“It’s OK,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired.”

“Yeah, well, this way I don’t have to worry about you driving off in your sleep.”

“What if I walk off in my sleep?”

“There are coyotes,” said Wise. “So don’t.”

I followed him into the warehouse, to a musty room where a cot had already been set up for me. “Bathroom’s straight back if you need it,” he said. “Other than that, if you get an urge to snoop around—”

“I know. Coyotes.”

I woke up in the morning to a vision of swastikas. To the left of my cot was a bookcase labeled ARYAN LITERATURE, filled with display copies of books with titles like A Hoax Called Auschwitz and The Illustrated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I got up, rubbing sleep from my eyes, and checked out the other bookcases lining the room, each with its own subject: White Supremacy; Black Supremacy; Religion; Firearms and Silencers; Knife-Fighting and Martial Arts; Bomb-Making; Biological Warfare; Torture Techniques; Confidence Games; Phony I.D. and Identity Theft; Computer Hacking; Money-Laundering and Tax Evasion; Stalking; Revenge.

I’d wandered over to Bomb-Making and was leafing through The Patriot’s Cookbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Brewing Explosives and Chemical Weapons at Home when Wise came into the room. He was showered and shaved, and in a much mellower mood than the night before. “Found something you like?”

“Lawful Good Press,” I said. “Is that a joke?”

“I don’t know. Are you laughing?”

I held up The Patriot’s Cookbook. “Is this a joke?”

“It’s no substitute for a college chemistry degree, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“The recipes don’t work?”

Wise made a seesawing motion with his hand. “The quality of the information varies. The smoke-and stink-bomb recipes are pretty solid; the ones for TNT and plastique, not so much.”

“What about this one?” I pointed to a line in the table of contents that read, “Sarin Gas.”

“Look at the equipment list.”

I did. “What’s a Gallinago flask?”

“A very specialized piece of hardware—so specialized, it doesn’t actually exist. But if you ask for it at a chemical-supply house, or try to search for it on the Internet, bells go off in Panopticon.”

“Are the books bugged, too?”

“Some of them. Eyes Only on selected volumes, plus Library Bindings on some of the hate literature. And of course we keep a mailing list.” He took a remote control from his pocket and pointed it at the picture of the Reichstag that hung above the Aryan Lit. bookcase; the picture slid aside, revealing a computerized map of the U.S. covered in blinking points of light. “Green dots are customers we believe to be harmless—people who think it’s cute to have How to Find Your Ex-Wife as bathroom reading copy. Red dots are customers who want to do damage. Yellow dots, we’re not sure yet.”

“Lot of red dots around Vegas right now,” I observed.

“Yeah, we noticed that too. But here, take a look at this…” He pressed another button on the remote, and all the dots vanished except for one in southern California. A picture and a name appeared at the bottom of the screen. “Recognize him?”

“The gas-station attendant.”

“He had some unfortunate ideas about anthrax and the U.S. Postal Service.”

“If he was a bad monkey, shouldn’t I have taken care of him?”

“Well, if you’d bothered to check the back of your vehicle for stowaways, we would have had time to discuss that. As it was, it just seemed simpler to handle him myself. Plus I really was feeling pretty cranky. You hungry?”

Besides the printing press and bindery, the building had a full industrial kitchen. I sat at a stainless-steel counter making small talk while Wise cooked me breakfast.

“So how’d you end up a Clown?” I asked him. “I mean, axwork aside, you seem like a normal guy.”

“Don’t let the haircut fool you,” Wise said. “I was originally in intel, but when I came out here to start up the Press, the head of the Scary Clowns made me an offer.”

“Panopticon to Clown seems like a popular career path. Did you know—”

“Gacy?” Wise shook his head. “Before my time.”

“What about a guy named Dixon? You ever cross paths with him?”

“You could say so. I was his Probate officer.”

“You trained Dixon?…So does that mean you were in Malfeasance?”

“No, regular Panopticon. Dixon was too at first, but he was bucking for a Malfie post from day one.”

“Did you like him?”

“He was a good student. A little overzealous, maybe. Why, what’s he to you?”

“He’s running my background check.”

Wise laughed. “I bet that’s fun.”

“Thrilling. Listen, maybe you can explain something to me: when Dixon called me in for an interview, I had to wear this wristband…” I described it to him.

“Sounds like a shibboleth device,” Wise said.

“What’s a shibboleth?”

“It’s from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. The men of Gilead went to war against the men of Ephraim, and the Ephraimites got slaughtered. When the survivors tried to pass themselves off as members of another tribe, their accents gave them away: Ephraimites couldn’t pronounce the ‘sh’ sound, so when they said the word ‘Shibboleth,’ it came out ‘Sibboleth.’”

“And a shibboleth device…?”

“Same basic idea. It’s a tool for sorting good monkeys from bad monkeys.”

“By the way they talk?”

“By the way they feel. The device tests for inappropriate emotional responses. Like, someone tells you your mother died, and you’re happy instead of sad. Or someone makes you talk about this shameful thing you did, only you’re not ashamed.” He laughed again. “You look worried. Don’t be. I don’t know what went on between you and Dixon, but if he had any serious doubts about you, you wouldn’t be here. This operation’s too important.”

“What is the operation, anyway?”

He handed me a silver medical bracelet like the kind epileptics wear. On one side was a cluster of Egyptian hieroglyphs over the legend OZYMANDIAS LLC. On the other side was an inscription:

in case of death

keep body cool & call

1-800-EXTROPY

for further instructions

—————

$50,000 cash reward

“You know what cryogenics is?” Wise asked.

“Sure. It’s where they put you on ice until doctors can invent a cure for whatever killed you. I didn’t know there was a rewards program, though.”

“That’s the deluxe version. The goal is to get the cadaver into cryostasis as quickly as possible, to minimize postmortem decay.”

“Let me guess: this is one of those clever-sounding ideas that turns out not to be.”

“There is a contradiction,” said Wise, “between wanting to live forever, and offering a cash bounty for the discovery of your corpse.” He passed me a stack of what looked like baseball cards. But the pictures were of both men and women, and the stats on the back weren’t sports-related. “These are all the customers of the Ozymandias Corporation who’ve died within the past six months.”

I counted thirteen cards. “How big is their client list?”

“Not that big. Going by the average of previous six-month periods, there should be two cards in that stack at most.”

“So someone’s killing them off for the bounty money…But wouldn’t that be kind of hard to get away with? I mean, you’d think the company would get suspicious when the same person kept claiming all the rewards.”

“The bodies were all discovered by different people,” Wise said, “and there’s no obvious connection between any of the discoverers. But we believe a connection exists.”

“So it’s an organized racket? Murder for profit?”

“Profit, and one other motive.”

“What?”

“Evil. We believe the killers’ ultimate goal—after making as much money as possible—is to attract the attention of the police.”

“Aren’t the police already paying attention?”