With fingers without feeling Sara replaced the receiver in its cradle.

She'd fled her room in tears, trusting in her small size and a certain knack of invisibility that had served her well at various points in her career to hide her in the mob. At first it worked. When they paged her in the lobby, it set a fresh pack of reporters baying after her, hungry to worry bones from which Hartmann's bland denial hadn't filleted the last scraps of meat.

Is Hartmann telling the truth? Why did Barnett's announcement specify you? What's your connection to the Bar- nett campaign? The questions split half and half between trying to get her to admit she'd hit the rack with Hartmann and trying to get her to admit she'd conspired with the fundamentalists to wreck the senator's good name.

Part of her ached to use the proffered forum, to announce, Yes, I slept with Gregg Hartmann, and I learned that he's a monster, a covert ace who makes people into puppets. Cowardice intervened. Or was it sanity? Her revelationsallegations, was the only way they would be viewed-were extravagant enough without turning them into Midnight Sun headline fodder.

She turned her face away and said, "No comment." And swallowed whole the steaming chunks of abuse: "Where do you get off trying to pull that shit? The public has a right to know. You're a journalist, for Christ's sake." Finally a cocktailer in leotards and one of those short black skirts took her by the arm and steered her here, into the office of the manager of the Marriott's lounge.

The receiver clicked home with the finality of a breech closing on a cartridge. Somebody took what she had to say seriously.

The caller was Owen Rayford of the Post's New York bureau. Chrysalis was dead. Murdered. Ace powers were involved.

Was it a puppet? She doubted that. Hartmann's strings quickly attenuated and broke with distance; she knew that from experience. There were bent aces-Bludgeon, Carnifex, maybe the Sleeper if he were far gone in amphetamine psychosis-who were capable of such a deed. That was an irony about Hartmann; in his position you hardly needed ace powers to get into serious evil doing. Money, power, and influence weren't exactly any weaker forces in human affairs than they'd been up until the fifteenth of September, 1946.

The fear lived within her; it coiled like a serpent, burned like a star. It brought with it terrible knowledge: the only hope of safety lay in risking all.

The manager and the waitress who'd rescued her stood by, watching with polite curiosity. She arranged her face in a smile and stood.

"Is there a back way out of here?" she asked.

6:00 P.M.

She had to take a Valium before she could get the damned acoustic coupler to work right. Her laptop had an inboard modem, but hotels were leery of modular jacks, preferring to keep their phones tethered firmly to the wall by old-fashioned cords. So she had to fiddle with the antique external modem, which was unforgiving if you didn't get the phone's handset into its twin-cup cradle just so.

Eventually she got it going. Then she sat in gloom, lit only by afternoon light straggling through the room's heavy curtains, smoking and squinting at the screen as the records transferred count spun on and her story spun down the wires that connected her NEC laptop to the Post's computers.

It had all come out of her in one orgasmic gush: Andi's death, her suspicion, the sinister hidden presence in jokertown who had flashed tantalizing clues as to his existence-and identity-during the riots attending another Democratic convention twelve years ago; her own personal quest, leading to her entrapment in the very web she'd been struggling to delineate. And finally murder.

There were two people, she'd written, who had their fingers on the Jokertown pulse. Actually there were three; Tachyon was the third, literally as well as figuratively. But he was blinded by personal regard for Hartmann, and the political plums the senator had thrown his way, the grants that kept him living in a style fit for a prince, which he was. Sara would not invoke his name.

The others were herself and Chrysalis. The Crystal Palace had never been more than a front for Chrysalis's real avocation, which was brokering information on everything that went down in J-town. Close observers of the scene took it for granted that sooner or later she'd reel in a thread and find it had a cobra tied to it.

The cobra was named Hartmann. And Chrysalis pulled his string just at the moment when he was swollen with venom and quickest to strike.

Why didn't I confide in her? she asked herself as liquid crystal numbers flickered in the dim. There had been plenty of time, when they gained a guarded sort of friendship aboard the Stacked Deck, during the year that intervened. But Chrysalis had remained in some sense a rival. And Sara was not a woman who found sharing confidences an easy thing.

UPLOAD COMPLETED, her screen said, with a beep for emphasis. She quickly broke the connection and began to disconnect the modem. Calm had come upon her, strange and a little frightening. The calm of an accident victim.

I'm a target, she thought without emotion. If Chrysalis learned his seeret, he has to assume that I know. She regretted pushing so hard at Hartmann's staffers earlier in the day. He had to have heard about that, and the inference would be unavoidable.

You're such an innocent, she chided herself. Naive, just as Ricky said you were.

But she wasn't a total fool. She was wading in the shark tank now. She'd learned a lot of moves during a long and successful journalistic career. None of them would suffice to get her to dry land intact. That was maybe the most important thing she knew right now.

She turned off the NEC's power and clicked its cover closed. She tucked the miniature computer into her shoulder bag. Stood.

It has to be Tachyon, she knew. He had to have his suspicions about what had been happening in Jokertown over the years-about what had happened in Syria and Berlin. He could read her mind, if he doubted her words.

Besides, he thinks I'm… attractive. Even if he refused to believe her, there was a way to attach herself to him. She had been prepared to offer herself to him before, when she was convinced the Doughboy case would lead to Hartmann. He had a certain magnetism. It might not even be so bad.

Don't kid yourself. She had not been with a man sincesince the tour. She hadn't felt the lack. Even before the famous affair, sex hadn't been her biggest priority.

But survival was. At least until Andrea was avenged.

At least Tachyon seemed the type to take his pleasure in a hurry and be done with it-no protracted grunting and groaning and Was It Good for You Too? She stabbed her cigarette to death on the Hilton logo embossed in the plastic ashtray. Pausing to dab some perfume on the insides of her wrists, where blue veins met white skin, she walked out the door.