"Not yet, we're not," I protested.

"If you elect Grey, you will be."

"Grey is a rabbi," I countered. "He would never join Christendom."

"Grey is a wimp," Mouse said in disgust. "He'll do what the people want."

I laughed. "Isn't that what an elected official is supposed to do?"

Mouse gave me a grimace. "America is a sinking ship, Dee. You have never recovered from the war. What America really needs is a benevolent dictator. Someone to guide wisely and steadily, not fluctuate with the tide of opinion polls."

"You're scaring me, Mouse. That almost makes sense." I laughed. "But, America is not Islam. We're kind of stuck on this democracy thing. Anyway, I'm surprised at you. How friendly would a dictator be to mouse.net?"

"Mouse.net is beyond single-country control."

"Ah-ha! Finally! World domination, eh, Mouse?"

He smiled, but there was a touch of sourness in his face. "You should give me more respect, Dee. I wield more power than you know."

"Enough power to get me information on two men sometime this week?"

Mouse blinked, then laughed. "All right, Dee. All right. Now then," Mouse said, with a wicked smile on his lips, "for payment ... underwear. Confess. What kind?"

"Couldn't I give you some other information?" I stalled. It wasn't so much that I cared if the public knew this kind of detail, but that I was giving it to Mouse. "There must be something else you could sell?"

"Of equal value?" he asked. After I nodded enthusiastically in agreement, he smiled darkly. The lines of his face looked tighter, and, for a brief moment, he looked older – more serious. Squinting past the screen into the sun, he said, "Sure, McMannus. Tell me what really happened between you and Daniel the night before the Pope was murdered."

"White, bikini-cut, Hanes, size 6."

His gaze slid back to mine. There was something different behind his eyes, disappointment, maybe. Or, if I allowed myself the thought, hurt or rejection.

"Bikini-cut, no lie?" he asked, picking up his airy persona like a feather mask. "Kind of tawdry, don't you think?"

"I'm an eternal optimist." I shrugged.

My saucy comment was rewarded with a genuine smile.

"Someday, Dee ... maybe you and I will both get lucky ... real-time." He wagged his eyebrows at me suggestively. "Got to run. I've got info to sell. I'll have the page ring you about the boomerang source, okay? Usual channels though, don't expect a telephone call. Sheesh."

After rolling his eyes at me, he was gone. When I found myself still smiling at the blank screen, I reached over and flicked the phone off.

Mouse's boomerang was my ace in the hole. The boomerang program was, as Mouse would put it, one wicked string of code. It followed a trace back to its originator, slammed them with a simple but irritating virus, and then returned with the information. Now, I just hoped Mouse would see fit to be generous with whatever information the boomerang provided; I was fresh out of good bartering material.

I smiled. Mouse was a paradox. With one hand, he raked in the dough through illegal, and often amoral, information brokering. Meanwhile, as if the right didn't know what the left was doing, the other hand busily redistributed that ill-gotten gain to the less fortunate around the globe.

Mouse provided wet ware or exoware to anyone, anywhere, no questions asked. Also, he allowed free access to his shadow of the LINK – mouse.net. If people were as creative and devious as Mouse himself, they might hack their way onto regular LINK channels, but more often they were content to talk amongst themselves. This irritated the international governments and Christendom especially. Not only was mouse.net not regulated, Mouse's people also did their business with their own strange barter system, which operated independently of any economic system. Fortunately for Mouse, he was clever enough to remain mostly harmless. Though many governments might prefer to shut Mouse down, his subscribers were mainly outcasts with little or no social, economic, or political power. Just to be safe, Mouse always buttered his bread on both sides. A great number of countries also owed him for information bought and traded.

The media tried to label Mouse a subversive rebel, but they'd misunderstood his motivations. From what I had learned when Danny and I pursued him, this generosity was a tenet of the Muslim belief in almsgiving. Though if the rumors were true about Mouse's misspent youth, almsgiving was the only part of his religion he followed with any kind of seriousness.

I pushed the chair away from the desk, and walked over to the coffeemaker. I poured myself another cup of coffee. Holding the warm mug in my hand, I breathed in the aroma. The coffee jock called it Sumatra, and next to romances, it was my other great addiction. Unlike any other coffee, it tasted just exactly like it smelled. The wind pushed a sheet of rain against the window. I took a long draught of my coffee and sighed contentedly. The old building's creaks and moans helped numb me to the silence.

I turned back to my desk with the intention of returning to my romance novel and letting the words fill my head for a while. Just then, a burst of lightning illuminated the office in a pale, bright flash. Against the wall, enormous wings fluttered. I cried out in surprise. The cup in my hand fell to the floor with a crash. The silhouette stretched from one corner of the room to the other. Before I could discern the rest of its shape, the shadow image vanished.

Black wings ... black, like the ebony feathers that bore Phanuel through the LINK. He was the first LINK-angel to appear, like a shadow that crawled out of the world's collective unconscious. A dark, fluttering thing – his presence at a LINK node would cause mass panic. Unlike the others that would follow, Phanuel did not broadband. Instead, he chose to visit individuals and corporations separately. He never spoke; rather he was seen and felt. I was still a cop when Phanuel came to the police frequency. Though some claimed to, I had never seen his face, just blackness that danced at the edge of my consciousness and haunted me for a week – like a shadow on the wall.

The room was empty of illusions now, but I felt an old chill go down my spine. I pivoted my head in the direction of the window, hoping to catch a reassuring glimpse of a fleeing pigeon. There was nothing I could see, so I moved cautiously closer to the rain-streaked window. Long lines of yellow-green light from the traffic tubes above made a crisscross pattern on the darkened windows of the rain-soaked buildings across the way. The storm-darkened skies heightened the oddness of the color of this near-street level, until everything seem bathed in puce.

I scanned the area, searching along the eaves for signs of a nest, but the shadows were long and it was impossible to discern much of anything. "Big crow," I told myself, though I hadn't seen a bird since the war thanks to the proximity of my office to the glass city that was once the Bronx, victim of the Medusa bomb. Still, I hoped aloud, "Or a raven." Anything but Phanuel.

My computer beeped. I scurried over to the desk to check my monitor, ignoring the broken mug on the floor. At the far right-hand corner of the screen, a mouse icon blinked at me. I clicked on it, and a window popped up. The text read: