“Tim Dooley, DEA,” the beefy blond said. “His partner. He was killed in a shootout in your lab in New York.”

“In my lab?” Mark was completely disoriented now.

“Over your fucking head shop,” the dark-haired one said. “Oh, excuse me. Your New Age deli.”

“A couple of years ago,” Carlysle said over her shoulder. “About the time you pulled your disappearing act from judge Conower’s courtroom.”

Mark had no idea what they were talking about. After Judge Conower’s surprise decision – adjudging both Mark and his ex-wife unsuitable parents and remanding Sprout to the custody of the New York juvenile justice system – Mark had sort of phased out of the world for a while.

“He was actually shot by a Narcotics Division officer from NYPD,” Carlysle said. “It was what you might call a slight misunderstanding.”

“That doesn’t matter,” the dark-haired agent snarled. “You’re just as guilty as if you’d pulled the fucking trigger. That’s what the law says, dude.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life!” Mark blurted.

The agent shoved the muzzle of his machine pistol up Mark’s right nostril. “Don’t call me crazy!”

“Hey, Lynn,” the big blond agent said, reaching up as if to touch his partner’s arm, not quite daring to do so. “Take it easy. Don’t want to get blood on the upholstery, you know.”

The other man turned him a look of hatred so pure it rocked him back against the rear of the seat. Then he relaxed.

“Yeah, you’re right, Gary” he said, actually taking the gun out of Mark’s face. “We’re supposed to take good care of the little lady, after all. Not subject her to the sight of spilled brains.”

“You can knock off the condescending sexist crap,” Carlysle said.

Lynn laughed and tucked his piece out of sight beneath the windbreaker he was wearing today. They were driving southeast away from Leyden Square, along the Lijnbaansgracht. Trees and colorful moored houseboats ticked past.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Mark said.

“Jesus,” Lynn said, and turned away.

“Go ahead,” his partner said. “You’ll have to clean it up.

“Wait. My arm. My left arm hurts. Like, what’d you guys do -”

He slammed his right hand against his sternum and doubled over.

Lynn came around in his seat. “What? What the fuck?”

“Hey!” Gary said, holding up a hand to try to keep his partner under control. “Hey, knock that shit off.”

Mark uncurled a little. “My – my chest. Aaah!”

“Wait!” Carlysle cried, veering a little. “You don’t understand. Nausea, pains in the arm – he’s having a heart attack, dammit!”

“Oh, bullshit,” Agent Gary said. He pulled Mark upright.

“Hey,” the blond agent exclaimed. “He put something in his mouth!” His hand went under his sport coat.

Mark grabbed the coat by the collar and yanked it desperately down Agent Gary’s back to his elbows, effectively pinning his arms. He changed.

The blond agent cried out in surprised fear as Mark’s skinny body expanded, filling the slope-roofed rear of the Citroлn. Helen Carlysle looked up to her rearview, saw an immense gray-skinned man crushing Gary against the side of the car, and crashed into a Daihatsu parked facing the canal.

The gray man reared up, crashing up through the tinted-glass fastback. He climbed out of the now-stationary car with a squeal of tearing metal, dragging the terrified Gary with him.

Lynn had his Scorpion out and leveled across the back of the passenger seat. Carlysle knocked its barrel up in the air. “Don’t shoot! You’ll hit Hamilton!”

The gray man was backing away, dragging the agent with him as a bullet shield. He was big and muscular in a furniture-mover way. His skin was shiny. He wore what looked like gray Speedo racing trunks. His nose and ears were small, and there was no hair visible anywhere on his face or body.

Spitting curses like a cat in a sack, Lynn pulled the lever on his door, kicked it open when it balked. He jumped out on the sidewalk with his Scorpion up in a two-handed Weaver stance.

His partner recovered his senses enough to scream, “Don’t shoot!”

Realizing that the dark-haired agent was going to shoot anyway, the gray-skinned man turned and lunged for the canal, still holding onto Gary’s coat. The seams gave way, leaving the agent standing there in just the sleeves as his erstwhile captor, still clutching the jacket’s torso, turned and launched himself in a racing dive.

As he did, he shifted again. What hit the greasy green surface of the Lijnbaan canal was the sleek, gray form of a Tursiops truncatus.

The passengers of a red-and-white canal tour boat crowded against its glass wall to point and mouth at the spectacle of the dolphin streaking past with a vest of some sort draped over its rostrum. Then they tumbled over each other as bullets from Lynn’s machine pistol stippled the water’s surface like hail.

The Scorpion ran dry. For a moment Saxon stood on the brick embankment, yanking the trigger so furiously that the weapon bobbed in his hands, as if he were a kid pretending to fire a toy gun. Its pilot hugging the deck beside his passengers, the tour boat ran into a moored houseboat with a bump and grinding crunch.

Gary Hamilton was wandering in a tight if irregular little circle. A trail of blood ran down the side of his broad, square face from a cut in his forehead. He made small gestures with his hands and talked to himself.

Helen Carlysle was out of the car, showy vast cape swirling about her, staring in white-faced fury at the front bumper of the Citroлn, which was well and truly locked with the yellow Japanese compact.

A black Mercedes glided to a halt behind the Citroлn. The driver opened his door and stood up behind it. J. Robert Belew regarded Carlysle through Ray-Ban aviator shades.

“Another screw-up,” he said. Mistral threw her hands up from her sides.

Sirens were beginning to burble in the background.

“Tell Crockett and Tubbs to hustle their hinder parts into the car. If the Dutch pin this one on them, George Bush himself won’t be able to get ’em out of stir in this millennium.

“Oh – from now on you can consider this a Langley operation. And that’s official.”

It was a little suburb strung along the Amstel River somewhere south of town. Mark sat on the grassy banks with his knees up and his head down and spent some quality time just dripping and breathing.

After a phase-shift between one of his “friends” – the ace personas his color-coded powders summoned – and plain-vanilla Mark, his thoughts tended to fragment like a frightened school of fish. It took time for them to coalesce.

Why did I come to this hot, heavy world? was his first coherent thought. On Takis I was a hero, a prince. I had Tis, and safety, and Roxalana.

But Sprout wasn’t on Takis. Even if she didn’t seem a whole lot closer, right this minute.

He picked up the do-it-yourself vest Aquarius’s ace strength had made out of Agent Gary’s coat. He wasn’t at all sure why the shape-changer had hung on to it; usually Aquarius felt total disdain for material things, particularly manmade ones.

In his dolphin form Aquarius wasn’t fully human in intelligence, in any sense of the word; the processing power of his brain was largely used up by the environmental interface, hearing and taste and sonar-sense, the orientation of self in four dimensions: up/down, left/right, forward/back, flow. Dolphin-Aquarius was a more truly alien creature than any Takisian. At two removes from baseline Mark, as it were, it was difficult to discern his motives. It was tough enough making sense of his memories, incredibly sensual and rich but incomprehensible, like watching a Kurosawa film in Japanese.

Mark suspected the reason Aquarius had hung on to the jacket during his high-speed swim through the canals of Amsterdam to the river was that the thing was stuck on his snout.