“He did, last time he visited,” Freya said as she approached the cliff bottom. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

  “You should see her hunt prairie dogs,” Sunny Joe said, not without pride himself. “Rattlers are easy compared to prairie dogs.”

  “You should see me hunt wolves,” Freya said. Remo Williams, who was still smiling all this time, stopped.

  His name was Winston, but what kind of a loser name was Winston? When you thought of “Winston” you thought of cigarettes or a gray old man in a suit and tie who lived his entire life in an office. Winston had once adopted a nickname, a true warrior’s name, but hadn’t quite lived up to it Now they just called him Winner. You could do a lot worse than Winner.

  Winner Smith had lived through his share of troubles. He’d grown up too fast, but didn’t necessarily feel grown up even now.

  The way he saw it, his life started for real on the day he came here, to the Sun On Jo reservation near Yuma, Arizona. The mess that came before, much of it of his own making, faded like a dream. Here, with the people who were his people, he somehow fit in. He learned to be at peace with the world without giving in to it.

  Not long after arriving, his new life became more complete with the appearance of the sister he never knew he had. Freya was, then and now, a pain-in-the-ass brat. He couldn’t have loved her more.

  Lately she’d been stirring up more trouble, and when Winner Smith saw what was coming into the village about midmorning he assumed the trouble was just beginning.

  “Would you just please tell me what’s wrong?” Freya demanded.

  “I want to see it first,” said Remo Williams, who had a strange look in his eyes. Winner had seen the look before, before he’d come to the rez. It was the look of— he didn’t want to even go there.

  They were walking fast across the village, straight to the pit, drawing the attention of the meager population of Sun On Jos from their homes and hogans.

  “First tell me why!” Freya insisted.

  “First I see.”

  “No!” She grabbed him by the arm and made herself a boulder. It should have brought Remo to a halt. She’d pulled that move on Winner and it felt like having your arm in a vise of iron spikes.

  It didn’t work on the man who was their father. Remo did something with his arm, something speedy but gentle, and all at once Freya was off the ground, spun around and held against him with one strong arm around her waist. Kind of like she does to the coyotes, Winner thought happily.

  “Let go!” She dug her fingers into Remo’s arm. Remo stopped at the entrance to the pit where a loosely woven mat covered the hole in the earth. “Freya,” he said, “that hurts.”

  “Oh.” Freya was shocked to see her fingers bloodied. There were punctures up and down the arm that was clamped immovably around her middle. “I’m sorry.” Remo toed the woven mat away from the entrance of the pit, allowing the morning sun to shine inside. He could see the shape huddled against the wall, alert and waiting. He placed his daughter on her feet, then stepped into the entrance and dropped to the earth, fifteen feet below, as easily as a man stepping off a curb. His eyes adjusted from bright sun to the dim haze, and Remo was eye to eye with the wolf.

  The wolf cocked its head, appraising him, then raised its snout and sniffed at the air. At that moment Freya clambered through the entrance, hanging for a moment from the wooden beams reinforcing the roof, then dropped to the floor with a thud. She brushed dirt from the knees of her jeans and regarded them, the wolf, then Remo, and there was something wild and stubborn in her eyes.

  “Young lady,” Remo said, “you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  ‘T heard you talking about the wolves the last time you were here. Remember?”

  Remo had been on the rez a few months back, when he got a call from Upstairs. They had been watching for signs of the wolves for weeks, months. A series of savage attacks formed a trail that led onto the Fort Bliss Military Reservation in the New Mexico desert. There, in a ghost town that had once thrived on Sacramento Mountains silver, Remo had found evidence of the wolves.

  Wolves weren’t normally the prey he sought, but there was nothing normal about these wolves.

  “I didn’t talk about the wolves when I was here.”

  “You were on the phone with Prince Junior,” Freya explained.

  “How do you know Prince Junior?”

  “I don’t.” She shrugged. “I just know you called him Prince Junior. He was the one who told you where to go get the wolves. Then the other one, Smitty, he gave you the cover to get into the exercises going on at Bliss. Later, Sunny Joe said you wouldn’t be coming back like you thought you would.”

  “You were listening in on my phone calls?”

  “When I’m standing right there in the same room it’s kind of hard not hear what you loudmouths are saying.”

  Remo shook his head. “The dots still aren’t connecting, sweetheart.”

  “I drove out to see about the wolves, that’s all. I found this one in the desert about ten miles outside the ghost town. He was with a dead one. This one had half his flank tom off, but I managed to stabilize him and get him home.”

  Remo Williams was about as shocked as he had ever been, and there were so many things shocking him he couldn’t sort through them all. Freya had overheard his phone call from halfway across the room, which was surprising, yes. She had gone hunting, for dangerous animals. She had penetrated the security of a U.S. military reservation. She had taken the dying creature and escaped the military without being apprehended, then nursed this beast back to health. Every fact demanded a why and/or a how.

  The wolf was indeed healthy now. It walked easily across the pit with only a slight limp and thrust its muzzle underneath the small, delicate hand of Freya.

  It gave a small start when Remo silently came alongside to examine the beast.

  “It’s small,” he said. That was a good sign.

  He had to be sure. He took the animal’s head in his hands, held on to it and looked into its eyes. The animal panicked when it couldn’t break the hold, but Freya stroked it, spoke to it, as Remo searched the glassy orbs. He didn’t know what he was looking for, really, but when he let go of the wolf’s head he was sure he hadn’t found it.

  “It’s just a wolf.”

  Freya didn’t question that strangely obvious statement. She explained, “Its pack was wiped out by a rival wolf pack. This one only survived because it was small enough to slip through the rocks into a crevasse. It was starved when I found it. The other pack was long gone, but it was too afraid to come out of the rocks:”

  “What about the other pack? You didn’t track them, did you?”

  “I tried. The trail was cold and I lost it.”

  Remo looked at the creature. “I didn’t know there were wolves still living in the desert.”

  Freya’s eyes lowered. “Nobody did, and they really are gone now, I think,” she said. “She’s mute. I bet her entire pack was. It must have been just enough of an edge to keep them from being hunted. This might have been the last free pack of Mexican Gray Wolves in the Southwestern U.S. They were lucky and clever enough to stay hidden from man for decades. For generations. But now man’s finally found them and wiped them out.”

  Remo considered what Freya had just said as he climbed out of the pit and as he ate his dinner, and when he lay down to sleep on his mat in Sunny Joe’s home.

  Freya was intuitive. Remo never told her anything about the nature of the wolves that he was hunting, so how had she come to her conclusion that the pack of wolves that wounded her pet were “man”? How had she dared to go out in search of them?

  What kind of a woman was Freya, anyway?

  Chapter 3

  James Sharma knew death. He’d seen death and delivered death, sometimes with a pen stroke, sometimes with his own bare fingers. He always thought he would recognize death when it came for him.

  Three minutes before he died, Sharma was smoking a cigarette and standing at the window of his room. The cigarette smelled despicable, but it masked the stench of the city of Casablanca. Forget every preconception you had ever gotten from certain movies; Casablanca, in reality, was a hot, ugly outhouse of a city.

  But some of the world’s biggest business deals were conducted here. Maybe one would go down within the hour. Sharma wanted to be in on it He had a suitcase full of U.S. currency tucked under his flimsy, lumpy mattress.

  Two minutes before he died, Sharma took a call on his mobile phone. He spoke briefly in Langley-approved code words. The CIA had specific ways of delivering messages. He essentially told the operative that he was sitting on his ass waiting to hear from his contact.

  One minute before he died, James Sharma spotted the biggest, ugliest centipede he’d ever seen, and it was scuttling around the floor of his hotel room. He tried to stomp it, but it shot under the mattress.

  Yech, Sharma thought. Maybe that’s what all the lumps were in that bed. Bugs.

  The centipede emerged from the other side of the bed and started up the wall. Sharma watched it as he reached for his vibrating phone.

  “Our lookout says the store is open,” said his CIA mission coordinator.

  “Shit!” Sharma said. “Why’d they open without telling me?”

  “You tell me. We thought you were one of their preferred shoppers. Is it too late to get in on the fire sale?”

  “I don’t know! I’ll call you.” Sharma disconnected and hit the number to dial his merchant contact. What had gone wrong? He was supposed to be one of the bidders! They knew he was CIA and they didn’t care— why should they? He had cash and he had a lot of it.

  “Faizel?” he barked into the mobile phone. “You there?”

  Faizel seemed unusually pleased to hear from him. “How are you, Jim?”

  “Pissed off! What’s the problem? Why’m I being shut out of the bidding?”

  “Because you’re dead, Jim,” Faizel said happily.

  Eight seconds before he died, Central Intelligence Agency Field Agent Jim Sharma felt something drop on top of him. He knew it was the centipede, and then his mind registered the fact that it was very heavy. As his phone clattered on the floor and the centipede tightened around his neck, Sharma felt the cool touch of metal.

  Some kind of a robot centipede? Didn’t make sense. The thing wouldn’t have the strength to strangle him, would it? He grabbed it and heard at that instant the high-pitched vibration of tiny spinning motors inside the centipede. His fingers were sliced to hamburger. He yelped and snatched his hands away, then realized his big mistake.

  The thin tungsten centipede legs were unbelievably strong and micromachined to be razor-sharp. As they wiggled, they slid into Sharma’s flesh like hot knives into warm butter.

  One second before he died, Jim Sharma felt his sweaty shirt become drenched in blood, and it smelled worse than the raw sewage on the streets of Casablanca.

  Chapter 4

  “It’s amazing.” The young man shook his head.

  “It’s ludicrous,” added the elderly man with the gray complexion. “We have mobile phones smaller than a pack of playing cards and yet this organization can’t stay in touch with its enforcement arm.”

  “It’s not a matter of technology. Dr. Smith,” Mark Howard said. “You could put a microchip in his skull and he’d still find a way to disable it.”

  “I know,” sighed Harold W. Smith, the elderly director of the Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, as well as director of CURE, the supersecret organization for which Folcroft provided a front..

  CURE was tiny in terms of its personnel, which numbered exactly four. Prior to the most recent major staff expansion, when Mark Howard was added to the payroll a few years previously, there had only been three official employees of CURE. Still, the scope of the organization’s activities had always been substantial. The impact CURE had on global events was incalculable.

  The problem at the moment was not a new one. For years management, which consisted of Dr. Smith and Assistant Director Mark Howard, tried to set up a system for communications with its enforcement arm. The enforcement arm didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t cooperate.

  “Why is it too much to ask him to carry a cellular phone?” Dr. Smith complained. “We could have it programmed to connect directly with our offices. All he would have to do is open it up.”

  “He says they get ruined during the course of his field activities,” Howard added.

  “We pay for his shoes by the gross, why not mobile phones?” Dr. Smith snapped. “What’s the situation with the CIA buyer?”

  “He’s still waiting for a contact.”

  “Sitting in a hotel room getting nowhere.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Smith glared at the top of his desk, beneath which was hidden his new, enlarged flat-screen display. The brilliant, high-resolution images had been an unexpected quality-of-life improvement for Smith. The new image reduced the tension that Smith hadn’t even known he was experiencing when he viewed his old display. That didn’t make it any easier to see what he was seeing now.

  “This is a failure. This should not be happening.” Dr. Smith spoke with subdued anger; this was not his usual sour disposition. “Remo could be at the buyers’ market right now, getting the answers, finding the stolen units, getting control of the situation. Instead our fate rests in the hands of one CIA operative who may or may not have a chance of even placing a bid.”

  “We could send the Yuma police to find Remo,” Howard suggested.

  “Remo would ignore them as he’s ignored our other messages,” Smith said dismissively. “When was our last call to Mr. Roam?”

  “Four hours,” Howard answered, glancing at his watch.

  “Intolerable.” Smith turned and looked out his window, where the waves of Long Island Sound crashed against the shore. He turned back. “Please get an update from the CIA while I try calling Mr. Roam myself.” Dr. Smith felt foolish as he rang the line of a mobile phone somewhere in southern Arizona. It picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?” The man sounded curious, and he sounded familiar.

  “Hello, Mr. Roam?”

  “You want Sunny Joe?”

  “Yes, please, this is extremely urgent.”

  “Uh-huh. Hold on.” The voice called out to someone else. “It’s Dr. Smith-for-brains. Where’s Sunny Joe?”

  Smith felt cold numbness grip his hands. Who was this? Why had Remo revealed Smith’s name to him? A young woman answered, “Riding the lines.”

  “He’s out checking fences,” said the young man on the line. “Call back tomorrow.”

  Smith said, “Mr. Roam went out to check the fences and he did not take his mobile phone with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “Oh, you think I’m lying? You’ve got some nerve calling me a liar after what you’ve done.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Hanging up now, Smith-for-brains.”

  “Wait! I’m looking for another man by the name of Remo. It’s possible he’s a guest of Mr. Roam’s.”

  “No duh, Smitty.”

  Smith breathed deeply and asked, “May I speak to Remo, please?”

  “Doubt it.” The young man lowered the phone and announced, “It’s Dr. Strangehate from the loony bin. You home?” Then the young man said, “He says he’s not home right now.”

  “I must speak to him—it’s extremely urgent,” Dr. Smith said sternly.

  “Go to hell, asshole.”

  Smith seethed and dialed again. It rang once. “I’m sorry,” said the young man when he answered again, “but the mobile phone you have called has been flushed into the septic system. Please try your call again never.” The speaker filled with an intense flushing sound, then the strange acoustical muffling that came of being under water. The phone functioned for an amazing four seconds before the electronics shorted and Smith was left listening to silence.

  Mark Howard entered.

  “Bad news.”

  Smith said nothing.

  “The CIA buyer was made. They murdered him in his hotel room. The Company watchers think the buy went down about the same time he was getting his throat hacked.”

  Dr. Smith nodded stiffly, then said. “Mark, you will please go to Arizona at once.”

  Chapter 5

  Nightmares are usually the stuff of fantasy, conjured to help the subconscious face its fears. In nightmares, one can live through the worst possible events and it makes the trials of real life seem less awful.

  But Remo Williams was dreaming of the past, of events that had actually happened, and it was worse than anything his mind could have imagined.

  First came the horror of Kali. Kali confronting them. Kali, the Devourer, alive inside the body of Jilda, mother of Freya.

  Almost as soon as he saw her confronting him, Remo saw her dead, killed by an Asian man so small, so old, he looked too feeble to brush a spider from the kitchen table. Horror and self-condemnation dawned on the face of the little Asian man as he realized who he had just killed.

  Then came the horror of Kali, the Devourer, alive inside the body of Freya herself. Remo’s daughter. His little girl.

  “Red One, remember me,” his little girl said to him in the voice of something ageless and evil.

  Then came the collapse of brick and stone, and the hours of digging in the rubble, the flash of golden hair. He extracted her little body from the ruin, a limp thing that wasn’t dead—Remo would not let her be dead. Almost through his own force of will he breathed life back into her.

  So it was a dream that ended well enough, as in reality. Freya survived, and she still lived, but in his dream there was a nameless dread.

  The dream shifted abruptly. Now there were no great events. No four-armed inhuman beings, no speaking gods. There was just Remo and a friendly woman, who was not an enemy, in a narrow room. Somehow every item in the room clashed in color and design with every other item in the room.