Then he tugged the handgun from Ang Wu’s hand and shoved it into the front pocket of his ridiculous Hesketh-Haywood suit. Ang Wu had strapped hunting knives to each ankle; Bryson grabbed each, knife and scabbard together, and carefully tucked each one under his belt. His belt! He suddenly remembered the aluminum-vanadium blade—but now he had weaponry that was far more effective.

  “This way!” called Waller, turning around and disappearing into the dim, recesses of the concrete-walled balcony. “Building’s surrounded.”

  “Where the hell are you going?” shouted Bryson.

  “Some of us have done our homework. Come on, Nick!”

  What choice was there? Whoever, whatever Ted Waller actually was, he was surely right: the warehouse was surrounded by PLA guards; if there was another exit at the ground level, as there almost certainly was, it would simply lead him into the ranks of his enemy. Of his immediate enemy. Waller raced up the steel steps just in time to see the fat man disappearing into a large open stairwell, just beyond long rows of parked military vehicles. Weaving between the serried ranks of Jeeps and Humvees and Chinese-manufactured trucks, Bryson ran to the stairwell just in time to see Waller climbing the stairs with speed and agility, the almost balletic grace that had always surprised him. Still, Bryson was fleeter of foot, and he caught up with Waller in a matter of seconds. “To the roof,” Waller muttered. “Only way out.”

  “The roof?”

  “No alternative. They’ll be piling in momentarily, if they aren’t already.” Waller was short of breath. “One stairwell. One freight elevator, but it’s frightfully slow.”

  By the time they had reached the third-floor landing, they could already hear shouts from below, running footsteps.

  “Shit,” said Waller. “Now I wish I hadn’t had the pate last night. You go ahead.”

  Bryson shot ahead up the stairway, rounding the wide bends until he reached what was obviously the top floor. He emerged into the night air, the broad expanse of a parking lot, row upon row of tanks and trucks. What the hell now? What did Waller have in mind? To goddamned jump from the top of the building? Leap across the ten- or twenty-foot chasm to the next building?

  “Burn the bridges,” Waller panted as he came out of the stairwell, and Bryson understood what his ex-mentor was saying. Block the path of their pursuers—but how? With what? There were no doors to lock or barricade …

  There were vehicles galore, hundreds, thousands of them. He ran to the nearest row, tried the door handle, found it locked. Shit! He ran to the next; it was locked as well. There was no time for this!

  Spying a row of soft-top Jeeps, he ran over to them. Pulling one of Ang Wu’s hunting knives from its scabbard, he slashed at the canvas top, then poked his hand in and opened the locked door from inside. The key was in the ignition, which made sense in such a well-guarded warehouse, where separating each vehicle from its key would be a logistical nightmare. Waller was standing clear of the stairwell, a cell phone to his mouth, talking. Bryson keyed the ignition, revved the Jeep’s engine, and drove it straight ahead, at top speed, toward the open stairs. As he approached, he saw that the Jeep was too wide to fit through the opening, but that would suit his purposes nicely. With a great crash, the Jeep smashed into the concrete wall, its front end jutting into the opening, then sank a few feet as the front tires dropped down to the second or third step before stopping. He could just manage to force open the driver-side door, and he squeezed out between the Jeep and the abutting concrete wall.

  But it would be nothing more than a delay: several men pushing together could dislodge the vehicle. It wasn’t enough! Searching the adjacent rows of vehicles, he spotted what he desperately hoped to find: a fifty-five-gallon heavy-gauge-steel fuel drum. Tipping it slowly to the ground, he rolled it toward the Jeep, now obstructing the exit onto the roof. He tugged at the plastic bung-hole seal, turned it, and popped it off. Gasoline began pouring out, forming a puddle on the concrete floor around the vehicle. He rolled it further, tipping the bottom up so that the fuel poured out even faster, a flood of it, torrents running around the Jeep’s tires, rivers of gas advancing to the top of the stairwell, then seeping around the Jeep and down the steps. The gasoline odor was overpowering. In short order he had emptied the drum down the stairwell, just as he heard thundering footsteps, the guards running up the stairs to the roof.

  No time!

  Grabbing his tie, he yanked it free; dropping it into the puddle of fuel until it was soaked, he jammed it into the bung hole of the now-empty fuel drum. It was empty of liquid fuel, but full of gasoline vapor—or, more precisely, a mix of air and gasoline vapor. The proportions might not be ideal, but he knew from long experience that it would do. He took out Giles Hesketh-Haywood’s brass lighter and touched the flame to the improvised fuse. The flame roared to life, and Bryson tossed the steel drum over the Jeep and down into the stairwell, then jumped backward and ran as fast as he could.

  The explosion was immense, deafeningly loud. The entire stairwell had become a fireball, a roaring yellow inferno. Waller, seeing what he had done, raced across the rooftop as well. In a few seconds, there came another, fantastically loud explosion as the Jeep’s fuel tank was ignited. The flames were dazzlingly bright, painful to look at: rolling, shimmering waves of fire, now billowing clouds of black smoke. Bryson came to a halt when he was halfway across the roof, and Waller loped up to him, flushed and sweat-soaked.

  “Nicely done,” Waller said, looking up at the sky. From the stairwell there came loud, agonized screams, but in a moment they were blotted out by a louder noise, a thundering racket from overhead: the sound of helicopter rotor blades. An armored helicopter, painted green with camouflage spots, roared directly above, hovering into place over a clearing free of vehicles, and slowly descended to the roof.

  Bryson gasped. “What the hell—?”

  The helicopter was an AH-64 Apache, clearly marked as U.S. Army, painted with an official army tail code.

  Waller ran toward it, instinctively ducking his head though there was no need to do so. Bryson hesitated for just a moment before he, too, ran toward the mammoth helicopter. The pilot was clad in U.S. Army fatigues. How could it be? If the Directorate was GRU, how had Waller arranged for a U.S. Army combat helicopter?

  As he clambered on, he saw Waller spin around, looking past Bryson with alarm. Waller cried out, said something that Bryson could not make out. Bryson turned, saw the dozens of PLA soldiers pouring out of the freight elevator no more than a hundred feet away, on the opposite side of the roof from the inferno that had been the stairwell. He clambered into the helicopter and suddenly felt an explosion of pain in his back, a crushing blow to the right side of his ribcage. He had been struck! The pain was immense, inconceivable. He screamed; his legs buckled, and Waller grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the chopper as it lifted into the air. As they rose, he could see the massed troops below, the amber blaze, the billows of sooty black smoke.

  Bryson had been shot before, a number of times, but this was worse than anything he had experienced earlier. The pain grew instead of subsiding; a nerve had been struck. He was losing volumes of blood, he was sure of it. As if from far away he could hear Waller saying, “ … a U.S. Army chopper, they won’t dare try to blast us out of the sky … international incident, and General Tsai isn’t so foolish as to …”

  Waller’s voice was fading in and out, like a radio with poor reception. He felt ice-cold one moment, then feverishly hot the next.

  He heard “ … okay there, Nicky? …”

  And: “ … first-aid kit but there’s an infirmary in the Hong Kong airport … long flight and I don’t want to delay …”

  And then: “ … the eighteenth-century physicians might have been on to something, you know, Nicky. It’s probably good to be bled from time to time … .”

  He passed in and out of consciousness, through a kaleidoscope of images. There was a landing on a helipad somewhere; he was helped onto a stretcher.

  He was brought into a modern building, hurried down a long hallway. A white-coated female nurse or doctor attended to him, stripping him to the waist, stitching the wound … the flare-up of pain, astonishing and white-hot, followed by the steep and rapid descent into the darkness of a deep, drugged sleep.

  “Truth? I just want to nail the guy.” Adam Parker was steamed and didn’t mind if Joel Tannenbaum, his longtime attorney, knew it. The two were meeting for lunch, as they did every month or so, at Patroon, an upscale, beef-and-claret restaurant on East Forty-seventh Street. The walls were paneled in dark wood and festooned with Kips engravings. Parker had reserved a private room where the two men could smoke Romeo y Juliets with their martinis. Parker prided himself on his physical condition, but whenever he was in Manhattan, he gravitated toward places like this one, redolent of a bygone Establishment and its venial excesses.

  Tannenbaum tucked into his grilled veal chop. He’d been on the Law Review at Columbia, ran the corporate litigation department at Swarthmore & Barthelme, but beneath his high-powered credentials and high-toned affiliations, he was a street fighter, a scrappy kid who’d grown up in the Bronx and always gave as good as he got. “Guys like that don’t like being nailed. They eat guys like you as an after-dinner mint. Sorry, Adam. I’m not going to start lying to you at this late date. You know the old joke about the mouse trying to screw an elephant? Trust me, you don’t want to climb up Jumbo’s back.”

  “Give me a break,” Parker said. “We’ve made mischief before, you and me. I’m just asking you to file a few papers. An injunction.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Enjoin them from commingling data from InfoMed with those other informational resources—we’ve got all these confidentiality agreements that have got to be honored. Charge that we’ve got prima facie evidence that they’re conducting themselves in violation of these covenants as entered and agreed upon blah blah blah.”

  “Adam, you’ve got bubkes.”

  “Sure, yeah, but I just want to tie them up. I don’t want to make it easy on them. They think they can swallow me in one easy gulp, and I want to give ’em a hairball they won’t forget.”

  “Jumbo’s not going to notice. They’ve got army battalions of lawyers on staff. They’ll have it thrown out in two minutes.”

  “Nothing involving the law takes two minutes.”

  “Five.”

  “I’ll take what I can get. Thing is, I’m not going to go quietly.”

  “Am I supposed to be moved by your poeticism?”

  “Given the size of your retainer, yes.” Parker laughed ruefully.

  “Adam, I’ve known you for, what, fifteen years? You were my best man … .”

  “Marriage lasted eight months. I should have asked for my present back.”

  “Believe me, some people did.” Tannenbaum took a careful sip of his martini.

  “You were saying.”

  “Adam, you’re an asshole, a prick, an arrogant, hypercompetitive, know-it-all son of a bitch without a trace of humility or any sense of your own limitations. That’s probably why you’ve done so well for yourself. But this time? For once in your life, you’re out of your league.”

  “Screw you.”

  “I’m a lawyer. I screw other people.” Tannenbaum shrugged. “All I’m saying is, punch your own weight, Adam.”

  “That what they taught you at Columbia Law School?”

  “If only they had. Look, you don’t need me for this. You’re here because you want my advice. So hear what I’m trying to tell you. Every law firm that’s worth a damn has got some sort of relationship with Systematix or one of its affiliates. Look around you and what do you see? Expense-account lunches on every four-top. A sizable portion of which is ultimately defrayed by everybody’s favorite client, vendor, or customer: Systematix.”

  “They think they’re the goddamn Standard Oil of information.”

  “Don’t even reach for historical analogies. Systematix makes Standard Oil look like the Little Pie Company. But does anybody make trouble for them? It’s like you always say—life isn’t fair. Fact is, the Department of Justice acts like their wholly owned subsidiary. That company’s got its tentacles everywhere.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I swear on my mother’s grave.”

  “Your mother lives in Flatbush.”

  “My point remains. They bought your company. You took their money. Now you’re acting like a dog in the manger. Listen to yourself.”

  “No, you listen to me. They’re going to be sorry they fucked with Adam Parker. If you won’t do the papers, I’ll find somebody who will. Sure, I took the money, but I didn’t exactly have a choice. It was a hostile takeover.”

  “Adam. You really don’t want to mess with these people. You know me. Not a lot scares me in this life. But this … well, trust me when I say it isn’t business as usual. They follow their own rules.”

  Parker finished the martini and signaled for another. “I may be an asshole, and I may be an arrogant son of a bitch, but I am not a patsy,” he said, undeterred. “Tell you one thing. Those Systematix drones are going to remember my name.”

  “We have your usual room ready for you, Mr. Parker,” the concierge said as soon as Parker appeared at the St. Moritz that evening. The concierge knew Parker liked the assurance, liked knowing that they’d made a note of his usual preferences.

  But on his infrequent visits to Manhattan, Adam Parker also liked to indulge in some unsual preferences indeed. That morning, he’d made a phone call to Madame Sevigny, as she styled herself, who’d promised “two jeunes filles, our very finest.” Madame Sevigny advertised in no publication; all her clients—they were mostly men of great wealth and power who lived in other parts of the country— had to have been properly introduced to her. For her part, she guaranteed absolute discretion. Her girls knew that a lapse of discretion was more than their lives were worth. They also knew that if they abided by Madame Sevigny’s exacting rules, they could put away a sizable nest egg in just a couple of years. Madame Sevigny had a physician on retainer who conducted regular blood tests and pelvic examinations of the jeunes filles, ensuring that their health and hygiene were beyond reproach. All of them maintained exercise schedules and dietary regimens that would put a professional gymnast to shame, and before they kept their appointments, Madame Sevigny conducted her own private inspections. As she deemed necessary, eyebrows would be tweezed, skin exfoliated and moisturized, feet pumiced, eyelashes tinted, legs waxed, nails filed; every bodily crevice would be irrigated and perfumed. “It is so difficult to be a natural beauty,” Madame Sevigny would sigh, as she gave her jeunes filles a final inspection.

  At ten P.M. precisely, a phone call from the St. Moritz lobby announced the girls’ arrival. Parker, lounging in his opulently appointed suite in a white terrycloth bathrobe, felt a sensation of warmth rise within him. All this stress he’d been under since the Systematix takeover—God, but he needed this. It had been too long. He was always quite precise in his instructions to Madame Sevigny—as the old semiconductor plutocrat who first sized him up and told him about Madame’s special services had explained, there was no point in beating around the bush with Madame S. What he had in store this evening was the sort of thing that his wife—a horsey, wholesome woman—simply couldn’t be expected to understand. It wouldn’t have surprised him, though, if the semiconductor mogul understood something of his pleasures.

  The knock on the door came minutes later.

  “My name is Yvette,” the striking, statuesque brunette said breathily.

  “And my name is Eva,” the lithesome blonde said. They closed the door behind themselves. “You like?”

  Parker grinned widely. “Very much,” he said. “But I thought Madame Sevigny said it would be Yvette and Erica.”

  “Erica took ill,” Eva said. “She sent me instead and asked me to send her regrets. We are like sisters. I think maybe you will not be disappointed.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” Parker said, eyeing with dry-mouthed anticipation the flat, gray briefcase Yvette carried. “Can I get you girls anything?”

  The two girls exchanged glances and shook their heads. “We begin, allons-y?” Yvette said.

  “Please,” Parker said.

  An hour later, Parker was bound to the brass bedposts with black silk scarves, moaning with pleasure as the two girls took turns spanking and stroking his reddened flesh. They were expert; every time he came too near to climaxing, they would move their attentions elsewhere, massaging his arms and chest with fingers that were as soft and as hard as anything he could image. Yvette now caressed his body with her soft breast and moist crotch as Eva readied the hot wax.

  The fragrant beeswax dripped on his body with intensely erotic heat, in equal measure painful and pleasurable. “Yes,” he panted, nearly delirious. “Yes.” His torso was laced with sweat.

  Finally, Yvette mounted him, taking his manhood into herself, enveloping him in her warmth. The silk bonds had been loosened enough to allow him to sit part of the way up, and now Eva clasped his chest from behind. Her fingers massaged his shoulders, and now his throat.

  “And, I think, a final pleasure for you,” Eva whispered in his ear. He barely saw a glint of the razor-sharp wire before she had looped it around his neck.

  “Oh God,” he groaned before the wire sliced through cartilage, fascia, and vessels, subtending his carotid arteries, trachea, and esophagus, and he spoke no more.

  Yvette, her eyes closed, lost now in her own pleasure, noticed first the waning of turgor within her. Her eyes opened, and she saw the gentleman’s head slumped forward, and the other girl, the girl who called herself Eva, holding a shiny metal loop. Was this some new plaything?

  “And now, I think, it is your turn,” Eva said breathily, and encircled Yvette’s neck with the shiny wire. Only then did Yvette notice the blood around the gentleman’s neck, like a bright red cravat, and just moments later she was conscious of absolutely nothing at all.