Dennis Serot was the kind of fat that sweated, even in the winter. In an overheated downtown coffee bar, Marbury watched the beads of sweat accumulate at the Frenchman’s temples underneath the brim of his white fedora. The palms of Dennis’s hands were getting damp, too. The Frenchman took long, hard-won breaths that had the rhythm of a faulty metronome. Marbury was sure that someday Serot would suffocate under the effort of being him.

"How was the play?" Serot asked.

"Very good. Not brilliant. Thanks for waiting."

Serot grunted and gave a nod. When Serot had called Marbury to set up this meeting Marbury had made him schedule it three hours later, because Marbury had plans to see A Christmas Carol at the New Seattle Theater across the lake in Bellevue, where he had a season pass. He wasn’t going to go into dramatic criticism with Dennis, though. Dennis wasn’t exactly a theater aficionado, and the fixer was anxious to get to the point.

A woman on the other side of the coffee bar said to her companion in reference to Serot’s clothing: "Who wears white suits in winter? Maybe he’s a pimp?"

Marbury suppressed a smile. "Is your countermeasure on?" Serot nodded and patted his briefcase on the bench seat next to him. "So I guess you have a contract for me?"

Serot outlined the contract in his accented English which always made Marbury feel a little bit like he was having drinks in Cannes.

The employer (who Serot did not have to explain wished to remain anonymous, and would enforce that anonymity with more methods of death, loud and quiet, than Marbury could comfortably think about) wanted to come into possession of a human being. That human being was a female, human, Caucasian, estimated age middle thirties, name Doe10, Jane. This was the name that had been assigned to her, along with a System Identification Number, which was more permanent than a name, when she was committed to the Wallace Mental Institute in Washington, DC. The Wallace Mental Institute was a federal institution for incarcerating people who had committed federal offenses but had been judged mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Jane Doe10 had been arrested for computer crime and sundry other charges stemming from a conspiracy to steal 3.75 million UCAS dollars worth of bearer bonds. She was diagnosed with acute schizo-affective disorder, and washed up at WMI. That was two months ago, in October. The employer was willing to pay fifty thousand nuyen in untraceable certified credsticks issued on the Voltz Interface Bank of Geneva to each member of the team that extracted Jane Doe10 from the Wallace Mental Institute and delivered her alive to a Mr. Edward Olsen, in a rental house in Baltimore. It was transparent to Marbury that Mr. Edward Olsen was a pseudonym, and the datatrail on the house would be lies and ephemera.

"Did the employer say why they wanted Jane Doe10?" Marbury asked.

"You’ll need a decker to override the Institute’s computer," Serot told him. "Do you have one?"

"I have No Meat Address. But Qabballah retired. What am I going to do for a magician?"

For years Marbury had worked with an unorthodox Jewish tzaddikim who’s professional name had been Qabballah but who’s real name was Aaron Burgstrauss. But Aaron had gotten married, taken his third grade of initiation and walked out of the shadows. Last Marbury had heard, he was considering a position with a temple in Tacoma. Marbury had been on vacation since then.

"Well," Serot took another effortful breath, "Borsky is out."

"Borsky?"

"Uh-huh. Oui."

"Is in Seattle?"

Serot nodded.

Silence.

"Okay. Give him my wrist commcode and we’ll talk."

Marbury got reacquainted with Borsky’s charm right away. They had a brief phone call, and when it was over Marbury realized that he’d agreed to meet Borsky at The Murdered Mime even though he hated loud bars. There was too much stimulus in too-sharp focus, like strobing pops of information splashing across his brain. An earring stabbing him in the eye because he’d seen the same earring on sale at Wordsworth’s last week, a human woman who was five years older than she made herself up to be, and two shades less drunk. And five conversations within earshot that he couldn’t help but follow no matter their painful, painful inanity.

He spotted Borsky at the bar right away. The shaman was still tall and slight. His hair was shocking. Like many elves, Borsky had always worn his hair long and in luxurious waves. Tonight it was a tight stubble against his delicate art-deco skull. Prison did that to him, Marbury thought automatically.

Marbury slipped by a row of three young Japanese at the bar who had JUNIOR YAKUZA printed across their foreheads. The yak soldiers in their elegant suits were having a conversation that Marbury could overhear, but they were speaking Japanese. Marbury was grateful tonight that Japanese was not a language he understood.

"Hello, Borsky." He could smell that Borsky was using a different brand of soap now.

"This place hasn’t changed," Borsky said, and in those four words Marbury sensed a change in the shaman. His personality had been beaten almost flat by three years in a Texas penitentiary, but the little shape it retained was defiant.

"Same bar, same stage, same syndicate grunts. Except it looks like sake has gone and vodka shooters are popular with the tattoos-and-tantos set." The elf grinned a wide grin. "It’s nice to be back home."

They embraced. "It is nice to see you, Krantz. Wait, is it still Krantz?"

They let go of each other. "No, no, it’s been Marbury since ’59."

Borsky smiled. "You’ll have to tell me that story. I believe that the best stories are the stories where your name changes at the end. Sometimes I change my name just to get the story out of it." Marbury saw how carefully the shaman reached for his drink and realized that Borsky was "looking through Fox’s eyes." The textbook term was astral perception.

"You initiated!" Borsky exclaimed. "Or you got so worked over that all your magic got squeezed out."

"Initiated. Discovered how to mask my aura. How about you?"

"Didn’t have the chance. Do you know what they do to magicians in prison?"

Marbury did. Borsky’s eyes refocused, and something subtle happened to his face as he shifted out of Fox’s eyes, because he couldn’t stand the pity in Marbury’s aura.

"Hard time?" Marbury asked.

"For three years I had recurring nightmares about chewing my own legs off." The elf threw back his drink, and the charcoal smell of scotch flooded Marbury’s nose. "What else did you learn when you got enlightened?"

"I learned to be stronger."

"Jesus, don’t shake my hand then. I hate it when macho slot-heads have to demonstrate on the poor little Fox shaman’s hands."

Silence.

"So the fat man has gotten better dressed since I went away. What’s this job?"

Forty-eight hours later Borksy and Marbury were outside the beltway in Washington, august capitol of the United Canadian and American States, driving through a snow storm that was burying the urban landscape under wind-stirred layers of gray and white.

"Are we even going to get to this place?" Borsky asked.

"I’m handling it," Marbury said shortly. His hands were getting stiff on the wheel.

"That would be a glorious shadowrun," Borsky went on. " "We were nearly to the target when we flipped over on the median and burned to death." "

Marbury pressed his lips together. He was an artist with a shotgun and as a knife fighter he was the whisper of death. But as a driver he was not a talent, and the idea of burning to death put a wad of broken glass in his lower intestine.

"Great form storm spirits!" Borsky shouted. "Sent by our enemies to kill us with this weather! It’s a set-up, man! We’re doomed!" The shaman laughed out loud when Marbury didn’t even smile. He slapped Marbury on the shoulder. "Oh, come on, work with me here. Do you remember Smash Hands? That ork had his sense of humor surgically removed to make room for more enhancements. I don’t think he ever liked me much. What happened to Smash Hands?"

"He got gunned down in the street in Renton. Street says it was some kind of Humanis Policlub complication."

Borsky grimaced. "I hope he took some of those racist pricks with him."

"I think he already had. That’s what it was about."

They drove the last five clicks in silence, except for a phone conversation Borsky had with No Meat Address. "How’s the weather up there?" Borsky asked.

"Ten degrees and partly sunny," the decker replied. The 3cm x 3cm screen on Borsky’s wristphone displayed nothing but the message NO IMAGE AVAILABLE. Address was declining to use the video feature of the phone, probably because he wasn’t using a phone at all. He was stealing the call from a UCAS government satellite.

Right now the decker was sitting in thirty cubic meters of space rented from one of the decidedly weird gangs that controlled the rooftops of the Redmond district of Seattle. That thirty cubic meters of space was bordered on five sides by a lean-to made out of scavenged sheets of construction plastic. On top of that lean-to, No Meat Address had glued a little satellite dish that was now connecting him and his cyberdeck to the wordwide matrix. Something that would have chagrinned the UCAS government if they had known about it, because it was their satellite Address was stealing time on.

If it had been heavily overcast in Seattle, No Meat Address’s job would have been tougher. But the weather reports had held true.

"We have a green light on the deal then?" Borsky asked.

"Go on the deal. Repeat, go on the deal."

"Go on the deal," Borsky agreed, and terminated the call. "You hear that?"

"Yes," said Marbury.

Twenty minutes later the two of them walked through the front doors of the WMI. The snow had tapered off but the wind was still cold and buffeting, and they hunched inside their overcoats.

Borsky’s trick was this: he could make people believe him. No matter how outrageous his lies were – mammoth, lumbering, gut-shot brontosaur frauds when presented by Borsky the Fox shaman were believed by everybody. Borsky could tell a polygraph that he was an aardvark that walked on its hind legs and the polygraph would end up lending him twenty nuyen.

So when they reached the armored glass booth that was the front desk of WMI and Borsky said, "Hello. Justice department. I’m agent Turner and this is agent Hartford. We’re picking up Jane Doe10," even Marbury believed that the elf was a justice department agent.

"Identification?" The orderly in the booth said for the sake of form. Borsky and Marbury took out credsticks and passed them through a drawer.

Marbury glanced around the lobby while they waited for the credsticks to clear. They used the same antiseptic cleanser to scrub WHI that had been used to scrub the 11^th floor men’s room of a Shiawase Corporation building in which Marbury had once changed clothes.

Marbury was very smart. He had made a career out of being smart, which was the same as saying that he had made a career out of being a hyper-alert control freak. There were a hundred thousand variables in every step of a run, and Marbury stayed alive by reading them. Like wind in the trees, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Pasts and futures turned on the weight a man put on his foot. The smell of a woman’s cigarette could tell you the brand and the brand could tell you what plane she just disembarked. The scars on a man’s knuckles carried information about which hand he liked to hit with and then you knew his weaknesses. Success flowed from seeing clearly and knowing the meaning of what you saw.

But Marbury knew something else; he knew that the details were fractal. Each detail carried infinite detail in itself. And no matter how much you could see there was always something more to see beyond that, and while control was synonymous with security there were moments outside of that which required instinct. You just had to jump.

To fool the computer that was checking their identities they had to rely on false DoJ I.D.s. No Meat Address couldn’t affect this part of the process. But they’d gotten those I.D.s from their anonymous employer. They didn’t even know why their employer wanted Jane Doe10 in the first place. They didn’t know who their employer was or what they wanted or if their employer even had the considerable matrix juice necessary to produce fake credsticks that would fool WMI scanners.

They could be standing on the cheese in an elaborate trap. But Occam’s Razor told Marbury they weren’t. If someone had wanted to kill him there were much simpler ways, and the simple solution was always the best solution.

Unless of course there was someone who wanted to feed Borsky to the UCAS federal authorities for reasons of their own . . .

"Alright, sirs," the orderly in the armored booth said. He sent their fake DoJ credsticks back through the drawer. "Let me buzz you through this door and your guide will meet you on the other side. Your credsticks will open the chokepoint doors."

They both said thank you.

Every space inside WMI was small, glossy white, and the obsessive clean that came from robots.

The man who met them inside the first chokepoint door wore all white. He was in his late twenties and had a Cleveland accent, along with a stun baton and a can of Pepper Punch hanging on the quilted white vest he wore that Marbury figured was armored against blunt trauma.

"Afternoon, gentlemen. What can I do for you?"

Borsky spoke up and Marbury nodded slightly to give the impression that he agreed. "Hi there. Turner and Hartford, picking up Jane Doe10."

His gloves were white. His baton and his Punch can were white too. You could get gear color-coded for your security people at lots of different suppliers. His socks were white too. He led them down a glossy white corridor. They passed a window made out of a full centimeter of armored glass that overlooked the snowy highway Marbury and Borsky had just driven in on.

There were three chokepoint doors between the front entrance and Jane Doe10’s cell, not including the lobby door. If the madhouse went catastrophic, the chokepoints isolated the problem like a quarantine keeping a disease from spreading. They were approaching the first one now.

If Borsky and Marbury had been real DoJ agents, their credsticks would have opened the chokepoints. But they were fakes – Marbury, Borsky, and their credsticks were all fakes – and although the phony I.D.s had gotten them past the front desk, they wouldn’t get them through the chokepoints.

Borsky stepped up to the first chokepoint door, which was a heavy white door without a window. He had his credstick in his hand; he fitted it into the slot that would open the door if he were a real DoJ agent. Which he was not.

Marbury casually fell back half a pace. He thought about the ceramic knife he was wearing in the small of his back. His eyes flickered over the tiny hairs on the back of their orderly’s neck.

The door hummed and the magnetic lock disengaged. Marbury felt the air pressure change when Borsky swung the heavy door open and they proceeded through. The orderly closed it behind them.

"Are we getting close?" Borsky asked the orderly, and Marbury thought Borsky was spreading the innocence a bit thick.

"Uh-huh," the orderly nodded.

No Meat Address had successfully infiltrated the Institute’s computer host. He was watching them now, through the cameras that were hidden in the walls. And when they reached the next chokepoint, he would unlock that door just like he had unlocked the last one, at the precise instant that Borsky stuck his bogus and in this case utterly worthless credstick in the slot.

Second door coming up at the end of the hall. Other white doors lined the sides of the hall, each with a little reinforced window at eye level. There were faces in some of the windows. They looked perfectly normal to Marbury.

Marbury could hear absolutely nothing from inside the cells, not even the breath of a troll they passed, his mammoth head pressed up against his little window, his nostrils fogging the glass.

"I use my credstick here too, right?" Borsky asked the orderly.

"Yes sir," the orderly said. From the way he said "sir," Marbury knew that he had already forgotten the phony names they had given.

Chick. Hmmmt. Clunk. The door opened and the group traveled through, the two imposter mercenaries in the pay of an unknown cause and the oblivious madhouse junior warden from Mentor, Ohio.

Marbury didn’t know much about how to bend other people’s computers to your will, but he did know that every time No Meat Address stole another action on the WMI host, there was a risk that the computer would notice the irregularity. If the computer noticed enough irregularities, it would launch its countermeasure programs. Terms like Gray Ice, Subsystem Authorization, Security User Status swelled and burst in Marbury’s brain.

He’d heard them on trideo. He had very little idea what they meant. He knew that if Address lost his toehold in the WHI host he and Borsky were going to become masters of the art of improvisation in record time.

The trio reached the third door. Borsky "opened" that one too, with movements so swift and practiced you’d think he spent his free time rehearsing his Justice Department impersonation. There was a fraction of a second’s delay between Borsky’s action and No Meat Address’s unlocking the door, but the orderly didn’t notice.

Marbury breathed out.

A few meters later and they were in front of Jane Doe10’s cell.

"I’ll have to get this one," the orderly said. Their DoJ identities wouldn’t open the cell doors, fake or not.

The Ohioan looked through the window in the cell door, then used his credstick to unlock the door of the cell. Marbury heard a tiny popping rush of air as the door unsealed.

The inside of the cell was about three meters by five. There was a sink, a toilet, a mirror made out of polished steel, a plastic desk and chair, and a human woman in her mid thirties sitting on the bed. She looked up curiously when the orderly came in the door, and she came along obediently when he told her to. She looked drugged to Marbury.

"Hello, Jane," Borsky greeted her when she came out into the hall. "We’re from the Justice Department and we’re here to help."

"What’s going on here?" Jane Doe10 asked.

"We’re taking a little ride, Jane," Borsky smirked. Marbury shot him a look and the elf amended, "Prisoner transfer. There’s a DA who wants to ask you some questions."

It was back down the silent hall for them now, on the journey out. The sameness of the décor was beginning to bug Marbury. The sameness and the silence and the lack of stimulus was beginning to make his brain overheat. The faces of the prisoners in the occasional cell window began to look like infected bruises under a skin of glass, swellings in a wall of white.

They passed smoothly through the first of the three doors. Marbury consciously restrained his impulse to walk faster. Doe10 slowed them down, walking along in a daze. If it came to running, they would pretty much have to carry her.

They were coming up on the second door. Marbury saw a man in one of the cells, peering out, with a white bandage pad taped to his face, scars in his eyebrows and the space in his eyes hogged up by an utterly alien madness. Marbury made eye-contact with the man for a flicker of time and moved on. The expression in the man’s eyes reminded him vividly of a time that he’d seen that same expression in the eyes of a small but muscular man in Detroit who had just jammed an Ares submachine gun into Marbury’s crotch. What Marbury really remembered about that incident was the data he had read in the man’s eyes in that split second: the man was looking into Marbury’s eyes to make sure that Marbury knew what was about to be done to his genitals with an automatic weapon.

The orderly from Ohio was frowning and he put his hand on his stun baton. Marbury’s knife flew into his hand and he slashed across the orderly’s weapon arm, opening a wet red gape. The second door hadn’t opened, and the orderly had noticed something was wrong.

"Now is not the time to be brave," Marbury told him. Behind him Borsky was swearing and the door bleated again as it rejected his credstick. "Keep your hands to yourself and this will all be over in a minute."

The orderly convulsed. His face twisted bizarrely as muscles rebelled against each other. His back arched, the back of his head thumped against the obsessively white wall and his knees went out from under him.

Marbury whirled on Borsky, who was still trying to make the door accept him. "I was trying to give the guy options!" Marbury hissed.

"What? Don’t blame me for that. Guy had a weak heart. In the wrong business if you ask me." One pointy ear twitched, Fox’s mask showing itself.

"What’s going on here?" Jane Doe10 asked.

My decker’s addiction to a designer drug called Psyche has finally affected his work and my Fox shaman is having a homicidal fit of claustrophobia, Marbury thought. "You’re leaving with us," he said. "That’s what you need to understand."

"This door is not cooperating," Borsky bounced his fist off the door to no effect whatever. He looked all around the hall they were enclosed in, at the ceiling, at the floors . . . then he knelt beside the dead orderly.

"Did you see this guy’s wearing a tranceiver?" Borsky asked as he went through the man’s pockets.

"Yes." Marbury strained his senses, trying to deduce what was happening on the other side of the chokepoint door that was trapping them in this small white space.

"Nice pen," Borsky said, holding up a red ink pen. He put it in his own pocket and stood up. "What’s our decker’s name again?"

"No Meat Address."

"Is this place wired for audio? Mr. Address? Mr. Address? Hellllooo?"

"I’m sure he’s working hard in there. Can you do something to lift this siege?"

Borsky pursed his lips and furrowed his brow. Marbury watched him intently, then remembered that this was the expression he always got when he summoned spirits.

And then there were four of them. They had been joined by a woman, 157 centimeters tall, barefoot and dressed in a white lab coat with an I.D. tag clipped to it. The words and picture on the tag were blurred to illegibility.

"Hide us, Spirit," Borsky instructed the woman.

"Yes, Doctor." The woman replied in a voice that was very thin.

Nothing changed that Marbury could sense. But he knew that their enemies could now walk right by them without seeing them.

Marbury heard a small noise, a tiny voice. It was coming from the dead man.

Marbury bent over to hear it better. The voice was saying, "Surmounting a little obstacle here . . . projected timescale to opening remaining . . . doors . . . twelve seconds."

It was No Meat Address, broadcasting to the orderly’s tranceiver from within the Institute’s computer. Marbury repeated the message to Borsky.

"So soon?" The shaman made a show of disappointment.

The maglock disengaged. Borsky grabbed Jane Doe10 by the arm, and Marbury swung the door open, his knife in his hand.

There were three orderlies standing on the other side of it, each one with Pepper Punch or a stun baton in their hand. Two of them squinted at an apparently empty hallway. The third pushed down on the fire button of his Punch can. That third orderly had seen them, in spite of the spirit’s help.

Marbury slipped to one side but he still caught a mist on the side of his face, and he knew the burning pain was in the mail.

"Pop!" Borsky said matter-of-factly, and all three of the orderlies shouted and threw their arms up in front of their faces. Marbury didn’t understand why, but you learned to accept these things when you worked with magicians.

They shouldered past the orderlies, Marbury shoving them out of the way with Borsky, Doe10 and the spirit following behind. Marbury stabbed two of them in the thighs to discourage pursuit, deliberately missing the arteries both times, even as the splitting pain rose up in his skull and the tears ran out of his eyes and the snot out of his nose from catching the Pepper Punch.

The next two doors were already unlocked, and with the spirit concealing them they went right by the two orderlies in the lobby booth. "Confuse those two," Borsky ordered the spirit as Marbury threw open the doors that led outside. And Borsky and the weeping adept and Jane Doe10, the anonymous schizophrenic who was worth 100,000 nuyen to an anonymous corporation, jogged across an icy parking lot to the rental getaway car.

They switched cars in a Washington suburb and headed for Baltimore in a blue minivan. It was 2017 hours when they drove by a middle class two-story with two four-door sedans in the driveway.

"What do you think, eagle eye?" Borsky asked.

"Looks very suburban."

"Very sitcom. What’s the name of that show -- ?"

"Lights on upstairs and down. What do you see?"

"No spirits, no barriers outside," the shaman said.

"You want to do an astral fly by of the interior?"

"Nah. Hell with it. Let’s drop this package off!" The elf made a dusting-off-his-hands gesture.

Marbury parked the minivan on the side of the street, snow slushing away from the tires. "How do you want to do this?"

Marbury sat with Jane Doe10 (who’s hands were tied with duct tape) and watched the grainy snow blow back and forth across his field of vision. One of the gifts of Marbury’s magic was that he could see in the dark as well as a cat. So with the engine of the minivan running, he sat at the wheel and watched Borsky walk across the street that was lined with single-family two-stories.

Borsky went up to the rendezvous house, stood to one side of the door and knocked. The door opened. A human male in a white turtleneck sweater, black flannel shirt and conservative blond haircut answered the door. The two had a brief conversation; then Borsky called Marbury’s wristphone.

"This is the place. Bring in the guest."

Marbury led Jane Doe10 across the street. They’d bought a ski-parka for her when they touched down in Washington. Not knowing her size, they’d erred on the side of bigness. She looked like an escaped mental patient in the huge quilted coat that swallowed her hands, and her white sweatpants with WMI stenciled down one leg. Hopefully people would think it was her company or her gym or something if they saw it.

Borsky and the blond man were waiting for them with the door open. "Come inside," the blond made said cheerfully. All four of them went into the house, and the blond closed the door behind them.

There were two more people in the living room, both elves, both in cable-knit sweaters and khakis. One, a woman, sat on the couch, next to a down comforter piled up next to her right hand. Marbury was sure there was a large weapon under there, probably some sort of submachine gun with a sound suppressor.

There were four credsticks on the end table next to her.

The other one, a man, leaned casually in the doorway across the room from the front door, his arms crossed over his chest. Those crossed arms said MAGICIAN to Marbury. Any one who was preparing to defend themselves with a firearm or a melee weapon would keep their hands free. The man in the doorway was ready to defend himself with sorcery.

"Jane Doe10?" The blond one asked their kidnap victim.

"Yes?!" She snapped, glaring around. Marbury wondered if she was due for another dose of medication.

"Take off your coat, please."

She did, petulantly. The blond gave her a cursory examination. He noted the letters on her drawstring pants.

"It’s her," the blond said to his companions. "And she’s in good health."

"Okay," said the elven woman on the couch. She picked up the credsticks she had near at hand and extended them to Marbury. Marbury stepped forward to take them.

"Four credsticks in twenty-five thousand nuyen amounts," the woman said. "As agreed. The extraction was satisfactory."

"Thank you," Marbury murmured. He put the credsticks in his overcoat pocket and looked carefully around. There was nothing more to say. The three secret agents in sweaters were waiting in silence for them to leave.

Marbury gestured to Borsky and headed for the door. Borsky stuck out his hand to the blond and smiled broadly. "Meeting you has been an enriching experience, Mr. Johnson. Happy holidays."

"Happy holidays," Mr. Johnson said back automatically.

Borsky nodded and smiled all around. "Good night. Merry Christmas."

"Good night," they replied.

Borsky followed Marbury out into the snowy street, beaming all the way.

"I am back, Krantz," Borsky crowed as he fastened his seatbelt back in the van. "I have re-arrived. I am Borsky the Fox! I am going to get a very large apartment downtown with that fifty grand. I’m going to park airplanes in it – "

"You called that guy Mr. Johnson?" Marbury asked as he put the van in drive and pulled away from the curb.

"Yeah. So what?"

"Did he tell you his name was Johnson, or were you just being smart?"

"He told me his name was Johnson. They all say their names are Johnson. So what?"

"Did he give a first name?"

"No. He didn’t invite me to his daughter’s confirmation, either, unfriendly slot. Who cares?"

"His name was supposed to be Edward Olsen."

Borsky started swearing immediately and didn’t stop for thirty seconds. "So who the hell did we just give that mental patient to?"

"Borsky, I don’t even know who we were supposed to give her to in the first place, so I can’t guess who would want to steal her from the anonymous people who paid us to steal her in the first place."

"So where were the people we were supposed to sell her to in the first place?" The shaman asked.

"It’s a big house. Probably piled in an upstairs bedroom."

"Are those credsticks any good?"

"Three to one odds against. They just stole her. Why pay for her? Unless they want to make it look like we deliberately betrayed our employers . . . "

Borsky started swearing at increased volume. Marbury had sensitive ears and it made the adept wince. "Shut up, will you? Shut up! You’re not helping anything!"

"Why didn’t you do something about this inside the -- ! Because we were outnumbered and outgunned and we weren’t going to drag her anyway, if our contacts were dead," Borsky said numbly.

"You’ve grasped it."

"So what do you think?" Borsky asked as they approached the freeway onramp that would take them to the border with the Confederated American States and reserved seats back to Seattle on an early morning flight.

"What do I think?" Marbury said. "I think we haven’t heard the last of this."