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“Wait,” Tabitha said. She sat down at her terminal again and spoke to its controls without using the headwalking gear. Masses of program code streamed by until she stopped it. “There, look! I knew I’d seen those OIB’s embedded somewhere. OIB-FED-R ... Those are result codes. The machine chews off a humongous amount of data, swallows it, digests it, and spits up a result. They’ve managed to combine the weather modeling with an econometric model plus some code of their own. I can tell, because when I was in deep, I could see the data streams coming in from around the country, huge amounts, from cities all over—Cincinnati, Seattle, San Diego, you name it. And it’s all headed for their system in the Atlantic Hotel.”

Jankowsky said: “I’d never have believed it, but it’s a clincher. This is not some vague and idle threat. We were looking for only one man, Robert Lee Hamilton, to try and interfere with the convention. Instead, it’s the 3045th, either working directly for Montclair, or else using him and CON2 as a Trojan Horse. This conspiracy has layers. Montclair may be working for Hamilton, or even someone else we don’t know about. CON2 is falling apart, and whoever these bastards are, they’re planning something. They’re probably getting ready to move soon. I’ve got to see General Billy Norcross again. He’ll go straight to the President. These people have to be stopped.”

What if it’s the President? David thought. What about Norcross? Mattoon? We could start being afraid of our own shadows before this is over.

“I’ll go to the Pentagon with you,” Tabitha said. “But first my coffee and donuts.”

“Go ahead,” Tomasik said. He sat by the terminal, which she’d left in deep entry mode. “OIB-FED-H. OIB-FED-L. OIB-FED-A. They are result codes,” he mumbled thoughtfully, “of some conditions they have programmed in. From the way it looks, I’d say they have something running that they think will predict the fate of—something? the United States? their plot?—from one moment to the next, based on a million variables, not unlike the weather program or a modern econometric data modeler.”

David said: “Everyone has OIB in it. That’s the name of their conspiracy. Each has FED in it. What’s FED?”

“Damn!” Jankowsky said, at the situation in general. He started to put his scarf on. “I’ll go to see Norcross at JCS immediately.”

Tabitha’s hard heels could be heard, past the sentry at the door, clattering down the stairs. Steel-plated security doors and steel stairs made her footfalls echo.

“Hey!” Jankowsky said, waving her umbrella. “She left without it.”

“I’ll catch her,” David said. Jankowsky tossed the umbrella. David caught it and started after her. He had to wait a moment before the upstairs sentry could open the security door for him on its smoothly oiled steel hinges.

As he went down the two flights of stairs, he heard Summers’ feet crunching on gravel already, gone from the building. Then he heard a car racing by. Then silence.

He came to the last set of stairs and noticed the bulb was burned out. The lower stairwell was shrouded in darkness. There should have been another sentry—momentarily, blinded by rainy daylight shining through a door that was six inches ajar and shouldn’t have been, David stumbled and dropped the umbrella. Catching his balance, he looked.

He glimpsed the sprawled Army private. He had a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, as though they’d shot him—silencer, David thought—just as he opened the door to peer. Then where was Tabitha Summers?

David took his 9 mm. automatic out of its holster. He clicked the safety off, raised the gun so it rested on his shoulder, and stood with his back to the steel outer door. Rain beat down in sheets now, sending in cool air. Pushing lightly, flattening himself into the shadows as much as possible, he opened the door another inch.

And another inch. There, sprawled in the gravel in the gusting rain, her legs bent at an unnatural angle, lay Tabitha Summers. From the broken limbs and the bloodied head, they’d run her down. It was no longer just ‘they’ now; it was Operation Ivory Baton; it was the 3045th and whoever else had brought that 1950s dinosaur back from extinction. He was about to rush out to the mangled body in hope of administering CPR, when the sound of a car engine racing caught his attention, just enough to make him freeze. He heard brakes, a squealing of tires. He managed to push enough of his face through the opening in the door, without opening it any further and giving himself away. He could see out with one eye, in the opposite direction, away from Tabitha’s body, toward the wide open parking lot. Framed by a backdrop of store windows, of red and blue neon, he saw a dark car. It was hard to see, with the downpour, but there was something familiar about that car. There. Two men sat in the front seat and looked toward the Task Force in anticipation. One was blond, preppy, with steel rims; the other dark, dark...oh yes, he’d seen those two before someplace, but where?

David’s heart began to pound as an idea formed. It was a horrible idea and it caused him to remain frozen another moment, staring. He could make out the men in the car. It was the same car he’d encountered at the Naval Observatory the night Ib was kidnapped. One, the driver, had a dark complexion, with mud-colored eyes and a brownish tongue whose tip protruded like a lizard’s. Riding shotgun was the young blond man with the steel rimmed glasses and the friendly smile that began to look downright dangerous, maybe even insane, when you looked at it several times. Just now the blond man was beginning to smile broadly, his eyes lit up with anticipation.

“Oh no!” David yelled. He turned inside to run upstairs. He slipped in a puddle of the sentry’s blood and fell on the body. Springless bones and rubbery meat cushioned his fall. He scrambled to his feet and, slithering again, made it to the stairway. “Hey!” he yelled.

He made it up three or four steps when the blast caught him and threw him head over heels.

Then something hit David, and the snapshot faded. His last thought was of Tory.