The garment bag was awkward. Jay moved it to his other shoulder, dropped back, fell in alongside a hulking joker whose green translucent flesh shimmied like lime Jell-O as he walked. "Where's everybody going?" Jay asked him.

"The Omni," the Jell-O man said.

A woman bobbed in the air above him. She had no legs, no arms. She floated like a helium balloon, her pretty face red from crying. "She lost the baby," she told Jay. Then she flew on up ahead.

Jay let himself be swept up in the human tide that flowed through the streets of Atlanta,. thousands of feet all converging on the Omni Convention Center. Slowly, piece by piece, he got the story out of the jokers who walked briefly beside him. Early this morning, Ellen Hartmann, the senator's wife, had suffered a tragic fall down a flight of stairs. She had been pregnant, carrying Hartmann's child. The baby had died.

"Is Hartmann going to withdraw?" Jay asked a man in a motorized wheelchair whose ragged clothing covered his deformities.

"He's going on," the joker said defiantly. "She asked him to. Even through this, he's going on. He loves us that much!" Jay couldn't think of a thing to say.

The jokers had begun drifting over as soon as the word had reached their encampments in Piedmont Park. Atlanta police and convention security watched the crowd swell with growing unease, but made no move to disperse them. Memories of the convention riots in New York in '76 and Chicago in '68 were still fresh in too many minds. By the time Jay arrived, the jokers had closed all the streets surrounding the convention. They sat on the sidewalks, covered the fenders of parked cars, filled every little patch of grass. They sat peacefully, wordlessly, under a blazing Georgia sun, with every eye fixed on the Omni. There was no shouting, no chants, no placards, no cheers, no prayers. There was no talk at all. The silence around the convention hall was profound.

Eleven thousand jokers squatted together on the hot pavement, a sea of tortured flesh pressed shoulder to shoulder in a silent vigil for Gregg Hartmann and his loss.

Jay Ackroyd moved through them gingerly. He felt fuzzy and exhausted. It was over a hundred in the shade, as humid as an armpit. Jay didn't even have a hat. The sun beat relentlessly against his head, and his headache was back screaming vengeance. His resolve had broken down and he'd swallowed a couple of painkillers, but even that hadn't done more than dull the throbbing in his side and the pounding behind his eyes.

There was nothing anyone could do for the sick feeling in his gut. All around him, the jokers sat silently, watching, waiting. Some wept openly, but tried their best to stifle the sound of their sobs. Others hid their faces behind cheap plastic masks, but somehow you could still feel their grief. Jay found that he could scarcely bear to look at them. None of them knew who he was or what he was doing here. None of them knew what he carried in the garment bag slung awkwardly over his shoulder, or what it would do to their hopes and dreams. But Jay knew, and the knowledge was making him ill.

He took up a position across from the main doors of the Omni, where he could see the delegates and journalists come and go under the watchful eyes of security. Time seemed to pass very slowly. It got hotter and hotter. TV crews panned their minicams endlessly across the sea of faces. News choppers hovered above them, and once the Turtle glided past overhead, his passage as silent as the crowd, the shadow of his shell giving the jokers a momentary respite from the sun. Later, a small woman in black satin tails and top hat emerged briefly from inside the convention hall and surveyed the crowd through a domino mask. Jay recognized her from the news: Topper, a government ace, assigned to bodyguard Gore, probably reassigned now that her man had dropped his candidacy. He thought about trying to get her attention, handing over the bloodstained jacket, making it somebody else's dilemma. Then he remembered her-colleague Carnifex, and thought again.

When Topper went back inside, a gaggle of delegates emerged through the open doors. One was a huge man with a spade-shaped beard who moved lightly in spite of his size; his impeccable white linen suit made him look cool even in this terrible heat.

Jay got to his feet. "Hiram!" he shouted over the heads of the jokers, waving his arm wildly despite the dull flare of pain in his side.

In the silence of the vigil, Jay's shout seemed like some obscene violation. But Hiram Worchester looked up, saw him, and made his way through the crowd, as ponderous and stately as a great white ocean liner sliding through a sea of rowboats. "Popinjay," he said when he got there, "my God, it is you. What happened to your face?"

"Never mind about that," Jay said. "Hiram, we got to talk."

"What was all that about?" Jennifer asked.

Brennan was still seething. "A setup. A goddamned setup."

"What?"

Brennan looked at Jennifer. "We weren't set up. Wyrm and Sui Ma were."

"I see. I think."

"Let's find a phone."

There was one on the corner. Brennan dialed and Fadeout picked it up on the second ring. "Hello."

"I don't like to be lied to," Brennan said softly.

"Well, Cowboy. Nice to hear from you at a decent hour."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"Well, sure. What's it in reference to? I didn't get the dope on Morkle wrong, did I?"

"That was fine," Brennan said. "The dope on Wyrm wasn't quite as accurate."

"Oh?"

"He had nothing to do with Chrysalis's death. He was in Havana when she was killed."

"Oh. Well. Sorry."

Greasy weasel, Brennan thought. "I'm not your private executioner," Brennan said grimly.

"It was an honest mistake-"

"Don't compound the lie," Brennan said. "I'll be in touch-"

"Wait," Fadeout said before Brennan could hang up. "Anything on Chrysalis's files yet?"

Brennan put the phone down without answering.

1:00 P.M.

"It's simply not possible," Hiram said after Jay had finished telling his story. "No."

Jay unzipped the garment bag, brought out the jacket, and laid it on the table between them. "Yes," he said.

The cocktail lounge was one of those places that was as dark at noon as it was at midnight. It was well away from the convention, deserted enough to give them a little privacy.

The air-conditioning was set way below arctic blast, but beads of sweat trickled down Hiram's broad forehead into his neatly trimmed beard. The booth was a tight fit for the aces imposing bulk, his ample stomach pushing up hard against the table, but when Jay put down the jacket, Hiram seemed to squirm backward, as if he were afraid to touch it.

"This is some kind of grotesque misunderstanding. Gregg is a good man. I've known him for years, Jay. For yearsl" Jay touched the jacket. "You were with Hartmann in Syria. Is this the jacket or isn't it?"

Hiram forced himself to look at the jacket. "It appears to be," he said. "But Jay, an off-the-rack sport coat, they manufacture them by the thousands. It has to be a fraud, it has to be."

"I don't think so," Jay said. "Stigmata had no reason to lie. He didn't even realize what he had. The other jacket was the fraud. Kahina never trusted Gimli. She gave him a double, probably used her own blood so a test would show the presence of the virus. That was what Gimli gave to Chrysalis. The real one Kahina kept for herself. She must have had her own plans, but Hartmann and Mackie Messer didn't give her the time to carry them out."

"Then," Hiram said hesitantly, "Chrysalis…"

"Died for nothing. For a phony jacket."

"The assassin she hired wasn't phony!"

"No," Jay admitted. "George Kerby is real. The hell of it is, right now I'm not sure if I'm rooting for him or against him."