Laura nodded eagerly, then stopped. "Uhmm... they're not in Changi, are they?"

"There's nothing wrong with Changi!" the cop said, net- tled. "Don't listen to globalist lies."

They were tooling slowly up Pickering Street, crammed with beauty salons and cosmetic-surgery joints. The side- walks were crowded with grinning, larking curfew breakers, but they hadn't yet thought to block the street. "You foreign- ers," the captain said slowly. "You cheated us. Singapore could have built a new world. But you poisoned our leader, and you robbed us. This is it. Enough. All finish."

"Grenada poisoned Kim."

Captain Hsiu shook his head. "I don't believe in Grenada."

"But it's your own people who are doing this," Laura told him. "At least you weren't invaded."

The cop gave her a salt-in-the-wounds look. "We are invaded. Didn't you know?"

She was stunned. "What? Vienna came in?"

"No," said a cop in the back with pessimistic relish. "It's the Red Cross."

For a moment she couldn't place the reference. "The Red

Cross," she said. "The health agency?"

"If an army came, we would chop them up," said Captain

Hsiu., "But no one shoots the Red Cross. They are already in

Ubin and Tekong and Sembawang. Hundreds of them."

"With bandages and medic kits," said the cop eating rice cakes. " `Civil disaster relief.' " He began laughing.

"Shut up, you," said the captain listlessly. Rice Cakes throttled it down to a snicker.

"I never heard of the Red Cross pulling a stunt like that,"

Laura said.

"It's the globalist corporations," said Captain Hsiu, darkly.

"They wanted to buy Vienna and have us all shot. But it too expensive, and take them too long. So they buy the Red

Cross instead-an army with no guns-and kill us with kindness.

They just walk in smiling, and never walk out of

Singapore again. Dirty cowards."

The police radio squawked wildly. A mob was invading the premises of Channel Four television, at Marina Centre. Cap- tain Hsiu growled something foul in Chinese and turned it off. "I knew they attack the tellies soon or later," he said.

"What to do ... '

"We getting brand-new orders tomorrow," said the lieu- tenant, speaking for the first time. "Probably big rise in pay, too. For us, plenty busy months ahead."

"Traitor," said Captain Hsiu without passion.

The lieutenant shrugged. "Got to live, la."

"Then we've won," Laura blurted. She was realizing it, in all its scope, for the first time. Ballooning inside her. All that craziness and all that sacrifice-it had worked, somehow. Not quite the way anyone had expected-but that was politics, wasn't it? It was over. The Net had won.

"That's right," said the captain. He turned right, onto

Clemenceau Avenue.

"Then I guess there's not much point in arresting me, is there? The protest is meaningless now. And I'll never stand trial for those charges." She laughed happily.

"Maybe we book you just for the fun of it," said the lieutenant. He watched a car full of teenagers zip past, one leaning through the open window, waving a huge Singapore flag.

"Oh, no!" said the captain. "Then we must watch her make more globalist moralizing speeches."

"No way!" Laura said hastily. "I'm getting the hell out of here as soon as I can, back to my husband and baby."

Captain Hsiu paused. "You want to leave the island?"

"More than anything! Believe me."

"Could arrest her anyway," suggested the lieutenant. "Probably take two, three week for the paperwork to find her."

"Especially if we don't file it," said the snickering cop.

He started laughing through his nose.

"If you think that scares me, go right ahead," Laura said, bluffing. "Anyway, I couldn't get out now if I tried. There's no way. Martial law closed the airports."

They drove across the Clemenceau Bridge. Tanks guarded it, but they looked abandoned, and the police car cruised past without pause.

"Not to worry," said the captain. "To be rid of Laura

Webster? No sacrifice too great!" And he took her to the Yung

Soo Chim Islamic Bank.

It was an eerie reprise. They were all on the top of the bank building-the personnel of Yung Soo Chim. Up there amid the white bristling forests of microwave antennas and fat rain-stained satellite dishes.

Laura wore her sari flap hooded snugly over her head and a pair of cop's mirrorshades that she'd begged from Captain

Hsiu. Once past the private security and into the bank build- ing, redolent with the stink of panic and the new-mown-hay aroma of shredded files, the rest had been easy. No one was checking ID-she had none to check, no luggage, either.

No one bothered her-she was passing for somebody's

Eurasian mistress, or maybe some exotic tech in high Hindu drag. If the pirates learned she was here among them, they might do almost anything. But Laura knew with thrilling certainty that they'd never touch her. Not here, not now, not after all she'd come through.

She wasn't afraid. She felt bulletproof, invincible, full of electricity. She knew now that she was stronger than they were. Her people were stronger than their people. She could walk in daylight, but they couldn't. They'd thought they had teeth, in all their corner-cutting crime conspiracies, but their bones were made of glass.

The criminal machine just didn't have it the gemeineschaft.

They were rip-off artists, flotsam, and there was nothing to hold them together, no basic trust. They'd been hiding under the protective crust of the Singapore Government, and now that it was gone the Bank was wrecked. It would take them years to stick it all back together, even if they were willing to try, and the momentum, the world tide, was against them.

This place and its dreams were over-the future was some- where else.

What a brag session this was going to make. How she'd crept out of Singapore in the very midst of the pirate bankers.

A steady procession of twin-tutored Singaporean military chop- pers was arriving on the plush landing pad on the Bank's roof. Two, three dozen refugees at a time would cram in helter-skelter and vanish into the leaden monsoon sky.

The others waited, perching like crows on the chain-linked parapet and the concrete anchor blocks of the microwave towers. Some clumped moodily around portable televisions: watching Jeyaratnam on Channel Two, weary and beaten and gray-faced, quoting the Constitution and urging the populace back to their homes.

Laura edged around a luggage trolley piled high with bulg- ing ripstop luggage in maroon and yellow synthetic. Three men sat on the far side of it, bent forward attentively with their elbows on their knees. 'Two Japanese guys and an

Anglo, all three in crisp new safari suits and bush hats. They were watching television.

It was Channel Four, "On the Air-For the People,"

featuring, as a stuttering, blushing anchorwoman, Miss Ting-

Kim's old flame.

Laura watched and listened from a discreet distance. She felt a strange sisterhood with Miss Ting, who had obviously been swept into her current situation through some kind of odd synchronistic karma.

It was all like that now, the whole of Singapore, giddy and brittle and suspended in midair. Up here it might be solid gloom, but below them the streets were full of honking cars, one vast street party, the populace out congratulating itself on its heroism. The last billows of smoke were fading in the docklands. Revolutionary Singapore-vomiting. out these ex- pensive data pirates, like ambergris from the guts of a conva- lescent whale.

The smaller Japanese guy lifted his bush hat, and picked at an itchy sales tag inside the brim. "Kiribati," he said.

"If we get the bloody choice we take Nauru," said the