“Good-bye, Governor. I appreciate your call.”

“Wait! Wait. Before you do something stupid, I want you to know that you can still come and talk to me. Before everything gets out of hand… next time, let’s talk it out first.”

“It’s good to know that we have that option, Your Excellency.”

“Kid, listen! One last thing! As Governor of Louisiana, I strongly favor genetic industries. I got no problem at all with your personal background problem!”

Oscar hung up. His nerves were buzzing like a shattered electrical transformer. His eyes burned and the bare walls seemed to pitch. He threw an arm over Kevin’s shoulder. “How are your feet, Kevin?”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m really dizzy.” He snorted. His heart was pounding.

“Must be allergies,” Kevin said. “Everybody gets allergies when they work in the Hot Zone. Kind of an occupational hazard.”

Kevin’s blather was light-years away. “Uh, why do you say that, Kevin?”

“Understanding workplace hazards is a basic mandate for the se-curity professional, man.”

The event affecting Oscar didn’t feel like allergy. It felt like an undiagnosed concussion. Maybe some evil side effect of military knockout gas. Maybe an oncoming case of bad flu. It was bad. Very bad. He wondered if he was going to survive it. His heart gave a sudden lurch and began beating fast and lightly in his rib cage, like a trapped moth. He stumbled and almost fell.

“I think I need a doctor.”

“Sure, man, later. Just as soon as you talk to the President.” Oscar blinked repeatedly. His eyes were swimming with tears. “I can’t even see.”

“Take some antihistamines. Listen, man — you can’t blow it now, because this is the President! Get it? This is the big casino. If you don’t chill him out about this Sabine River shootout, I’m done for. I’ll be doing a bad-whitey terrorist rap, right next to my dad. And you, you personally, and Dr. Penninger too, you’re both gonna go down in major flames. Okay? You have got to handle this.”

“Right,” Oscar said, straightening his back. Kevin was absolutely correct. This moment was the crux of his career. The President was waiting. Failure at this point was unthinkable. And he was having a heart fibrillation.

Kevin led him through the Hot Zone airlock. Then he pulled a monster beltphone and called a cab, and a fleet of twelve empty cabs arrived at once. Kevin picked one, and it took them to the media center. Up an elevator. Kevin led him to the green room, where Oscar scrubbed his head in the sink. He was coming apart. There were scarlet hives on his chest and throat. His hands were palsied. His skin was taut and prickly. But still, somehow, a gush of cold water on the nape of his neck brought him to snakelike alertness.

“Is there a comb?” Oscar asked.

“You won’t need a comb,” Kevin said. “The President’s calling on a head-mounted display.”

“What?” Oscar said. “Virtual reality? You’re kidding! That stuff never works.”

“They had VR installed in all the federal labs. Some high-bandwidth initiative from a million years ago. There’s a VR set in the White House basement.”

“And do you really know how to run this gizmo?”

“Hell no! I had to roust up half the lab just to find somebody who could boot it. Now there’s a huge crowd sitting in there. They all know it’s the President calling. You know how long it’s been since a President took any notice of this place?”

Oscar fought for breath, staring in the mirror, willing his heart to slow. Then he walked into the studio, where they produced a casque like a deep-sea diver’s helmet. They bolted it over his head.

The President was enjoying a stroll through amber waves of grain below the purple majesty of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Oscar, after a moment’s disorientation, recognized the backdrop as one of Two Feathers’s campaign ads. Apparently this was the best virtual backdrop that the new White House staff could produce on short notice.

Leonard Two Feathers was a creature in stark contrast to a gener-ation of prettified American politicians. The President had huge flat cheekbones, a great prow of a nose, a bank-vault slit of a mouth. Long black-and-gray hair streamed down his shoulders, which were clad in his trademark fringed buckskin jacket. The President’s black, canny eyes seemed as wide apart as a hammerhead shark’s.

“Mr. Valparaiso?” the President said.

“Yes? Good evening, Mr. President.”

The President gazed at him silently. Apparently, to the Presi-dent’s eye, Oscar was a disembodied face floating somewhere at shoul-der level.

“How is the situation at your facility? You and the Director, Dr. Penninger — are you safe and well?”

“So far so good, sir. We’ve sealed the premises. We suffered a severe netwar attack that trashed our financial systems, so we’ve had to cut most of our phone and computer lines. We still have internal problems with a group of malcontents who are occupying a building here. But our situation seems stable at this hour.”

The President considered this. He was buying the story. It wasn’t making him happy. “Tell me something, young man. What have you gotten me into? Why did it take a French submarine and three hun-dred Cajun guerrillas to kidnap you and some neurologist?”

“Governor Huguelet wanted to see us. He wants this facility, Mr. President. He has a great deal of irregular manpower. He has more manpower than he can properly control.”

“Well, he can’t have that facility.”

“No sir?”

“No, he can’t have it — and neither can you. Because it belongs to the country, dammit! What the hell are you up to? You can’t hire Moderator militia and overpower a federal lab! That is not in your job description! You are a campaign organizer who has a patronage job. You are not Davy Crockett!”

“Mr. President, I completely concur. But we had no other realis-tic option. Green Huey is a clear and present danger. He’s in league with a foreign power. He completely dominates his own state, and now he’s launching paramilitary adventures over state borders. What else could I do? My security staffer informed your national security office as soon as he could. In the meantime, I took what steps I could.”

“What is your party affiliation?” the President said.

“I’m a Federal Democrat, sir.”

The President pondered this. The President’s party was the So-cial Patriotic Movement, the “Soc-Pats.” The Soc-Pats were the lead-ing faction in the Left Tradition Bloc, which also included the Social Democrats, the Communist Party, Power to the People, Working America, and the ancient and shriveled Democratic Party. The Left Tradition Bloc had been suffering less ideological disarray than usual, lately. They had been able — barely — to seize the American Presi-dency.

“That would mean Senator Bambakias of Massachusetts?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you ever see in him?”

“I liked him. He has imagination and he’s not corrupt.”

“Well,” the President said, “I am not a mentally ill Senator. I happen to be your President. I am your newly sworn-in President, and I have naive, new-hire staffers who are easily fooled by fast-talking hustlers with family links to white-supremacist gangsters. Now, thanks to you, I am also a President who has had the misfortune to kill and wound several dozen people. Some of them were foreign spies. But most of them were our fellow citizens.” Despite his expressed regret, the President looked quite ready to kill again.

“Mr. Valparaiso, I want you to listen to me carefully. I have about four more weeks — maybe three weeks — of political capital to expend. Then the honeymoon is over, and my office will be broken on the rack. I will have to face all the lawsuits, constitutional chal-lenges, palace revolutions, outings, banking scandals, and Emergency machinations that have screwed every American President in the past twenty years. I want to survive all that. But I have no money, because the country is broke. I can’t trust the Congress. I certainly can’t trust the Emergency committees. I can’t trust my own party apparatus. I’m the nation’s Commander in Chief, but I can’t even trust the armed forces. That leaves me with one source of direct Presidential power. My spooks.”