said. "Going Out of Business" and "Closed" signs were pasted across many of the shop windows. "Except there's nothing to miss. There's nothing left."

They turned at the water tower and headed past the school, with its boarded up windows and hoopless basketball court. The curb and the sidewalks continued on a little way and the houses were a little better kept and a little bigger for a minute before dwindling away to shotgun shacks and doublewides. They were headed for a two-story brick house that looked like it had been built in the wrong place. It was surrounded on three sides by a picket fence in need of a paint job. In the hard-packed yard, crocuses were popping through a fringe of strawberry plants and a Chickasaw plum was shyly in bloom A black Crown Vic was parked across the street and a small knot of strangers were waving signs and chanting by the front gate.

"As we make our approach," Julio intoned, like a pilot in a bad movie, "I'd like to point out that per prior reconnaissance we have canned spooks at three o'clock. In addition, we seem to have accumulated an unidentified squad of COB. Repeat, we have citizens on the battlefield. And drop will commence in 4-3-2-"

Julio stopped the van beside the protesters while John and Vinnie bailed out, masses of flowers further camouflaging their flimsy disguises. The protesters formed a gauntlet of verbal assault through which they passed as rapidly as possible. Julio, bearing a giant American flag made of red, white, and blue-dyed carnations, brought up the rear.

"You're going to hell, all of you. The Lord will see to it."

"God hates you the way he hates all fags and everyone who serves in our faggot military."

One of the women, fat and rabid, tried to spit on John, but she missed. Vinnie managed to tread on somebody's foot in passing and a howl went up. So Vinnie came back to apologize.

"Did I step on you? I'm so sorry," he said in complete insincerity, and managed to rack the guy as he was helping him to straighten up. Julio grabbed Vinnie under one arm to make sure he made it to the front porch, where John was ringing the doorbell.

An elderly gentleman with a mild handsome face and a shock of white hair pulled back a lace curtain to ascertain whether or not the door should be opened. Seeing Julio, he held up a hand in greeting and hastened to let them in. When the door closed on the obnoxious noise of the protesters, it was like stepping back in time. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light, they could make out a coat tree, high ceilings, and polished wood floors. Directly in front of them a woman was descending a staircase with stern and measured tread. She was winsome in a worn sort of way, but with plenty of fight left in her. She smelled the flowers before any of them said a word. And was not pleased.

"Now Julio, you went and did what I asked you not to. 'In lieu of flowers,' I said and you promised me, you _promised_ you wouldn't come hauling a whole bunch of funeral posies I will just have to turn right around and compost. I mean look at that," she scolded, following Julio and his flag of flowers into the Victorian parlor, with its well-worn settee and matching chairs. "Were you trying to get my dander up? You know what Sinclair Lewis said, don't you?"

John and his father knew. From the hallway they recited together like obedient children: "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." Her face went paper white and she walked to where John was standing, still mostly hidden behind his bowl of American Beauties. She snapped at Vinnie. "Young man, you will do me the favor of opening the front door." While to John she said in a low tone, eyes narrowed in rage, "And you - give me those damn roses." He did, and stood aside as she flounced out of the house and down the front steps, where the Eastboro Baptist crazies greeted her with the screams of the damned. The window of the Crown Vic scrolled smoothly down, the better to hear and record, my dear.

"That would be Mom," Vinnie hazarded, pulling out an audio jammer and sticking it to the nearest wall to disable any listening devices in the immediate vicinity. "OK, the cone of silence has been activated."

"She was a cruel woman," John said, watching as his mother spoke briefly to the protesters, extending the bowl to one of the women, who seemed for a moment nonplussed by the gesture. When no one would accept the peace offering, John's mother placed the bowl on the ground and strode purposefully back to the house. Behind her back someone kicked the bowl over and there was a free-for-all to see who could grind the roses most thoroughly to a pulp. "But fair."

She stomped up the porch stairs and slammed the door closed behind her for good measure. She zeroed in on John and flew right into his face, seething with fury. "I suppose you think you're clever, showing up like Tom Sawyer on the day of your own burial." John looked a little sheepish and doffed his deerstalker. His father did not try to intervene, but meekly took the hat, along with the plaid jacket John had already stripped off. "And I'm supposed to pull an Aunt Polly and hug your neck, when nobody ever bothered to tell me that you weren't dead, though obviously your father knew. And Andrew if you think I won't divorce you for this after almost fifty years, you don't know me."

"I'm sure you're right, my dear, you're always right," John's father said soothingly, patting the false beard into some semblance of order. He buttoned up the plaid jacket and accepted the stack of bills John pulled from his hip pocket.

"Don't you patronize me, you old coot," she raged.

"My darling, I wouldn't dare," John's father assured her, and reached for the doorknob.

"Just where does your father thinks he's going?" John's mother rounded on John.

"To save the homestead from the evil scheming bankers?"

You could have heard a pin drop. If they still made pins in this country. John's mother sniffed. Her nose was bright red. "Well he's put it off this long, I reckon he can put it off a little longer. I have a fresh baked pecan pie in the kitchen."

"Pecan pie," Vinnie ventured to say, looking from John to his mom and back again, "is probably the best pie in the whole world."

"It is certainly one of _my_ all time favorites," Julio volunteered.

"Now, these boys are tempting fate just to be here -" John's father felt obliged to point out.

"I have vanilla ice cream." Her voice quavered. "The pie is still warm. I was just about to take some to those two idiots in the car. They've been out there every day. For two years now. I keep thinking any day now they'll go home."

"You might want to wait on that. At least until we're gone, Mom," John suggested gently.

She shook her head, eyes tightly closed so the tears could not get out. "I hope I'm not that kind of old fool. And I hope you know if I had it to do over, I'd sell my soul before I'd let you sell yourself to the army."

"But then I couldn't stand here and agree with Dad. You were right, Mom. About all of it. And I'm sorry. And - at least one of us still has a soul."

"Pie a la mode," Vinnie interjected, with forced enthusiasm. Attempting to lighten the mood. "What could be better?"

Nobody answered him. John's mother was too busy hugging John's neck.

7 This Charming Man

They were booked on separate flights. "You don't want to travel with me," the Kid joked. "I always get yanked out of line. I'm on their fucking watch list. I'm always the last guy they let on the plane. When I'm allowed to get on."

But they weren't letting anybody on any plane at the moment, even though the strike had ended promptly at 4:00 p.m. There were lines into the Metro, lines out of the Metro, lines to enter the airport, lines to get into lines to check-in. Jane waited in line for over an hour to get to a departure kiosk, alternately staring up at the flight board (on which the word 'CANCELLED' figured prominently) and checking her cell for some new word from John. She had texted him before showering, again before changing, before checking out, before anything and everything. "Phone dead since 2/15. En route D/MI. Truce?" But so far no reply.

And so far no glitches. Arriving in a crush of irate travelers provided an extra layer of protection, as harassed airport personnel struggled to handle the logistics of too many passengers for too few planes. Once past the initial security checkpoint it occurred to Jane that she couldn't remember her last meal, but there were lines outside all the food stalls. "Departure lounge it is," she told her stomach, which was making mutinous noises. "A little deferred gratification never hurt anybody."

Yet even as she chided her anatomy, Jane caught sight of a person for whom deferred gratification was a joke, a threat, an affront. A physical if not moral impossibility. Further up the concourse, not quite lost in the ebb and flow of stranded humanity, the super model Saki was finishing up a fashion shoot. In cowboy boots, ripped jeans, and military jacket, she sat her signature vintage Ducati motorcycle the way Genghis Khan sat his warhorse. Tough, fearless, easy.

She was signing autographs and trading jokes with the lighting techs. As if sensing Jane's gaze or presence, she stopped mid-laugh to look in Jane's direction. It was quite a distance, with many people intervening, but no doubt Jane's still, slim outline in black leggings, short black trenchcoat, and black boots did stand out against the multicolored swirl of ordinary trekkers and trippers. Only the very privileged and the very poor have that silhouette. Like a bird against the sun.

Jane nodded slightly and turned to the escalator. Her gate was in the satellite terminal, some distance away and reachable via an underground walkway. As she descended, she was not entirely surprised to hear the motorcycle revving up and closing the gap between them. When the motorcycle did not stop at the top of the escalator, but swerved to the UP side and came bumping merrily down the mechanical steps that rose to meet it, Jane was not among those who stood with mouths gaping. She did not alter her pace though she could hear the motorcycle purring gently in pursuit.

"Hey white girl."

Jane kept walking. The motorcycle described lazy arabesques in her wake.

"Know where I can score some decent weed?"

Jane kept walking. Dodging a baby carriage and its attached parental units, Saki caught up with Jane and, staring straight ahead in deadpan imitation, asked: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Jane kept walking. Saki dismounted and pushed the bike along at Jane's side as she chattered. "I do. Because they told me you were dead. A spy and a traitor, blown to pieces with your husband in a terrorist attack. I didn't believe any of it. Especially the husband."

"And yet..." Jane held out her left hand, on which a wedding ring was visible.

"It's horrible what life does to people," Saki said bitterly. "I suppose I'm to blame."

"You were the one who ran off with Madonna."

"You're the one who was always running off to Third World jungles. And now here we are," Saki marveled.

"Not me," Jane contradicted. "I am but a figment of your guilty imagination."

"My imaginary childhood friend. I'm trying to imagine where you're off to."

"New York, by way of Switzerland."

Saki leaned over her handlebars in disbelief. "No fucking way. Me too. So this is like one of those karmic, kismet moments. You cannot fight this. You have to come with me, there's this private jet all fired up, just waiting for me to finish my shoot. Jane, it is your destiny."

"People keep saying that," Jane said. She stopped short beneath one of the airport's ubiquitous flight boards. All the commercial departures were still tagged 'CANCELLED.'

"People, shit," Saki said. "I am your one true love. I'm making you an offer you cannot refuse. Unless of course you want to be stuck in this loser's limbo for the next three days."

"From the orphanage to your own private jet. By way of Madonna, but still. Not too shabby," Jane had to admit.

"Oh, it's not my jet. It's my next gig. It's kind of involved? But there's this corporation that has this arrangement with this guy -"

"This _guy_?" Jane opened her eyes wide.

"This very important, very charming man," Saki fluttered her eyelashes. "With a huge appetite and very eclectic tastes. Of which I happen to be one."

"Do tell," Jane was thinking hard. She didn't have a day or two to spare and regular flights were indeed indefinitely backlogged. Getting to Detroit ASAP meant getting to John ASAP. And if she got a chance to do some field work among the rich and shameless, so much the better.

"So about whom exactly are we talking?" Jane asked.

"Oh you know. He's head of one of those global money things." Saki waved a careless hand. "The World Bank or the IMF or something. The main thing is - it's class all the way."

Jane felt a chill run up her spine. Kismet indeed. Flying with oligarchs. Swimming with sharks. She was thinking fast. "So I could be your - personal assistant, maybe?"

"Prude. He'll still try to jump your bones, but we can play it that way if you want. Hell yeah. If it means you'll come." A star-struck teenager tentatively approached with a magazine and pen, and Saki had to balance the motorcycle against her hip while she took time out to sign the cover, then a water bottle, then someone's upper arm.

"Hell yeah," Jane echoed grimly. "I'll come."

8 Hard To Explain

The voice from the stairs was mellifluous and amused. "My god, it's like a Dickens novel down there. Is little Nell alive? No, no. Do over. 'It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.' Or something like that."

All eyes turned toward the woman descending the staircase. Creamy skin, dull auburn hair twisted into a knot, brown jeans under a brushed velour jacket the color of ripe persimmons. So vivid was her presence that she appeared to smolder against the somber wood of her surroundings. The room more or less erupted.

"Angela?" Vinnie was surprised, but pleased.

"Angela!" John was stunned, but perturbed.

"Angela, Angela, Angela," Julio declaimed, one hand over his heart. Everybody looked at him. "What? I was feeling marginalized."

"I thought you were going to meet us in Chicago." Vinnie turned glowingly to John. "But how do you know -"

"How do _I_ know-" John couldn't believe the question.

"She said she came to pay her respects," John's mother was perhaps the most bewildered of all.

"It occurs to me," John's father interposed, furtively scratching his head under the wig, "that the bank will be closing soon."

"My first wife," John clarified, flashing on Vegas, a frenzied stopover between the civil war in Bosnia and the dirty war in Guatemala, mad sex that destroyed a hotel room and went on without respite or mercy for three dimly recollected days. Followed by a return to sanity and a sheepish annulment.

"My first wife-to-be," Vinnie's head was about to explode. Angela smiled caressingly up at him on her way to the parlor. Her fiancée and ex-husband stood as if turned to twin pillars of salt.

"You know what?" Julio asked, putting an arm around Andrew and propelling him away from the gathering storm. "We'll be right back." He waved and followed John's dad out the front door.

"Nobody else showed up. None of your high school friends, none of your art school buddies or brothers in arms," John's mother fretted. "Nobody had the guts or the decency, unless you count those mad dog anti-Baptists." She sank into a chair.

"You forgot your friendly neighborhood G-men," Angela noted, moving one of the lace curtains ever so slightly in order to peek out. "Semper fido."

"Honeybunch, you never mentioned you were married before," Vinnie called, emphatically not looking at John.

"It was more of a youthful indiscretion," she said airily. "A post-graduate project, really. We were testing a series of psychoactive substances and - things got a little out of hand."

"Oh. Uh huh. All in a day's work." Vinnie was looking at John, for whom the dawn was breaking.

"Wait. That was - a science experiment? With me as lab rat?"

"Well, it wasn't just you. I was there, along with our whole team. And the entire hotel participated. Albeit," she admitted a little sheepishly, "without voluntary informed consent."

"Dear lord!" John's mother ejaculated. "Mengele is alive and well."

"And working for the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology," John said.

"Our project lead wanted to use a college fraternity. I rather thought I took the high road," Angela sniffed.

"I rather thought you said you were some kind of ethicist," Vinnie's eyes and tone were hardening, his heart sinking. Here we go again, his brain was saying. Fucking women.

"As a matter of fact, I did switch to neuroethics after that. Because of that. The ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. Oh dear," she dropped the curtain. "We might want to continue this discussion in the car."

The doorbell rang. Vinnie went for his Glock and John's mother bristled.

"Young man, we may have more guns than people in this country -

"More than the next seven failed states combined," Angela corroborated.

" \- but this home is a weapon-free zone," John's mother insisted.

"Yeah, I can appreciate the sentiment," Vinnie said soothingly, still aiming for the door, "but these guys are from the school of shoot-first-get a search warrant-later, if you know what I mean."

John signaled for everyone to shut the fuck up and jerked his head toward the kitchen. Vinnie scraped the audio jammer off the wall, grimacing as John's mother examined the four little white splotches where the suction cups had caused the wallpaper to part company with the plaster. The door knocker rapped smartly, and John's mother had the sense to call out, "Just a minute! Land sakes!" She shooed Vinnie away, blew John a kiss, and \- armed only with an offer of prairie hospitality and homemade pie \- prepared to do battle for the life of her cub. John was not betting on the guys with the guns.

John hurried Vinnie and Angela along the central hallway and through a swinging door into an old fashioned kitchen with a rose-patterned linoleum floor and Eisenhower-era appliances. The smell of pecan pie was redolent. A canary fluttered in a cage in the breakfast nook. John pulled out a Sig 9mm and checked the back porch. No Feds. There were two vehicles parked beneath the porte-cochere: his father's maroon 1948 Ford and a sleek, cream-colored hearse.

"Where's the car?" John hissed frantically, hearing his mother striking up a conversation a few rooms behind him.

"Right there," Angela hissed back. The two men looked at each other over her head.

"That is _not_ what we're driving to our wedding," Vinnie objected. "You cannot be serious."

"Well." She gave him a wide-eyed look in which the faintest hint of mischief may have lurked and pointed out one relevant and overlooked fact. "After all, it is white."

9 Breaking Into Cars

"And how is it you know our Saki?" the charming man wanted to know.

He was sitting beside Jane in the galley of the airplane, a cozy wood paneled utility area normally reserved for 'the help' - flight attendants, spare pilots, so-called 'close protection operatives.' Several hours into their transatlantic flight, he had grown bored with his other playmates and sought her out. As she had known he would, based on Saki's shrewd observations and her own experience with his type - hypersexual, predatory, alpha male.

"We were at school together."

"Do they have schools in America? I was under the impression that education was not widespread. That you have television instead." His dark eyes dared her to contradict him.

"The true opiate of the masses," Jane agreed.

"Reform school." Saki had left the party in the main cabin to check on Jane. She had ditched her coat and you could see her naked breasts quite clearly through the wife beater she was wearing. "They got me for drinking and driving while young, hot, and Asian. With Jane, it was breaking into cars."

"So you were bad girls, then?" His thick mane of hair was untarnished silver, but he had the energy and robust appearance of a much younger man. Aging stallion, Jane thought. Without turning her head she reached out and briefly caressed Saki's arm with the back of her hand. His dark eyes followed her every move.

"Incorrigible. And I have the juvenile record to prove it," Saki said, perching on the arm of Jane's seat and twining her long clever fingers in Jane's.

"A couple of dangerous characters," he surveyed them both and emptied his wine glass. "I wonder my bodyguards allowed you on the plane."

"If the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?" Jane murmured.

The charming man raised an eyebrow. "You allow Oscar Wilde in your jails?"

"And we send some of our finest criminals to Congress. Go figure," Jane smiled.

"Not for the first time you make me regret my years of imprisonment at the Sorbonne." He glanced moodily toward the main cabin, where something approaching an orgy was in progress.

"And yet one meets such interesting and useful people in prison. It can be a life-changing experience," Jane rose gracefully and bent to reach for his empty wine glass. Their fingers met fleetingly and he turned in his seat to watch as she went to pour him a refill. She picked up the bottle to study the label, allowing him ample time to gauge her physical perfections from a rear perspective. She put the bottle down, and with her back still turned to him, swirled the wine in the glass with the precision of a master sommelier. Inhaled. "Like all the 2000s. Really stunning. Opulent." She held the glass up to admire its deep color. "It could almost have come from Napa."

The charming man was at her side in a flash, making the cutest stereotypical sound of Gallic disapprobation imaginable. Like a wet Bresse hen. "Oh, luh luh luh luh luh," he clucked. The entrance of a very beautiful, very disheveled, very nude young blonde failed utterly to distract him. He snatched the glass from Jane, eying her sternly. He swirled the wine himself and buried his nose in the glass.

"This is a classic, _classic_ Old World Bordeaux. The bouquet, the color -"

"The fruit-forwardness? The drinkability? No, no that's New World all the way."

"Dodo," the blonde nymph sighed. The object of her desires paid no attention. Instead, he took a gulp of wine and swished it around like mouthwash, rolling it back and forth across his palate, thrusting with his tongue, aspirating briefly to catch any overlooked aromas, considering Jane and the wine with undivided intensity. Finally, he swallowed.

"I cannot agree. There is a structure there, an elegance that American wines can only dream of."

"Yet that is the very wine that Americans beat - twice. In 1976 and again just five years ago."

"Dodo," the young woman placed herself between Jane and the charming man, winding her siren arms around his aging neck. "It's my turn. It says so on the schedule."

The charming man looked vexed a moment, then gave Jane a droll roll of the eyes over the head of the blonde lamprey clamped to his side. He took another slug of wine and pointed an accusing finger at Jane, "This discussion is not finished. You're invited to join us," he nodded toward the main cabin. "If you wish."

"Maybe next time," Jane demurred. "I'd like to hear what you have to say about the American style."

"There is no such thing," he said over his shoulder, smacking the blonde's naked ass and propelling her ahead of him through the partition. "What you're talking about is the International style. Coming, Saki?" For answer, Saki went to him, took his face between her hands and gave him a long, salacious, penetrating kiss, which ended with her groping his crotch as he bit her neck. Jane watched quizzically, until Saki pushed the charming man away.

"Don't give it all to that stupid girl. If you know what's good for you," Saki admonished. She had gotten his blood up and he was breathing heavily.

"Don't make me wait too long," he said, and Jane could not tell if he meant it as a plea, a command, or a warning.

"Just for that, it will be a little longer," Saki taunted. He inclined his head by way of acceptance and passed into the dimly lit main cabin, pulling the divider closed behind him. The erotic pulse of club music faded to background noise. Saki sank back onto the arm of Jane's chair, swiveled slightly and collapsed sideways onto the seat.

"Thought he'd never leave. Can we talk?"

Jane was inspecting the well-stocked galley. "There are cameras present. But I expect you know that. I'm more interested in - can we eat?"

"Oh sure, Dodo's got everything."

"I'll say. Croissants from Le Meurice? And salmon crème? I knew the IMF was responsible for hell on earth, but I had no idea they owned a stake in heaven too."

"IM-what?"

"I-M, U-M, We-M Fucked, basically. Croissant?" Jane carried a plate and a bottle of water back to the seating area.

"No. Yes. And a mimosa. I seriously need a mimosa." Clutching a croissant in her teeth the way a dog holds a bone, Saki went hunting for OJ and champagne. Found a split and a juice box, which she unceremoniously emptied via a double stream of foam and Floridian gold into an oversized brandy snifter. She sat down opposite Jane, crossed her legs, and took a bite of croissant. "Go on," she said, mouth full.

"You first," Jane retorted.

"You could at least call a person."

"I was letting the dead past bury its dead?"

"I cried my eyes out. You may have seen some of my campaigns from that period - Member of the Funeral for YSL? Goth Chic for Galliano? The shutterbugs ate it up. Some of my best stuff." Saki snapped her fingers. "Speaking of dead. You're not drinking."

"I'm hydrating," Jane waggled her water bottle. "I'm practicing good in-flight hygiene. Besides," she admitted, almost against her will, "John drinks enough for both of us."

"Ah ha!" Saki pounced. "I knew it."

" _You're_ drinking enough for both of us," Jane pointed out tartly.

"So are you guys _finito_?" When Jane took a minute to answer, Saki was exuberant. "Great! End of conversation. You're coming home with me."

"No, I'm going to find John and have a few things out. Man to man."

"You never chased after me that way," Saki pouted.

"Ordinarily I wouldn't chase after John," Jane admitted.

"You should stick to the rules. You should forget his sorry _gaijin_ ass. Give me one good reason -" Saki stopped and leaned forward to stare at Jane. "Oh my god."

"Yeah, don't go there," Jane growled.

"But - is that even possible?"

Jane threw up her hands. "After 5 years of anorexia and 20 years without a single visit from Auntie Flo I didn't think so. And did I mention I'm flying on one ovary after that cockup in Djibouti?"

"Damn," Sake said. "That sucks. Aren't we too old or something?"

"Thank you. You are too kind. Yes, I'm overjoyed and I'm sure John will be too. If he can stop sucking face with other women long enough for me to tell him."

Saki's face expressed utter disgust. "Well, he sounds like a shit. Correction. A perfect shit. Like all men. So when he confirms his innate and irredeemable shitosity, you need to call me and we'll do what we always said. We'll blow this popcorn stand and run away together."

"There's a place for us," Jane sang. She dug through her handbag, trying to decide what was more ludicrous, the philandering Saki casting stones at John or the idea of Saki in loco parentis. Accent on 'loco.' . "Huh," she said at last, and ran her hand around the edges of her seat. Stood up to search the floor.

"Problem?" Saki asked.

"To call you, I would need your phone number. But I seem to have lost my phone."

"Dodo took it," Saki stated, matter-of-factly. "He steals stuff all the time."

"Do tell. Obvious remarks about the true criminal class aside, what the fuck?"

"He likes you. He does it for fun. I saw him do it. And -" Saki held up the errant phone. She had stolen it back.

"OK. Well. Fair enough. Because - just for fun?" Jane took the phone and typed a few words. Held them up for Saki to see. "I ROOFIED HIS DRINK."

10 Bizness

"So who's driving?" Vinnie whispered through clenched teeth, trying in vain to open the driver's side as he glowered over the hearse at the fair Angela.

"The dwarf, of course," Angela said, lifting one shoulder in playful disdain. The driver's side window unscrolled and Vinnie looked down to find the driver's seat taken by a smallish human being with waifish eyes and floppy bangs who would not have been able to see over the steering wheel were it not for the aid and support of a booster cushion. The dwarf waved cheerlessly and held up an iPad.

"Get in," the iPad said ominously. It sounded, John thought, like actor Samuel L. Jackson doing a disaster movie voiceover - though in that case it probably would have been 'Get the fuck in'. Angela slid gracefully in beside the dwarf, leaving John and Vinnie facing one another over the roof of the hearse. The engine was already running and the hearse started to glide soundlessly away, as only a meticulously maintained 1959 Cadillac Superior Crown Royale hearse can glide. John and Vinnie dove to grab the receding door handles. They managed to scramble into the jump seats in the rear of the rapidly accelerating hearse. The hearse cleared the back of the house via an unpaved back street. John and Vinnie almost knocked heads checking the rear windows. So far, no feds. Meanwhile, the dwarf touched some numbers on the iPad's onscreen keyboard and the iPad spoke again, jauntily. "Welcome aboard."

"I thought we were going to Chicago, Sugarplum," Vinnie said over his shoulder.

"What makes you think we aren't, Buttercup?" Angela said over hers.

"This, um, guy - is going to drive us from Oklahoma to Illinois?"

"And on to Detroit. By way of Chicago, Chicago," Angela sang. "You know - the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down?"

"Next stop, the Big Onion!" the iPad announced, in the direst of tones.

"Who IS this guy?" Vinnie faced forward in bewilderment and pointed at the dwarf.

"Leo Myshkin at your service," the iPad responded with grim exuberance. "Entrepreneur extraordinaire."

"The rental car died at the cemetery," Angela said. "And Leo offered to drive us wherever we needed to go."

"Have hearse, will travel," the voice of Samuel L. Jackson corroborated.

"Nobody in town would touch the memorial service. No offense, John-John," Angela said. "It's what we in the trade call a textbook case of false consciousness. The media called you a terrorist and poof! You were a terrorist. Between your status as enemy of the people and your folks' status as enemies of Big Oil, the Powers-That-Be have managed to ban the very idea of you in these parts. They didn't want to give you so much as a stone marker in the mission graveyard. And they wouldn't have if it weren't for your daddy's tribal connections. The media had a field day. 'Crystal City Bomber Ceremony Shunned by Locals.' Leo came all the way from - where did you say?"

"New Jersey," the iPad replied, with gusto.

"New Jersey. Your mom had to go all the way to New Jersey to find a hearse."

"Not that she needed a hearse," John pointed out. "Since there were no remains."

"She needed a hearse because she was told she couldn't have one. To drive to the funeral and back again. I think it was gutsy of her, given the times. And it was gutsy of Leo. Is gutsy," Angela corrected herself. "After all, how often do people get into your car waving guns? You're taking it awfully well," Angela told Leo, approvingly.

" _È_ _tutto business,"_ Leo demurred in his own voice, which had a slight Russian lilt. He shrugged modestly. "You need a hearse, I gotta hearse. Besides - I come from guns. Mafia funerals our specialty."

"Oh my god," Angela said. "You can talk."

"Oh yes," the dwarf said. "I am only mute professionally. The kids get a kick out of it," he flourished the iPad. "Prom season is bigger than Halloween."

"The more pressing question," John interrupted, facing frontward abruptly. "Is can he drive?"

Out the rear windows, flashing lights appeared in the distance, seeming almost to burst from the bloody crescent of the setting sun. They were far enough away that you couldn't hear the siren, but they were closing fast. The hearse had already shed the outskirts of town with its trailer parks and convenience stores. It was now passing through an industrial wasteland of pipeline terminals and tank farms, the only highway in four counties unrolling before it in a rough grey unbending strip to the eastern horizon. Like a prelude to infinity. Or the shortest route to perdition.

The dwarf stepped on the gas. The hearse took off like a rocket. 80 mph. 90 mph. 100.

"Woo!" Vinnie hooted, as the hearse pulled effortlessly away. "Yeah, baby!"

"Of course if they call for backup or we run a speed trap, we're hosed," John observed.

"You want to stop?" Leo asked, as the hearse reached 110.

"Do you think we can drive 900 miles in this car with an all-points-bulletin on our ass?" John asked, pulling his clip to check the ammo. "Just sayin'."

"OK," Leo said and took his foot off the accelerator.

"Uh, what is he doing?" Vinnie asked. "What - what are you doing?"

"What he said," Leo said, braking and putting the car into a j-turn. "Turning around."

"No, no. No turning around. Bad idea," Vinnie protested, from somewhere near the floor.

"There is no other road for forty miles. It would be hard to lose this car in the busiest city. Our options therefore are limited." Leo bumped off the highway and braked to a stop on a gravel patch in front of an abandoned doughnut shop standing sentinel outside the gates of an abandoned oil refinery. The Dippin' Donuts sign was smashed, as were the plate glass windows, but on top of the roof sat a ten foot tall plaster doughnut, like the biggest cop magnet in the world. Leo had positioned the hearse directly under a security light that was idiotically blazing away in the middle of nowhere. Making them starkly visible from either direction.

Leo considered their possibilities for them. "At this point, you can get out and run. Get out and attempt an ambush. Or get out and see if I can maybe scam their pants off."

John and Vinnie looked at each other, looked out the windows. The winter terrain offered little in the way of shelter or camouflage. Barb-wired fence and open fields in front, chainlink fence and rusting towers behind. The wail of the siren cut short their silent deliberations.

"I say, shall we get out or get out, old bean?" John asked Vinnie.

"Getting out would seem to be the done thing, under the circumstances," Vinnie surmised. At which point there was a mad scramble to evacuate the automotive premises. Crowding out of the far side of the hearse, John and Vinnie ducked down, gauging the distance to the nearest cover and their chances of reaching it unobserved. Then Vinnie noticed something significant. Angela had not moved a muscle.

Vinnie straightened to see where the cop car was, aghast and dismayed. Then bent to address his betrothed. Urgent. Almost savage. "Angela!" It sounded like a curse.

Angela just blew him a kiss. "Did I mention I found a killer dress? Feathers from here to eternity." Vinnie groaned and slammed the door shut. John was already bent over and sprinting for a stand of cedars just yards away. Vinnie joined him, swearing for real this time. "Goddamn motherfucking shitass cocksucking -"

"I think 'pussy' probably belongs in there somewhere," John said.

"Pussy," Vinnie said obligingly. "I have to tell you, buddy. I think I'm getting cold feet." About that time the Crown Vic screamed into view.

John made a dismissive sound. "Pfft. Happens to everybody."

"Never once, in all the time you and Jane have been together, did you tell me you felt like a turkey the day before Thanksgiving."

"Must have slipped my mind," John said. "Doesn't happen very often. Only everyday since we said 'I do.'"

There was only the one car. And in it just two of America's finest. Vinnie wrinkled his brow and held up two fingers. "What's up with that?"

"Either they're really good," John hazarded. "Or there are times when austerity is our friend."

The Crown Vic screeched to a halt athwart the hearse, blocking any exit. One agent leaped out and drew a bead on Leo's windshield with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle. The other spoke over the car's PA system.

"This is the FBI. Step out of the car with your hands in the air."

Leo opened the door and hopped down, obediently coming into the open with his hands on his head, looking anything but threatening in his size 7 Brooks Brothers suit. Angela followed orders in her own way, taking her own sweet time and enacting a sort of strip tease as she slowly, languorously separated herself from the hearse. When she raised her arms it was with the sinuous grace of a harem dancer. The agent with the PA mike could be heard clearing his throat.

" _Zdrahstvooytyeh!"_ Leo called, as though greeting newcomers to the international space station. ["Greetings!"]

"Is there anyone else in the car?" PA guy asked.

" _Nyet,"_ Leo said.

"What are we, chopped liver?" Angela asked, looking like something decidedly more delectable.

"So there's no reason my partner here shouldn't fill that casket carrier full of lead?" PA guy conjectured.

"I can think of at least three," Leo answered. "First off, it used to belong to Elvis and was featured in the cult classic 'Harold and Maude'."

"Bet they're Beatles fans," Vinnie said under his breath.

"Hoover had a thing for Liberace," John murmured.

"Second, it might cause this young lady to be late for her wedding in Chicago," Leo said.

"Beats being early for her own funeral," PA guy quipped.

"Speaking of other people's funerals brings us to reason number three. I should perhaps mention that the hearse is not in fact mine. I lease it from my uncle."

"Who gives a flying fuck about your goddamn uncle?" PA guy wondered.

"Oh dear, I was afraid of that." Leo clicked his tongue and leaned forward ostentatiously to draw attention to the front license tag. "You didn't do an ID check, now did you? On the other hand, my uncle knows who _you_ are by now." He pointed an elbow toward the hearse's windshield. "In Russia, dash cams are _de rigeur_. It is a sad fact of life."

PA guy was silent a minute. The agent with the rifle flicked his eyes toward his buddy, who was consulting an on-board computer.

"Are you shitting me?" PA guy groused.

"Would you like to see my tattoos?" Leo offered, pointing to the palm of one hand.

"OK, we're done here," PA guy snapped. "I'm serious," he said to his partner. "Pack it in." The agent with the rifle shouldered his weapon and folded himself back into the Crown Vic.

"By the way, those nice old people back there?" Leo called, straightening his tie. "They've been through enough, don't you think?" PA guy flipped him the bird and was gone in a spurt of gravel. _"Dosvedanya!"_ Leo smilingly gave them a thumb's up in return. The equivalent of a Russian raspberry.

"So about this wedding thing," Vinnie said, standing up behind the cedars with difficulty. The knees weren't as young as they used to be. "There's really no way out at this point. I'm probably going to have bite the bullet."

"Yeah, you're dead meat," John put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. "Once you've had the bachelor party, it's all over."

When they rejoined Angela and Leo, the dwarf was twirling his keys impatiently on one finger.

"Guess what?" Angela said.

"We'll never get to Chicago in time and we have to call it off?" Vinnie hazarded, giving it one last shot.

"Silly. We can have the wedding whenever we want to. Here and now, even. Leo - is an ordained minister." Angela turned to Vinnie as if presenting him with a mind-blowing gift. A Ferrari maybe. Vinnie, for his part, dimly understood that some expression of felicity was in order.

"Happy, happy, joy, joy," he pretended to enthuse.

"Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster," Leo was handing out cards. "I'm legal in all US states, territories, commonwealths, _and_ possessions. Ditto the high seas. And the Republic of Palau."

"A Russian mobster _and_ a Pastafarian," John scratched his head with the barrel of his SIG. "That's colorful. Nice keychain, by the way." It was a black USB drive on a silver ring. Leo held it out to show off the design. A grinning skull atop crossed swords. Pirates of the Caribbean and Jane again.

"Pirates are sacred in our faith," Leo said instructively, as he ushered Angela back to the front seat, extracting a bottle of Stolichnaya from the glove compartment in the process. "As is vodka."

"Can I get a 'Ramen'?" Vinnie's enthusiasm this time was authentic.

John on the other hand was feeling for his phone. Damn that Jolly Roger keychain. He slapped all his pockets. Realized he had left it in the coat he had taken off at his parents' house. The coat he had loaned his father in what was supposed to be a short-term switcheroo. Happy happy joy joy indeed, if the FBI got hold of that phone.

"This is no time to be soba," John agreed. "Better make mine a double."

11 Via Con Me

"Take the bike."

"You may not get it back."

"I'll build another one. I could use some grease under my nails. Take the bike."

Standing on the garishly lit tarmac in the wee hours, Jane flicked a skeptical glance at Saki's fashionably correct if masculine manicure. "Dude, it's going to be 20 degrees where I'm headed."

"Boy-toy picking you up? Is that it?"

"He is not even answering my calls,' Jane was forced to admit. Tit for tat, no doubt. After all, her phone had been on the fritz for almost two weeks. He would be thinking the worst. And if he wasn't in Detroit... "No," Jane tried to extricate herself with a canny mix of truth and nostalgia. "I was thinking I'd take a stroll down memory lane and see what turns up. For old times sake."

"Impoundment lot?" Saki guessed shrewdly.

"Long-term parking," Jane replied.

"Yeah, well, we know what's really going on, baby mama," Saki teased. "How times have changed. For instance, keyless entry is a bitch." She thrust her hands in her pockets and pretended not to be hurt.

"Keys?" Jane scoffed. "When it comes to car jacking, we don't need no stinkin' keys." No slim jims, no wire tools, no wedges. It was true. "Nowadays," she flourished the cell phone Saki had reclaimed for her, "there's an app for that."

And there was. Originally developed as a government-sponsored undercover surveillance tool, UnZip.car was a big-data, small-screen utility that had somehow found its way to the gray market. Sitting on the Airtrain and circling JFK airport, Jane was able to pull up a list of all remote-assist equipped vehicles within a mile radius, which she then narrowed down to ultimate luxury cars belonging to ultra-high net worth individuals living and working in Manhattan. In the end, it came down to a Pagani Huayra or a Porsche 911. A high-flying private equity shit with scores of over-leveraged bankruptcies smoldering in his wake - or the equally infamous SEC suck-up who refused to regulate him. Jane opted for the Porsche. Because it was the suck-up's job to know better. Because it was the suck-up's job to draw the line. And OK OK because, in the good old days, back when their marriage was young and money plentiful, John used to hanker for a 911. "Yeah, Mr. Porsche," Jane said to herself, clicking on 'Turbo Carrera S Cabriolet, Platinum Silver, Fully Loaded.' "Decline to investigate this."

The parking lot attendant slept soundly in his heated kiosk, head thrown back, dead to the world. Jane strolled by, guided by the Porsche's GPS coordinates and a walking map, courtesy of Google. When she drew near the Porsche, it flashed its lights, revved its engine, and opened the driver side door in welcome. There was even music all teed up on the sound system: "Damn It Feels Good to Be A Banksta." Damn it felt good to sink into the black leather seat, supple as the Italian gloves Jane was wearing, and swipe a car from one of the self-serving pricks who was stealing the rest of the world blind.

When Jane coasted silently up to the kiosk, she found the attendant still snoozing. A bullet headed guy in a puffer jacket and knit cap. She didn't blow the horn, she just rolled down the window and cranked up the volume a decibel or two.

Damn it feels good to be a banksta

Give us all your money or we'll crash ya.

He almost fell off his chair; it took him a minute to reorient. Then he slid back the little pay window and contemplated Jane with a jaundiced and bleary eye.

"Chu got chur ticket?"

"Will this work?" Jane held out the universal ticket, a crisp hundred dollar bill.

He was all business in a New York minute. Wide awake and giving the Porsche his undivided attention. "Yeah that car been here awhile. Fourteen days at least. Plus a lost ticket penalty. I'd say, at one c-note, chu 'bout half way home, pretty mama."

As Jane added another Benjamin, the music changed. Shuffled to the soundtrack from "Wall Street." David Byrne singing 'This Must Be the Place."

"We cool?" Jane asked.

"Chu got the car, I got the money," he put half the money in the cash drawer, bobbing his head in time to the music. "We anyway chu wanna be, mija." The barrier arm with its diagonal stripes lifted obligingly out of her path.

Her path. Which basically led around her elbow to get to her ear. Preparing to ease into predawn traffic, Jane reviewed the gymnastic feat that travel had become. Airports, with their hyped up security, were best used sparingly, so it was a no-brainer that she shouldn't fly to Detroit. Rental cars were similarly monitored and traceable in a situation where it was desirable to leave gaps in one's itinerary. Identity checks were relatively lax on buses and trains, it was true. But you ran the risk of sitting next to a reality-TV aficionado, a connoisseur of America's Most Wanted for instance. Moreover, detours and layovers were inevitable. Incredibly, trains no longer ran directly from New York to the Motor City. It wasn't just Greece that was retrogressing. Ayn Rand's dystopia was alive and kicking in these United States. And _not_ due to society's socialist abuse of bankers and industrialists, as Jane was uniquely positioned to know. On the contrary. Von Hayek's fantasy of serfdom was coming to life courtesy of capitalism and the monied class. After all, financial giants and multinational bigwigs who fly the private skies have no use for public infrastructure, she reflected, as she hit the New Jersey turnpike and swerved to avoid a pothole. There were an increasing number of instances where no, you couldn't get 'there' from 'here'. Not any more. Not quickly or easily at any rate. Devolution had set in.

And now for 10 hours of uninterrupted interstate bliss, Jane thought. With absolutely no enthusiasm. At least she had slept on the plane, so the sheer monotony did not lull her into the first ditch. Aside from the odd toll-booth pause and gas station fill-up, she drove the I-80 wasteland non-stop through Pennsylvania, passing the time by listening to John's messages on speaker phone. Which basically told the history of her own despair, in 3-minute increments. Love, loss, his flight to Mexico. Drunken poetry.

"But thanks for letting me save the old homeplace. I know you don't like my mom-"

" _You_ don't like your mom," Jane retorted aloud.

"It does leave a hole in our finances, but I'll make it up to you. Hey, as long as I'm over here, I could check out the Detroit gig. Those guys are like the Fed. A few clicks on the keyboard and we're billionaires. Call me back. Please."

"Not like I haven't been trying," Jane said.

"We're headed for Chicago and Vinnie's big day as soon as we drop off the deutschmarks. You could call and wish the poor guy luck, you know."

"Like he cares," Jane countered. "I mean, we're talking about the guy who _used_ to say 'If I ever talk about getting married, I want you to shoot me. I mean it. Put a gun to my head and put me out of my misery.' That's what he _used_ to say. Oh hey - you know what?"

Thinking of Vinnie, marriage, and misery reminded her. She needed a gun. At the moment, after successfully running the gauntlet of international airport scrutiny and evading arrest in several countries, she was distressingly _desarmado_. Nakedly weaponless. In any country known to have more guns than people, this was patently unwise, not to mention downright unprofessional. What was true in Somalia was doubly true in America, where fifty years of bottomless outlays for national defense had somehow made no one safe.

Judging from place names like Cleveland and Cincinnati, and roadside attractions like the Kent State Memorial and the childhood home of Superman, Jane deduced that she was somewhere in Ohio. She had turned north a short while ago and was bending around Lake Erie. Seeing a billboard that shrieked CASH, CASH, CASH FOR ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING-BUY*LOAN*SELL-WE ABOLUTELY WANT YOUR BUSINESS, she absolutely got off at Toledo.

Wooden Indian Gun and Pawn was conveniently located just minutes from the exit ramp. It was tucked away in an otherwise deserted strip mall as advertised, but of the wooden Indian there was no trace. No-nonsense bars protected the entire storefront, breached only by a wrought iron gate that swung back so you could get to the front door. Hub caps glittered in the windows and the first thing Jane noticed when she entered was the sheer mass of every kind of stuff - and the smell of cat. 'Please Don't Feed the Tiger' the sign said. In its zoo-mesh cage, the beast laid its ears back and snarled, then rolled over on its back and batted the air with monstrous velvet paws.

"Nice kitty," Jane murmured. As her eyes adjusted, she could see a middle American of middle age and considerably above average girth leaning on the back counter. He was wearing a Captain America t-shirt. A western-style holster complete with ivory-handled revolver rode his right hip.

"What can I do you?" he asked, colloquially dropping the word 'for.' Jane looked first over his head at the rack of semi-automatic rifles; then dropped her gaze to the glass case under his elbows. In it, against red velvet, the handguns gleamed like jewels. "Maybe the gent needs a little nudge to let him know it's time to put a ring on it? Then again," he allowed, "sometimes it's easier to move on if we're not carrying so much baggage. Turning tears into cash is our specialty."

He was a shrewd one all right. Or was it that all women came to pawn shops with broken hearts. Jane decided it was safest to play along. The damsel in distress routine.

"I do have a problem," she confided. "There's this man -"

He nodded sympathetically. "I can't remember when there wasn't."

"I don't know who he is, but he won't let me alone." Switching to anonymous stalker routine.

"He may be crazy, but I can't fault his taste," Captain America said, tossing a gentle compliment into the mix.

"The police say they can't do anything." Building the drama.

"Budget cuts. What are you gonna do," Pawn Shop guy commiserated. He straightened and hitched up his Levis. "Things ain't what they used to be. If they ever were."

"So _I_ thought," Jane said with a straight face, "maybe a gun. You know."

"It just so happens that I do," he said, and got down to business. "You're a legal resident, I take it."

"I tend to think of myself as a citizen of the world," Jane said loftily.

"And do you have a concealed carry license issued by this state or any one of the 23 states with which we have a reciprocal agreement?"

"Is it a problem if I say no?" Jane gave him the doe-eyed treatment. Her global carry permit presumably had either died with her or been revoked when she and John were forced to go AWOL.

"Not if it lives in your lingerie drawer. Which is where this little cutie would feel right at home." He pointed to the far side of the case. "Smith and Wesson Pink Lady .38 special. 12 ounces of aircraft-grade aluminum, fixed sights, 5 shots for just $449.95."

"Oooh. That is just too, too adorable," Jane cooed. "But someone suggested I ask about - what was it? A Sig 1911 Tacops Carry." She was standing right over one. Captain America tilted his head and pursed his lips in silent approbation as he removed the gun from the case and held it out for inspection.

"Did someone also recommend a rosewood handle?" the pawnbroker asked, as suspicion began to dawn.

"Ergo grip," Jane said, weighing the Sig and checking the action. "How many mags?"

"Comes with four. Ammo?"

"Two 50s. Remington if you have them. What's the damage?"

He plunked two boxes of bullets on the counter. "$1299.95 with background check. An even $2K without."

"That second thing. I have cash," Jane said, peeling the bills from a short stack. "And aren't you worried I'm a cop?"

"We _prefer_ gold or cocaine," Captain America declared, licking a thumb as he counted the greenbacks. "And the cops around here are all on the take. I go out of my way to have a healthy working relationship with all the local authorities. Cops, Feds, Chamber of Commerce. The only thing I got to worry about," he punched a key on the old fashioned cash register, which opened with a loud ka-ching, "is UN-organized crime. You want a receipt?"

Some American wit once said 'Thanks to the Interstate Highway System it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.' Jane reflected on the truth of that statement as she bid Captain America adieu and eyed the traffic filing docilely past the pawn shop toward the on-ramp. Detroit was just an hour north. On the interstate again, she found the road darkened by recent snowmelt and the going rough, even though it was nowhere near rush hour. Trucks and semis way outnumbered passenger cars, barreling along at top speed. Over 250,000 people had fled the Motor City in the last 10 years as manufacturers killed factory jobs or sent them elsewhere; but trade still flowed hard and fast from Mexico to Canada and back again. All along this final leg of the trip, electrical transmission towers stood guard in an ominous unbroken line. It was almost a relief to duck through a series of tunnels and emerge in the city. After more than 600 miles of nothing but asphalt, signs, barriers, berms, bumpers, and more asphalt, the mind and eye craved freedom from the totalitarian uniformity of the freeway. However relief turned quickly to jaw-dropping dismay. "What the fuck?"

Even after two years in an EU under economic siege, Jane was not prepared for Detroit. A ghost, no, a rotting cadaver of a city. Post-Katrina New Orleans without the high water marks. A former Paris of the Midwest where blight now swallowed art deco skyscrapers and gilded age mansions alike. Block after block of busted out windows. Razor wire bristling around the carcasses of landmark buildings - hotels, office towers, a train depot as imposing as Grand Central Station. All derelict, all deserted. As Jane drove, she had the place to herself, wide thoroughfares practically devoid of pedestrians or traffic. The very street art pleaded for mercy: HUMAN$! PLEA$E!

A Mogadishu or Karachi in the making.

Funny. Her bailiwick had been the so-called Third World, her specialty the extra-judicial takedown of individuals unofficially judged to be behaving badly in less developed, resource-rich locales. How odd to find the landscape of a banana republic and the hallmarks of a failing state suddenly transposed to her own backyard. Then again, how would she have seen these things from her old haunts - 10,000 feet up in business class or the hushed corridors of power, where life played like a prime time TV commercial or a slick magazine ad. She had no idea how long entropy had been gnawing at the roots and fabric of these United States. But the destructive forces at work in Greece were recognizable in the metropolitan holocaust that was Detroit.

Her original intention was to flop at the safe house until the rendezvous coordinates were transmitted sometime after midnight. She had an address and a combination for a lock box. But she also had time to kill and as she drove, it occurred to her that there was one other stop that she could make. A visit she could pay. To a certain chop shop in the industrial southwest hinterland known as Delray.

If downtown Detroit was a disaster area, Delray was a post-apocalyptic war zone. A No Man's Land minus the poisonous gas and trenches. Here and there a single dwelling or a cluster of commercial buildings still stood stubbornly intact next to an entire street of smoking or semi-bulldozed ruins. Strippers and scrappers had made the rounds, scavenging the carrion created by financial predators, ripping out pipes, gutters, appliances, windows, even aluminum siding. For rock-bottom resale and shipping off to Shanghai. Heavy industry still hogged the waterfront, polluting both river and air, but everything was highly mechanized now, so the work was gone and the working class enclaves collapsing apace. Like any vanished race they left much behind. Front yards and porches full of discarded furniture, black trash bags bursting with superfluous belongings at the curbside, battalions of stray dogs scrounging in overturned garbage cans, bald tires piled just anywhere for no obvious reason, the denuded skeletons of cars grinning at you from every direction, and a bewildering number of bass boats, rusting high and dry in vacant lots.

Sherwood Body Shop stuck out of its necrotic surroundings like a healthy thumb. A tidy green garage with six bays and some gas pumps, its surrounding streets and blacktop were overflowing with cars, buses, and SUVs in various stages of automotive therapy and repair. Further up the block, vacant lots had been commandeered for a community garden verdant with winter greens and heralded by a sign that read "One House, One Block, One Neighborhood at a Time." Young people in neat green jumpsuits toiled in, on, or under vehicles, welding, sanding, spray-painting. On a gravel patch to one side of the garage, another gaggle of youngsters gathered around a picnic table and a smoker grill to learn the finer points of barbecuing a whole suckling pig. Their instructor was the object of Jane's quest. The last time she had seen him, he was also thusly engaged - teaching a breathless circle of intensely focused recruits. Only back then the recruits were Special Forces types and the subject was not suckling pig. It was cobra blood.

Before Jane could so much as roll down a window, the Colonel had spotted her. Tall, clean-shaven, with a little more gray in his close-cropped hair, he turned the training and the BBQ tools over to an obviously unready participant and strode briskly toward the car, his face grim. Porsches being a portent of nothing good in a part of the world where late model cars, once the coin of the realm, were now a rarity. A pace or two off, he stopped and did a double-take.

"Well, I'll be a honky's monocle. Will you look at what the Aristocats drug in." Grim turned to grin as he leaned on the doorframe of the car a minute, drinking her in.

"Lady and the Tramp?" Jane quipped. He shook his head and opened the car door with a flourish.

"Lady and the Tiger, maybe." He stood back and looked her over like she was some kind of prodigal son. "I ain't gonna stand here and lie. After they missed you in New York, I was sure they got you in DC."

"Maybe they did. Or maybe there's something to that whole nine lives thing." She stepped out of the 911 and they shook hands warmly, awkwardly. To cover the embarrassment of an emotion that had nowhere else to go, Jane transferred her gaze to her surroundings and took refuge in idle chatter. "But speaking of magic kingdoms - not too shabby, sir."

"Said the chicquita lolita with the hot damn wheels. That what they driving in hell this year?"

She smiled tightly and decided, yeah, just go for it. Just do it. Otherwise it was just a dumb fucking move with no rhyme and no reason. If she wanted a second opinion, she wasn't going to find a more expert witness. "I've been having a hard time telling where hell stops and America begins."

"You and me, Marine. 'Course - you dead. I just got handed the Big Chicken Dinner," he said.

"Way I heard it," Jane said, "that contractor had it coming."

"Contractor. Huh." He looked her straight in the eye and seemed to make the same decision that she had. "That 'contractor' was a direct report. Straight to the top. Talking hearts and minds in the provinces by day and running death squads and torture camps by night. OK, you and me, we know that shit goes down. But the fresh meat they send over," he shut his mouth a minute. Then told the rest of the story. "One kid refused to play when they handed her a mess of electrodes. She recognized what they were handing her was an illegal order, and she turned that 'contractor' in. Blew the whistle. She was one of mine. One of my last. The facts were supposed to die with her."

"Lot of that going around," Jane murmured.

"I am pleased to say," the Colonel said, "that we may be overrun with buddy-fuckers, but they are almost exclusively concentrated among the top brass. Above my pay grade. Which got reduced a step for every rib I broke, by the way. But I'm telling you, right?"

"Looks like you're making the best of it, sir." They were silent a minute, looking at the kids at work.

"We still the few and the proud. They let me keep a part of my pension, as hush money I'm guessing, and these young brothers and sisters need something to do. We got us a little co-op thing going."

"You fix cars then?"

"Fix cars, paint cars, break 'em down for parts, crush 'em."

"Buy, sell, trade?"

"Have done. Pretty much anything that keeps money moving here in the 'hood. Mow grass on vacant lots. Run a little BBQ takeout joint on the side." He pointed to the smoker, where the kids were taking turns poking the pig to test for doneness. "Just trying to keep things lively, don't you know."

"I'll be honest, sir. I came on purpose to see you."

"Do tell. All the way from that undiscovered country. I'm honored."

"I wanted to hear the truth and I thought I might hear it from you."

"What truth is that exactly."

"That it isn't just a few bad apples, sir. That this country is at war with us."

"Us," he repeated.

"With its own people. And just about everybody else."

For answer, he reached into a hip pocket and pulled out a worn, creased square of paper and offered it to Jane. "Read it." She began to read it silently. "Aloud," he amended. She started over.

"I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

"I helped make Mexico, especially  Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the  National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." - Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, 1935

"1935," he repeated. "Same as it ever was, or pretty much. Ain't nothing new under the sun, Marine. Though they do seem to be setting new records in some old categories. Seven Middle East countries in five years, for instance. They're a little behind schedule, but Libya makes four. _And_ it's the gateway to Africa. So we got us a world war all right. But this country ain't going it alone, by any means. We got lots of help out there. The world over. If there's a difference between then and now, it's probably this - this time around there ain't nobody trying to fix it. Nobody who counts. In fact, it looks to me like they doubling down." He gazed at her with grim significance.

Jane folded the paper slowly and handed it back.

"You're saying - there's nothing to be done?"

"Said no marine, ever," he remonstrated with arch disapproval. "But that is another question entirely. With many answers." He nodded toward the garage. "This is mine. At the moment. Anything else I can help you with today?"

She looked thoughtful. "Could use a ride downtown."

"Something wrong with the hoss you rode in on?"

She made a face. "Not my style. And there seems to be a slight problem with the serial number. Nothing a good sharp file couldn't fix."

"I got you. Lima Charlie. If you're just looking for a loaner, how 'bout you borrow that jeep yonder." He pointed. "Keys already in it. You can park it any old where. It'll find it's way back. It always does." They stood looking at one another, not quite knowing how to break things off. Hugging and slapping each other's butts just didn't feel right somehow.

They were saved by a twenty-something with a dripping oil filter. "What you got there, cadet? Other than a pure T mess," the Colonel bent to examine the object, as Jane gave half a salute and started for the jeep. From the entrance of the body shop, the Colonel called after her.

"You know, as devil pups go, you were one of the best."

She flashed him a grin. "For a split tail, you mean."

"One of the best," he repeated.

It was an open jeep with a crust of snow still frozen to the seat and slush on the floorboards. Jane brushed at the snow, but she knew damn well when she sat down the damp would seep straight through the seat of her pants. She also knew there was something she could not put off any longer.

A one-sided war was no better than a massacre. She had already chosen sides. There was no sitting this thing out. Like it or not, she was going to have to take a stand and enlist for the duration in what was shaping up to be history's most hopeless cause. John or no John. And it was looking more like 'no-John' all the time. She checked her phone yet again. _Nada_.

"I'm legally dead, I'm unintentionally pregnant, I may have permanently misplaced my husband, and it looks like I'm going to have to help a bunch of pacifists save the world from a bunch of psychopaths and megalomaniacs. What could possibly go wrong?" she muttered, as she hit the gas a little too hard and sped off in search of the safe house.

12 People Like Us

In the kitchen of the safe house, a partially refurbished mansion in the formerly posh Brush Park neighborhood of Detroit, John and Angela sat facing one another across a massive wooden table.

Between them on the tabletop were arranged the following: a cell phone; a magnum of champagne (unopened); a dainty pair of bridal pumps delicately embellished with feathers; and the saddest of white wedding bouquets, composed of wilting gardenias, ranunculus, narcissus and a few feather tendrils tied with a satin ribbon.

A third chair was taken by a wedding dress. The dress. The killer dress. A magnificent creation - mermaid style, with a satin bodice from which tiers of white feathers cascaded to the floor in front, while additional tiers, fluttering from a semi-cathedral length train, dusted the floor behind. The feathers trembled with every puff of warm air emitted by new cast iron registers in the newly refinished heart pine floor. As conversation pieces go, that dress was the white elephant in the room.

"Well, here we are," John said at last.

"Here we are," Angela repeated airily. Now that her crying jag was over, she had recovered both her brittle, bright shell and her accustomed _savoir faire_. What he would do with her after the summit was not even on his radar screen. He would jump off that bridge when he came to it.

"How the hell did this happen?" It was a purely rhetorical question, but her answer was at once ironic and deadly serious.

"Aside from the fact that I got stood up? Which begs the linguistic question of what it means to be stood up by someone who got cold feet. Or do I mean feet of clay?" She waved a hand. "Something made it - inevitable."

"Fate?" John hazarded automatically. He had used Angela's phone to check in with the Anons, but had decided not to call Jane again until after the meeting. If then. He was just shooting the shit to be charitable. And pass the Jane-less time.

"God, no," she demurred, with wrinkled brow. "And no, not god. I'm a scientist for heaven's sake."

"His mom is gone," John ruminated. "So that leaves society."

"You're getting warmer. Pay some attention to the man behind the curtain."

"I'm sorry. What? You're saying Vinnie scratched the wedding because of the price of tea in Fukushima? Or do I mean the price of sewage treatment in Jefferson, Alabama?"

"Vinnie said you were married again."

"Oh sure, one non sequitur deserves another."

"Where's your wife?"

"What's your point?"

"It's not a point, it's a thesis: 1) that we are being run by a confederacy of cannibals to whom other people are either food or nothing, and 2) that in a world based on a cannibal's assumptions and preferences positive outcomes are rare. What I am postulating is an extreme application of Gresham's Law. What happens to human civilization when bad drives out good on a grand scale."

"We _are_ in a festive mood."

"I haven't done the math, but we've clearly entered a diminishing, self-reinforcing feedback loop - otherwise known as a death spiral - so 'rare' may be optimistic. I'm not ruling out 'impossible' as the ultimate endpoint."

"No happy ever after for _me_ ," John concluded wryly.

"Or me. Or anyone. Well, we could change our definitions, I suppose. For a time anyway. Revise our expectations downward, as Lloyd Blankfiend of Goldman-Suxx likes to say. In that case being mateless, jobless, and homeless simply becomes the new normal. And if we want your opinion, we'll give it to you."

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of a bare subsistence. Ah, serfdom," John rhapsodized.

"American dream on. Serfs had a certain value. You and I are rapidly becoming excess baggage. We represent a demand on resources that the system has allocated or intends to allocate to other purposes - by which I mean the purposes of a few privileged others. The system as currently constructed was not designed to include us. We are disposable. In your line of work, you possibly understand this better than I."

"I no longer have a line of work," John demurred.

"Ah-ah," she raised a professorial finger. "You no longer have _an employer_. In the Mad Max world that is fast approaching, yours will be the only line of work remaining. At this rate, though it may come as an unpleasant surprise to all the poor little rich boys, the last man standing will not be a lord of finance. It will be a man with a gun."

"And here I was remembering you as such a fun date."

"You can forgive a girl being a little down in the dumps after she gets dumped by the person who was supposed to make her life complete. Left standing at the altar - how quaint yet infinitely devastating is that? But in an odd way, it's all connected - you, me, Vinnie. And the Vampire Squid Apocalypse. I have seen the future. It tried to kill me."

"Oh, now we're in Terminator territory."

"Movies are a way we address issues we are not otherwise addressing," Angela's agile mind made yet another leap that John had difficulty following. "Vinnie told you how we met." It was more of a statement than a question.

"Several times. I think. No, he did, he did. Gimme a break. I didn't know it was you he was talking about. We were having a pre-marital-end-of-the-world pub crawl and I was brooding over a post-marital Jane."

"I was in Mexico doing research on narco-terrorism."

John blinked. "Pro or con?"

"DoD. They wanted to know how people are being affected by the extreme violence on the border. And don't look at me like that. I left the Company before you did. I'm at a little college in the Midwest now. Or I was. The point is - every other source of grant dollars has evaporated. Government is being drowned in a bathtub and, outside of the military-industrial complex, an entire generation of scientists is going down the drain. Austerity? Hello!"

"Let me guess," John closed his eyes and pressed a forefinger to either temple, as though pretending to read her mind. "The Zetas and DEA arrange atrocities and you follow-up with victims to measure how they're coping." His eyes popped open, his expression as caustic as his tone. "And you were shocked, shocked to discover that it's not really about helping people survive terrible crimes inflicted by a bunch of low-life sociopaths at all. It's about studying how well extreme violence works as a tool of state-sponsored oppression and control."

"Are you saying this is old hat? Because I _was_ shocked, shocked," Angela maintained, hotly.

"I'm saying I've been catching up on my reading. History, politics, economics. Seems we - meaning whoever runs this shit in our name - have been making the world safe for ruling elites since at least 1945."

"Well, that's cutting to the chase. But you are correct. That is the punch line. I was supposed to monitor a certain population over time to document their response to domestic terrorism. I wasn't supposed to figure out the true nature of the horror story - that this shit doesn't just happen. That it is planned and purposeful and orchestrated at the highest levels. But they slipped up. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I saw a familiar face." She named a name. John whistled silently.

"You were where?"

"Just nowhere. This little hole-in-the-wall taqueria in Ciudad Juarez. Plastic chairs, formica tables. A tiny bar next to the door. I was there to meet with a group of ordinary citizens to talk about their lives, before and after terrorism. Standard Fifth Avenue focus group stuff. About half way through, I went to the ladies room and -" she paused and reached out to fiddle with her wedding bouquet.

"All hell broke loose."

She blanched and made a gesture. "Shots. Screams. I was trying to hide behind the sink with bullets whizzing by; the walls were that thin. I was sure they'd walk back any minute and open the door and that would be the end. But then it got quiet. And I waited. And waited. I heard sirens and I thought, oh they're long gone, they won't wait around for the cops. So I'm thinking maybe I can sneak out the back way, through the kitchen. So I open the door, just a crack - and there he is. Standing over a heap of bloody corpses, not talking, just surveying the carnage, cool as a cucumber. Or should I say as impassive as a popsicle?"

Reminded that neither of them had even thought about eating for almost 24 hours, John got up and went to the Sub-Zero refrigerator, which was starkly empty. "Make mine a Klondike bar. Man, I thought they said this place was stocked."

"He looked right at me. And turned and walked out. The next thing I know, two federales and an army guy grab me and there's a gun to my head. I'm done for. I'm a goner. But then an argument breaks out."

John had found a vacuum-sealed bag of Starbucks next to a Krups coffeemaker. He snorted. "Oh, you'd be worth so much more in a brothel. In tsunami-kissed Japan, say, or sunny Qatar."

"That's what I said. Tried to say. When I could get my mouth working again. They were talking Tenancingo."

"The town that sex built," John said, measuring water. Eight cups. It was going to be a long night. "I know it well. Had a couple of jobs there," he hastened to add.

"Under the circumstances I told them it sounded good to me. It was about that time that this drunk American comes reeling out of the men's room. Big dude. Taller than you. And potentially very cute."

"One does tend to observe these things. It was our man Vinnie I take it." He found some coffee filters in one of the cupboards.

"One does. And it was. Though he's not my anything any more," she said morosely. "Anyway, I've got a policeman on one side and an army guy on the other, and there's the second policeman holding a gun and Vinnie kind of stumbles over to him and says 'Knock- knock.' And I'm squeezing my eyes closed because I'm sure Vinnie is about to become just another gory statistic. And Vinnie is asking for it. He's leaning all over the gun guy and insisting he finish the joke. 'No, no, you're supposed to say 'Who's there?' And the gun guy does it. Maybe because he's some kind of sadist or something, he says in this sing-song voice ' _Quien esta alli?_ " And Vinnie says, 'Jose,' And I hear that sound, like in the movies, I hear the sound of the trigger being pulled back as the gun guy says, like he's playing along, _'Jose quien?_ ' And Vinnie starts singing the Star Spangled Banner, he goes 'Jose can you see' but I am not looking, I'm waiting for the gun to go off and the gun does go off, but it's Vinnie who somehow has the gun, and he shoots the other two killers, and I did not faint and what can I say? It was love at first sight. He told me afterward he'd been watching me all evening. From the bar." She sighed. She couldn't help it. "So romantic."

"Dead people aside." He didn't want to tell her Vinnie had been there on assignment. To hit the guys who made the hit. Things were complicated enough. The coffeemaker was burbling and steaming.

"Not at all. They follow me about. It's in the Bible isn't it? Your dead you have always with you?"

"Something like that. Cream?"

"Just a packet of cyanide, thanks. I should think _you_ must be one of the most haunted people I know."

"Didn't use to be. I used to trust and believe that whatever I was asked to do was for the greater good."

"And yet even back before you knew the score, back when you were being a good soldier, it ended badly. Ka-boom, right? Game over. True for you, true for me, true for the EU, true for anyone anywhere the system is in place. Only the bastards make it out in one piece. With all the marbles, mind you."

"The New World Order ate your baby?" John grinned. Painfully.

"Beats crying over spilled weddings."

He set a mug of coffee down in front of her. "But the truth -"

"Will set you free?" Her tone was acid.

"Can only take you so far." John leaned against the table and ruminated. "Don't get me wrong. We're on the same page, pretty much. For the past two years, I've been here and there, in Europe mostly, watching people going about their daily lives, and everywhere I've been, it's the same thing, over and over. People everywhere being ground down by one thing after another. Pretty much everybody losing - one way or another. At the same time you read and you hear - the list of billionaires is growing. These two extremes, the up and the down, with so little push back. And it just gets worse. I mean you can see it all accelerating. In Greece it is absolutely brutal. But then I think even if people had a clue, even if they all knew - what good would it do? It's the rich against the rest and they've got the security and surveillance infrastructure to make it stick. As we well know."

"But I notice you're not wasting away in Margaritaville."

He lifted his coffee mug in a wry toast. "Not today."

"What about Iceland? Tunisia? Egypt?"

"Valiant efforts. But skirmishes at the periphery. Here at home, in the belly of the beast? We've got nothing."

"According to the literature, humans respond to an existential threat in one of three ways," Angela said. She took a long reflective pull of coffee. "You can try to beat it, you can join it, or you can run the hell away from it. We few, we unhappy few, people like us, have a special quandary. We have glimpsed the Leviathan. We have seen the dark shape of the deep state moving beneath the waters. We have experienced its predatory nature and cannot deny the threat. For us, there's no going back. We wouldn't if we could. We cannot rejoin the borg; due to nature or nurture, we are constitutionally unable. We are outcasts and conscientious objectors. We have only two choices."

John knew the answer. "Fight or flight."

"And here we sit. What will we do? You're going to a certain meeting tonight. I, for my part, have decided to begin as a nun begins. I shall burn up my vanity, specifically by torching this ridiculous dress. I look at it now and I ask myself - 'What were you thinking?' I don't suppose you have a match on you?"

Click-click. The sound from the kitchen doorway made them turn. There stood Jane, her trusty windproof zippo at the ready. In classic Jane fashion she had just three words to say.

"Burn, baby, burn.".

13 Trust

The two women sized one another up - the sultry redhead, the smoldering brunette. Angela spoke first.

"The current Mrs. Livingston, I presume."

Jane snapped the zippo shut. "The word 'current' has an ominous ring."

"Sweetheart!" John stood up, trying to read Jane's expression. He didn't know whether to be overjoyed or terrified. "This is Vinnie's -"

"Ex," Angela finished archly. "Also John's ex. How do you do?"

"I could trash a dress or two," Jane admitted.

"I would offer to let you be my guest, but alas, my need for catharsis is acute."

"I can relate." Jane eyed the dress appraisingly. "That sucker should go up like a flare."

"Like an effigy at Burning Man," Angela predicted.

"Burning Man," Jane appeared to savor the concept. "Now there's a little idea." She tossed the zippo to Angela, but John reached out a hand. Neatly intercepted it.

"Ladies, the estrogen in the room is getting a mite thick."

"You want testosterone?" Jane obligingly brandished her gun. "I can do testosterone."

"Objectivity. Love. Trust." John let the words out slowly and soothingly.

"Said the man last seen kissing another woman," Jane reminded him. "And next found schmoozing with his first wife."

"I take it back. You light the front, I'll light the back," Angela offered, an instant sense of sisterhood and sympathy kindled by Jane's words. "It's the least I can do."

"Not helping, Doctor," John admonished. "Whatever happened to 'First do no harm'?"

"I am channeling our aggression toward an inanimate object, thank you," Angela said defensively "Not toward men in general, or you and Vinnie in particular."

"I'm sorry, but my level of aggression has reached critical mass. Supply exceeds demand. It doesn't want to be channeled," Jane observed.

"Substance abuse, uncontrollable anger, difficulty maintaining a close relationship. Textbook PTSD," Angela said to John. "Both of you. No surprise there. Passive aggressives make the best killers."

"I am not crazy," Jane fulminated, "I'm pissed. I am sick and tired of the bullshit people pull. I'm mad as hell and I don't think anyone should take it any more. From top to bottom, everything is rigged and ruined and rotten to the core. Even John.

"Even Vinnie," Angela agreed.

"That lowlife bastard," Jane raged.

"This lowlife bastard?"

A second apparition filled the kitchen doorway. It sounded like Vinnie, looked like Vinnie in most of the standard particulars - height, weight, body type - but upon closer inspection it more nearly resembled a refugee from 'Night of the Living Dead'. A blood-soaked bandage wrapped its head, one eye was blackened and swollen shut, it wore one shoe, and it spoke with extreme difficulty. Under a black formal dinner jacket, the shirt it wore was a ripped and bloody rag.

Fortunately for Jane, the zombie Vinnie crumpled toward the floor, and she was spared the embarrassment of a reply. John and Angela rushed to the monster's side. Leo walked briskly past with two brown paper grocery bags.

"Like US-Russian relations, it looks worse than it is," he assured them. "Back in Mother Russia, they made me a medic when they drafted me. But they couldn't make me good at it."

"Good grief," Angela exclaimed, examining Vinnie's shiner. "Did you do this for me? Leo, I'm touched. But you really shouldn't have."

Vinnie opened his good eye and rolled his head, trying to set the record straight. "Caviar," he croaked.

"Rosebud?" Jane suggested. She hoisted herself backward onto the table and picked up the champagne bottle. La Grande Dame by Veuve Clicquot. Not too shabby.

"It is my fault, all mine," Leo began. "I must explain. We were early to the wedding and I noticed. There was no caviar. Champagne, many silly American finger foods - but no caviar. In Russia is a law almost - you cannot have wedding without caviar."

"We did," John volunteered.

"Bad luck," Vinnie implored, struggling to sit up. John and Angela helped him to a chair as Leo unpacked the grocery bags. Orange juice, sour cream, a bag of buckwheat.

"So in Chicago I know a Russian tea room, not far, and we think we have plenty of time. So we go."

"Ooh, bad move. That warehouse was on the East Side," John winced. "Nice exposed brick and metro views from the inside. Bloods and Outlaws on the outside."

"And me in my pretty black bowtie," Vinnie said. Angela was unwinding his bandage with no-nonsense precision.

"We run into old friends," Leo continued.

"Zetas?" Angel stopped short, staring at the gash in Vinnie's scalp.

"Alphas, Betas," Vinnie closed his one good eye. "At least one Chechen."

"Me and my tattoos they left; but Vinnie they carried away."

"Biker dudes. French Canadian," Vinnie said. "Remember Quebec?"

"It keeps remembering me," John replied. Jane began to hum a tune from 'Gigi.'

That brilliant sky,

We had some rain,

Those Russian songs,

From sunny Spain.

_Ah yes, I remember it well_.

"A bad decision on their part. My uncle is a very sensitive man. To him, it was a form of disrespect. Particularly when he found the Chechen was moonlighting. It took a little while to track them down -" Leo explained apologetically.

"Lucky for me they wanted to make sure I got a slow painful death." Angela dropped a furtive kiss on the head she had begun to re-bandage.

"\- but minus a competitor or two, here we are. With caviar," Leo finished, lifting the golden tins for all to see.

"So the show can go on," Vinnie asserted. "Right here, right now."

"The show can go upstairs to bed," Angela corrected sternly. "Right here, right now."

"I like where your head's at," Vinnie told Angela, as she and John stood him up and set him in motion.

"Hold that thought." Angela slipped under his arm so he could use her as a crutch. Seeing that they were stable and could manage, John stepped back.

"Later," Leo promised, "We will have wedding breakfast fit for Czar. Scrambled eggs and mimosas. Blini and beluga."

"Sex before marriage," Vinnie said, as they moved toward the door. "Is that still legal?"

"As long as no underage sheep are involved," Angela assured him, with a straight face.

And then there were three. John, Jane, and Leo. The silence was deafening. The tension was overwhelming. Like a bystander in a spaghetti western, Leo looked from one to the other and back again. John opened his mouth -

And three cell phones rang.

14 Hidden Systems

Due to budget cuts, the streetlights were out in this part of the inner city, so it was lucky a waxing moon came out to play. No one lived here, and so many of the buildings were abandoned that the Anons could move unseen and en masse toward their destination. They came from every direction, a sprinkling of phosphorescent disks marking their way like luminous breadcrumbs.

They had been asked to walk in with as little noise or commotion as possible, and so they made the journey in complete silence. Well almost. At last John grew so exasperated by Jane's frigid exterior that he leaned over and whispered.

"I'd rather you just shoot me." Jane kept walking.

"None of this is my fault," he insisted. Jane kept walking.

"I didn't do anything wrong!" He yelled, in a hushed voice.

"Shhh," Jane replied, a finger to her lips. And then she murmured the four words that every man instinctively dreads. "We need to talk."

John stopped in his tracks, hung his head, then raised it again as if beseeching the marital gods. Leo trudged past, throwing him a look of fraternal commiseration. After a minute, John walked on, feeling indignant and ill-used, but careful to keep Jane in sight.

The building they entered was a derelict theater, one of the art deco movie palaces of the last century whose _raison_ d'être had long since been transferred to distant suburbia with its cookie cutter cineplexes. A few Anons with glow sticks waved people toward doors and windows that had been unblocked for the occasion. John and Jane stumbled through a rear entry along a cramped hallway into what was left of a soaring auditorium that in its heyday had held 2000. All the orchestra seating had been removed, leaving the main floor bare aside from piles of rubbish and broken plaster. Through a doughnut hole in the roof where a dome used to be, a rind of moon peeked in, shedding just enough light to navigate by. The stage itself was intact and partially shrouded by velvet side curtains, tattered at the bottom so that when some current of air stirred them, they looked like ghostly fingers, stroking the floor.

The balcony had been built in tiers, so there were concrete risers to sit on and it was toward these that the attendees filed, ascending either from the auditorium or the unseen lobby. Jane climbed to the very back and stood against the wall close to one of two exits. John stationed himself on the stairs and waited for the others to get settled. Many were masked or hoodied, so it was not possible to deduce much about demographics. Whoever they were, they were perhaps two hundred strong.

As the small noises hushed to nothingness, a voice began to speak from no particular direction, but loud enough to echo a little in the empty vaulted space.

"Our time is short, our situation dire."

Far below, at the front of the darkened stage, a shimmer of light appeared, multiplied, solidified, and grew into a man. Or, more accurately, a shining translucent hologram of a man. At that distance he looked like a latter day Jesus Christ. Or a resurrected Abbie Hoffman. With streaming dreads and a salt 'n pepper beard.

"The Fourth World War has begun."

A throbbing sort of music began to play on the edge of hearing and, behind the shining bearded man, another and far larger ball of light exploded into a sphere formed from a thousand crimson points connected by bright green spokes.

"The Cold War, which was the Third World War, handed victory to the owners. Since then, over the last twenty years, money and power have consolidated. One hundred and forty-seven transnational corporations - mostly banks, mostly in the US and the UK - control about ninety-five percent of the means of production. We're talking about global domination by six thousand people, mostly men, mostly white. In addition to things, these men own politicians, generals, pulpits, and the media. They control laws, policies, institutions. The money supply. And via all these means they are waging war against the rest of us."

Pictures of the President, Joint Chiefs, top bankers, media moguls, religious leaders, and well-known captains of industry bloomed in rapid succession, circled the sphere, then faded from view.

"They no longer fight each other. Instead they sow fear and division and make us fight amongst ourselves."

The sphere faded into the background as video clips of various conflicts took its place. The long sectarian wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing tribal war in Libya, the continuing civil war in Sudan, the vicious gang wars in El Salvador.

"Rising numbers are jobless and homeless and hungry even here, in the very heart of the empire, in the richest country the world has ever known."

Video clips of the uprisings in Tunisia, Algeria, Eygpt, Greece, Spain, Italy appeared, followed by footage of crowded food banks, soup kitchens, homeless encampments, job lines, and eviction protests.

"Worse is coming. We have known for the last two years that they have the means to monopolize the internet."

Major corporate logos danced in the air - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook.

"We also know they have laid the foundations for a police state, militarizing borders and local law enforcement. Now we learn, that by manipulating wars and financial crises, they have literally stolen our common wealth, the wealth of nations, and hidden it in an archipelago of tax havens, creating what amounts to a super-financial system beyond our reach, all the while telling us that we are broke. That we cannot afford decent education or healthcare or pensions."

A series of headlines succeeded one another - "Lie By Lie: The Iraq War Timeline," "Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion," "Tax Havens: Super-Rich Hiding at Least $21 Trillion." "No Alternative to Austerity Say EU Chiefs."

"Now, in addition, we learn that they are creating a super-legal system based on markets and trade to be run by and for themselves, which will supersede the laws of nations, annulling our rights, and essentially ending democracy as we have known it."

Out of nowhere, the sphere with its crimson points and green spokes streaked across the stage, landing with a thunderous crash, half-buried and smoking, in the virtual floor. The half of it that remained in view magically transformed into a blue and white Earth that caught fire and was engulfed in bright blue flames.

"And all the while," the hologram spread his hands, "the planet burns."

"We have been told since Maggie Thatcher that there is no alternative. That there is no such thing as society and any idea of a social contract is dead."

Pictures of the gods of neoliberalism gyrated above the blue flames, like roasting souls - Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman, Pinochet, Clinton, Blair, et al.

"That is the defining lesson the elites would have us learn. That we are helpless, hopeless, and most of all alone. But for some reason, for a million different reasons, you and I have arrived at a different conclusion. The richest among us, the 1%, have made this world, this suffering world, in their own image and according to their infinite predatory greed. But another world is possible. The question we are here to answer is how far are we, who represent the other 99%, willing to go to create that other world? How much can we do and how long can we hold out once we start down that road? For we are talking about displacing or derailing the New World Order, which is in fact a very Old World Order. But the point is - most people are not awake to the catastrophe that has been prepared for them, much less ready and willing to begin the world again."

From the broken grill to the left of the stage where the pipe organ used to be, a woman called a warning, "They're coming!"

"We've already angered 'the gods,' the Powers-That-Be, by exposing bits and pieces of the truth - and that work must continue. But absent a Vulcan mind-meld on a global scale, absent some means of communication that can instantaneously transmit our understanding of reality to every sentient human on the planet and at the same time short circuit the propaganda machine of the ruling elite, simply revealing all we have learned may not be enough. And that is why we are here. I have been asked to present two proposals for augmenting our current rules of engagement. Proposal Number 1: Given that we are not in a position to single-handedly unseat the global ruling class, are we prepared to do what we can to identify and block significant incursions and attacks aimed at ordinary people by our own governments? No's only, show of cell phones, please."

Not one Anon moved.

But the woman called out again. "Closing fast!" The Anons shifted a little on their risers, but otherwise remained seated.

"Proposal Number 2: If blocking proves insufficient, are we prepared to take it to the next level and go Star Trek on their corporate and military asses? Are some of us prepared to try, in extreme cases, where there is a threat of physical harm to innocent civilians, to intervene and reverse the polarity? No's again, please."

There were none.

"That's it then. We're out of time in more ways than one. Spread the word."

The spinning grinning heads morphed into grinning skulls. Which crumbled into dust and darkness.

"We may never meet this way again. Don't forget to exit through the gift shop." He paused, then finished with a benediction: "We are everywhere."

They were already on their feet and they replied as one. "Expect us."

At which point the hologram collapsed like a telescope and the background music swelled to become a techno version of Delibes' "Flower Duet." The woman stationed in the organ space fled her lookout post, shouting as she sprinted for the balcony, "They're here!"

With a whirring sound, a series of batlike shapes dove through the doughnut hole. They buzzed the room, zooming wildly in all directions, before gathering in midair to begin advancing toward the balcony in tight formation. Meanwhile, the Anons, rather than dispersing all the ways they had come, emptied their rows neatly and noiselessly in one direction, toward the rear of the theater, as if according to drill. Jane watched as they filed hurriedly into an upper hallway that led via two grand curving staircases down to the lobby where the plywood sheeting intended to keep out trespassers swung back as if on hinges to permit their orderly escape. The music grew louder and Jane realized it was playing outside as well as in. She turned back to look for John and saw him at the end of the line, bringing up the rear, behind the last Anon, Well not quite the last, for two Anons, a man and a woman, had held their ground near the very front of the balcony and stood facing the reconnaissance drones, arms extended.

"Immobulous," the woman said. And, magically, the drones stood still.

"Expelliarmus," the man said. And, magically, the drones stopped whirring. And crashed, in perfect synchrony, to the ground.

John and Jane hastened to join the duo. "Harry Potter. Really?" Jane said.

"GPS jamming and spoofing. Really," the Kid grinned, displaying then pocketing the handheld gizmo Jane was beginning to recognize and respect.

"Feeling obsolete yet, Prom Queen?" Jen inquired, blowing on her spoofing device as if it were a smoking six-gun. Last-seen-in-Iceland Jen.

"Cute. Got anything for the giant economy size?" Jane asked tartly. And everyone followed her gaze, which was directed toward the hole in the roof. There, silhouetted against the peaceful moon, a Blackhawk helicopter hovered like an angel of death, fast ropes descending. "I feel so underdressed," Jane remarked peevishly.

"I know, right?" John said. "The invite did not say black tie and rocket launcher."

"Are we holding or folding?" Jane asked, coolly chambering a round.

"We are un-assing," Jen said, heading for the stairs. "Dee dee mau. In case they -"

A couple of flashes, a double explosion, and a cloud of smoke finished her sentence. John ducked instinctively, but his attention was fixated on Jane's pistol. "I thought that was the new 1911. Sweet! How's it handle?"

"I was just about to field test it," Jane said, holding it out. "I passed on the laser sight. Kicking myself now."

"Who knew?" John asked, pulling out his own P226.

"Speaking of lasers," the Kid cut in, as black ninja figures began dropping down the ropes like so many spiders, "Could you guys get it in gear? The show's about to start and it's going to be a whole lot better from the cheap seats." He stood in one of the exits and, peering at the glowing screen of his jammer, began to count backwards. "3-2-1."

Outside the theater a massive roar went up. The sound of a million voices crying out, but not in terror. Casting a last look through the doughnut hole, John could see that the Blackhawk had become part of a laser light show. Bright bursts and arrows of colored light painted its unmarked hull and rappelling commandos in dizzying hues and psychedelic patterns. The strobe effect and intensity must have dazzled the retinas of those on the receiving end. The copter dipped drunkenly forward, then jerked sharply back before settling into a wobbly spin. For a heart-stopping minute the ninjas swung like wind chimes and it seemed a crash was imminent. Then, just as the Flower Duet reached its technobeat crescendo, the Blackhawk righted itself and, escorted by four MH-6 Little Birds, beat a hasty if uneven retreat toward the nearest air base, disappearing with the last ecstatic note of the song. Victory was theirs.

Outside, ten thousand ravers cheered.

"Ever been to a rave before, Blondie?" Jen asked, as the four of them stood on the sidewalk beneath the theater's busted out marquee and watched ten thousand electronica aficionados, armed with ten thousand points of lime green light, chase Orwell's worst nightmare back to its military-industrial hidey hole. Apparently the Powers-That-Be did not care to have their operations witnessed by ten thousand impressionable young minds, many with parental strings and Youtube attached. At any rate, not yet. Jen reached into a cardboard box stacked with laser pointers and offered one to Jane. "Souvenir?"

"Gloating," Jane sniffed, "Is such an unattractive quality."

"Our work here appears to be done," John said. "Though damned if I know what it was."

"Au contraire, mon frere," the Kid said, watching Leo exchanging Bruce Lee moves with three candy ravers in neon fur. "We're about to kick it up a notch and take things to a whole new level." The Kid jerked his head and began hoofing it toward the waterfront. "Walk with me," he said puckishly. Jen followed without skipping a beat. Leo deftly disentangled himself and fell in beside Jen. John and Jane faced one another, hands in their pockets, undecided.

In the distance a dozen cop cars began to wail. Like Pavlov's long-suffering pooch, Jane and John responded as one and on cue. They walked.

15 Ghost in the Machine

They did not go far. A couple of blocks on, the Kid led them up a network of metal stairs to an el station where they boarded the automated train that circled downtown Detroit night and day. The car disgorged young people who did not seem to distinguish the flashing blue lights of cop cars from the visual effects produced by the DJs for the rave. They ran toward the chaos shrieking with excitement as John and company boarded and were silently sucked away, passing directly over the festivities and those assigned to quell them.

"What up with dat?" one rider asked another, pointing at the scrum of police and sheriff's deputies below. "You can call 911 all day and never get an answer."

"They must of went and tried to have them a good time, or something. Lord knows," his friend said, "we can't be having us none of _that_."

The train was thinly populated but nobody sat down. Aside from red, yellow, green traffic lights, the city was largely in eclipse. No money to pay the light bill. The windows of the People Mover turned into mirrors.

"You look terrible," John said to Jane's image. He meant it sympathetically. But still.

"As an ice breaker, a pick up line, or an apology - that's a great little buzz kill," Jane replied.

"Did you do something to your hair?" he asked, more puzzled than critical.

"Nice of you to notice. Got a few stitches in Athens and had to do a comb-over to hide them. The cradle of democracy is rocking some serious authoritarian shit."

"Partying like it's 1941." John nodded.

"And 1967. I think I saw Kissinger," the Kid said.

John frowned. "Wait. You came with this guy?"

"I'm here. You're here. Not at your mother's," Jane pointed out in mock astonishment.

"Mom says hi," John said hurriedly.

"Your mom hates me." Jane said.

"She doesn't hate you, she doesn't hate anybody. She's an ex-nun, for god's sake."

"Greektown! This is the Greektown station," the Cylon voice of the People Mover proclaimed.

The Kid tapped John's arm and everybody filed out. It was a straight shot from where they stood to the seven skyscrapers of the Renaissance Center. The GM logo floated over Detroit like it was advertising a giant blue-light special. Down on the street, only the Bouzouki Gentleman's Club and Patras' Coney Island remained open. A few drunks, at loose ends after last call, were weighing their options. Jane understood their dilemma.

"Decisions, decisions. Tits-and-ass. Or hot dogs. I'm so conflicted," Jane murmured, shuddering.

"I'm not," Jen grinned, veering toward the strip club. The Kid caught her by the back of her coat.

"Our daily scan says the tits are bugged, but the hot dogs are not. We can neither confirm nor deny the nutritional value of either." The women in the larger than life-size burlesque pictures fronting the strip joint looked hurt. In an objectified, stereotypical sort of way.

"Is really Balalaika Club," Leo said.

"Let me guess," John said. "Your uncle owns it."

"A family friend," Leo clarified. "I must pay my respects. _Paka_!" He crossed the street, passed beneath the red-hot neon awning, and disappeared inside.

"Who IS that?" John asked the Kid.

"One of ours," Jen said. "Believes in standing up for the little guy."

"Oh great. We're mobbed up." John did not look pleased.

"We're connected," the Kid stressed. "Remember, the mafia has Robin Hood roots. Also - let he who is without sin and so forth? We're _all_ refugees from the dark side. Who else knows this shit?" The Kid herded them toward the diner. It was steamy warm inside, so much so that the windows streamed with moisture. They got a booth in the middle of the small dining room. There was a fun moment when Jen and the Kid sat down and John and Jane hesitated. The Kid was puzzled.

"What?"

John leaned down. "We don't usually sit with our backs to the door." Jen made a rude noise.

"I'll keep it brief," the Kid promised.

"OK," John said. But when Jane slid into position, she sat sideways, with one arm on the back of the bench. John kept one foot in the aisle, pointed toward the cash register.

"First off," the Kid began, as the waitress was doling out menus and plunking down water glasses, "Let's talk organizational structure. There isn't any."

"That explains a lot," Jane said. Jen stood a packet of raw sugar on end and flicked it at her.

"We're a loosely affiliated group of IT and intelligence types working under the umbrella of the Anonymous collective. No leaders, just a self-healing network that takes on projects as they arise. Because of our background, we're kind of the Anon special forces. Waffles, everybody?" He paused to let the waitress do her job. When she walked off to clip the ticket to the order spindle, the Kid resumed. "Our code name is - yes, go ahead and laugh, we have a code name - _Deus Ex_."

"Cocky much?" John wondered, watching the Greek proprietor take money from another couple of nighthawks.

"'Ghost in the machine' is what we were after," the Kid explained.

"That would be _Spiritus Ex Machina_ ," John's inner altar boy observed.

"Too long. Our job is to intervene when least expected, like the gods in Greek plays, so - " the Kid shrugged.

"Wake up, Blondie," Jane was nodding off. Jen kicked her under the table. "We're getting to the important part."

"Ah yes, the important part. Thanks to you two and Jen and the Pentagon job, we have been able to nail down almost the entire history and apparatus of the New World Order, including the who, what, where, when, how, and why of the War on Terror and the Global Financial Crisis. We have pieced all that together from your pirated files, and before too long, if what's left of the independent press does its job, the stories are going to begin to dribble out. Deregulation and the debt bubble; the Lehman takedown; the secret Fed bailout; the trillions in tax havens; the rigging of derivatives, currencies, interest rates, and exchanges; endless war and the strategy of tension; the mass surveillance networks; the political blackmail; the international economic games being used to dismantle society as we know it - in short, the entire neo-con, neo-lib ball of wax."

John was still watching the proprietor, a wizened fellow, near eighty if he was a day, who had just picked up the ringing telephone. The old man listened, scowling, then came out from behind his check-out desk, and made a quick visual survey of the room, taking a long hard look at John and company.

"So that's that, right?" John guessed absently. The proprietor turned his back and began to talk in heated, spitting Greek.

"Not hardly," Jen scoffed.

"The elites are this close to achieving total global domination." The kid held his forefinger and thumb mere nanometers apart. "The information we have is going to shock people when it gets out; but nobody thinks our corporate overlords are going to relinquish power and privilege without a fight. They own everything - armies, media, pulpits, politicians, prisons, banks."

"Newsflash. We are fucked," John said. "But are these some bodacious waffles or what?" He smiled winningly at the buxom waitress, who blushed and dealt their plates, refilled their cups, set down butter and syrup, then whisked away with flaming cheeks to another table.

"We do - or did - have an inside track on a gambit that might even the odds. In their drive for efficiency and supremacy, they made something that could conversely break them." He paused for effect. "A ring of power."

Jane groaned. "Who's writing this script?"

"Relax, Prom Queen, it's a metaphor," Jen said. "Anybody want my bacon?" John raised his hand.

"Yes. That is, no it's not a ring you wear," the Kid erased the air with the hand not holding his fork. "It's a highly secure network. It sits on top of their global command and control system. They call it SPIRE."

"And MPIRE and XPIRE - surveillance, remote management, and - uh - let's just say that last one gives a whole new meaning to the term 'killer ap'," Jen elaborated. She gulped some coffee and said quickly to John, who had his hand in his jacket, "Wazzup, Kemo Sabe?"

"Speaking of untimely ends," John breathed.

The elderly man at the cash register was yelling into the telephone in highly scatological Greek. He smashed the receiver back into its cradle and continued yelling at the top of his voice. Jane caught a few words.

"Forty... years? Something about 'the last time'," she looked at John.

"Now see, here is where you can't send a machine to do a man's work. Forty years ago, that guy," John nodded toward the proprietor, "was working for the US in Greece. Under the junta. Or so he says." He raised a forefinger at the waitress. "Check?" He needn't have bothered.

"Out! Everybody out! We're closed. You, in the kitchen - go home. Everybody go." The old Greek started pushing people out the door. "Now, fast. Are you deaf?" A couple of hipsters began to object. John pointed his gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.

"You heard the man," he said, in a voice of pure reason. Instant ghost town. They were the last to leave and the old Greek clutched at John as he passed. His face contorted as John pulled away. He started backing up the block, looking warily at the sky.

"When they say I am evil," he called, "Don't forget - you are alive."

Leo was waiting a few doors down, pacing beside a food truck. He jumped into the cab of the truck when he saw them coming. The engine was running.

"How long?" Jane asked, following Jen and the Kid into the rear of the truck, with all its stainless steel shelves and prep surfaces.

"Leo, remember when President Reagan said, "We start bombing in five minutes?" John asked. He barely got the words out. Leo stood on the gas and everybody else pitched to the floor as the truck went from 0 to 60 in under 5 seconds. They had the ultimate drag strip, a quarter mile straightaway to the RenCen. Behind them a teeny, tiny laser-guided incendiary drone ended its test flight by dotting the 'I' in 'Patras' Coney Island.' Fireworks ensued.

Tomorrow it would be reported that a popular downtown dining institution had suffered an electrical fire and would be closed until further notice. Today the explosion created a ball of flame so intense that the rear of the food truck could be read as clear as day:

"Super Gyros - There When You Need Us."

16 Reboot the Mission

"So here's the deal. We have two projects we can't pull off alone," the Kid said, getting down to brass tacks.

After a short suspenseful drive, much of it with headlights off, the five had abandoned the food truck in a port authority parking lot and were stealthily mounting the gangway of a freighter bound for New York. Other ships basked in halos of smoky light as the noisy business of bulk cargo and container loading shredded the last hour before day. Their ship, as big as two football fields, stood in relative darkness, with a few red deck lights illuminating their path aft. The Kid tapped on the door of the pilot house in passing and immediately the low background thrum of engines increased to a dull vibrating rumble.

"Neither is particularly difficult, but they do require something that you have and we lack," the Kid continued as he opened the door of a cramped cabin.

"I don't have the official minutes of our last meeting in front of me," John said, as the Kid pulled two straight chairs away from the small dining table and over to the loveseat where Jane had dropped in near exhaustion. Leo brought a plastic chair in from the deck. "But as I recall, the consensus was that Elite Solutions and Anonymous had reached a parting of the ways due to irreconcilable differences. You have a strict policy of no weapons, no killing. Whereas weapons and killing" he raised his shoulders apologetically, "is what we do."

"I seem to remember being called a 'dinosaur'," Jane remarked, stifling a yawn.

"Not that I'd mind playing Jurassic Park with a few Wall Street types" John said.

"Violence and technology," Jen shook her head. "Still not good bedfellows. But," she went on brightly, "turns out contrary to our original thinking, we do need old people."

"Expertise," the Kid corrected her hastily. "We need interpersonal expertise and gravitas, and we'd like you to consider expanding your business model to include - diplomacy and social engineering."

"You want us to run a con?" John sat forward with his elbows on his knees.

"One con, one negotiation," the Kid amended.

"The Sting and Dangerous Liaisons," Jen said.

"Who and who?" Jane asked.

"Who and _where_ ," Leo put in. He pulled a handkerchief from his front pocket, performed some mysterious hand motions, and produced his iPad, which he handed to the Kid with a flourish.

"Here is the who." The Kid pulled up a front page story in _Le Monde_ and passed it around. Jane did a double-take when she saw the cover photo. It was someone who had made quite an impression recently. Saki's pal. IMF guy. She pointed at the iPad.

"OK, that's creepy. We were just on a plane together."

" _Mon dieu_!" Leo exclaimed, in perfect French. He looked around the group, who were equally taken aback. _"C'est superbe!" [My God! That's fantastic!]_

"It's so much easier to blackmail people you already know and don't love," Jen said. Jane and John waited for the Kid to explain.

"We need to open a dialogue with the guys at the top," he began.

"And they are mostly guys," Jen interjected. "Just sayin'."

"\- to let them know that the game is up and we can end this nice and easy - or we can end it nice and rough," he finished.

"Define 'nice and easy'," John said.

"We all suddenly discover our inner FDR and start running the world for the common good."

"Nice and rough?" Jane asked.

"We release every last piece of dirt available in government dossiers for just about every politician, banker, CEO, and military officer on the face of the planet. Bust their vast criminal enterprise wide open. For starters," the Kid said.

"Yeah, I'm glad you said 'for starters,'? Because where we come from, assassinating presidents, starting wars, and killing thousands before breakfast is just part of a day's work. 'Dirt' is kinda like Purell for those guys. They wash their hands in it and move on." John sat back with his own hands behind his head.

"Sweet talk the oligarchs, check," Jane said. "What else?"

"We need real time access to SPIRE," the Kid was typing on the iPad again.

"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them," Leo quoted.

"In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie," Jen added.

"Isn't it past your bedtime?" Jane was so tired she was getting cranky.

"No way can I get back into the Pentagon." John put his feet up on the coffee table.

"Fortunately," the Kid said, "the Pentagon is only one gateway. There are others. We think we've found the most vulnerable. We had an inside man, but we lost him last summer. You may have heard about it. He turned up inside a gym bag." He turned the iPad around again, this time displaying first a large red hold-all in a bathtub, and then a vast green and white structure that looked as though it was made out of Legos. Instantly recognizable as a picture from the most sensational spy murder of the new millennium and a beauty shot of the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

"Oh -" John started.

"\- shit," Jane finished.

"I see you know what I'm talking about," the Kid glanced at Leo who had picked up a stack of orange life rings and was beginning to juggle.

"Kinda hard to not to. It was in all the papers," Jane said. "Is in all the papers."

"Inside man was the victim of an inside job," John asserted. "Very clean, very professional."

Jane nodded. "And whoever did it had a warped sense of humor. Your friend was sports mad and ended up in a sports bag."

"Kind of like Turing, who saw 'Snow White' a hundred times and died of a poison apple," Jen said. Everybody was watching Leo flip and spin the orange rings.

"At any rate, it was a big loss for us. Huge. Because he wasn't some file clerk; SPIRE was his baby. He created it to spy on foreigners; terrorist types in the Middle East and Asia, or so he was told. When he found out it was being turned on you, me, and everyone we know, he came to us. Had he lived just one day longer we probably would not be having this conversation."

"You want us to break into MI6?" John chuckled as Jane took her eyes off Leo long enough to roll them.

"It's all set up, a dead hand job, you won't believe how easy," the Kid insisted. Jen stood up and clapped her hands and Leo tossed her a life ring, which she tossed back. Leo kept juggling without skipping a beat.

"A dead hand job for two dead spooks." John couldn't help himself. "Not that we'd have the ghost of a chance."

"Snowball in hell," Jane agreed. "And they don't just shoot you over there. Old world decadence and the _ancien_ régime are alive and well in the New World Order."

"So you'll think about it then?" the Kid urged. Jen and Leo were now team juggling, tossing the rings to and fro over the Kid's head like marines exchanging rifles during silent drill.

"Sleep on it," Jane temporized, getting up stiffly and stretching like a big Persian cat. "Ten hours to New York, right? I'm going to need all of them." Leo and Jen chucked the life preservers to John, who caught them neatly, and followed the Kid out, presumably to other sleeping quarters. John locked the door behind them and turned to find Jane already prostrate on the single berth.

"Big ship, little bed," he said. Jane had not bothered to undress or pull back the white comforter.

"Half as much mattress as the _Casablanca_ ," he noted aloud, thinking with a pang about Jane's sloop, moored in Piraeus Harbor, and better days. A shudder ran through the freighter and out the window the lights of a tugboat streamed slowly by. They were getting under way.

"Probably not enough room for two," he hazarded. He thought he might be talking to himself. That she was ignoring him or sunk already in dreamless sleep. He sighed and decided he could probably make do with the loveseat and the coffee table though his back would give him hell in the morning. Jane mumbled something and he pricked up his ears.

"Sorry," he leaned forward. "I missed that. Say again?"

" _La senora es muy bonita_ ," Jane said, quoting a certain Cuban bus driver. " _Y son ustedes casados, no?" ["The lady is very pretty. And you are married, right?"]_

He was out of his shirt in less than a heartbeat. Her boots took a little longer.

17 You Can Leave Your Hat On

The view was stunning, especially at night. Look left and there was the East River. Straight ahead the UN. The Empire State building and the rest of midtown Manhattan stretched away to the right. Everything all lit up like Christmas. But Jane did not waste time admiring the scenery. She sat in the high-backed executive chair, beneath a single recessed spotlight with her back to the door, and read as fast as she could the hand-written pages of plain-spoken French.

"Il ya quelques milliers d'années, Aristote écrit que 'le meilleur partenariat dans un état est celui qui fonctionne à travers les gens milieu ... les Etats où l'élément central est grande ... ont toutes les chances d'avoir une constitution bien géré'."

"Cela était vrai à l'époque d'Aristote, il est vrai au temps de Keynes, et il est vrai aujourd'hui. Stabilité dépend d'une classe moyenne forte qui peut propulser la demande. Nous ne verrons pas ce que la croissance ne conduit pas à des emplois décents, ou si les récompenses de croissance de la poignée de privilégiés sur le nombre marginalisés."

" _En fin de compte, l'emploi et l'équité sont des éléments constitutifs de la stabilité économique et la prospérité, de la stabilité politique et la paix. Cela va au cœur du mandat du FMI. Il doit être placé au cœur de l'agenda politique." -_ _La crise mondiale de l'emploi, discours du FMI 13/04/2011_

["A few thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote that 'The best partnership in a state is the one which operates through the middle people...those states in which the middle element is large... have every chance of having a well-run constitution'."]

["This was true in the time of Aristotle, it was true in the time of Keynes, and it is true today. Stability depends on a strong middle class that can propel demand. We will not see this if growth does not lead to decent jobs, or if growth rewards the favored few over the marginalized many."]

["Ultimately, employment and equity are building blocks of economic stability and prosperity, of political stability and peace. This goes to the heart of the IMF's mandate. It must be placed at the heart of the policy agenda."- The Global Jobs Crisis, IMF Speech 4/13/2011]

The door of the office opened swiftly, and was shut and locked with a businesslike click.

"Forgive me, _ma petite_ , the big heads have brains like _fromage_ and adore nothing more than the sound of their own voices. I thought dinner would never end."

Jane spun the chair slowly to face her interlocutor. IMF guy was tossing his overcoat on a couch. Turning back, he paused and blinked in surprise. Well, after all, Jane did present an eyeful. She wore a severe yet supple leather suit, vintage Armani, with a pencil skirt and one button blazer, the plunging neckline of which revealed no blouse or undergarment. Her normally flowing hair was captured in a severe bun and surmounted by a chic leather cocktail hat adorned with a spotted veil. Beneath the desk she sported wickedly high-heeled Manolo Blahnik booties. Needless to say her elegant hands were sheathed in four-button-length Italian leather gloves. All black, from hat to heels. Of course.

Jane placed the pages back on the desk, next to an original edition of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," a set of fur handcuffs, and a BlackBerry.

"Nice speech," she said, sitting back in the chair, making a steeple of her gloved fingers.

"Nice dress." He rejoined with gallic aplomb. "It had to be written." He reached up to loosen his tie and gestured toward the speech, "But it will never be heard."

"And yet it is just what the world needs to hear," Jane rested her arms on the arms of the chair and swiveled ever so slightly from side to side, like a snake charmer mesmerizing a cobra.

"And that is precisely why tomorrow it will be turned into confetti for some future parade. It will be tossed in front of your Macy's balloons like rose petals before an idiot bride. We must have spectacle. Truth is for street sweepers only."

"Not for quadrillionaires in quiet rooms?"

He smiled. "I will not insult you by saying don't worry your pretty little head about such things."

"Too late. You just did." She got up and walked around the desk to stand within arm's reach.

"Was I expecting you?" he asked rhetorically. Staring into his eyes, her face just inches from his, she removed his tie, unbuttoned another button on his custom tailored shirt, and pointed to the chair.

"Sit." He sat, bemused. "Comfy?" He nodded. "In a minute," she said, clasping one fur cuff around his left wrist and locking it securely, "I'm going to ask you to tell me a word." She walked behind the chair, gently twisting his arm downward and to one side. "That word will be your safe word," she continued, running her hand down his right arm and placing it into the same position, after which she cuffed his other wrist so that his arms were gently but firmly fastened behind him. She stepped back and surveyed her prisoner. "If at any time you want to stop what is happening, all you have to do is say that one magic word." She bent down again, this time leaning on the arms of his chair so that his gaze, if it left hers, could reach far down the front of her jacket; and she breathed into his ear, "Do you understand?" He nodded. She had set one foot on either side of his bespoke wingtips. She was, in effect, straddling his legs. "But first," she said, keenly aware that he was becoming aroused, "I want you to tell me what you want."

He closed his eyes, brushing her cheek with his, intoxicated by the fugitive, musky perfume of her skin, leather, and hair. "Oh, you know, this is all so sudden. Suppose you surprise me."

She straightened with a slow seductive sigh and touched the BlackBerry. Joe Cocker's "You Can Leave Your Hat On" began to play. Instead of stripping, though, Jane leaned against the desk and crossed her arms.

"Suppose I tell you what _I_ want?" She arched her eyebrows.

"Ladies, first, by all means," he pulled a little at the handcuffs, growing restive as his anticipation mounted.

"I want you and all your Bilderberg mates to stop what you're doing," Jane said, slowly and deliberately, dropping her vamp act, cold. "Just stop."

"Are you mad?" IMF guy began to go red in the face. "There are guards just outside."

Jane raised her eyes to the ceiling and her hands to her chignon, which was secured by an unobtrusive and highly ornamental pair of stilettos. As the glory of her hair fell around her, she smiled. "I was wondering if you have a heart. Shall we find out? Besides," she tilted her head provocatively, "I'm sure they've heard worse. Now where were we?" She tapped her temple reflectively with one stiletto. "Ah yes. What I want. I want you to give your speech."

"Better to kill me now," IMF guy growled. "Because if you don't, they will."

"I am not your enemy," Jane insisted. "I like you, I even find you sexy in an earthy, Nietzschean sort of way." He made a rude noise. "You've been to Greece, you've been to Spain. That speech says that you know the harm you're doing. So do the right thing for a change. Go ahead and tell the truth."

"Who are you?" IMF guy was pulling actively at his bonds, but the cuffs had a special resistance-activated feature. He only succeeded in making them tighter.

"A question I ask myself every day," Jane admitted. "But the question we should be asking is \- who do we want to be? Do you want to be the guy who caused a world of misery or the guy who made it stop?"

"You talk like a backward child. A Pollyanna. This thing cannot be stopped, only a child would think otherwise," he said heavily.

"Well, the children do think otherwise," Jane said. "There seem to be quite a lot of them, and generations to come. Whereas you are all of - six thousand? Twenty? Even one hundred thousand. Against billions who just want a decent life. That's not just bad morals, it's bad math."

"Except we own the armies."

"Except we are in the same room, alone, you and I." Jane pointed her daggers at his exposed chest, with its virile mat of grey-white hair. "Who was it said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable?'"

"Kennedy," IMF guy said. "And we know what happened to him."

" _Bon_. You are a philosopher," Jane said. "And coming from the land of the guillotine you can well imagine what will happen to you and any number of your friends if the rest of the world should ever find out - about Kennedy, about all of it. So why not just cut the crap and play nice? Before we're all dead. That is what I was sent to say. Oh - and that the NSA has been recording your exploits for years and we managed to get copies of just about everything," she ended dutifully.

"So there is a 'we'," IMF guy pounced.

" _Mais oui_ ," Jane confirmed readily enough, "as I said."

"A rag-tag few," he hazarded.

"In your dreams," Jane contradicted. "We walk among you. In greater numbers every day. Like your French resistance. Only global."

He looked skeptical. "Suppose I relay your message. Suppose I give the speech. What then?"

"Then," Jane said, bending to kiss him lingeringly on the lips, "you will have been a very good boy."

"Humph," he grunted. "Virtue is its own reward, is it? I thought as much."

"If I can't sell you a vision of enlightened self-interest, how about a market-based approach? Now for a limited time only, we are offering you, yes you, the deal of a lifetime. First dibs on a ground-floor opportunity. Think about it. Among politicians and bureaucrats, who else is telling the people what they already know to be true? Who else is not lying through their teeth? You will have a brand new virgin field entirely to yourself. There are gains to be made," Jane pointed out, taking one last look at the skyline of New York. "Run for president, why don't you?"

"The _avant-garde_ of anything is usually wiped out - hence the term 'bleeding edge'. As an economist, I know it is the second wave adopters who fare the best. You ask a lot _, cherie_. And you left your phone," he called after her, as she turned to go.

"In case you need me," she said. "Just give a whistle. You know how to whistle don't you?" She arched her eyebrows and blew him a kiss.

"What about my safe word?" he joked, leaning forward in an attempt to slip the handcuffs over the back of the chair and so release himself. "Not to mention the bloody key."

"Welcome to the real world," Jane said, opening the door. "Where there is no such thing. And where, at the moment, not a one of us is free."

18 Things Ain't What They Used to Be

"You had to kiss him?" The moment she closed the door to the inner office, there was John in a black jumpsuit, standing over a pile of bodyguards, inert, unconscious, and generously bound with duct tape. John, for his part, was clearly pissed. "So now we're even. Is that it?"

Jane made a sound of irritation. "You had to listen? I told you not to." She grabbed one of the two backpacks at his feet and kept moving, flinging open the door to the hallway and making tracks for the elevator. John shouldered the second backpack, pausing only to make sure the door was locked and the lock thoroughly jammed before following swiftly in her footsteps.

"I was supposed to listen. I'm your backup." It was a long hallway, with many darkened, silent, and empty offices, given the lateness of the hour.

"And I was supposed to be seductive, that was the pitch." Jane reached the elevator and pushed the 'up' button.

John cast a furtive, proprietary glance at her sweet leather-bound ass. "Worked for me. Damn it."

"For him, maybe not so much," Jane speculated, watching the indicator lights above the elevator, which were not moving. "More Flytrap than Venus in there. Your snarky little friend may be right. I'm getting too old for this game."

"Yeah, I'm guessing she has a crush on you. Women are so insecure," John said, condescendingly.

"And who do we have to thank for that?" Jane said, glaring at him pointedly.

John immediately saw the wisdom of changing the subject. "The truth is we're just not used to this. Whole new ball game. Let's face it. It's so much easier just to pop 'em."

Jane waxed nostalgic for a moment. "In and out. No fuss, no muss. Just boom - and done."

"Things ain't what they used to be," John lamented.

Jane glanced at him sideways and crossed her arms over her stomach. "Baby, you have no idea." She opened her mouth to say more, but he interrupted her.

"Speaking of boom and done," John said, "have you noticed the elevator isn't moving?"

"I have," Jane said, glad of yet another reprieve. "And I've been standing here thinking we might have a problem."

"Silent alarm?" John asked.

"Silent alarm," Jane repeated. Immediately they turned and surveyed the hall of doors.

"Pick a door, any door," John said. "World Bank? World Health Organization?"

"French Consulate," Jane pointed.

" _Tres bien,"_ John said. "If the passkey works. They missed the alarm system. Damn!" The passkey went in all right, but then it just sat in the lock. Like a politician elected to office who goes back on all his promises.

"Hairpin, stiletto." Jane held the implements at the ready. _"Excusez moi."_

"Is this the time to mention that the elevator is moving again?"

"Shh," Jane said, eyes closed, listening to the tumblers click. _"Eh,_ voilà _!"_ The doorknob turned, the office was theirs.

And none too soon. They whisked inside and shut the door behind them just as the elevator chimed. They stood like mannikins, listening, barely breathing. There was movement in the hallway, a lot of it, but no talking. It sounded as though a security detail of four or five passed by. As soon as they were out of earshot, John and Jane abandoned the Louis XV reception area, with its mirrors and gilt-edged everything, for the back office. The suite had a few private rooms, but most of the functional workspace was communal, in keeping with the prevailing urban plantation system, with its reliance upon administrative overseers and cube slaves. John and Jane had no need to pry further into individual offices; the small kitchen area had just what they needed - two tall windows separated by a thin pillar of building. Just right for anchoring the odd rappel rope or two. John got to work on the windows. Jane got out of her clothes.

"Whoa," John said, affixing vacuum cups to each window, "Do we have time for a floor show?"

"I'd like to see _you_ shimmy down 26 floors with your knees glued together." The blazer peeled off like the skin of an onion. The skirt, however, was fighting back. John spritzed the corners of both windows with compressed CO2 and fished for his window punch. Bra-less but not exactly panty-less, Jane stepped into a black jumpsuit like John's.

"Is that what I think it is?" John stood to one side and the window punch did its work with a muted pow. Pow. A spider web of cracks spread across the face of the glass. John grasped the vacuum cups and began peeling the window back.

"If what you think is that I'm rocking a tummy-taming, super-flattering, body-shaping thong," Jane's voice was more than a touch defensive, "then yes." She zipped the jumpsuit and sat down to pull on some running shoes.

"You know, I noticed you were getting a little -" John stopped himself mid-sentence and hastily punched two more holes in the second window. "Pot bellies are sexy."

Jane strapped on one tactical rappel belt and tossed another to John. Hard.

"Hey!" he objected. There was a little more commotion in the hall now. Voices as well as feet.

"It's been a little hard to get to the gym recently," she reminded him, running the anchor end of her rappel rope around the piece of wall between the two windows and clipping it. She slung her backpack on and dropped backward out of the window, palpably miffed. Hearing the sudden crackle and blare of a cop radio outside the consulate door, John was right behind her. Head first.

"Sometimes you make me so crazy, I don't know which end is up," he joshed, dangling just out of reach.

"You know what I'm starting to think? I'm starting to think that maybe we just need an open marriage. Mr. Hot Dog." At that point, they were already halfway down.

"Maybe you just need to stop talking trash, Ms. Buns," John said sternly, swatting hers as he slid past. "The good news is - after this, it's two weeks to London on a luxury yacht. Breakfast in bed, five star cuisine, the works. There'll be plenty of time to hit the gym," John said, flipping himself upright as they both touched down on the sidewalk. "Among other things." He bent over to kiss her, but she just glared at him and turned away.

"Right," Jane said, dropping her harness and flagging down a pedicab. John was puzzled by the sarcasm dripping from her every word. "I can hardly wait."

19 A Mansion and a Yacht

"Wait. What?" John sat up in bed abruptly, looking like a surprised baby chick.

"Tsk, tsk," Jane chided, setting a breakfast tray on the nightstand and pouring him a steaming cup of joe. "I have a feeling the _proper_ phrasing would be - "I beg your pardon, but may I ask you to repeat that?"

"No way."

"Oh, way beyond way. We're talking super-way. You didn't read the brochure did you?"

"It was a travel brochure with a boat on it."

"It was a training brochure with a contract in it.

"A contract contract? For a hit?"

"A contract that requires us to spend the next two weeks learning the ins and outs of indentured servitude. PS - you already missed the icebreaker session: 'Starting the Day with the Perfect Tray.' I'd love to stand here filling you in on the finer points, but Orientation begins in - um - ten minutes." John was out of bed and hunting frantically for his clothes, which seemed to have vanished. "Your uniform is hanging in the closet. See you on the upper deck."

He grabbed deck shoes, a white button down shirt, a slurp of coffee, and a sweetroll before stumbling out the door, zipping the fly of a pair of black Bermuda shorts as he went. Jane's pert derriere, in a short black shirt, was just twitching out of sight around a corner. Hopping on one foot, then the other, sweetroll clenched in his teeth, John followed her as best he could up one curving flight of stairs, along another hallway, and onto a posh, glass-enclosed observation deck. The floors were inlaid, the furniture covered in French silk, the windows retractable in season. At the moment both the churning Atlantic Ocean and the brisk April breezes were held comfortably at bay while at the same time remaining vividly present on the other side of the crystalline wall.

John was still buttoning his shirt when he scrambled into line beside Jane and seven or eight other warm bodies, Jen's among them. He glowered at her, guessing her to be the author of his current travail, which included, yet again, Jane's all too palpable displeasure. Jen, for her part, stuck out a saucy tongue.

"How good of you to join us, Mr. Brown. We missed you at breakfast. I trust you are well rested?" The speaker was a steely-eyed matron in a severe pants-suit and no-nonsense hair who had entered the salon behind John and who now strode forward to take up a position in front of the group, which she appraised with keen dispassion, making no effort to hide the fact that she found them individually and collectively wanting. Conspicuously so.

"I am. Yes. Thank you. Ma'am." John cast back to his military training for the appropriate mode of address. Came up short.

"Due to the lateness of your arrival last evening, I fear you were shown to the wrong accommodations. That error is being rectified as we speak. No doubt Mrs. Brown will update you as time permits." She looked inquiringly at Jane.

"Indeed, madam," Jane replied, right on cue.

"Excellent. Then without further delay we can proceed with the program at hand. My name is Mrs. Stevens. I am a training director for Envy, Inc., a bespoke lifestyle management and concierge service. In plain English, we are in business to make rich people happy. You are here because you have signed up and paid good money to learn a small part of what we know and do. Specifically, over the next two weeks you will be schooled in how to be not merely a good or even an excellent yacht steward or stewardess, but in how to be a superlative one. More generally, you will be absorbing the theoretical and practical skills essential to the art of serving.

"The fact that you are here, former teachers, former factory workers, former mortgage bankers - oh yes! - means that you have made an important discovery. You have come to the conclusion that the world is rapidly dividing between the haves and the have-nots, and that in order to survive you would be wise to throw in your lot with the winning side. That being the case, your challenge becomes 'What do I have to offer these golden people? What can I do to make myself valuable, necessary, indispensable such that I have a future in their high wealth orbit and hence a relatively safe place in the vast unhinging scheme of things?' You are to be applauded for your shrewd insight, for the truth is that there are more servants wanted and employed now than there were 200 years ago. Though little spoken of, it is one of the fastest growing employment sectors in the world. At a time of declining incomes, our graduates can expect between 2,000 and 4,000 euros per month in wages, with weekly tips averaging an additional 500 euros per week. And starting today, you will begin to acquire the means to join this elite, lucrative, and almost secret job market. Starting today you will begin to learn how to suck-up, how to pamper, how to please. How to shun ego in the pursuit of perfection. How to exceed in order to succeed. In short, from this moment forward, you will learn what it is to serve."

"In closing I should like to emphasize that the training you receive over the next two weeks is fully transferable to service aboard a private jet as well as an excellent introduction to the more advanced professions of butling and/or estate housekeeping. Top graduates can expect our assistance in both immediate and repeat placement. Please keep in mind that we offer a complete range of continuing education opportunities to assist you in honing old skills and mastering new. I shall now turn you over to my esteemed colleague and instructional partner, Mr. Nicholson. Mr. Nicholson was for many years in service at one of our most prestigious royal households and upon retirement became a regular at the International Butler Academy and our own highly selective education bureau. In certain circles he is acclaimed as the maestro of majordomos, or as he himself more modestly puts it - a butler's butler. I leave you in his very capable hands."

With a curt nod, Mrs. Stevens surrendered the floor to a man of medium height and build attired in the traditional garb of the English butler, as seen in countless PBS costume dramas - swallowtail coat, contrasting vest, white gloves, the works. Something about his clipped mustache and speech suggested Alec Guinness in "The Bridge on the River Kwai." He regarded them with an expression that might have been pity, or contempt, or nothing at all.

"Perfect, omnipotent, omniscient," he said. "Invisible, infinitely capable, clairvoyant. The first is a definition of God. The second is a definition of the ideal servant. One could discourse endlessly on the comparisons and contrasts, but our time is limited so I shall refrain. Suffice it to say that we may not be gods, but we aim to inspire in our employers both awe and gratitude."

"As we continue this morning to cover the basics of world class personal service, you may wonder why we are meeting here rather than in a classroom with a table and chairs. You may wonder why I continue to address you from a standing position and why you continue to stand before me more or less at attention. The answer is - we must begin as we intend to go on. On shipboard a good part of your life will consist of standing and waiting. When not standing and waiting, you will be cleaning, because a yacht steward or stewardess is in fact little more than a glorified but meticulously trained janitor. Additional duties will include food and beverage service, laundry and ironing, child and pet care, and flower arranging. But standing and waiting is first and foremost. Servants being a form of ostentation, many employers will expect you to dance attendance at all times, which oddly enough will often involve no motion whatsoever. You may be required to stand in the sun for hours, silent, unmoving, without sunglasses - because guests and employers must always be able to look you in the eye." He stared at each of them in turn.

"And may we stand just anyhow? May we lean or shift or god forbid check our iPhones?" He directed that comment at a young person who had made the mistake of looking at hers. "No we may not. Phones are to be left below at all times. Better yet, do not own one. I do not. But to return to Lesson #1: The Stance. It is an adaptation of the military's attention position. Back straight, head up, eyes down, feet together, hands clasped, repeat, hands clasped in front of you, left over right." He surveyed them one by one. "So far, so good."

"This session is about introducing concepts which will be covered in depth in the coming days. Foremost among them is what we call First Principles. Your employer is rich and you are a professional. Everything else follows. Privacy, security, and confidentiality are sacred. I need hardly mention that you may not blog, Facebook, or tweet any part of your existence in so far as it involves your employer. For the most part you are to be seen, but not heard, speaking for the most part only when spoken to. Never ask personal questions, never interrupt, never argue, do not divulge details of your life history, be polite to a fault, but if you seek success in private service you must always remember your place and that means you keep your distance and you do not engage.

"Personal hygiene, appearance, and attitude are a large part of your stock in trade. To the best of your ability you should be pleasing to the senses as well as functional. Hair for men must not brush the collar," he said, looking at John, whose sun-streaked hair was grazing his shoulders, "and you must be and smell fresh at all times using toiletries that will be provided. You must gargle after so much as a mouthful of coffee. You must be clean-shaven - ladies, that includes armpits and legs unless your employer expresses an alternate preference." Here, he let his eyes flicker over Jane's gorgeous gams. "You must learn the etiquette of communications, including forms of address and cultural differences which may arise depending upon whether your superior is an American billionaire, a Russian oligarch, a Middle Eastern sheik, or a Chinese princeling. Last and not least in this list of generalities is the subject of abuse. Verbal, emotional, sexual." Again his eyes strayed toward Jane.

"Being extremely wealthy, your employers will be extraordinarily powerful, privileged, and overly stressed individuals. Such people do not waste time upon niceties. While we strive to overwhelm them by providing for their every want and need before they themselves conceive of any lack, alas, appreciation is the exception rather than the norm. The norm is naked exploitation. Yachting for some reason seems particularly prone to this occupational hazard. It may have something to do with the fact that there are no - repeat no - labor protections for work on the high seas. Your meals, uniform, and lodging are provided - but you'll rarely have time to eat, you may find the mandatory clothing indecent or in poor taste, and your rooms will be as cramped as anything depicted in a Victorian novel for the reason that giving you space would be taking it away from the owners and their guests. I should warn you to pray for sunny weather, as foul weather inevitably brings out the worst in them. The good news is we have a well-developed, thoroughly researched, and psychologist-approved set of techniques for handling employer dissatisfaction and inappropriate behavior, which we will explore with you in excruciating detail."

At that point Mr. Nicholson drew an old fashioned watch from his vest pocket and consulted it with a frown. "I appear to have run overtime by a full minute, so we will have to forego questions this session. It is getting on for lunchtime - meaning time for you to get your first taste of the intricacies of luncheon service. When we reconvene this afternoon our topic will be "Me and My Shadow," which will cover the finer points of shadowing employers and guests to ensure, for instance, that bathrooms are always spotless and toilet paper ends forever exquisitely folded, that all pillow zips invariably face down, that all towels are everlastingly rolled with monograms displayed, and all sun cream and other toiletry bottles are eternally full with labels aligned or lord help you."

He inclined his head slightly and released them with a benediction in which the irony was at once striking and perhaps unconscious. "You are free to go. God speed and be happy in your work."

20 Serve Them Well

The last, worst guests had tottered off to their cabins, leaving John and Jane to tidy the salon and ferry the ice buckets below. In the hallway off the galley they met Jen coming the other way, similarly equipped, champagne being the quaff of choice for moonlit nights, the chill of spring on the high seas notwithstanding. Seeing their faces, Jen turned abruptly and would have hied herself to safer surroundings, but they each caught her by an arm and whisked her into the butler's pantry.

"For a travel agent, you're a great little slave trader," John growled. Jane fumbled for a light switch.

"Hey, don't blame me. It wasn't my idea. You can thank Blondie's side of the family." As the light blinked on, Jane and John towered and glowered above Jen, who leaned against the door and fended them off, laughingly, with an empty champagne bottle.

"If a yacht is moving at 35 knots per hour and you throw an 120 pound body overboard, how long before anybody notices she's gone?" Jane wondered aloud.

"Well you need to rework the equation and plug in your friend Whitney," Jen said. "Because she's the genius behind Operation Underdog. She's the mastermind behind the con. She's spent the last two years kissing ass all the way to the top of Envy, Inc. It was her idea to get trainees to pay to crew a yacht, so clients get free service and Envy earns money plus employer good-will, win-win. They think she walks on water. She has their admiration and more important, she has their trust..."

At this point a monstrous snore interrupted their colloquy and they turned around to see Mr. Nicholson sprawled in an armchair, head thrown back, dead to the world. As they stared, he drew a deep guttural breath, seeming almost to swallow his tongue, which brought him chokingly to life. He opened one blood shot eye.

"Mr. Nicholson!" Jen warbled, hoping he had neither heard nor made sense of their interchange. "We didn't see you there."

He closed his eye again. "And yet here I am. And where else would I be? This is the butler's pantry and I," he asserted regally, "am the butler." For no reason at all, he began to sing in a spirited if derisive tenor.

For we shall serve them, serve them, serve them,

We shall serve them all our days.

"The question is," he said, portentously, "why are _you_ here? When I was your age, I couldn't follow my father into the pit; Maggie Thatcher was shutting them down. I couldn't go out to the colonies, we'd given them all back. We had gone off war for the moment, so - _my_ choices were extremely limited. That was thirty years ago. I can't very well stand up and say this in front of a class, biting the hand that's feeding me, and so forth, but what in bloody hell are you children thinking? And Americans of all things? You don't have our ridiculous caste system in your country. Land of the free and all that. Do you really need a broken down son of a Brit to tell you that no sane person with a shred of self-respect should waste their life doing the shit work of others? To each their own shit work, that's what I say. If everybody cleaned their own toilets we'd be halfway home to something like Eden by now. Did they finish all the bubbly, by the by?"

John checked, holding one dripping bottle up to the light. "Half a tank here."

"Same," Jane said, examining the bottle in her ice bucket.

"You clearly stand in need of advice, and after forty years of abstinence I stand in need of a drink. Glasses on the sideboard, my poppets."

When they each had a flute in hand, he raised his in a toast, "To Mrs. Stevens - prickly as a hedgehog, but possessed of a damned fine bosom. And what's more, like the miller's wife in Chaucer, methinks she hath 'a lickerish eye.'"

"Mrs. Stevens," the three repeated dubiously.

"You were saying?" Jane prodded the butler, whose eyes had closed again.

"I was?" he sounded confused. "Indeed. Or rather, I already did. You don't want to end up like me - measuring out your life in other people's coffee spoons. You can't have a proper home of your own, you know - and no children, not your own. I hope you don't have children?" He looked at Jane imploringly.

"No, we're good to go on that one," John said brightly. A little too brightly. Jane shot him a dark look.

"After awhile," Nicholson mused, broodingly, "They're not human any more. When they get that rich. It separates them. They lose touch. They go blind. After awhile, they don't care. They become - other. Alien. And that's dangerous." He held out his glass, which John instantly refilled.

"Dangerous," Jen said. "How do you mean? For us? For them?"

"All of the above," the butler said. He pointed a shaky finger in her general direction. "I direct your attention to Mrs. Stevens again. Her lips may say 'your obedient servant' - ah, but her eyes, her eyes say 'off with their heads.' I myself left my last position for one reason only. I could no longer fulfill my duties. I began to entertain the most distressing thoughts. I believe the experts have a term for it - 'homicidal ideation.' In particular, I became obsessed with a certain episode of an old telly program. One of yours."

"The Brady Bunch," Jen guessed. "Or Baywatch."

"Marcia and homicidal ideation. I can see that," Jane agreed.

"Kill Marcia if you must," John said. "But spare Pamela Anderson. I'm shocked, shocked, Sparky. That's Babewatch to you and me. Did you ever try turning off the sound?"

"I tried listening to _Cosmos_ , but even Carl Sagan couldn't save it for me."

"I was speaking of The Twilight Zone." Nicholson interrupted, gently. "A little piece called 'To Serve Man.'"

A moment of silence. Ah yes, the cookbook episode. In which benevolent extraterrestrials are found to have an ulterior motive for befriending earthlings. It was also, Jane recalled, the motto on the military patch of the 509 Stealth Bomber Wing, along with a bit of Latin: _"Gustatus Similis Pullus."_ Which John had once translated as: "Tastes Like Chicken." Way back when, that had seemed a harmless inside joke, aimed at conspiracy rubes who imagined Area 51 harbored flying saucers and such. Nowadays...

The spell was broken by a rude and insistent humming noise. Like a Bronx cheer given by an entire hive of killer bees. Jen held up a pager.

"Ask not for whom the buzzer tolls. Master cabin. Deck 4," Jen said. "See ya." And, like any good aspirant to the status of human chattel, she was gone.

"Toodles," Nicholson said, draining his glass and sitting forward to set it on the sideboard. "I think that about covers it. Class dismissed."

"You need anything before we go?" John said, lingering a minute, torn between pity and fascination. So many tortured souls. So little time. What a world, what a world. Jane was giving the glasses a quick rinse.

"May you ask if I require anything further before you retire?" Nicholson provided the preferred formulation, then sighed and lay back in his chair with the weary air of one whose work is never done. With his eyes closed, John decided, it wasn't Alec Guinness that Nicholson resembled after all. It was Anthony Hopkins. 'Remains of the Day' meets 'Silence of the Lambs'. "Thank you, no. Except - I trust you will hold our little chat in strictest confidence. Like the young man in the book, I have always felt a special responsibility for the innocent. It's coming down to them or us, you know. Eat or be eaten."

"Mums the word," John assured him, feeling the hair prickling on the back of his neck. Jane slowly met his eyes. Dried her hands. Made a beeline for the door.

"There's a good lad," the butler smiled ever so slightly.

"Take it easy, Jeeves," John said. "Don't let the bedbugs bite." Nicholson waved the way royals do, with palm inward and that weird circling motion of the wrist.

"Eat the rich," he admonished. Merrily. The way some Brits say, "Cheery-bye!"

21 London Calling

"Three please," Whitney said to the souvenir vendor, and he handed her three miniature Union Jacks emblazoned with a heart and a picture of a smiling couple. John and Jane immediately evinced distaste.

"I don't do flags," Jane said, upon being handed hers.

"Unless it comes with a martini the size of a bobby's helmet," John was willing to concede, eyeing the headgear of one of London's finest. There seemed to be an uncommon lot of them. Bobbies, that is. "Unlike some people, I don't give a damn whether it's shaken or stirred, as long as there's plenty of gin."

"Protective coloration," Whitney insisted, waving hers. "Think of it as a prop, part of your act. After two weeks of rehearsal you are almost ready for your first live performance. Strike that. You're already live and part of a cast of thousands - and you need to be smiling. There are over 1 million public surveillance cameras in this city, many wired for sound, and located everywhere, taxis and public bathrooms included. They're basically looking for anything menacing, out-of-the-way, or suspicious. Fortunately, at the moment, facial recognition software is expensive and ineffective in a crowd situation. Look suitably overjoyed."

John and Jane obediently grinned like lunatics and brandished their royal wedding favors.

"Brilliant," Whitney approved, then dropped her u-class accent and her voice. "Now let's go case the joint."

They were in Westminster and so had only to walk a few blocks and cross over Vauxhall Bridge to get the lay of the land and a feel for the heightened security arrangements. As they walked, Whitney began to fill them in on the state of play.

"First off, so far you two are batting a thousand. Way to go! Our IMF friend gave his speech - and it electrified. Inequality, progressive taxation, social safety nets, the whole nine yards. He left no billionaire privilege unscathed. He basically smacked the global rich across the face and called out the last forty years of policy choices as the direct cause of the economic crisis, global misery, and international unrest. The back channels are burning up as the elites try to figure out what just happened and whether the general public noticed. He's got the bit between his teeth and a bee in his bonnet, it seems. Started talking about extending extra credit to tapped out governments like Greece via Special Drawing Rights and he's meeting with the German chancellor next week to revisit the entire austerity thing."

"And he's still walking around?" Jane asked curiously, trying to figure out how far they were from Mayfair. The streetscape was so drab and unremarkable, all office buildings and residential flats. An occasional respite in the form of a small public park. But no high end window shopping. No window shopping at all. She missed window shopping.

"With an Arab Spring in his step," Whitney said. "While we wait to see how the empire strikes back, we need to talk about your next little adventure."

"There and back again," Jane said.

"Once upon a time we were plain quiet folk and had no use for adventures," John sighed. "Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things."

"Not this time," Whitney assured them. "You won't believe how easy."

"Uh oh," Jane gave John a look.

"Yeah, I noticed. They're quoting _each other_ now," John said.

"First off - the money," Whitney paused at a particularly bad intersection. It was five o'clock on the eve of a national holiday and traffic clogging the thoroughfare was on the one hand making their progress tricky but on the other masking their conversation. Always trade-offs.

"Oh hell," John laughed.

"Starting with the money," Jane winced. "Always a bad sign."

"You want to work for free?" Whitney said. "Fine by me." A red double-decker bus sped by, full to the brim with flag-waving tourists.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't get me wrong. Even dead people have to make a living," John admitted ruefully. He stepped to one side to avoid a jogger.

"Even if it kills them," Jane rejoined. "Are we raiding someone's trust fund, by the way?"

"We make money the old-fashioned way - we skim it. Off laundered assets. Drug deals, black market weapons, political payoffs," Whitney said. "A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

"Oh well, as long as we're playing Robin Hood. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let's review." Jane adopted a litigious tone. "My government tried to kill me twice, without due process - what's that worth, do you suppose? One million? Two?"

"Dollars or Euros? And don't forget two years interest, compounded daily," John prompted.

"They destroyed our home, stole our pensions, inflicted untold pain and suffering -"

"You left out loss of livelihood, darlin'," John reminded her, as the light changed and they stepped into the crosswalk.

"Loss of livelihood." Jane snapped her fingers. "What he said. We just bailed out his parents, we've had zero income for two years, and do you know what it costs to raise a child these days? Well, do you?" She pointed her Union Jack at John first, and then at Whitney. Suddenly, both of her companions were staring at her. Slack jawed.

"African or European?" Whitney managed at last.

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" John stopped dead in the middle of the intersection, thunderstruck and dazzled by an idea that explained and transformed everything. The pedestrian clock was counting down inexorably. Eight, seven, six.

"Look, we need to stay on message here. And not get run over. Operation Underdog? Hello!" Whitney tried to border collie them along.

"I mean - if a person - or two - were so inclined," Jane recovered. "Which we're not." Cars began honking. Bicycles and mopeds whizzed past. Bobbies sprang up from every compass point, bearing down with grim intent. John's face fell. Whitney made a gesture of surrender and left them there.

"Aren't we?" he asked.

"This ain't the Globe theater, Romeo," a cabbie yelled. "Get the fook out of the way. Eejit!"

"People with bad mothers should not become parents," Jane said, hunching her shoulders and walking hastily toward the curb.

"What about people with great fathers?" John objected, hastening after her. The ensuing torrent of traffic cut most of the bobbies off. They stood on the far side of the street, hands on hips, scowling. "Besides, it wasn't her fault. Your mom."

"This is so screwed up," Jane said. "I was raised in an orphanage. My mom was some kind of drug addict. And that's the happy part of my childhood."

Whitney was not amused. "You came this close to being on the cover of every tabloid in the kingdom tomorrow morning," she scolded. "I can see the headlines: 'Lover's Quarrel Kills Couple on Eve of Royal Nuptials.' And what's all that about your mama?"

"Kate's dress will be on the cover of every tabloid tomorrow morning," Jane said coolly. "And I don't want to talk about my mama."

"Good thing you weren't saying what I thought you were saying," John remarked. "We would be so outta here."

"Let me get this straight," Whitney fumed. "As long as you had nothing more to lose, you were ready to rumble; but if you were suddenly the Von Trapp family or something, you would just climb right out of the movie? Well, maybe I should say so long, farewell to you, girlfriend, 'cause you are letting the side down, as they say over here. Not to mention your own family history. Your mama died in a prison cell alright, but drugs had nothing to do with it. She was tortured to death in Chile, along with thousands of other leftie dissidents. I thought you knew. They sure talked about it enough after they thought you died. All your pinko commie family history. Fox News had you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

They were halfway across Vauxhall Bridge now, with the green and white Legoland of the MI6 building before them, like an alien toy accidentally dropped from a passing space ship onto the mud flats of the Thames. To their left Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and the great wheel of the London Eye. To their right, the shiny new castles of the global rich and the rotting hulk of the Battersea Power Station. Whitney waved her flag at a passing cab.

Jane looked stunned. John looked from Jane to Whitney and back again. "You didn't know that?"

"How would I know that?" Jane demanded. "I never heard anything remotely like that."

"Lie," Whitney said, eyes rolling heavenward. "They lie like breathing."

"It's in your file," John said.

"I never looked in my file," Jane snapped. "Who looks in their own file?"

By their faces, it was pretty clear that John and Whitney both had.

"OK, OK, OK," Jane said. "None of this matters. None of this changes anything. We came here to do a job. An easy job, by all accounts. So let's cut the crap."

"And discuss babies later?" John said hopefully.

"Operation Underdog," Whitney interposed sternly. "Is a simple in-and-out live drop. You show up in a car tomorrow morning, you drop off a package, and you're pretty much done."

They had resumed walking and had reached the Lambeth side, where fresh boodles of bobbies were unloading vans full of riot barricades, those aluminum frames that resemble bicycle racks and are used in crowd control. Apparently, they were preparing to close down the bridge.

"Speaking of things people know," John began, "Were we aware that the bridge will be closed tomorrow?"

"Oh sure. No biggie. The car will be taking an alternate route," Whitney assured him. They were off the bridge and then under it, traversing a footpath that wound along the river for a spell. Near at hand, a bright yellow amphibious vehicle sped down a concrete ramp and entered the water with a brownish splash. "We had planned to have it pick you up at your squat. This side of the river."

"Notice I did not so much as flinch when you said 'squat,'" Jane observed. "Nor mention the proximity of the Dorchester or the Ritz. But I admit to having qualms at the thought of dropping off a package at a place that must have such fond memories of IRA bombings."

They had rounded the MI6 building, with its sturdy, no-nonsense fencing and shielded, turnstiled entries, and were negotiating the unpleasant junction of roads and rail lines known as Vauxhall Cross. Breathing here was difficult, as the area was more charitable to toxin-emitting cars and buses than to mere oxygen-dependent bipeds.

"And if that's all there is to it, wouldn't FedEx be a whole lot cheaper?" John asked, thinking yes, there was more than a whiff of sulphur underlying the choking gas fumes and car exhaust.

"See the trick is, you have to drop off the package _inside_ ," Whitney emphasized. "I have been trying for almost a year, but they always stop me cold. However, tomorrow we have the perfect setup."

"I'm lost." Jane said, lowering her voice to minimize the echo inside the pedestrian tunnel. They were beneath the railway viaduct. "I thought we were trying to hack a network."

"And to do that, we have to get _inside_ ," Whitney reiterated. "Get inside all their anti-hacking defenses and - make a phone call."

"The plot thickens. And the contract requirements escalate," John said.

They were skirting a block of gay bars and fitness clubs, bristling with trendy youngsters of all genders. There must have been a Starbucks close by; the green and white cups were more ubiquitous than blue jeans.

"Need more background," Jane said. "We know about the spy in the bag and his network. They got him last August. Here it is April." She marked two points in the air, widely separated. "Please fill in the blank."

"You know what Envy, Inc. is," Whitney sounded a tad impatient.

John raised his hand. "You gild lilies for a living." A left turn, a quick right, and the new construction was gone, replaced by Georgian rowhouses, wider sidewalks, and narrower streets where two cars could no longer drive abreast.

"Give that young man a prize. Indeed we do. For time-constrained, self-important, organizationally-challenged plutocrats. You might say we're there to help them be better at being rich. We connect all the best people with all the best things - including each other. While you two were pottering about aimlessly for the past two years, some of our old gang and I have been busy infiltrating what is arguably the most expensive and exclusive lifestyle management group in the world. We now have access on a daily basis to the most beautiful of the beautiful people, the crème de la creme. Jen's bunch may have the digital 'goods' on the global rich, the 'dirt' if you like - but I know where and how they live, down to what cars they drive, whose designer clothes they wear, and what's in their refrigerators. I staff their lavish multiple homes, I buy gifts for their mistresses, I hook them up with the most talented tax avoidance lawyers. And one of my newest clients," she paused for effect. "Is the head of MI6."

"So - deliver the package yourself," Jane said. "What am I missing?"

"That I don't have clearance to enter the building. And I need to remain under cover to help run other, possibly more critical missions," Whitney explained.

"Whereas we - " John began.

"Are expendable," Jane finished.

"Are _über_ _c_ apable and opaque to the Powers-That-Be. Having been declared legally dead, your data has been scrubbed. We can use your biometrics any which way we need to. Moreover, at the moment you are not plugged into any other long-term ops," Whitney argued. "You can therefore approach the mission tomorrow with a whatever-it-takes frame of mind. Knowing full well that, at the end of the day, I'm going to fire your ass."

"Asses?" John wondered. "Plural? There are two of us."

"A man is always suspect, whereas women are routinely disregarded. So we're sending Jane in. You're - backup."

"What the hell does that mean? Am I driving the car?" John wanted to know.

"Negative. We have a driver, they know him; he's part of our carefully crafted routine." Whitney said.

"Am I in the car at least?" John had a feeling he already knew the answer.

"That would raise a red flag that doesn't need to be raised. Any security guard with a gun on his hip is going to believe he can handle a mere woman. A woman and a man - warning signs begin to flash. And speaking of things that flash -" Whitney stripped off the watch she was wearing and handed it to Jane. "Your weapon, madam."

"I don't do jewelry," Jane said, examining the timepiece critically. It had an outsized square dial and a black plastic band. "Well, pearls on occasion."

"Nothing for me?" John sounded like a crest-fallen four-year-old.

They had arrived at and were walking through a small public wilderness, densely planted with trees and bushes and the odd organic sculpture, an improbable bit of London greenery situated, or so a sign said, where bombs had left nothing but a blackened wasteland after the Blitz. "Welcome," the sign graciously announced, "To the Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden and Paradise Project."

Whitney studied John a minute. She glanced right, glanced left, scanning for cameras and microphones, and then said in a lowered voice, "How do you feel - about jet packs?"

22 The Palace Guards

"I'm sorry, Missis, the answer is no." Inside his security cubby in the bowels of MI6, the wiry ginger-haired guard was growing weary. "It's 'no' now, it'll be 'no' five minutes from now, and if you choose to wait 'round till it's time for us all to go home to our tea, the answer will still be 'no.'"

But standing beside the gently purring Town Car with its E4-NVY license plate, Jane was just getting warmed up. Her hair dyed ash blonde and twisted into a fashionably careless bun, she laid the Oxonian accent on extra thick, a power play aimed at his working class subconscious. "Perhaps you didn't understand me." She removed her sunglasses and tempered the accent with a confidential smile made all the more beguiling by her choice of lipstick, a bare rose shade called Über Nude.

"Oh I understand you, all right. You want in and you're not getting in." Rather than backing down, he was instinctively pushing back, the Scottish burr in his voice thickening.

"I probably didn't make myself clear." She put her head on one side and unbuttoned her black Hugo Boss jacket.

"Clear as this glass between us." He straightened and tightened his tie, which had gone askew.

"This package is for your employer, Sir John -"

"Sir John is not my employer, I work for Her Majesty's Government. And that's rather a sore subject, I might add, as I've been made redundant by the last round of cutbacks, which is why you find me here on a holiday, wringing what last few quid I can from what's left of the public purse."

"Well you see the package is to be delivered to Sir John, but it is _for_ His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, who intends to give it to his father, the Prince of Wales, at dinner this evening."

" _For_ Prince William who intends to give it _to_ Prince Charles. Why didn't you say so?" the guard made it sound as if all her troubles were over. And then cheerfully punctured her rising hopes. "Because I'm a flaming Republican who believes the monarchy is an elitist, anti-democratic, archaic waste of money at a time when the rest of us are being tossed out of the lifeboat without so much as a 'by your leave'. If I can have 9,000 nurses or one sodding queen, I'll take the Florence Nightingales, thank you. And if the royals get to exchange one less gift on a day many in the country are jobless and scraping by, I say tough titty biscuits. So you can leave the package as usual or you can take it back where it came from, I don't give a bally Archduke's damn. But either way, you are not stepping foot in this building. Not without the proper clearance."

"And how does one get the proper clearance?" Jane asked, "In an emergency situation, say."

"One doesn't. Not here. In any situation." He folded his arms. She folded hers. They stared at one another, bristling like two alley cats. At this point a taller, Monty Python sort of senior officer entered the booth with a genial, "Go and get your elevenses, then, Pegg. They've got the national flimflam on in the break room if you've a stomach for it. Hallo," he regarded Jane over his eyeglasses with mild surprise. "What have we here?"

"I'm trying to see Sir John."

"Are you now? I'm afraid he can't be trying to see you, or we'd have heard about it. Have we heard about it, Pegg?"

"We have not," Pegg declared in no uncertain terms.

"It's a matter of the utmost urgency," Jane said, fixing Monty with her great grey-green eyes.

"Is it?" Monty inquired of Pegg.

"It's a matter of the utmost rubbish." Pegg disagreed vehemently. "Or she'd hand the blinking package over and faff off."

"No need to pitch a wobbly, young Pegg. Let's keep our hair on, shall we?" the older man said breezily. "Do we know what's in the package? No?"

Jane reached down to pick up a black leather case, several times longer than it was wide. She placed the bag on the counter, on her side of the glass, and unzipped the brass zipper, letting the case drop open to reveal, nestled in black velvet - a gold-plated AK-47.

"Blimey," Pegg breathed.

"Blimey indeed," Monty concurred.

"I was told," Jane said "That I must personally place this in Sir John's hands. Perhaps we might contact him directly? I do have his private number," she assured them, zipping the case closed again. "But I can't seem to ring him from here.

23 Step Into My Office, Baby

They confiscated her phone, ran a check on her fake ID, and made her stand in a full body scanner long enough to read the tags on her lingerie. La Perla, if you must know.

"We took the liberty of calling up," Monty said. "And C has agreed to see you. Young Pegg here will light your way."

On the other side of the divide, Jane set the gun case down briefly and checked her watch. "They'll be saying their vows any minute now," she said with a sigh, surreptitiously pressing a minute silver button.

The watch was in fact a miniature cell phone modified to broadcast multiple silent messages to MI6's proprietary in-house communication and computer systems. "How does this work exactly?" Jane had wanted to know. This was last night, following their trek over Vauxhall Bridge, when they were at dinner in a quirky bohemian café. Whitney was a tad vague.

"Before they killed him, our boy genius created a sort of super-spyware that can transmit wirelessly. The UK and the US have been using it to spy on and steal data from just about everybody. In some cases it has also been used to shut down targeted machines or websites, erase data, even hijack industrial control systems."

"Whoa. You mean like - maybe in Iran, where their centrifuges went haywire?" John stopped chewing.

"I mean exactly like the centrifuges in Iran. He managed to get us the rootkit and updated command modules the day he died. If your watch gizmo works, we will be uploading patches that will allow us to access, monitor, and ultimately, if need be, take control of the systems that are supposed to be monitoring and controlling us."

"I thought all signals in and out of the building were shielded," Jane looked up from her vegetarian curry, perplexed.

Whitney spread her hands. "I'd be lying if I said I know how it all works. But they tell me that we have the technology. You'll know you've made contact if phones nearby start to ring. Just one ring and then silence. We may not be able to tell right away if everything installs properly or not; and it may take time for the spyware to report back. Kind of like the Mars Rover."

"So I'm essentially going to put my life on the line to take a stroll through MI6 with absolutely no guarantee of success?" Jane's brow was furrowed.

"Think of it as walking into hell for a heavenly cause," Whitney suggested. "But - yeah."

"I begin to understand 007's addiction to martinis. A martini would be good here." Jane sounded rueful.

"I'm sorry Missis," their waiter had overheard her last remark. He was an affable Jamaican with dreads bundled beneath a rainbow-colored knit cap. "We're unlicensed, BYOB only. But we do have Ribena Blackcurrant or Robinson's Orange Squash."

Before Jane could render an acerbic opinion on the relative merits of martinis versus soft drinks, John hastily swallowed his mouthful of tri-color pasta and piped up, "Definitely. A round of Robinsons."

"For the table, sir?"

"Oh, I think everyone should have Orange Squash," Jane said wickedly, on the theory that a people who made such stuff should be condemned to drink it.

"A round for the house, then," John proclaimed. "Orange squash for everyone!" An elderly couple in the corner had clapped vigorously.

Pegg snorted. He swiped a card and typed in a PIN to exit the security booth. Once he and Jane were inside MI6 proper, they found themselves in a long service hallway, where he eventually stopped to repeat the process to gain access to an elevator.

"This must be the most secure place on the planet," Jane marveled. With sublime mendacity.

Pegg sniffed. Gazed at the ceiling of the elevator. "The Pentagon gives public tours, you know. Not us." They were rising rapidly. Fifth floor, sixth, seventh. At the eighth the car stopped. Pegg pushed a buzzer and put his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself.

"Judging from what you put me through, I doubt anyone could break into this building," Jane went on guilefully.

"They'd better not try. We're secure to the nines. Missiles on the roof now."

"Really," Jane opened her eyes at him, truly taken aback for a moment. Then recovered and shuddered. Ostentatiously. "Well, that just tells you, doesn't it?"

"I should say it does," he agreed. He was plainly enjoying his role of MI6 impresario. Just then his cell phone went off, playing a shred of song by Billy Bragg. The chorus from the Internationale.

So come brothers and sisters,

_For the struggle carries on_.

He pulled it from his pocket, but it only rang once, Jane noted. He shrugged and put it away.

"The times we live in," Jane shook her head, soberly despondent this time. The case was beginning to feel a little heavy. All that gold.

"It's a war, alright. But between you and me -" He let himself look at Jane a minute, but before he could say more, the intercom crackled. "Do come in," the invitation was given briskly, by a man's voice. And immediately, the elevator doors parted.

It was a corridor like any other but it reminded Jane of a painting she'd seen somewhere. Of an orange street in unsparing sunlight with a girl running uphill. Beside the girl, an arcade of doors marched far into the distance. And up ahead an ominous shadow loomed. In the corridor facing Jane, there was no daylight, not even a window, and the floor was a chessboard of green and white. No end of doors though, all closed, receding on either hand. Empty, eerie, menacing. Surreal. But not Dali. John would know the picture she had in mind. Art was his bailiwick. All she had was Yalie polysci, which turned out to have been hopelessly in thrall to the worldview of the predatory, plutocratic few. So what had she learned, really? This corridor was like that. Like her bogus education and a painting by an artist whose name she could not remember. A trap with no exit.

Under the watchful eyes of multiple cameras, they trekked all the way to the door at the end of the corridor, where Pegg showed her how to present her palm to a hand scanner. "It's just another way of signing in," he said. She prayed silently to the hacker gods that her data had indeed been expunged from global security repositories and high-fived the input screen. Several latches snapped open with a series of clicks and they were allowed to enter a small suite. Directly in front of them was a waiting area dominated by a large and unattended desk. An empty conference room stood off to the right, and to their left, through a half-open office door, they could hear voices.

"This will just take a moment, and then we'll break for luncheon. I'll have to leave you on your own as I promised to make the delivery in person. If you don't care to brave the canteen with its _delirium nuptiis_ , I can have something sent up. Hallo." The head of MI6 stuck his head out. "I must say I had given up on you. Let's have a look, shall we?" he said to Jane, stepping back so that Jane could join him in the inner sanctum. The phone on the unattended desk rang shrilly as she passed it. Which caused Sir John to pause in irritation. However the phone fell silent immediately, so Sir John's face cleared. "Gone to voicemail. Good. You needn't wait," he said to Pegg, who tugged his receding forelock in mock salute and withdrew.

The office was spacious, with large windows across one wall. Jane had an impression of granite and glass and curves. There was a glass-topped executive desk, and a number of green leather chairs, one of which was occupied. The occupant had his back to the door and all Jane could see was the back of a well-shaped head.

"May I?" Jane handed the gun case off and stood quietly, thinking things were going pretty smoothly, as Sir John set the case on one end of his desk, talking all the while. "You may recall the dust-up about my daughter and a certain weapon that once belonged to a certain Iraqi gentleman, which I was given in appreciation for - ah - services rendered." He began unzipping the brass zipper. "It was a tempest in a teapot, a slight Facebook indiscretion. Someone took her picture looking like Patty Hearst under our Christmas tree and posted it. It got into all the gossip rags." He had the case open and was inspecting the contents. "His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was amused and intrigued apparently. So much so that his son asked if I could put my hands on another one as a thank-you for all that his father's done about the wedding and so forth. Kind of an inside joke and filial homage, rolled up in one. Quite a nice gesture, I thought. So of course I said I'd try. Eh?" He turned the case so his guest could see.

"That," his guest said, leaning forward, "is a first rate example of Dictator Chic." Jane froze at the first word. Sheer panic coursed through her. She thought fast. Prepared a face to meet the face she was about to meet.

"They have a name for this sort of thing, do they?" Sir John was amused.

"There's so much of it going around, they had to call it something." His guest settled back in his chair.

"You'll want a signature?" Sir John asked Jane as he re-zipped the case.

" _Si vous êtes heureux, nous sommes heureux_ ," Jane said. ["If you're happy, we're happy."]

The effect of her voice on the man in the chair was volcanic, nuclear even - in a semi-controlled Fukushima sort of way. In jumping out of his chair, he seemed almost to jump out of his skin.

Sir John did not notice. His phone had just rung and he was trying to figure out what button to push to answer it. "It's just a hop, skip, and a scurry across to Buckingham, old man. I won't be quite an hour. I say -" When the phone failed to ring a second time, Sir John glanced up to find his American colleague rooted in place, his bloodless face the color of Pentagon limestone. "You look as though you've seen a ghost."

24 Of All the Gin Joints

" _Un fantôme,"_ the man repeated. _"Fort possible."_ ["A ghost. Very possibly _."]_

"I'm afraid we can't dilly-dally, the PM expects to be the man with the golden gun before dessert and I'm a little behind my time," Sir John urged good-naturedly. He had Jane by the elbow and was steering her back the way she had come.

"Of course," the man recovered sufficiently to join them at the hall door, where he proceeded to stare pointedly at Jane. "It was just - have we met?"

At that, Jane turned her head to meet his scrutiny directly, and presented him with a totally blank façade where her face should have been. She looked more like a marble statue than a flesh and blood woman. A queen or a goddess carved from unfeeling stone or etched in relief upon a cold hard coin.

"Oh, come now, James," Sir John guffawed. "You can do better, surely. He's been single a bit too long, Miss - er, um. I hope you'll excuse him."

"Brown," Jane allowed, with a tight smile and an air of _ennui_. "And yes, I do hear that rather often." The other thing she was hearing as they approached the elevator was the muffled sound of phones ringing up and down the hallway from behind closed doors. Neither man seemed to notice. Again and again. That telltale single ring that meant the spyware was being fruitful and multiplying.

"Brown. Not Smith or Doe? Because you could be her twin," James seemed to be arguing with himself. They had reached the elevator. As Sir John did the honors, swiping his badge and so forth, Jane felt as though her former lover's eyes were boring a hole straight through her. "A dead ringer."

"Bollocks!" Sir John exclaimed. They both turned to look at him as the elevator doors slid open. "Dash it all, I was supposed to bring that Libyan brief. See her out, will you? Or take her to lunch, why don't you?" Sir John grinned knowingly. From his breast pocket the James Bond theme began to play. Just the opening guitar chords. He pulled out his cell phone, which immediately went silent. "There's a good chap," he said absently, and, returning his phone to his pocket, trotted away.

As soon as his back was turned, James grabbed Jane roughly by the arm and practically flung her into the waiting elevator. Jane noted that he too had a badge, confirming that he was very much at home here. He slid the badge through the reader with a suppressed savagery, as if it was a throat he wished to slit. From a neutral Krav Maga stance, but with her hands at her side rather than at the ready, Jane prepared to fight her ex-beloved to the death. Or fake his pants off.

"Let's see - you're very loud, you have perfect teeth, and are prone to violence. I don't even need to see your gun. You must be an American." Jane attempted to ice the short distance between them.

"Kiss me," he said, turning abruptly and backing her into a corner.

"Add sex perv _and_ insane. The complete stereotype," she snapped. Instinct goaded her to let fly with a groin-kick/hammer-fist combo. Reason warned that if she did, it was game over.

She struggled a moment, the way an ordinary woman would, turning her head, scuffling with him briefly; but he was ruthlessly insistent. He found her lips and expertly delivered one of those long, slow, deep, hot kisses made famous by a certain Reagan-era baseball movie. Jane made herself go limp, and stayed that way. Played the cold fish to the end, refusing to respond. But despite herself she felt all the old chemistry - along with his shoulder holster and hard evidence that he was at some level sincerely happy to see her. In a Mae West sort of way.

"Damn you," he said. The lift had stopped and opened without prompting, meaning they had reached some less restricted zone.

"I shall have you up before a magistrate for that," Jane said frostily, smoothing her hair and avoiding her ex's gaze.

"I shall have _you_ up before a firing squad," he retorted, walking her briskly past a gym, a lounge, and a staff cafe. His cell phone rang - the theme song from "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly." _Wah-wah-wah._ He ignored it. Televisions squawked and fawned in every room, magnets for workers who had drawn the short straw on this one-time holiday, but who were nonetheless determined to participate in the pro-monarchist PR binge, if only virtually and vicariously. They kept their noses more or less glued to the telly screens, oblivious to the drama enacted behind their backs. "And the jury should note," James continued, "that the lady failed to scream."

"Ladies don't, as a rule," Jane snapped back. "Moreover, much good it would do me. I'm standing in a constabulary of sorts and I've just been accosted by someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a constable."

"Of sorts," James conceded. He gestured toward the rapt and huddled big-screen masses as he led her through bulletproof sliding glass doors onto a broad balcony facing the river. "Any number of people to help you. Feel free to raise a ruckus."

"Don't think I won't. Because as delightful as this has been, I must be going," she said, glancing at her 'watch' and pressing a second concealed button, a red one this time. She understood that by so doing she had just activated a burst transmitter that should indicate both her physical location and her desire to be extracted from a sticky situation. ASAP.

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world," James stopped beside an outdoor table and pointed at a chair. "Sit."

Having determined at a glance that she was only on the fourth floor, with a series of terraces between her and the outer fence, and that she could, in a pinch, parkour off the building with relative ease, Jane sat. A few pigeons circled the antennas on the highest tower.

"I can see that you are either deranged or high," Jane commented. "This is obviously some deep-seated cry for help."

"I thought I'd put moral dilemmas behind me," James said, heaving a sigh of frustration and something else. Anguish maybe. He threw himself into a chair. "And now here you are and my world turns upside down. Do I kill you, do I turn you in?" he drew his gun, a Walther PPK/S, removed the safety, and put it on the table between them. "Do you have an opinion?"

"Whoever she was, she seems to have made quite an impression," Jane sat back and debated overturning the table. She knew the gun was bait. She also knew that John should be on his way. Sit tight, she told herself.

"You want me to count the ways," James smiled painfully. "Or apologize? The truth is I did not regret it. I was right. At the time."

"So what's the problem?" Jane let her gaze wander right and left. No sign of John. Damn.

"You chose that half-assed slacker piece of shit over me," he almost shouted.

"I can't imagine why," was Jane's swift, barbed reply. She stared pointedly from him to the gun and back. "Sexual assault and intimidation - what woman could resist?"

"Lisbon. Prague. St. Petersburg. Look at me," he demanded. She looked, with the blandest of expressions, trying not to remember some of the best sex any woman could ask for. But any emotional attachment had been short-lived and almost entirely one-sided. For good reason.

"I'm thinking - trust," she spent a long time on that one word, "trust might be an issue in your line of work." She was walking a tightrope here, trying to say only the sort of things an unwitting but cautious hostage might say. And yet hit him where it hurt, if such a place existed.

"You _knew_ that marriage was fake. You _knew_ it was just cover. That she meant nothing to me. That it was over the minute the mission was over and we debriefed."

"You make it sound like something out of Shakespeare. Star-crossed lovers separated by tragic flaws and world events."

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Here as - in this building?"

"As - in my life again."

"I'm very much wishing that I had not come," Jane said honestly. "If that is any comfort. This has turned into the most complete cockup."

"Who or what are you after," James asked, narrowing his eyes. The next instant he was opening them wide, as epiphany struck. He dug his phone from his pocket and dialed a number. "Say that again." Jane had a sinking feeling. What had she said?

"You saw for yourself. I'm not after anything." Over his shoulder, she could see two men advancing toward them, in aprons. They might have been waiters from the canteen. Except on closer inspection they looked very like Monty and Pegg, MI6's own Keystone Cops. James held out his mobile like a microphone.

"Say 'cockup' again. Say anything you damn well please. Tell me, for instance, how you feel about the IMF." He wanted a voice imprint. Shit! All her old stuff was archived - retina scans, DNA, fingerprints, alias profiles. But what about her conversations with IMF Guy on the charter flight and up in his New York office? To her knowledge, _Deus Ex_ had not gone out of their way to access and erase any new recordings that might exist. On the theory that her involvement was so limited, amounting to a single data point or two in an ocean of intelligence. After all, what were the odds?

"I'm just a courier. Do you allow firearms in this establishment?" she asked the two men, over James's shoulder. They had stationed themselves a little to the right and behind him. He automatically stiffened and put his hand on the PPK.

"No smoking, no drugs, no weapons is our rule, Missis," Pegg replied, reaching over James to offer her a menu card. "We do allow dogs, so long as they're service animals."

"We're featuring an all-wedding menu today, with special dishes inspired by the royal reception," Monty said, sizing up the situation and motioning to Jane keep calm and carry on. "I call your attention to the Cornish Crab Salad on Citrus Blini, which has been selling briskly. And perhaps the gentleman would fancy the Confit of Pork Belly with Crayfish and Crackling." He had a pair of shiny silver handcuffs at the ready.

"My personal choice would be the Scottish Langoustines with Lemon Mayonnaise," Pegg said, pulling a small spray can from under his apron and giving it a vigorous shake. "And do be sure to save room for dessert - a slice of Chocolate Biscuit Cake, which is Prince William's favorite and made from a royal family recipe." With that, he sprayed the contents of the can directly in James's face and deftly immobilized his right arm as Monty grabbed the left. James yelled in acute pain and all three of them went down in a heap, as Jane scrambled to one side.

Apparently she was being rescued. But should she stay put and play the damsel in distress or make like a hockey player and get the puck out of there? The jig was up, James was on to her, to her connection with IMF Guy, possibly to the implications of a gal from Greece bearing gifts. In such a situation, her would-be knights in shining armor, Monty and Pegg, would probably say that things had gone pear-shaped. And they would be right.

The PPK skittered into the open. Came to a rest at Jane's feet. If there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow, Jane thought, throwing a gun to a professional killer in a tight spot must have some sort of meaning. Silencing James was imperative. And it was a pity, but it seemed she would also have to relegate Monty and Pegg, accidental members of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Club, to the trash heap of collateral damage. The younger Jane would have done the deed already. The current Jane hesitated.

Because the temptation to take up arms against a sea of troubles was instinctive and logical on the one hand. Practically second nature. The years of conditioning had done that. On the other, the irony of taking lives when she was carrying one was not lost on her. The irony that the executioner had a baby on board.

For a minute, she looked up, past the pigeons this time. Really, universe? Why and how had it come to this? That the obvious way out of any tight spot was to go around offing people, including those who might have loved us once upon a time? To say nothing of snuffing innocent sparrows?

Exactly when had her esoteric profession become a way of life?

And speaking of things that fly, where the hell _was_ that half-assed slacker John? Torn between compunction and vexation, she bent down to pick up the PPK.

25 The Killing Type

"I say. Was that supposed to happen?" Monty wondered aloud, a trifle concerned.

"Well. He was supposed to become 'tractable.' That's how they put it in class," Pegg replied. "Tractable."

The two men stood over James, who lay face forward on the terrace pavement, silent and immobile, wrists cuffed behind him. Monty donned a pair of spectacles and leaned in.

"About as tractable as a dead parrot. Should he be turning blue?"

"Let's see." Pegg rubbed his chin. "Memory lapses, crying jags, altered perception of reality. I don't remember anything specifically about facial pigment. But it's a new product."

Jane straightened with the PPK in hand, checked that it was good to go, and added her mite to their deliberations. "A little mouth-to-mouth?" she suggested.

Both men backed away at that, exchanging uncomfortable glances. "No need, he's coming round," Monty sounded relieved. James groaned and his head slipped to one side. He coughed and drew a deep breath, like a dolphin surfacing after a long dive. "I'm sorry to trouble you further, Miss, but we'll need a statement before you go."

"Statement my ass."

Jane became aware of a high-pitched whining, the hum of a thousand giant hornets angry and in heat. Turning around, she beheld John, hovering a foot or two above the terrace at the helm of a vertical take-off and landing vehicle known as an X-Jet. Powered by a cruise missile engine, it could best be described as a cross between a jet-ski and a flying pulpit. It maneuvered with the ease of a Segway and could reach top speeds of 60 mph. Due to an advanced chameleon coating that mirrored its surroundings, the X-Jet was difficult to focus on visually, but Jane had no trouble fixating on John. He set the X-Jet down and whipped out a pistol.

"Hold it right there, Goldilocks." Straight from central casting, John was wearing standard-issue Men in Black attire, including white shirt, skinny black tie, Oakleys and an earpiece. Jane found herself staring down the barrel of her very own Sig. "Hands up." Obediently, she put her hands over her head, the PPK clearly on display. Monty and Pegg followed suit. John approached Jane with an abundance of caution, seized and pocketed the PPK, and motioned Jane toward the X-Jet. "Let's go, sister."

"I beg your pardon," Jane remonstrated, as John stopped snapping chewing gum long enough to wink at her over his Oakleys.

"Half a mo'," Pegg protested. "She's a British citizen on British soil and she's been victimized by your mate there, I've seen the footage myself. A regular old Tailhook moment it was."

"Good thing you've got us around to watch your back," John hustled Jane onto the X-Jet. "Because 'my mate there' spotted her right away. Top of the US terror watch list. We're headed straight back to Gatwick. Do not pass Go, do not collect a hundred dollars."

"What utter rot. I am nothing of the sort," Jane said indignantly, twisting around to tell John off. "You're mad, you Yanks, the whole lot of you."

"We did a background check. The worst one can say of her is she voted Lib Dem last round, but there's no law against that, you know," Monty insisted.

"The killing type? Her?" Pegg shook his head. "We've got terrorists under our beds, then. And by now we know who put them there." He was interrupted by a cackling at his feet. James was rolling and jerking like a fish out of water. As John pressed the ignition button to restart the X-Jet, James burst into a peal of maniacal laughter. He struggled into a sitting position and spoke as though to a hovering and invisible multitude.

"Once more, once more! I will kill thee again and love thee after. It was you in New York; it was you who changed the Dodo's song. Cuckoo, cuckoo. Your Dodo's doomed. The last of his kind. Deceased, demised, passed on. An ex-Dodo. It's all arranged. Cuckoo, cuckoo. You can kill an idea after all. Watch me. The fat lady is about to sing." He left off speaking to give a blood-curdling howl.

John saluted as the X-Jet began to lift off, Jane standing stiffly in front of him.

"Do send a lawyer," she implored, gripping the side rails of the X-Jet.

"Do avoid a land war in Asia," John exhorted as they rocketed straight up a good fifty feet. He had not yet mastered the finer points of X-Jet control.

"Do you think those roof-top missiles are still on auto?" Pegg asked, shading his eyes as the shimmer of the X-Jet climbed higher and higher.

"It is the age of austerity." Monty said, in a tone of despondence and resignation. "There's no telling what's been cut or kept any more. Let us at least hope, if they do fire, they make it all the way to Downing Street."

26 Riding Shotgun Down the Avalanche

"We'll get on a train and never stop," Jane laughed, once she got her breath back. "Only it's a rocket and you stopped."

"Sorry about that. Steering's a breeze, but the vertical thrusters are for shit," John complained, as the X-Jet jerked to a halt. "I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be her maiden flight."

He leaned a bit to the left and the X-Jet described a lazy arc back over the Thames. Nothing much was stirring down below. Though rain had been forecast, and the sky was the color of dirty wool, even the weather was towing the line. Not so much as a drop had marred the day. Most of London was either pasted to its telly screens at home or safely corralled within the wedding security zone and worshiping one jumbotron or another. Early on, the unions had threatened strikes over such a wanton waste of public wealth when so many social needs went begging, but in the end the financial elect, their propaganda machine, and 5000 policemen had triumphed. The wedding of mass distraction was even now concluding without incident. Or so, to everyone but Deus Ex, it would seem.

"I'd about given up on you." Jane leaned against John and listened to the full-throated clamor from the other side of the river, where the royal couple had begun their drive by gilded carriage from Westminster to Buckingham Palace. Bread and circuses without the bread, she was thinking. If she closed her eyes did they sound more like arctic seals or savanna baboons? She couldn't decide. She opened her eyes again. It was nice up here, like riding a Vespa through an eternity of clouds. "Oh look, doves!" She pointed. Released in celebration, a shifting cloud comprised of about a hundred snow white birds rose up, circled Big Ben, and flew toward them in an undulating arabesque.

"Oh fuck, doves!" John said, dropping the X-Jet precipitously to avoid either a bird-strike collision or air intake mishap. He went low, the birds went high, and the rapier mini-missile shot right between them, neatly self-destructing after missing both targets and before impacting the stony facade of Thames House, home of MI5.

The shock wave blew them sideways. Fortuitously. For, woken from its mechanical slumbers, another missile from atop another building on the other side of the embankment fired off, only to bury itself in the gently flowing Thames. The resulting geyser of foam and water almost knocked the X-Jet into Lambeth Bridge. A steep climb to avoid impact and they were once more easy pickings, for the riverfront was fortified with a kind of automated gauntlet, an entire integrated system of rooftop missiles that, at the moment, were actively seeking the X-Jet and its passengers. Apparently the X-Jet's chameleon coating could fool cameras and the human eye but not radar or infrared guidance technology.

A voice in his ear interrupted John's frantic concentration. "Got a minute?"

"Not now, Sparky. Hands're kinda full," he barked. Dropping to the other side of the bridge, he tried to hold the X-Jet steady as another missile's proximity fuze gave the suicide order. Four lanterns shattered atop their posts.

"So I gather. Listen. Things are hotting up like nobody's business and we are bugging out. You want the good news or the bad news?" In the background John could hear people shouting. A car door slammed. Jen was breathing hard. John couldn't concentrate.

"No time for jokes, talk to Jane."

Jane took over the earpiece, without enthusiasm. "OK, go."

"Congratulations. Every member of the British Armed Forces not nailed down at the parade route is headed in your direction," Jen informed her. "Coming by land, sea, and air. They're going to close every bridge from Battersea to Canary Wharf and shut down anything that's moving on or near the river."

"Well that certainly sucks," Jane said. John was keeping the X-Jet low over the water on the theory that the radar was designed to detect airborne threats and would have a hard time differentiating the X-Jet from buildings and ground clutter. "But it's not like anybody told us there was an air defense web in this part of town."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're working on that." She turned aside to say to someone else, "No, try 1030 GHz. Crap, it's not even encrypted. What the fuck?"

"Or that we had friends visiting from back home," Jane continued.

"Be nice to me. I can't type as fast when you're being mean, and if I don't get this old video footage loaded on the MPS surveillance system we're _all_ going down," Jen pouted. "Just keep your pom-poms on, we're sending reinforcements. And you're gonna love Plan B."

"Don't bet on it."

"There's a boat heading downriver."

"Boat," Jane pointed to the only craft in sight. It was hard to miss. A smallish tourist barge, painted bright yellow with an oversized plastic duck's head affixed to its prow. It was just passing under the Westminster Bridge. "And?"

"Land on it."

"Land on it?" Jane looked up at John, who was holding the X-Jet about five feet off the surface of the Thames.

"Tell Leo he's got five minutes to get you to the exit. Starting - now. _Capisce_?"

"Leo. Five minutes. Roger that. Sort of."

But Jen was gone and John was already riding the barge's wake. He zipped under the bridge close behind it and at an altitude just high enough to maneuver the X-Jet onto a square bit of roof without having to pop back up into missile alley. The moment they touched down, the pilot of the barge opened the throttle wide. The engine noise and turbulence increased, but the acceleration was barely noticeable. She had a flat bottom as well as a flat roof, after all. She wasn't built for speed.

A hatch in the roof flipped back and out popped the torso of - a white duck in an admiral's uniform, genuine beaver-covered bicorn hat included.

" _Pryvet!"_ said the duck in flawless Russian. Then, in English, "Welcome aboard!" ["Hey there!"]

" _Kak dela?"_ Jane said. "And Jen says we have about four minutes to get wherever we're going." ["Wazzup?"]

John pointed at the X-Jet. "Should we tie this sucker down?"

The duck waved at the X-Jet dismissively. "Is made with 3D printer. What happens happens. And we have world of time. Sign here." It made no sense, but rather than waste time arguing, Jane and John took the clipboard the duck was holding and hastily put their Hancocks on a creamy white document embellished with multiple stamps and seals. "Come," the duck said, as they passed the London Eye. "We were just getting to the good part."

Following the duck down a folding ladder into the boat, John and Jane found a buslike interior, basically a tin can lined with a double row of benches separated by a center aisle. The pilot's seat was forward and the duck had returned to sit in it, steering against the current toward the middle of the channel and the silvery spider webs of the Jubilee Bridges. Someone coughed, and John and Jane turned to find Vinnie and Angela posed together in the stern of the boat like a bride and groom on a wedding cake.

"Vincent Giancarlo Amato," said the duck, over his shoulder, "wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together from this day forward in an exclusive estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others keep only unto her so long as you both may live?"

Vinnie paused, appearing to think deeply. Angela put one hand on her hip and tapped her foot. As if blown by a hundred breezes, the feathers on her dress fluttered and then were still. Vinnie grinned and raised the hand he was holding to his lips. "Abso-fucking-lutely," he promised.

"Angela Burns Smith," the duck continued, "wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband to live together from this day forward in an exclusive estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others keep only unto him so long as you both may live?"

"Hell to the yes," Angela vowed.

In the front of the boat, the duck stood up and took off his head. It was Leo of course, in a cartoonish duck costume, but a serious, scowling Leo, who checked the rearview mirror and then rubbed at the front windshield with his clumsy fuzzy hands, and spoke more quickly. "Then with the power invested in me, I now pronounce you shackled for life. You may buss the bride - and get ready to rumble." As he spoke, an array of fast-moving black dots appeared on the glinting surface of the river behind them. Inflatable speedboats skimming the water at nearly double the pace of the duck boat.

"He left out fascism or democracy," Vinnie said, taking Angela's radiant face in both hands.

"And pumpernickel or rye," Angela complained, closing her eyes as Vinnie leaned in to seal the deal.

"But the real question, " John insisted, inspecting the contents of a couple of large wooden boxes, "is submachine gun or grenade launcher?"

"Who says Christmas comes but once a year?" Jane exclaimed, handing him a Russian APS underwater assault rifle and a handful of steel darts. "But isn't this against Anon rules?"

Machine gun fire rattled the rear of the boat like bb's on aluminum siding.

"Isn't _that_ against _EU_ rules?" Angela gasped, coming up for air and fingering a bullet hole. Vinnie picked up an MP5 and a high capacity magazine. "When did 'shoot first' become standard operating procedure?"

"Always read fine print," Leo asserted, grimly churning toward Waterloo Bridge and the Victoria embankment. "Deadly force OK if for defense only."

Angela gingerly examined a Czech pistol. "What happens if we hit something?" She instinctively dropped to the floor as John and Vinnie aimed out the rear window flaps and began to return fire.

"Points off, and a fine. Up to six figures per glad bag."

"Oh man. I hate to lose. And what the hell is this?" Jane held up a pink HELLO-KITTY AK-47. "OK, for once, I'll take the girl gun. By the way, I think we have like two minutes?" she warned, raising her voice to be heard over the gunfire. "If anybody's counting."

"Yeah, baby!" John crowed. He ejected the clip and began to reload. "One rubber ducky down."

"That was a two-fer," Vinnie said, as the lead boat spun out and crashed into its starboard mate. "But the other three are still on our six. And closing."

"Are we there yet?" Angela said plaintively.

" _Ebat' kopat',"_ Leo breathed. Up ahead loomed Waterloo Bridge. Squads of heavily armed troops were converging upon it, double-time, from either end. And beyond the bridge, high in the dirty woolen sky, a grey Lynx helicopter beat toward them like certain death. ["Holy shit!"]

"How much farther?" Jane asked, kneeling beside him and hugging the grenade launcher. Because under the circumstances HELLO-KITTY just wasn't going to cut it.

"Under this bridge, halfway to the next. See that red dot?" He pointed to a speck in the distance.

"Can we abort and go overland? That pier over there? Because we are not getting past those guys. Unless - " She bolted for the ladder. John beat her to it.

"No way."

"X-Jet or it's over. Down here we're sitting ducks. We need air superiority. For two seconds. Move!"

Her logic was irrefutable. "I'll drive, you shoot." He pushed back the hatch, and raised his head by inches to peer out cautiously.

The pursuit boats were coming in wide from the left and right. Vinnie was having a hard time covering both of them. "I always knew you'd leave me for her," he jibed.

Angela rolled a couple of smoke grenades toward Vinnie before settling elegantly into John's vacated spot, resting an M4A1 carbine on the window ledge. "Awww. Just think. Our first mortal combat as man and wife" she said fondly.

Vinnie ripped the canisters open and dropped them, clanging, onto the back deck, where they spun, bounced, and hissed, belching flames and thick smoke the color of egg yolks. Angela set her chin and sprayed a few rounds through the billowing yellow fog. Vinnie's jaw dropped. Briefly. Then he closed his mouth, swallowed and said "Ordinarily, that would scare me in a spouse."

The words had barely left his lips when a misfired Skua missile slammed into a small pleasure craft moored to a wooden jetty just behind them. John and Jane swung from the ladder like rag dolls, while the others rattled around on the floor like dice. The X-Jet tumbled, clanging, off the roof and drowned with a mighty sploosh! The shockwave actually gave the duck boat an added forward thrust, while the foremost pursuit boat jumped five feet out of the water sideways and capsized. A second confused missile exploded in the path of the last speedboat, scattering Royal Marines to the four winds. Like the African Queen, the duck boat doggedly kept right on chugging. It was within easy firing range of the bridge now and if the commandos didn't get them, the Lynx, with two more Skuas in its firing bays, most assuredly would. Oh - and another pod of speedboats was skimming toward them, from the Blackfriars side this time.

"We should be dead," John remarked. "For real this time."

"Give it a minute," Jane said.

Vinnie pointed to Jane's grenade launcher. "Couple more of those and we could take these clowns."

"RPG under front seat," Leo piped up, restored to the captain's chair. "Is Soviet era, but works."

Jen's voice crackled in the dangling earpiece. "Hello? Anybody there?" She switched the audio over to speaker mode.

John hoisted the R-47 Widowmaker to his shoulder, "I'll take it out the hatch."

Jane nodded, "I'll clear the right. On three." Vinnie slapped a fresh clip into his MP5 and shifted to the left.

"Head's up, boys and girls. One minute," Jen mockingly trilled a sing-song warning.

"Shut up!" Everybody yelled.

"OK," Jen said, a tad miffed. " _Don't_ look out the window. Fine by me."

As she spoke, it sounded like the second Battle of Britain had begun - or the world was coming to an end. It was precisely 12:30 pm GMT. The royal couple was standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace encircled by the rest of the royal family, preparing to enact the pre-reception ritual of the royal kiss. Across London and, indeed, from end to end across the entire British Commonwealth, including UK territories and dependencies, church bells rang, guns saluted, jets screamed overhead. And fireworks detonated. The streets were full of sparklers, firecrackers, and minor squibs. The squares had rather larger set pieces primed and ready to ignite. Along the Thames, major displays had been days in the planning - elaborate fusillades, barrages, and cannonades, professional pyrotechnics consisting of computer-activated chain-fused aerial shells and comets. According to the master schedule, the Thames display was programmed for 9:00 pm in the evening, a Disney ending to a Hans Christian Anderson day.

Except it was taking place NOW.

Gandalf the Gray would have been proud. There were beehives, brocades, bottle rockets, chrysanthemums, cones, crossettes, dragon eggs, dahlias, diadems, girandolas, peonies, strobes, wheels, and willows. The shells screamed and whistled and crackled in every direction. The air over the Thames banged and snapped with arcs, spirals, and spiders of glitter interspersed with pillars of dragon fire. But more immediately important than the sparkles and spangles, mind you, was the technicolor blanket of thick, camouflaging smoke.

They were already under, then past Waterloo Bridge, the furor of the fireworks drowning out their motor, the momentary shock and awe pinning their would-be adversaries to the bridge.

"I can make it, we're going to make it," Leo shouted, pointing to his nautical GPS unit. He spun the steering wheel hard to the left and shifted into overdrive. There was a bump and a lurch as Leo rammed the duck boat into the shallows. Near the water line the rainbow fog lifted just enough to allow those aboard to see that the prow of the duck boat was pointed toward a concrete ramp climbing a gap in the river bank between two grimly imposing Victorian warehouses. The brick corner of one building was painted Heinz catsup red and adorned with a stenciled Banksy original in black and white - an anarchist, face half masked by a bandana, eyes ablaze, one arm frozen in the act of hurling a sheaf of wildflowers into the blank heart of London's financial district.

"O frabjous day," Angela cried. "We're amphibious!"

Well, not exactly. The duck boat was indeed a 6-wheeled WWII surplus amphibious transport vehicle converted to tourism use, but at the moment only half the tires, those on the right side, were operational, causing the vehicle to slew sideways rather than mount the ramp.

"It's your pneumatics, little buddy," John said, pointing. "Separate controls."

"No time, you sit," Leo traded places, hefting the Widowmaker, which was about as long as he was tall, onto his own braided and epauletted shoulder. "10 seconds, Bob."

John inflated the left side, threw the gears into full reverse, and, twisting the wheel to realign the boat, stepped on the gas. The duck boat surged backward, broke from the water, and plowed rear bumper foremost up the incline like the Allies re-taking Normandy beach. It reached the crest and everybody cheered.

"We win!" Vinnie crowed, arms in the air.

"Ummm - what exactly did we win?" Jane said doubtfully, peering out the front windshield as the fireworks ended abruptly and an eerie smoke-filled silence reigned. As if in answer, two things happened simultaneously. The Lynx helicopter loomed suddenly and terrifyingly out of the obscuring haze. And every ear caught the sound of a low rumble that seemed to increase with each passing second.

"Not to worry, too close for a Skua," John scoffed, "But remind me to tell you that I love you."

"Sorry to be a Debby Downer, but I think he's pivoting to give his door gunner a clear shot," Jane said. "And remind me to tell you that the rabbit died."

"There's a Starbucks. And it's open," Angela said from the platform at the rear of the duck boat, facing away from the river and therefore mercifully oblivious to the brevity of her future. "How Repo Man is that? You'll find one on every corner, kid. You'll see," she intoned.

"Let's all go get a latte. Or something. I'm buying," Vinnie called, his line of vision similarly obscured. He followed Angela down the steps and onto the cobbled street.

John and Jane stared after them. And then at each other. And then at the helicopter. As one, they dove for the back door, dodging the stairs to the roof, where Admiral Leo, his duck's head restored, stood in brave if comical defiance, calmly sighting the Lynx through the Widowmaker's laser scope.

They felt and heard rather than saw the thundering wall of water that came sweeping up the Thames, shaking the ground and washing over the bridges one by one, carrying boats, soldiers, debris, anything and everything in its path on a wild swirling ride from the Barrier to Battersea and beyond.

Leo fired just as the water struck. As he was preparing to pull the trigger, the front of the duck boat was rising imperceptibly up up up, on the outermost frothy edge of the approaching wave. Then came a final jarring punch, after which the duck boat paused, wavered, toyed with the idea of toppling, but decided to drop to terra firma again after all. The way the Lone Ranger's horse used to rear and paw the air at the end of every episode. It all happened in a flash, sending Leo's shot high and wide.

But the Lynx burst into flames and a shower of spare parts anyway.

27 Lost in Hollywood

"Did I hit anything?"

Leo lay on the ground, on his back, still in full duck regalia, his round cartoon head cradled in Angela's feathered lap, a circle of worried faces above him.

"One shot," John said promptly.

"One shot is what it's all about, man," Vinnie corroborated. "Unless we're talking espresso." He gestured with his Starbucks cup.

"You're so full of shit you're going to float away," Leo contradicted. "Nobody ever thinks of me as a badass." He sat up and glared around accusingly.

"You can play dodgeball on my team anytime," Jane said.

"I missed, I know I missed," Leo insisted. "The world turned upside down."

"Somebody at Skynet didn't get the memo," Jen put in, from behind. "IFF is now SIFF. A little transponder SNAFU. A failure to communicate between copter and missile control. So it was friendly fire, not you, my friend. We should drink a toast to the gods of complexity. Frappachino?" She held out a cardboard carry carton.

"As long as it's not a short one," Leo warned, getting testily to his orange, webbed feet.

"Never send a machine to do a man's job. I keep saying," John sighed. Jane opened her mouth and John hastened to correct himself. "Person. A person's job. But what I want to know is - where did you find a flood on such short - er -" Leo whipped his duck's head toward John. "scant notice?"

Jen pointed to the camera crews, airstream trailers, and milling background actors close at hand. "New James Bond film. Number 23. 'Skymall' or something. Whitney got hold of the shoot schedule, which included closing the Thames Barrier for most of today, while the rest of the world was otherwise engaged. We just hacked in and opened it back up a wee smidge ahead of time. And a tad faster than usual. Oh c'mon. Over-sensitive much?" Leo lifted his wings in frustration and waddled away. "The rest was math. Spring tide plus full moon times cubic meters."

"Are you saying -" Jane was thinking back, rapidly. "This whole thing was fake?"

"Fake, no," Jen said. "Hollywood?" She nodded vigorously. "But then the war on terror is Hollywood, the war on drugs, the financial crisis. All carefully scripted and stage-managed. This whole day is pure Hollywood. Prince meets peasant girl and so forth. We just hitched a ride. And speaking of hitching a ride -" She looked over their heads.

Everybody turned around. Behind them a Silver Birch DB5 Aston Martin had just purred to a halt. The Bond of the moment stepped out and eyed Jane and Angela with wolfish charm. "Who's driving?"

When nobody moved, Vinnie raised his hand. Bond guy tossed him the keys, put his hands in his tuxedo pockets, and strolled rakishly away.

"So that's your getaway, Big Guy," Jen said. "They need the car in the Scottish Highlands by Monday. There's a castle along the way that's got your name on it. Happy honeymoon from all of us."

The door on one of the airstream trailers flew open and all of Jane's old crew bubbled out - Wallis, Wendy, Wanda, Willa, and of course Whitney. For one surreal moment it seemed as though the world had been bombed with party supplies. Mostly pink and white. Balloons, confetti, a fluffy stuffed lamb, a banner, a cake.

"Oh. No." Jane's tone was one of foreboding.

Angela put an apologetic arm around her. "Oh, yes."

Whitney stuck a bright fuchsia bow on Jane's head. "We expect you to take it like a man, Marine. And, in case you didn't know, Louis Vuitton does make a diaper bag." Jane groaned in resignation and allowed herself to be led away. In cultural chains.

Leo reappeared, in his chauffer's uniform again, having returned the duck suit to wardrobe. Wordlessly, he passed a cigar case to those who remained - John, Vinnie, Jen. Took the last stogie for himself. They settled back, lounging against the Aston Martin in a rag-tag row, listening as the ritual babble of the baby shower drifted out the open trailer door to mingle with the methodical sounds of the movie being made behind them - "Quiet on the set! Scene 42, take 2. Action!"

"So - how goes the hunt for Red October? Where are we with the sub?" Jen asked, rolling the cigar between thumb and forefinger.

"They'll be done filming the underwater scenes in about an hour," Leo said. "Then it's back to Syria by way of Cyprus. We can drop you in Piraeus," he told John, extending a cigar cutter. "Guillotine?"

"Much obliged," John said. He clipped the head off his cigar and passed the cutter to Vinnie. "Somebody punch me. I just realized, I'm going to be my father."

"Props man, and congrats," Vinnie said, handing the cutter off to Jen. "You got one past the goalie!"

A company of Ghurkas came marching around the corner, marched past the Aston Martin, marched down the incline to the boat ramp. Upon reaching the duck boat, the phalanx split into two, separating to right and left, and fanned out in both directions along the riverbank. About this time Jane appeared in the airstream doorway, wearing a pink bib and mouthing the word, "Help!" Ruthless feminine hands dragged her back into baby shower hell. John, Vinnie, Leo, and Jen stood motionless, taking it all in.

"You know," John mused, after it was clear the soldiers were going to ignore the boat - and those standing near it - and continue on their goose-stepping way, "I have no fucking idea how this is going to turn out."

Jen peered at John through the round hole of the 'guillotine'. "Stupid kills. Evil kills. A lot of innocent people are going to suffer and die." She grinned mirthlessly. "Same old, same old. See Greece."

"You get married and you think 'we'll buy a house, we'll get a dog, we'll have children'," John continued, speaking around the cigar he was trying to light.

"Greece, Russia," Leo pocketed the 'guillotine.' "Things are pretty much the same all over. Corruption, inequality. In Russia we are nostalgic for Stalin, which should tell you something. We quote Chekov so much, is a bad joke." He paused to light and draw on his cigar, "'All we can do is live.'"

" _Dum vivimus vivamus,"_ John nodded. "While we live, let us live."

"Hold that thought," Vinnie interrupted, holding out his phone, which had just stopped beeping. "John and Jane Brown, alias John and Jane Doe, alias John and Jane Smith, alive and well, and now playing at number one on the President's personal kill list. Check it," he insisted. "Top of the Pops, ahead of Julian Assange AND Osama bin Laden."

Leo whistled noiselessly. "Go big or go home."

Into the thoughtful silence that ensued came Jane. She slipped out of the trailer, shutting the door stealthily behind her. She vaulted down the stairs and ran for cover behind the Aston Martin, peering back at the airstream chamber of horrors with revulsion.

"We're playing hide-and-seek." She narrowed her grey-green eyes like a cat watching birds through a window. "I hate hide-and-seek."

"They've been looking for him for ten years, right?" John said to Vinnie. "And the price on his head is fifty million?"

"With or without turban," Vinnie agreed.

"And they got bupkis," John shrugged.

"Looking for - ?" Jane searched from face to face.

Jen mumbled something about getting the duck boat back to the props department safe and sound. She started backing toward the vehicle, talking fast.

"I mean, it's like finding a needle in a haystack, right? I mean, yeah, they have the tools to do that, but we'll be running up their asses any minute now. We're in like Flynn at MI6 already. Talk about totally pwned. We've already got" - she checked her phone - "three servers, four logins, and a partridge in a pear tree. And if things get too dicey," she said, from the back of the boat, "you know what? We'll get a bunch of the old gang together - SEALS and shit? And we'll fake a raid. Pretend to kill you all over again. Film the whole thing, tell everybody we threw you into the ocean for - I dunno - some fucking reason or other, and bingo! You're home free." She disappeared into the duck boat and started the engine. The boat began to roll backward, away from the river, past the Aston Martin, up the cobblestone road toward St. Paul's.

"Oh yeah, _that'll_ work," John said.

"About like faking a moon landing," Vinnie agreed.

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Demille," Leo mocked.

Jane was a little more thoughtful. "To be fair, we usually pretend we _don't_ kill people. Would it be that much of a stretch to pretend we did?"

That was the moment Angela chose to flutter trippingly down the trailer steps - one hand holding her billowing skirt aloft, the other crooked around a pink cardboard barrel of the sort found at cinema concession stands - trilling as she came, "Popcorn! Fresh-popped, buttered popcorn! Get it while it's hot!"

After - If I Didn't Care

June 2011. Exarchia, Greece. The bar was closed again - the Kypos Tis Kalashnikof. A noticeably pregnant Jane was seated at the same table as before with a cup of coffee procured from the enterprising Nigerian again. Shades on. Booted feet stuck out in front of her, ankles crossed again. The Peroxide Kid was also there, sitting beside her. And the tatted couple was still dancing on the balcony across the street. This time to "If I Didn't Care."

"Another day, another riot," the Kid said. His face was chalk white with Maalox, a tear gas antidote.

"This one seems to be going well," Jane observed. Her face was slathered with Maalox too. Another difference was that the police were keeping their distance this time. Whereas the people were holding their ground and giving as good as they got.

"Mmm," the Kid agreed. "We got lucky in the draft this round. Look who we signed." He glanced toward the edge of the neighborhood where John, in swimmer's goggles and a bandana, and the Riot Dog, in bandana only, were chasing down tear gas canisters and returning them to their point of origin with a cricket bat.

"Who's a good dog?" John could be heard saying, above the singing and chanting of the protesters. Crack! went the cricket bat. "Attaboy!" Loukanikos raced to corner another canister, which John picked up with a fireproof kitchen mitt and popped right back toward the police line. The crowd went wild.

"Yeah, but we're kinda out of our league?" Jane retorted. She began to count the ways. "They've got IMF guy in the slammer on rape charges, the banksters are passing off the heist of the century as sovereign debt, Bin Laden and the war against the war on terror are dead, and I'm not feeling so good myself."

"Moneyball," the Kid demurred, flatly.

"Moneyball," Jane repeated, with zero comprehension.

"Rich teams vs. poor teams. It's an unfair game and we're going to change it. Thanks to whistleblowers and hackers and Wikileaks and crusading journalists and insiders like you who are willing to take a chance and make a stand." Jane rolled her eyes, but the Kid persisted. "Even if we didn't have a back door into all the evil they plan to do - think about it. They may be loaded, but we've got statistics. When 200 obscenely wealthy people own more than the poorest 4 billion combined, the odds begin to shift. They have to. I mean" he indicated the scene in front of them, "People aren't going to sit still for this shit. Something's got to give. Like Ghandi said -"

A canister landed in the street right in front of them and Loukanikos circled it, barking and snapping. John paused to toss him a treat, then waved to Jane and addressed the canister as if it was a golf ball. "Fore!"

"\- 'When I despair'," the Kid quoted, settling the gas mask that had been sitting temporarily on his forehead back into place. "'I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall'."

"Yeah, well, I would just like to point out," Jane said, removing her sunglasses and donning her own NBC headgear. "It's not like we have forever here. This baby is due September 17. Hey!" She tossed a bottle of Maalox to a group of Black Bloc protesters who had forgotten their war paint. Shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

The Kid just smiled beneath his NATO filter, watching the dancers on the balcony as they finished their song with a dip and a kiss. "Think of it - always."

NOTES

**Anons** Members of the hacker group Anonymous

**BCD** Barracks slang for Bad Conduct Discharge.

**Duce egg** A twenty dollar bill

**Gene Sharp** Founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit devoted to advancing the study of nonviolent action, and author of _From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation_.

**IFF** Identification Friend or Foe, automated query-and-response system used in aviation to discriminate between friendly or hostile forces

**Lima Charlie** Loud and Clear

**Moneyball** Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. A baseball book by Michael Lewis, later made into a movie, that examines how an analytical, evidence-based approach can positively compete against a model primarily reliant on superior resources.

**MPS** London's Metropolitan Police Service

**NBC** Nuclear, Biological, Chemical

**PBS** Public Broadcasting Service, publicly supported non-commercial television station in the US

**Rehypothecation** The practice of pledging one asset as collateral for multiple deals; daisy-chained or quantum collateral

**SAD** Special Activities Division, CIA's covert paramilitary unit

**September 17** Date Occupy Wall Street started in New York City

**SIFF** Successor Identification Friend or Foe, the UK version of IFF, not originally fully interoperable with IFF

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I.C. Springman is an absolute nobody with an interest in real-world

economics and power elite studies. Springman's work is rooted in the belief

that an understanding of global financial arrangements

and their impact on ordinary people in every walk of life

is the first step toward altering those arrangements

for the benefit of everybody everywhere.

No matter what they tell you -

Another world is possible.

