In yesterday's primary, a lot of people had written in the Governor's name. A lot of people. So many that the counting of the ballots had been delayed. But the results available as of the middle of the night before, when the newspapers had gone to press, suggested that Cozzano had actually won a number of precincts, made a strong showing overall, and might actually come in second to Normal Fowler, Jr. He had been so strong, in fact, that he had actually gotten several thousand write-in votes in the other party's primary.

When Aaron saw the preliminary numbers printed in the paper, he turned on the TV in his office to see if he could get some up-to-date numbers. He never used to pay attention to this stuff, but since he had started hanging out with Ogle he had become very election conscious.

The news networks were full of Cozzano. Cozzano in Vietnam. Cozzano being carried around on the shoulders of fellow Bears. Cozzano raking leaves in front of his big house in some backwater town in Illinois. Cozzano waving from the window of his hospital room in Champaign. And the name Cozzano, crudely printed on T-shirts and homemade yard signs.

He was startled to realize that someone was standing in his office doorway. It was Marina, the office manager, word processing and desktop publishing genius, fixer, diplomat, you name it. She looked a little dreamy. If this had been a Warner Brothers cartoon, she would have had stars and birds circling around her head.

"I just got the weirdest phone call," she said.

"Tell me about it," Aaron said.

"This guy called up. A guy with a southern accent. I think it's that guy you've been dealing with out in California."

"Cy Ogle."

"Yeah."

"Well, what did Mr. Ogle have to say?"

"That I was fired."

"He said what?"

"That I was fired. That the corporation was undergoing a restructuring and that I could apply for reemployment later."

Aaron was more nonplussed than he was angry. It had to be Ogle's weird sense of humor at work. "Well, who the hell is Ogle to be saying stuff like that?"

"Exactly what I asked him. He said he was the chairman of the board of directors."

"I'm the chairman," Aaron said.

"I know that."

Another person appeared in the hallway, standing behind Marina. It was Greg. College buddy of Aaron's. Cofounder of the corporation. Chief biologist. "I have just been informed that I'm fired too," he said. "But maybe it's not so bad since our stock is selling for twice its normal value today. So I'm worth twice as much."

"Good," Marina said, "so am I." Marina had lots to stock too.

"Selling?" Aaron said. "None of our stock has changed hands in months."

"Get with it," Greg said. "Fifty-five percent of it changed hands at 9:05 this morning."

"What you're saying is that our venture capitalists sold us to someone else."

"That's what it amounts to."

"And Cy Ogle claims to be that someone," Marina said.

The telephone on Aaron's desk began to purr. Aaron picked it up, indicating with a hand gesture that it was, okay for Greg and Marina to stay in the room.

"You're probably pissed because I just fired half of our company," Ogle said. "Which is understandable. It's hard to run a tight ship based on emotion and personal loyalty. Damn hard."

"Who's next? Me?"

"Nope. You're staying on, along with your two electronics guys. We can use them. Everyone else has served their purpose."

"How am I supposed to run an office without Marina?"

"You don't have to worry about running an office anymore. We have plenty of room down here in Falls Church."

"But I don't live in Falls Church, Virginia. I live in Arlington, Massachusetts."

"Then you better get used to a hell of a long commute," Ogle said, "because a moving truck is showing up at your office door in five minutes to pick up all your equipment and drive it down here."

"Now, wait just a second," Aaron finally said. He had been fighting the impulse to get pissed off ever since this weirdness started. "This is just totally unacceptable. You can't just uproot our lives like this. Hell, I don't even know for sure that you're the real chairman!"

"I am," Ogle said, "but there's no point in your getting pissed off at me."

"There certainly is," Aaron said, "if you're the chairman."

"I'm the chairman of Green Biophysical Systems as of 9:05 a.m.," Ogle said, "but as of 9:03 a.m. I was no longer the chairman of Ogle Data Research."

"Huh?"

"I got bought out too."

"By whom?"

"A whole bunch of folks. MacIntyre Engineering. The Coover Fund. Gale Aerospace. Pacific Netware. They own me now. And the first thing they did was tell me to buy you. So I did. And then they told me to initiate a radical downsizing program. So I did. And part of that is closing the Lexington office and moving it down here to Falls Church."

"And all of these events took place during the first five minutes of the business day."

"Yup."

"Gee," Aaron said, "a guy could almost get the impression that the groundwork for this whole thing had been laid well in advance."

"Draw your own conclusions. Throw a tantrum. Call me names. Just don't be late for the meeting."

Aaron rolled his eyes. "What meeting would that be?"

"Emergency board meeting for Ogle Data Research, which you're invited to sit in on, to be followed immediately by an emergency board meeting for Green Biophysics."

"When and where?"

"Right here at Seven Corners, at two o'clock this afternoon. That should give you time to grab a pair of shuttle flights. Oh, and Aaron?"

"Yes?"

"We bought you out at twice your book value."

"So I heard."

"We'll double that figure again if any of your existing stockholders want to sell out. But they have to do it today."

"I'll pass that along."

"See you at two o'clock."

Aaron hung up his phone. Cy Ogle's phone. MacIncyre's, Gale's, Coover's, and Tice's phone.

"The bad news is, we just got hit by the financial equivalent of Desert Storm," he said, "and we lost. The good news is that we all just quadrupled our net worth."

Marine laughed, verging on hysteria.

"Not bad for an hour's work," Greg said, looking at his watch. It was ten o'clock.

A big, handsome head shot of Governor William A. Cozzano flashed up on the television screen. Roaring white noise came out of the speaker, the sound of a wildly cheering multitude.

Aaron sold his stock. There was no point in hanging on to the stuff when he knew that it would drop to one-quarter of its current value by the end of the day. He took a taxi to Logan, hopped the shuttle to LaGuardia, walked across the concourse and hopped another shuttle to National Airport in Washington.

As the shuttle twisted and veered down the lower Potomac, Aaron looked out the window and saw the Washington Monument, the Mall, which seemed prematurely green to a person used to New England winters, and the dome of the Capitol. He realized, somewhat to his own astonishment, that this was the first time he had been to Washington, D.C., since his high-school band trip fifteen years before.

It was thirty degrees warmer here, humid, green, with flowers coming out all over the place. Spring, which hadn't even started in Boston, was a memory here. It gave him a feeling of being out of it, of being way behind the times. He got on a little bus that inched its way through the airport's pathetically constricted traffic pattern and finally let him off at Avis. There, he climbed into a brand-new navy-blue Taurus. It was about a hundred and twenty degrees inside the car, and the controls for the air conditioner were already set to MAX.

D.C. was going to take getting used to. His car in Boston didn't even have air-conditioning. He was going to have to buy a new goddamn car.

He went right out and got badly lost. That was okay, he had plenty of time, and he felt like driving around lost for a while. Eventually he pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a big oversized street map atlas for northern Virginia and figured out where Falls Church was: just a few miles due west of D.C. Right in the middle of that was a place called Seven Corners, where a whole lot of roads came together. It was difficult to miss. From its folksy name, Aaron was expecting it to be sort of a quaint, woodsy crossroads.