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  Gordian looked at her, his frank blue eyes meeting her brown ones.

  "For a while, maybe," he said. "But sooner or later you'd have stopped kidding yourself. And you'd have done exactly what you did."

  She shrugged. They were silent a moment, just the two of them in the office. Outside the window behind Gordian, Mount Hamilton rose through the late afternoon smog, massive and somehow benign in its fixed solidity.

  "Maybe you're right," she said at last. "But I'd noticed a lot of unexplained payments to American lobbyists crossing my desk. Sums that went far beyond what they should have been receiving for their services. And as I started paying closer attention to them, I realized they always followed visits to my department head from someone who was with the Canbera bank in Indonesia." She shrugged again. "Anyone with open eyes could have seen the money was graft to American politicians. The lobbying group to whom it was going was specifically hired to promote deregulation of cryptographic technology in Washington. But it wasn't until I mentioned it to Max that I allowed myself to see the truth."

  "And it was Max who convinced you to snoop around in the computer databases for financial discrepancies."

  "And plant the voice recorder in the Corporate Communications director's office." She shook her head. "It's hard for me to believe how indiscreet they were. I mean, I walked right in there every day before my boss arrived, tucked it behind the sofa, and picked it up every evening between the time he left work and when the maintenance woman came to do her cleanup. Then I'd walk back to my own office and upload everything onto a computer disk before heading home. It went on like that for two months."

  "People get away with murder long enough, they get arrogant. They get arrogant, they start to think nothing can touch them. And as a result we've got half a dozen conversations about the payoffs between the director and Nga Canbera… and a couple with Marcus Caine's voice added to the mix. Coming over your former boss's speakerphone loud and clear."

  "The CEO of Monolith himself imparting his wisdom about which government officials to target for bribes," Kirsten said. "Incredible, really."

  They were quiet again for a while. Then Gordian leaned forward, meshed his fingers on the desk, and looked steadily at her face.

  "Kirsten, I didn't ask you here to the States because I needed to have the voice recorder and disks hand-delivered," he said. "I wanted to tell you in person how deeply I appreciate what you've done. And also let you know that I'd be honored to have you working for UpLink — wherever in our organization you'd prefer— should you want a job with us."

  She smiled a little. "That's a very generous offer… but I hope you won't be offended if I decline to accept it, at least for now. I'd like some time to myself. Time to.. regroup. You understand?"

  His eyes were still holding steady on her.

  "Yes, yes, I do," he said. "As long as you understand that the offer stands if you ever change your mind. And that I never forget my friends."

  She nodded, her smile growing larger. It was very genuine and very beautiful, and Gordian thought he knew what Blackburn must have seen in it.

  "Is it back to Singapore for you, then?" he said.

  She was quiet a moment, then nodded again.

  "For a time, anyway. But there's one more thing I have to do here in America before I go."

  Armitage sat by the answering machine in his office, his eyes staring out of his wasted features with a cold vitality which seemed to demand and consume all that was left of his life force — like small, mean creatures arising from detritus, feeding on decay.

  There had been a number of messages from Marcus Caine waiting for him this morning, each more panicked and desperate than the one preceding it.

  No more of that, he thought.

  Bound to a failing body and his wheelchair, he was determined to cast off unnecessary ballast. It was hard enough to manage without the dead weight.

  ''Erase messages," he said, activating the device with a voice chip produced in one of Monolith's San Jose factories. He paused a moment, then set it to screen and disconnect any calls originating from Caine's home or office, verbally inputting the numbers to be blocked.

  He did not want to be dragged down with Marcus as his role in the SEAPAC affair, the campaign finance scandal, and numerous other damning episodes became known. Indeed, any association with him at all would be a severe liability.

  How quickly things changed. He had believed Caine a likely candidate to win Uplink International and forge a media/technology monopoly that would extend around the globe as no single entity of its type had done before… and as a plum for being instrumental in bringing that about, Armitage was to have been handed Uplink's biosciences division on a silver platter. Who could say what new treatments for his condition might have emerged with the company's resources at his disposal? Who could truly say?

  But Marcus had disappointed him. Failed him, and none of that was to be.

  He pulled air through his throat and released it in a watery sigh. Perhaps the ALS would get him in the end. Almost certainly it would. But he would live long enough to see Marcus go down first.

  And no doubt write many interesting and widely read columns about his fall.

  * * *

  "There it is. You can check everything out if you'd like."

  Marcus Caine sat on the leather-cushioned sofa in his study, a square of mahogany wall paneling pulled back on his right to reveal an open wall safe.

  The man he'd spoken to stepped across the room and peered into the safe. He reached a hand inside, extracted a banded pack of bills, rifled their edges, then put them back and looked into the safe another minute.

  "It contains over a million dollars in cash. And some trinkets… diamonds, my dear wife has always loved her diamonds… worth a great deal more."

  The man shifted his gaze toward Caine. He was smallish with a pencil mustache and gray eyes that matched the color of his sport jacket.

  "You sure you want me to do this?" he said.

  Caine spread his arms over the top of the backrest, tilted his chin up, and laughed — a sound that reminded the man a little of crows.

  "What's the problem? Are you afraid you'll screw up, the way your friends did at the airport? Or how about Sacramento — shall we discuss that merry fucking romp?"

  "There's no reason to talk to me that way," the man said. "Those were tough assignments."

  Caine laughed his harsh, cawing laugh again.

  "Then let's see you tackle an easy one," he said. "Earn your money this time. And spare me the humiliation of becoming the poster boy for Court TV for a year or so, to be followed by a lifetime of prison interviews."

  Silence.

  The man walked across the room, stopped in front of Caine, and reached under his jacket. The weapon he brought out from underneath it was a Heckler & Koch.45 P9S.

  A moment passed. Still standing there, he took a sound suppressor from his inside pocket and screwed it onto the barrel.

  "You worried about how your wife finds you?" he asked.

  Caine straightened, and brought his arms down off the backrest. The pained humor was gone from his face and his eyes were watery.

  His mouth suddenly tightened.

  "Earn your money," he snapped. "Make a fucking mess for her."

  The man nodded, cocked the gun, and angled its bore up at Caine's head. There was the sound of Caine sucking in air, and then the muted thud of bullets leaving the gun as he pulled the trigger ten times, emptying the magazine.

  When his job was finished, the man holstered the gun, walked back around the couch to the safe, and quickly emptied it, transferring everything that had been inside to his briefcase.

  He paused briefly at the door on his way out. Looked at the body and the blood on the sofa and walls. And nodded to himself with satisfaction.

  Got what you paid for, he thought.

  The inscription on the gravestone was elegant, a quote from Wordsworth:

  O joy! That in our embers Is
something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers, What was so fugitive.

  Reading it, Kirsten wiped a hand across her eyes.

  "I remember, too, Max," she said. "I remember."

  Behind her, Pete Nimec waited quietly, standing in the shade of the Japanese maples that grew where Blackburn had been laid to rest, his body flown back from Malaysia soon after his identity was confirmed.

  Kirsten knelt over the soil that filled the grave, still loose under her fingers.

  "Atman and Brahman," she said. "Sometimes, Max, we need illusion to show us the truth in ways we can manage… and though I can't be sure, I sometimes think you didn't understand that, and sold yourself short because you didn't. That you felt guilty about asking me to make difficult choices, and let that guilt get in the way of your opening up to me." She felt moisture on her cheeks. "The thing is, Max, I believe Roger Gordian is right. That you were really showing me the way to my own conscience. To my own heart."

  She tasted salt, touched her fingers to her lips, touched the place where Max's name was carved on the gravestone.

  "You… what we had… it was Brahman, my sweet love," she whispered. "It was truth."

  Kirsten lingered there a moment, her eyes closed as if in prayer or repose.

  Then she rose, turned from the grave, and strode slowly to where Pete Nimec was waiting.

  "You okay?" he asked softly.

  She looked at him, smiled a little.

  "I will be," she said.

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