"Who is Lomax?"

"Man in the limousine."

"I've mistaken him twice for the Senator's man. Once in New York, I _think_. Now here."

"You weren't mistaken," Mudger said. "Loyalties are so interwoven, the thing's a game. The Senator and PAC/ORD aren't nearly the antagonists the public believes them to be. They talk all the time. They make deals, they buy people, they sell favors. I doubt if Lomax knows whether he works for PAC/ORD or Lloyd Percival, ultimately. You have to understand, agencies allow this to go on all the time. People know what's happening. But they allow it. That's the nature of the times. You go to bed with your enemies."

"I assume you feed Lomax false information."

"Tell you what," he said. "Sometimes this is so much fun, I'd do it for nothing."

"Who is Glen Selvy?"

"No idea."

"Howard Glen Selvy?"

"Not a leaf stirs."

"Bullshit," she said.

"I like your smile."

"I'm not smiling."

"I thought that was a smile. I mistook that for a smile. Have some lemonade, why don't you?"

"These are Vietnamese, these people you've got here?"

"We have some Vietnamese here, definitely."

"That you got out just in time."

"I've had hairier moments. So have they. Compared to the life most of these people have had, getting out of Saigon was on the level of an escapade."

" Ho Chi Minh City," she said.

"Yeah, Ho Chi Minh City. A lark with firecrackers."

Moll nibbled on a cookie and drank some lemonade. She couldn't shake the feeling she'd crossed an invisible frontier into another way of life. The rules were different here. Sitting in the shade. White wicker and lemonade. Ponies motionless in their small corral.

"Back that way along the road," she said. "Radial Matrix?"

"Right."

"Thriving, by all accounts."

"Systems. It's one of the areas we still excel in."

"'We' meaning Americans."

"Nothing but,"

"In Vietnam you were involved in drug trafficking, no?"

"We did some of that, We were a link, As I say, I've unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing's geared to electronics. There's a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There's a general sponginess, a lack of conviction."

"You had your own zoo in Vietnam,"

"Checking up on me."

"A little," she said.

"My pride and joy, that zoo. We got to the point where we were making exchanges with real zoos halfway around the world. We had an animal dealer from Michigan come all the way out to see our operation. I had more gibbons than I could use. I was laying off gibbons the way bookmakers lay off excess bets. I had this rare type lynx, Eurasian, almost extinct, this one variety, and we bred it successfully in captivity. I tell you what, that made my war."

"Victory after all."

"We won far's I'm concerned. Revise the texts."

"What sort of retirement plans-forgive the skeptical look,"

"Domestic bliss," he said. "My wife's off having a baby, matter of fact."

"Nice."

"I'm fifty-two years old."

"Interesting."

"Wife number three."

"Not bad."

"She's a gook," Mudger said.

Apron and gloves. Helicopter landing in a field. She recalled what Percival had said before his sour mash whisky slowed him to a crawl. One set of rules. Mudger's. Nobody else gets to use them. Vietnamese in cowboy hats.

"Not that I don't have something to fall back on," he said.

"Aside from domestic bliss."

"I've got a shop in the basement. Sometimes I go down there and work half the night. Do a little planing, a little sanding. Lock things in vises. It's good for the soul. Punch holes in metal, do a little buffing. So anyway I got to fooling around with a small machine of my own devising that tests the hardness and content of steel. Machines that size do hardness alone, normally. I can tell you high carbon, low carbon, how much nickel or manganese. Is this boring?"

"Sort of."

"The machine has a thing called a diamond tip penetrator. I trademarked it as the Mudger tip."

"A little better," she said.

"I'm building a large shop about twenty miles south of here. If things work out, I'll be filling contracts for Radial Matrix."

She watched him light up a little at the irony of that.

"This is what's called negotiating a termination," he said.

He laughed, eyes not leaving her face. She judged him the kind of man deeply pleased by the appreciation of others. He would be a studier of faces, eager to gauge people's reactions to things he said. Robust men were always like this.

"It's real work," he said. "Doesn't involve secret transmitters, hot mikes, all the rest, Like for instance"-she watched his face shade with amusernent-"I can let you hear dialogue and other noises pertaining to last night's amorous activities."

"Involving whom?"

"You and the Senator, of course."

"Never happened. Sorry to disappoint."

"It doesn't necessarily have to happen," Mudger said. "All we need's your voice and his, which we have. The rest is purely technical."

"You make it happen."

"Sure."

"In this case has it already happened or is it pending?"

"I don't know. Lomax would know."

"Being the Senator's man, Lomax might push the wrong button. Scramble the voices beyond recognition. Or erase the tapes."

"It's a little more complicated than that."

"You've got me thinking I've done something wrong."

Mudger seemed to grow serious. He sat sideways in his chair, left arm extended, resting on the table, his right arm hanging over the back of the chair.

"When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals," he said. "Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can't escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It's a little like what I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we're guilty, then we're guilty. But it goes even deeper doesn't it? It's the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we're committing crimes. Just the fact that these things exist at this widespread level. The processing machines, the scanners, the sorters. That's enough to make us feel like criminals. What enormous weight. What complex programs. And there's no one to explain it to us."

That night Mudger stood behind the bar in his living room, mixing himself a drink. He put his glass down on the red folder, the Dorish Report. Lomax sat near the French doors, looking at a magazine. The doors were open, revealing a small Buddhist shrine in the garden beyond the patio.

"Been meaning to ask."

"What's that, Earl?"

"Why was the subject carrying a gun?"

"I don't know."

"He's over there in Percival's office, reading, isn't he? Or hanging around some art gallery. I'd like for you to tell me why he's carrying a gun."

"Earl, he shouldn't have been."

"Is he some kind of cowboy? What is he, a junior G-man? Because I thought we trained people better than that."

"It was contrary to procedure."

Mudger was sitting at the bar, his back to Lomax.

"This business with guns. He's, what, some kind of sportsman? Shoots fucking bear with a handgun?"

"He was on the Lower East Side. Maybe he thought it was dangerous."

"He was right, it turned out."

They both laughed.

"Who'd you press into service?" Lomax said.

"I called Talerico. He's in Canada these days. We've done things for each other before. Always worked out. Tal said he'd see what he could do."