“What planet are you from again? Between the scumbag landlords and the scumbag developers, nothing in this city will ever stand at the same address for even five years, name me a building you love, someday soon it’ll either be a stack of high-end chain stores or condos for yups with more money than brains. Any open space you think will breathe and survive in perpetuity? Sorry, but you can kiss its ass good-bye.”

“Riverside Park?”

“Ha! Forget it. Central Park itself isn’t safe, these men of vision, they dream about CPW to Fifth Avenue solid with gracious residences. Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by. The only way to live here is not to get attached.”

Maxine is hearing similar advice from Shawn, though not necessarily in terms of real estate. “I checked out your Weblog last night, March, so now you’re chasing dotcoms also?”

“Real estate, easy to hate, these techies it’s a little different. You know what Susan Sontag always sez.”

“‘I like the streak, I’m keeping it’?”

“If there’s a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself, you need ‘a deep sympathy modified by contempt.’”

“I get the contempt part, but remind me about the sympathy?”

“Their idealism,” maybe a little reluctantly, “their youth . . . Maxi, I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world. ‘Information has to be free’—they really mean it. At the same time, here’s all these greedy fuckin dotcommers make real-estate developers look like Bambi and Thumper.”

The coin-op washing machine of Intuition clangs on into a new cycle. “Let me guess. Your estranged son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.”

“She’s a magician. You do birthday parties?”

“Actually right at the moment, hashslingrz also happen to be causing a client of mine some agità. Sort of client.”

“Yeah, yeah?” Eagerly, “Fraud maybe?”

“Nothing forensic that’d hold up in court, or not yet anyway.”

“Maxi, there is something really, really weird going on over there.”

Mike shows up with a smoldering cigar gripped in his teeth. “Ladies?”

“Not lately,” March beams. “How about waffles, bacon, sausage, homefries, coffee.”

“Special K,” sez Maxine, “skim milk, some kind of fruit?”

“Today for you, a banana.”

“Some coffee too. Please.”

March is shaking her head slowly. “Early-stage food nazi here. So tell me, you and Gabriel Ice, what?”

“Just good friends, don’t believe Page Six.” Maxine gives her a quick rundown—the Benford Curve anomalies, the ghost vendors, the Gulfward flow of capital. “I’ve only got a surface picture so far. But there do seem to be a lot of government contracts.”

March nods sourly. “Hashslingrz is as tight as it gets with the U.S. security apparatus, an arm of, if you like. Crypto work, countermeasures, heaven knows what-all. You know he’s got a mansion out in Montauk, just a morning jog down the trail from the old air base.” Funny look on her face, a strange mixture of amusement and doom.

“Why would that—”

“The Montauk Project.”

“The . . . Oh, wait, Heidi’s mentioned that . . . She teaches it, some kind of . . . urban legend?”

“You could say.” Beat. “You could also say, the terminal truth about the U.S. government, worse than anything you can imagine.”

Mike shows up with the food. Maxine sits peeling her banana, slicing it over the cereal, trying to keep her eyes wide and unjudging while March digs in to her high-cholesterol eats and is soon talking with her mouth full. “I see my share of conspiracy theories, some are patently bullshit, some I want to believe so much I have to be careful, others are inescapable even if I wanted to escape. The Montauk Project is every horrible suspicion you’ve ever had since World War II, all the paranoid production values, a vast underground facility, exotic weapons, space aliens, time travel, other dimensions, shall I go on? And who turns out to have a lively if not psychopathic interest in the subject but my own reptilian son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.”

“As another kid billionaire with a wacko obsession, you mean, or . . . ?”

“Try ‘power-hungry little CIA-groupie jerkoff.’”

“That’s if it’s real, this Montauk thing.”

“Remember, back in ’96, TWA Flight 800? Blown out of the sky over Long Island Sound, a government investigation which got so cute that everybody ended up thinking it was them that did it. Montaukies say it was particle-beam weapons being developed in a secret lab under Montauk Point. Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.”

“What—time travel? Aliens?”

“If you were doing something in secret and didn’t want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?”

“Ice doesn’t strike me as an antigovernment crusader or a seeker after truth.”

“Maybe he thinks it’s all real and wants to be duked in. If he isn’t already. He doesn’t talk about it at all. Everybody knows that Larry Ellison races yachts, Bill Gross collects stamps. But this, what Forbes would probably call, ‘passion’ of Ice’s, isn’t too widely known. Yet.”

“Sounds like something you want to post on your Weblog.”

“Not till I find out more. Every day there’s new evidence, too much Ice money going for hidden purposes in too many directions. Maybe all connected, maybe only part. These ghost payments you’ve been trying to follow, for example.”

“Trying. They’re getting smurfed out all over the world to pass-through accounts in Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Azerbaijan, all finally reassembled in a holding bank in the Emirates, some Special Purpose Vehicle registered in the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Like the Smurf Village, only cuter.”

March sits blinking at the food on her fork, and you can almost see those old-lefty gears being double-clutched into engagement and starting to spin. “Now, that I might want to post.”

“Maybe not. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody off quite yet.”

“What if it’s Islamic terrorists or something? Time might be of the essence.”

“Please. I just chase embezzlers, what do I look like, James Bond?”

“I don’t know, give us a macho smirk here, let’s see.”

But something now in March’s face, some obscure collapse, starts Maxine wondering who else is going to cut her any slack. “OK look, my whistle-blower has a source, some kid übergeek, he’s been digging, trying to crack into some stuff that hashslingrz has encrypted. Whatever he finds, whenever that is, I could pass it on to you, OK?”

“Thanks, Maxi. I’d like to say I owe you one, though at the moment, technically, I don’t. But if you’d really like me to . . .” She looks almost embarrassed, and Maxine’s mom ESP, cranking into action now, tells her this will not be unconnected with Tallis, the child March is not shy about admitting she once literally prayed to have, the one she misses most of all, living over on the Upper East Side, just across the park but it might as well be Katmandu also, society lady, a kid of her own that March seldom if ever sees—lost Tallis, bought and sold into a world March will never give up her hatred of.

“Let me guess.”

“I can’t go over there. I can’t, but maybe you could on a pretext, just to see how she’s doing. Really, just a secondhand report’s all I want. From what I can tell off the Internet, she’s the company comptroller at hashslingrz, so maybe you could, I don’t know . . .”

“Just call up, say ‘Hi, Tallis, I think somebody at your company’s playing Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar, maybe you need a decertified CFE?’ Come on, March, it’s ambulance chasing.”