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  “Moon, sir. Call sign Trollhunter, sir. We’ve met before, sir.”

  The colonel smiled unpleasantly “I didn’t ask for your call sign, Moon. Only real pilots are known by their call signs.” The colonel tapped the gold wings sewn above his own breast pocket.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t ever forget that, Lieutenant Moon. Now give us your situation report.”

  The kid cleared his throat. “Um, sir . . . ” He ran a quick glance across the screens in front of him. “Um . . . we have six drones over the area of operations right now, four of them still fully armed. We’ve had no confirmed contact with terrorists on this watch yet, and we’re now flying cover for a ground operation in Hilltown. It’s another up-tit, apparently.”

  Driscoll had shucked off his flak jacket and was settling into a chair. “An up-tit? What’s that?”

  “Uprooting the infrastructure of terror,” the colonel explained. He gave Moon another nasty look. “A specialized type of precision operation, Doctor, carried out on pinpoint intelligence, designed to write down the physical and human infrastructure of terror.”

  “Ah.” Driscoll took a notebook from the thigh pocket of his pants and made a note.

  “Put all the video feeds onto this screen,” ordered the colonel, and the kid called Moon tapped some buttons. A large monitor began to relay split-screen images shot from several different points, wheeling high above the ground.

  Driscoll leaned forward to stare more closely. “Incredible,” he said. “It almost looks like a normal city apart from the squalor. And look at all those terrorists, out walking in the street!”

  “Indeed, Doctor. We find there’s a marked increase in terrorist activity during daylight hours. Not that we need the sunlight to see them: with our new imaging technology and biometric software we can identify individual terrorists almost instantly, even by starlight. Provided they look up, of course.” He turned to Moon. “Hey! You there—what’s-your-name. Do we have any targets waiting for our attention?” He smiled at Driscoll. “Perhaps we can put on a show for you.”

  Moon looked at his computer. “Uh, no, sir. We have a contact query sent in by an intelligence operation in Hilltown. But it’s not confirmed as a target yet. We’re just about to take a look at it.”

  A sly expression appeared on Driscoll’s face. “Int op, eh? Would that be Captain Smith, by any chance?”

  The colonel looked at him sharply. “How would you know about that?”

  Driscoll waved a hand. “The captain and I have worked together before. Inside the Embargoed Zone.”

  The colonel gave Driscoll a long, conjecturing look, then lowered his voice. “Tell me, Doctor, what do you think of Captain Smith?”

  “I’m very impressed by him. A brave and shrewd officer. He handled himself very well when we were both involved in an ambush situation. I’ll probably mention him when I meet your esteemed general this afternoon.”

  Colonel White’s face contorted in horror. He leaned toward Driscoll and lowered his voice still further.

  “Between you and me, Doctor, Smith’s a disaster,” he confided urgently. “He has no sense of discipline. He’d be a colonel himself by now, perhaps even a general, if he hadn’t been demoted twice for reasons I can’t go into. The man’s a Neanderthal: his background was in the artillery, and as an intelligence man he’s also stuck in the past—far too much running around on silly comic book adventures inside the Embargoed Zone. How can you trust anything that anyone tells you there? They’re all a bunch of terrorists!”

  “Ah,” said Driscoll. It pained him profoundly when men he admired, good men, spoke ill of one another. He needed to change the subject.

  “Colonel,” he said, lowering his voice, “tell me something, please. Off the record, of course. Have you picked up any information in recent days that would suggest a new Iranian presence inside the Embargoed Zone?”

  “Iranians?” the colonel said with a shrug. “Well, obviously, Iran is flooding the Easy and all the other quasi-autonomous terrorist entities with weapons and money and propaganda and all that. If it weren’t for Iran and all the other instigators of hate, there wouldn’t be any terrorism—we’ve gone out of our way to be nice to these people.”

  Driscoll nodded quickly. “Of course. But what I mean is, have you heard reports of actual Iranian agents inside the Easy?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no! We’d never let them in!”

  “I see . . . . Because I have to tell you confidentially, Colonel, that I have solid information that Iranian agents are indeed operating inside the Embargoed Zone. And I have very strong reason to believe that they were behind this morning’s atrocity.”

  White bristled. “I suppose Captain Smith told you that, did he? Well, that doesn’t mean any—”

  Driscoll held a hand up to still him. “Oh, no, Colonel. Captain Smith told me nothing. Or almost nothing; I have my own sources, and I make my own assessments.” He glanced at the two drone jockeys sitting nearby, apparently busy at their tasks, then lowered his voice to a murmur. “Tell me, Colonel, what do you know about the U.S. Navy’s top-secret cetacean warfare program?”

  White looked puzzled. “Only what I saw on the Discovery channel,” he admitted.

  “Colonel, could we go somewhere private?”

  “No need,” said the colonel. He raised his voice, jerking his thumb at the door. “You two—out. Go stand in the corridor until I call for you.”

  Moon stared at him anxiously. “But sir, regulations say we can’t both leave this post unless we’re properly relieved by a qualified—”

  “I am a qualified . . . whatever it was you were going to say!” barked the colonel, jabbing his thumb at his pilot’s wings. “Now go!”

  When the pair was out of the room Driscoll leaned close to Colonel White.

  “You may not be aware of this, Colonel, but for many years now the U.S. Navy has been using dolphins and small whales to protect vessels and port installations from hostile frogmen and to recover experimental weapons systems lost at sea.”

  White made an effort to look surprised. “No. Really?”

  “Oh, yes. All highly classified. More recently, the navy has also experimented with using marine mammals in a counterterrorism role to deliver payloads against terrorist ports and shipping.” Even though they were alone, Driscoll was almost whispering. “Initially this proved unsuccessful. Although supposedly highly intelligent, the trained animals kept shaking off their warheads and swimming away before they could be detonated. But then the scientists found ways of combining top-secret neuromechanical synapse interfaces with the very latest in autonomous drone technology. The result was a powerful new weapon: the remote-controlled antiterrorist bomb dolphin.”

  “Amazing,” said the colonel politely. “And do these bomb dolphins work?”

  “To a point, Colonel. What I’m telling you now is known only to the highest circles in the Pentagon and to a few trusted insiders and opinion formers like myself. But I’m sure I can rely on the discretion of a loyal ally such as yourself. Anyway, the first dolphins worked fine on the test range in Florida, but the entire program was compromised, perhaps fatally, during the first operational sea trial in the Shattal-Arab waterway. The operators had guided a prototype to within one hundred yards of the chosen target, a terrorist fishing boat, when contact with the weapon was suddenly lost.”

  “The terrorists jammed the control signal?”

  “No. Worse than that. It seems that the operators had misjudged the distance to their target, thinking it closer than it was. When the dolphin came to the end of its control tether, its momentum pulled the umbilical jack from the animal’s cerebrocortical data port, severing contact with its operators on a nearby undercover research vessel.”

  “You don’t mean to say the dolphin had to be plugged in to work?”

  “That is correct; it was a wire-guided dolphin. The navy concedes that it may have been a mistake to field-test the prototype in this configuration�
�they should have waited until they had fully debugged the radio controls intended for full operational use. Unfortunately, the dolphin used in the Shattal-Arab test was last seen swimming toward the Iranian shore, and the Pentagon and Langley are both very concerned that the Revolutionary Guard may have recovered it. So do you see, Colonel, what I’m getting at here?”

  “No,” he said almost wearily.

  Driscoll smiled thinly. “I think you do, Colonel. That dolphin was controlled by a command line—just like the bomb donkey deployed by the terrorists this morning. And to clinch it all, I found an Iranian calling card at the site of the attack: a secret Aryan symbol, freshly painted on the wall!”

  The colonel looked pale.

  “Colonel,” continued Driscoll. “Let’s be frank with each other: we can both see the writing on the wall.” He smiled urbanely. “Let me ask you this one question, completely off the record, hypothetically if you like, on deep background: Is it possible that this morning’s terror attack was carried out by an experimental explosives-packed bomb donkey controlled by top-secret neuroelectronic synapse technology stolen by Iran and then smuggled for testing here in the Embargoed Zone?”

  The colonel closed his eyes again for a long moment and then slowly opened them again. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “It is possible.”

  “Ah,” said Driscoll, and made a jot in his notebook. “Good. Now, you said something about a target?”

  The colonel went over to the door and called the two drone pilots back to their posts. “Right, boys,” he said. “Let’s see that target you were telling us about.”

  The one called Moon looked unhappy. “It’s not a target yet, sir—it’s just an unconfirmed report. Even the tank crew who reported it weren’t that sure about it.”

  The colonel took a cigarette box from his tunic, removed a cigarette, and then, realizing where he was, stuffed it angrily back. “Never mind that,” he said testily. “Let’s just get this done. Put the area on screen. And get ready with that joystick.”

  “But sir—”

  “That’s an order!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The university at which Flora was taking her premedical year had no anatomical dummies, so her knowledge of first aid was almost entirely theoretical. But 24/7 had sent Joseph abroad on a survival course once, years before, when the wall was still somewhat porous, and he remembered enough to be able to clear the boy’s airway and get him breathing again. The heavy jeep bounced and wallowed as Tony hurled it into the bends, sending Flora and Joseph sprawling across the body on the blood-slick floor between them. The blood seemed to be coming from everywhere, not just from the mop of fibrous meat that sprouted where the boy’s arm and shoulder had once been joined, the white ribs gleaming through it. The jeep’s medical kit contained two field dressings and four bandages and a vial of some kind of opiate, and there was also a tourniquet and a packet of sticky bandages. When the field dressings were both tied to the chest, which already was heavy and dark and glistening, Joseph took off his shirt and tore it into strips and began applying the tourniquet to the knee-length leg wound.

  Flora, kneeling in the blood, tried to think of something useful to do. Unwrapping an adhesive bandage, she fixed it over one of the little blue-mouthed entry wounds created by the plastic, X-ray-proof flechettes. And then it occurred to her how silly she was being, and she stopped, bracing herself against the side of the jeep, and forced herself to lean over the boy’s face. His lips were blue, and his eyes had rolled up behind half-closed lids that fluttered like insect wings. A low groan came from his mouth, like an exclamation of puzzled annoyance, and the eyelids stopped fluttering. Flora touched the boy’s throat, inexpertly seeking a pulse. She couldn’t find one, so she tried a wrist, and then she lowered her cheek over the gaping mouth, hoping for a breath. After a time she sat back on her heels and tapped her uncle on the shoulder.

  “Adam’s dead,” she shouted above the engine noise. And then she turned back to her brother, who lay across the backseat. His eyes were tightly shut and he was breathing fast, but he was no longer screaming.

  A doctor stood outside the entrance to the emergency room, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. The Red Cross ambulances, being unarmored, had reached the hospital before the heavy Land Rover, and Flora saw the paramedics open the back doors and show the doctor what was inside. He puffed on his cigarette a couple of times and then jerked his thumb toward the ramp that led around the back of the hospital. The ambulance drivers let their clutches out and drove down the ramp, no longer in a hurry, and Tony eased the Land Rover into the space they had left. The doctor plastered Gabriel’s broken arm and cleaned up his cuts and then gave him an injection that put him to sleep.

  The child lay motionless on a gray, sour-smelling sheet stippled with little balls of loose cotton. The sheet was too small for the mattress, exposing wedges of dirty yellow foam in which bored little fingers had picked so many holes that it now resembled a cheese. The hospital had run out of bed gowns a long time ago, so Gabriel was still dressed in his own underpants and T-shirt, smeared with the blood of his friends.

  Plaster flaked from walls that were damp from lack of heating. Fragments of broken glass and cardboard sagged from the duct tape that crisscrossed the windows. There was the sweet, horrid smell of generic body fluids. Over in the corner nurses were fussing around a four-year-old boy who was, for some reason, slowly dying. A couple of older kids watched from their beds.

  “Come on,” Joseph said to Flora. “We need to get you home so you can wash and change and get some pajamas for Gabriel. Do you want me to tell your father what happened?”

  Flora rounded on him. “We’re not telling Dad!” she shouted, and then she controlled herself. “Dad doesn’t need to know. Gabriel is going to be fine. He’s hurt his arm, that’s all. I can look after him.”

  Tony waited for them out in the Land Rover. Adam’s body was gone, and someone—presumably the morgue attendants, who were used to such work—had hosed and mopped all the gore from the back; the wet metal floor plates were steaming. Flora sat behind the front seats on the damp bench where Gabriel had lain. Horns blared, and two other armored Land Rovers swept into the hospital parking lot, tires singing on the tarmac.

  “We really beat the competition on this one,” said Joseph. “Felicity’s going to be delighted.”

  “You’re not actually going to send her that stuff from this morning, are you?” demanded Tony.

  Joseph sneered at his own reflection in the windshield. “Why not? Felicity will love it. She’ll be a big star at this morning’s conference.” He turned to Flora. “Sorry,” he said.

  “There’s an obvious setup on that tape, Joseph,” Tony warned.

  “So what? I’m not going to send London the setup. I’m only going to send the other stuff, the stuff that came later. The stuff I couldn’t have set up if I was Steven fucking Spielberg.”

  They passed by the park. Another group of boys was playing on the mound.

  Flora slumped against the wall in her building’s dark vestibule, considering her next move. If she was quiet enough, she should be able to sneak into her room and change her clothes before her father knew she was back. Holding her breath, she opened the front door and tiptoed along the passage toward her bedroom. To her left yawned the open entrance to the workshop. Deliberately not looking, Flora glimpsed her father in the corner of her eye; he was contemplating a large washing machine placed before him on his workbench. She was reaching for her bedroom door when the sound of voices halted her. Her father was not alone.

  “It’s a beauty!” said an admiring voice, a man’s, low and ingratiating, furred by tobacco. “The Maelstrom Circe! The most advanced automatic washing machine yet built. It’s so smart, it practically talks to you. Brand-new.”

  “Right. So why does it need fixing?”

  The stranger chuckled. “It doesn’t, my friend. It’s right out of the box, that. Perfect working order.”

  “So why are you here?”
Her father sounded even more bewildered than usual. Flora wanted to go to his rescue, but first she had to change her clothes.

  “It’s worth two grand,” the stranger went on. “But I’ll let you have it for fifteen hundred. On account of your son Jake. He was a good kid. One of our best.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t. I fix old appliances. I don’t sell new ones. Anyway, this is the wrong kind of washing machine.”

  “What do you mean the wrong kind?” The stranger was indignant. “It washes clothes. What more do you want?”

  “It’s an American washing machine—a toploader. Most of the world uses frontloading washing machines like all the other ones here in this workshop.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “A very big difference.” Flora felt a pleasant pain: her father was beginning to sound professorial again. “For a start, American machines can wash a load much faster, and you can also pop open the door in the top here to take stuff out or put more stuff in while the machine is still working. You can’t do that with a frontloader because the door is holding all the water in—you have to be patient with frontloaders.”

  “So the toploader is better, then.”

  “Oh, no. Not when it comes to economy. Clothes washed in toploaders wear out more quickly, because they rub off this spindle here that comes up through the middle of the drum. Also, they use a lot more electricity and soap than frontloading machines, and they need an external hot water supply. The costs quickly mount up. You’d struggle to give this machine away in most parts of the world.”

  A sudden metallic crash made Flora jump. The stranger must have punched or kicked the side of an appliance.

  “And there’s another thing,” her father went on, as if he hadn’t noticed his visitor’s eruption. “When you have a frontloading machine, you can stack other appliances on top of it—a lot of people put their dryer up there. It saves a lot of space if you live in a small house. Of course, that’s generally less of a problem for Americans, so they can afford to stick with toploading machines like this one of yours.”