Voelker held up a hand. "Khan, get the gear out of the van. I'll un-chain the car."

Khan and McCruder started pulling hard-shell Pelican cases from the van. McCruder just shook his head sadly. "You're the one who asked how hot it was."

Fifteen minutes later Voelker extended the antenna on a sizeable handheld remote controller. Khan and McCruder sat nearby on the empty hard-shell containers in front of a folding table. The table was strewn with cables, high-gain antennas, and two ruggedized laptops with shades shielding their screens from the sunlight. A half-meter satellite dish pointed skyward on a tripod placed in the grass nearby.

Voelker looked to McCruder, who was peering at his laptop's LCD screen. McCruder finally nodded. "Anytime, Kurt."

Voelker pointed the controller directly at the Lincoln on the trailer bed. The car looked identical to the endless number of black fleet Town Cars with smoked glass coursing through downtown streets and airports nationwide-replete with a TCP number on its back bumper and a vanity plate reading LIVRY47.Voelker pressed a button on the remote. The car's V8 engine started. He slid a lever to put it in gear and then began backing the car slowly off the trailer ramps.

"I bet he rolls it," McCruder snickered.

"You'd better hope he doesn't."

Voelker didn't even look. "Guys, I'm working here. You wanna shut your pie holes for two seconds?"

In a few moments he had deftly backed the car onto the dirt road; then he shifted it into drive and eased it out onto the asphalt of the small oval racetrack nearby. The circuit was perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. An oddity, really. Nothing you could actually race on. It was crisscrossed with mysterious grooves set at odd angles.

"This good?" Voelker turned to his companions.

They shrugged.

Khan took a lollipop out of his mouth. "How the hell are we supposed to know? We're in the box. Park it where it is."

Voelker killed the engine. He collapsed the controller's antenna. "Anything?"

Both men shook their heads.

He walked up. "I guess we wait."

The late afternoon sun was sinking toward the hills. They had been waiting and sweating for a couple of hours in the brutal heat, listening to the wind chimes dangling from the eaves of a nearby utility shed. The chimes sounded all too infrequently.

Khan mopped his face with the front of his black T-shirt. "Goddamn. It is Africa hot."

McCruder upended a soda can. Nothing came out. "I thought you Indians thrived in this weather, Khan."

"Fuck you. I grew up in Portland, moron."

Voelker wiped the salty sweat from his eyes. He blinked from the sting. "Guys, I swear, I'll take a tire iron to you both if you don't quit your bitching."

They heard a blip-blip sound from the nearby laptop. They snapped to attention.

Khan leaned over McCruder's shoulder to look at the LCD screen.

McCruder looked up to Voelker. "It's here."

All three turned expectantly to the asphalt.

Suddenly the car engine roared to life. It revved several times. The wheels turned left, then right.

They all watched transfixed.

Khan grinned. "It's alive! Bu-wahahahah!"

Suddenly the car's engine raced, and it laid down rubber, accelerating madly along the asphalt track.

"Jesus!" Voelker turned to the other two. "What the hell is it doing?"

"Don't know, but look at it go, man."

The Lincoln was weaving side to side, then it suddenly slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. It peeled out suddenly again and went into a power slide, whipping its tail around. It roared forward again, building up speed on the straightaway, then wrenched its wheels into another slide, and came out facing the other direction-still accelerating into a bootlegger reverse.

McCruder smiled. "It's testing the properties of the car."

Khan and Voelker leaned in, while still watching the screeching display of stunt driving.

McCruder spoke louder. "It's confirming the specs. Braking distance, turning radius-all that stuff. It's making sure we followed instructions."

Voelker pointed a finger at McCruder. "It damn well better meet the spec."

Without turning, McCruder extended his closed fist, then operated his thumb like a crank to extend his middle finger.

Suddenly the car stopped its acrobatic display and sat motionless on the pavement. Oily rubber smoke still wafted across the track.

All three men stared at it. It was half a football field away.

A Bullwinkle the Moose voice came over the speakers of McCruder's laptop. "Duhhh, you have mail."

McCruder checked.

While McCruder was busy, Khan looked at his own laptop screen. He grinned at Voelker. "We no longer have a connection to the car, Kurt. It changed the access codes."

Voelker didn't flinch. "It's part of the spec, Khan."

McCruder glanced up at his companions. "Let me confirm this." After a few frenzied moments of clicking, he smiled and turned to them again. "Fifty-six thousand dollars have been deposited into the corporate account, and we have an order for six more AutoM8s. The Daemon is pleased with our offering."

They whooped and high-fived.

"What will that total?" Khan was beaming.

Voelker thought for a second. "Three hundred thousand and change." He looked to McCruder. "Does it say where the cars will be coming from?"

McCruder shook his head. "Doesn't matter. Corporate leases, probably. Not our problem. Looks like the Haas has downloaded more plans, too."

"Excellent." Voelker smiled at them both. "Congratulations, gentlemen."

Suddenly the distant car roared into action again-laying down more rubber. They all turned. It was accelerating toward them.

"It's gonna whack us!"

They ran for the van, but the Town Car raced past their table and out along the dirt road. It accelerated and kept going.

They gathered their breath and watched it recede into the distance.

Khan turned to them. "We should follow it. You know, back to its lair."

McCruder narrowed his eyes. "What, are you fucking insane?"

Voelker nodded. "He's right. We released it into the wild. Those were the instructions. Following it is just a good way to get killed."

Khan watched the cloud of dust moving toward the distant hills. "You think we're the only ones doing this?"

Voelker watched, too, shielding his eyes against the sun. "If the number of unemployed electrical engineers is any indication, I'd say no."

Chapter 31:// Red Queen Hypothesis

Garrett Lindhurst marched purposefully toward the corner office on the fifty-first floor of Leland Equity Group's palatial world headquarters. He clenched a rolled magazine in his hand like a baton in a slow-motion relay race and looked visibly worried. Worried about systems.

As chief information officer, Lindhurst held dominion over the systems that delivered the lifeblood of Leland Equity Group: real-time financial data. That data was delivered instantaneously to every corner of the organization and to every client. Every account and every dollar in every branch office passed through Lindhurst's networks and data systems. Every e-mail passed through his servers. He had thirty regional VPs as direct reports and oversaw an empire of some five hundred IT employees worldwide.

And yet, Leland Equity Group was one of those multibillion-dollar companies that existed on the periphery of public awareness. Their unremarkable logo could be found in the skyline of any major city in North America, Europe, or Asia, and even if most people had no idea what the company did, they assumed it must be doing something important.

The reality was that, with eighty billion dollars in assets under management, the decisions made by Leland MBAs ruled the daily lives of two hundred million Third World people.