On another level she was curiously indifferent to the objects around her. This was despite their high quality, the dramatic space, the secrecy of the whole setup, the handsome trappings, the subject matter itself. The strongest thing she felt was a sense of the work's innate limitations. She recalled what Lightborne had said about old and new forms. The modern sensibility had been instructed by a different kind of code. Movement. The image had to move.

From his window Selvy could see a colorless strip of the Anacostia River. He hadn't shaved in two and a half days, the first time this had happened since his counterinsurgency stint at Marathon Mines in southwest Texas, a training base for paramilitary elements of various intelligence units and for the secret police of friendly foreign governments.

Shaving was an emblem of rigor, the severity of the double life. Shaving. Proper maintenance of old combat gear. Seats on the aisle in planes and trains. Sex with married women only. These were personal quirks mostly, aspects of his psychic guide to survival.

He'd broken the sex rule and now he had nearly three days' growth. But the routine still applied. The routine in one sense was his physical movement between New York and Washington, and the set pieces of procedure, the subroutines, that were part of this travel. In a larger context the routine was a mind set, all those mechanically performed operations of the intellect that accompanied this line of work. You made connection-A but allowed connection-B to elude you. You felt free to question phase-i of a given operation but deadened yourself to the implications of phase-2. You used expressions that contained interchangeable words.

The routine was how your mind had come to work; which areas you avoided; the person you'd become.

He'd known from the beginning that Christoph Ludecke was a systems engineer. When the break developed-Senator linked to transvestite-the dead man's occupation was among the first things looked into.

He'd also known that systems planning was the cover Radial Matrix used in its role as funding mechanism for covert operations. Obviously. Radial Matrix-an abstraction personified by Lomax, his sole contact-was the entity he worked for.

The connection was unexpected. It didn't fit the known world as recently constructed. It was a peculiar element in a series of events otherwise joined in explainable ways.

This was where the routine was important. He stuck to the routine. The routine enabled him mentally to bury this queer bit of intelligence, Ludecke and Radial Matrix, a conjunction of interests that could only lead to areas he wasn't privileged, or competent, to enter. He wasn't a detective, after all. He didn't build models of theoretical events surrounding a criminal act. Nor did he concern himself with policy.

Ludecke was linked to the Senator. It wasn't within Selvy's purview to meditate on additional links, even when they might pertain to his own ultimate sustenance. Especially then. This was why the routine existed.

In his right hand, as he stood looking out the window at nothing in particular, was the.41 magnum, loaded with expandable bullets. Selvy's regard for the implements of an operational mode became a virtual passion where handguns were involved. He went regularly to the range to work on sight alignment and trigger control. He dry-fired, he used live rounds. He practiced grip and finger positions. He worked on various steadying exercises.

This, too, was the routine.

He kept the chambers clean. He took precautions against fouled bores and corrosion. He owned any number of lubricants, brushes, swabs, preservers, conditioners, degreasers and removers.

To Selvy, guns and their parts amounted to an inventory of personal worth. He controlled the weapon, his reflexes and judgment. Maintaining the parts and knowing the gun's special characteristics were ways of demonstrating involvement in his own well-being.

These pieces, laid out at his fingertips, resembled nothing more than routine hardware. Still, there was order in this grouping; distinct precision. He could see how each surface was designed to adapt to at least one other surface. The interrelationships accumulated and spread. Things fit.

Where the routine prevented Selvy from seeking human links, it prompted him to study the interactions within mechanisms.

At the range he worked on stance, breath control, eye focus. The idea was to build almost a second self. Someone smarter and more detached. Do this perfectly and you've developed a new standard for times of danger and stress. He stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the proposed line of fire. He tried to avoid locking his elbow. He fired, focusing his master eye, the right eye in his case, on the gun's front sight.

The handgun is intimate. A functional accessory. You wear it. It fits you or doesn't, and vice versa.

He found it reassuring to handle the parts, to know their names and understand their functions. Attention to detail is a form of vigilance. There were no shadings in his willingness to use the stopping power at his disposal. This was very clear, this resolve. It affirmed his bond to the weapon itself.

Evening. The room was dark. He didn't move from the window to turn on a light.

Sex with an unmarried woman. Two and a half days without a shave. Minor lapses. He saw the humor in his idiosyncrasies. The routine still applied. That's what mattered most. The routine applied to the extent where he didn't actively speculate on who that might have been who was standing in the doorway of that run-down bar directing automatic fire across the room, or what the reasoning behind it was, or who was supposed to get hit.

In a storeroom on H Street, Moll Robbins went through _Running Dog's_ files, such as they were, on Earl Mudger.

From bases in Japan he led strikes by F-84Es against selected enemy targets in Korea. These strikes were operational tests of refueling procedures as much as combat missions. He also coached the football team, 116th Fighter-Bomber Wing.

Still in Korea he resigned his commission and spent a year in special paramilitary programs run by Air Force Intelligence, an open-ended term of duty.

He left to return to civilian life as Vice-President, Distribution, Process Management Systems, a firm with headquarters in Oklahoma City.

Three years later he appeared as chief training officer at Marathon Mines, an abandoned silver mining site in rough country north of the Rio Grande, where antiguerrilla specialists taught survival techniques and conducted war games.

In Laos he was a contract officer attached to Air America during operations secretly directed by the CIA.

In Vietnam, still on a contract basis, he recruited and directed CT teams against the Vietcong. Later he helped set up a network of provincial interrogation centers, where Vietcong suspects were tortured. Then he ran a cover operation in Saigon, hiring mercenaries for special operations.

It was while Mudger was on loan to Special Forces for unknown duties that he became something of a legend in Vietnam. Apparently he established a feudal barony complete with loyal ARVN soldiers (loyal to him, not the government) as well as pimps, black marketeers, shoeshine boys, war refugees, bar girls, deserters, pickpockets and others. It was suspected to be a drug operation with a thriving sideline in blackmarket piasters. As head, Mudger dispensed land, money, food and other favors.

He also set up a private zoo in the jungle outside a village called Tha Binh. He managed to stock it with tigers, wolves, elephants, peacocks, snakes, leopards, apes, zebras, monkeys, hyenas and hippos.

Virtually all this information Moll found in a single clipping, mdst of it color background for an AP dispatch that detailed Mudger's exploits during the fall of Saigon. Waving a Browning automatic he commandeered a C-123 transport, rigged for defoliation, and crammed most of his people aboard, along with seventeen of his animals, on the day before the city fell.