Down the elevator, out through the Emergency Room entrance, driving back home. Scrubbing his face with clean-up packs from a barbecue joint, in case he met somebody in his apartment stairwell. But he met no one.

He glanced at his watch: A long way to go. In the bathroom, he washed his face and hands, scrubbed away the last of the Cover Mark. After drying his hands, he got the pistol from the dresserdetoured around the living room on the way out, unwilling to look at the wrecked walland headed for Hart's place. Hart was expecting him. Had to talk about the next move.

Hart was worried. "I don't know if it'll hold," he said. "I don't know if Benson will hold."

"Take it easy," Corbeil said. They were in Hart's study, a converted family room. In some ways, it aped Corbeil's study: a leather chair, but not quite as sleek. Books, but not as many, and with a narrow range: karate, guns, camping, travel.

Corbeil found it irritating. "If he's caught, he knows that we're his only chance. Giving us away won't help him: he'll wind up with a public defender instead of the best defense money can buy."

"I'm not sure he's that smart," Hart said. He dropped into the leather chair, brooding. Corbeil paced in a lazy circle. As he passed Hart, he took the pistol out of his pocket, paused, and, moving unhurriedly so the motion wouldn't catch Hart's eye, put the muzzle next to the other man's temple and pulled the trigger.

Crack!

Hart slumped. Corbeil waited a moment, listeningrealized that if there were anything to hear, he probably wouldn't, being deafened by the shotthen reached for Hart's throat, pressed his fingers just under his jawbone. No pulse. He hadn't expected any. William Hart was thoroughly dead.

All right. Now: one more shot, with Hart's finger in the trigger. the Webster's should do as a backstop. He fired again, into the heavy hardback dictionary. The little.380 slug penetrated to page 480, and stopped. Corbeil picked up one of the two ejected shells, carefully added one loaded shell to the top of the gun's magazine, pressed the shell against Hart's thumb, replaced the magazine, and dropped the gun on the floor next to the chair.

He looked at his watch. Still a long way to go.

He picked up the dictionary and left.

He drove through the night to Waco, his mind crowded with possibilities. Stay and fight. Run and hide.

The simple fact was this: if nobody knew about the satellite intercepts, none of the killing made sense. Even if somebody knew, it could be blamed on Tom Woods, and then he would kick free. The conspiracy never required his involvement, he thought. Woods could have set it up with the other two. He had the technical backgroundbackground that Corbeil didn't have.

As of now, the danger to himself had narrowed to a single point.

A car was parked in the driveway at the ranch, and there were lights in the main house. Corbeil parked, got out, felt the second gun nestled next to his leg. Took a moment to stand in the driveway, to look up at the stars.

Woods came out on the porch: "Hey, John. What's going on?"

"Hey, Tom. Need to talk about next week. I've got an order from Azerbaijan."

"Jeez, those guys."

Corbeil was looking up. "Look at the stars. You can really see the stars out here."

Woods walked down the three steps of the porch and stood beside his friend to look at the sky.

"Glorious," he said. Then he said something that prolonged his life for a few seconds. "By the way, I'm not sure about this, but there might be something going on out here."

"What do you mean?"

"Somebody may be messing with the dish controls. I don't know where it happenedinside the house or outbut we got an odd signal the other night. I just noticed it."

"Odd?"

"Attenuated, as if the signal were being blocked somehow. Not interfered with, but physically blocked."

"What would do that, Tom?"

"Somebody standing in front of the dish. Something placed near the amplifier loops. that would do it. Could be nothing. Could have been a bird building a nest. Or, if it was inside, it could have been somebody messing with the gain controls, although they're all right now."

"Did you look at the dishes?" Corbeil asked.

"Yeah. Everything looks all right. Might have been nothing at all."

"Probably. We're all a little jumpy with this Firewall thing, that shooting."

"That fuckin' Hart. The guy's a killer, John. He probably enjoyed it."

"Look at the stars," Corbeil said.

"Glorious," Woods said again. The muzzle of Corbeil's gun was an inch from the back of his head.

CHAPTER 26

I spent the next day intermittently monitoring the Net, watching news programs, and checking the newspapers' online editions, looking for somethinganythingthat would tell me what was going on with AmMath, Firewall, or with Benson or Hart.

When I wasn't doing that, I was playing with the tarot, or drawing. The landscape north of Dallas is interesting, in its own Southern Plains way, though not as interesting as the area around Tulsa, some parts of Kansas, or the Dakota grasslands.

Still: interesting. The relative flatness of the landscape, only sparsely inflected by humans and weather phenomena, gives the land and atmosphere a natural abstraction that you don't see in landscape paintings, but that you often see in nonobjective art. By working with the land and sky, without adding human inflection, you wind up with something that looks like abstraction, but has a kind of organic quality that pulls the eye in. Under the best conditions, the viewer falls into the picture, rather than colliding with the painted surface of the abstraction.

Either that, or I'm completely full of shit. In any case, the first real break came that evening, and left me astonished. I'd been clicking around the cable channels with the remote, and heard Corbeil's name mentioned. Channel 3: the newsreader had more hair than the average werewolf, and teeth just as shiny, he liked this stuff, and this story.

Benson had been found dead in his hospital bed, a victim of what police said was a deliberate barbituate overdose. He'd been murdered.

Benson had been with a man named William Hart when he was shot, and had given Hart's name as an alibi for the time that Lane Ward had been shot. After Benson had been found dead, police went to talk with Hart. They found him dead in an easy chair, a pistol on the floor beside him, an apparent suicide. The newsreader added that police had interviewed Corbeil in the case, but that he had not been charged with anything, nor was he being held.

"Corbeil says that his company, AmMath, a high-tech concern that creates top-secret coding software for the federal government, has been under attack for several days by the hacker group that calls itself Firewall, apparently because AmMath is one of the lead contractors on the Clipper II chip. The Clipper II, if you recall, is the chip that the government would like to see incorporated as a standard in communications hardware, including that used on the Internet. Firewall is the group that has taken credit for the continuing denial-of-service attack on the IRS.

"Corbeil said that he did not understand Benson's involvement with Lane Ward or her brother, Jack Morrison, who was slain last month after an alleged break-in at AmMath's secure computer facility. He said that he had asked Hart to monitor Benson's activities after the Morrison shooting, but hadn't known of Ward's presence m Dallas or his security officers' shootout with them," the newsreader intoned, his eyebrows signaling a moderate level of skepticism.

Benson and Hart were dead. Who'd done that? Corbeil himself? Or were there more security goons in the background somewhere? Corbeil's story was actually pretty good, from a legal standpointhe took no position, he was confused. If it all got mixed in with national security and codes and spies and Firewall, and if the guy held out, he might walk.