She was halfway to her car when her beeper detonated, scaring her half out of her scrubs. She had been awake or virtually awake for thirty-six hours and was running on a lean, rancid bland of caffeine and adrenaline. One reflex told her to grab the beeper and push the button that would make it shut up. The other reflex told her to pull the trigger on her stun gun and get it up into the solar plexus of any bad guys who might be in her vicinity. The reflexes got a little confused and the two little black boxes collided, the stun gun and the beeper, and the stun gun won; the beeper went silent.

(a) This was no time to stand still and figure out the problem and (b) as of thirty minutes ago, she was no longer on call. This had been a mistake on the part of the operator. She had paged the wrong doctor. Sooner or later, they would figure it out, they always did. Right now, Dr. Cozzano needed to get home and sleep.

When she got back to her apartment, her answering machine was taking down a message from a man whose voice she did not recognize. She just caught the tail end of it as she was coming through the door: "... condition is stable and he's under the personal care of Dr. Sipes, who of course is a very fine neurologist, Thanks. Bye."

She recognized the name Sipes; he was on the faculty of the Central Illinois University College of Medicine and he showed up at all the conferences. Apparently this call had come from down-state, where some colleague had a question about something. Didn't sound urgent; she would call him back later. She turned down the volume on the answering machine, locked all of the locks that Dad had installed to keep her safe, fed the cat, and went into the bathroom.

There was a mirror in the bathroom. Mary Catherine had not looked in a mirror for something like a day and a half. She took this opportunity to see if she still recognized herself.

Her father was the Governor of Illinois, which meant that this face of hers showed up on television and in the newspapers with some regularity. She had to look respectable without being dowdy. She was also a doctor, so she had to look smart and professional. She was a resident, so she had no money and couldn't spend any time at all worrying about how she looked. And she was the product of a small town in Illinois and had to go back there every couple of weeks and not seem uppity and strange to her old Girl Scout chums.

Once you left the city limits of Chicago you were in Big Hair Territory. Mary Catherine had been the only girl in her high school who had escaped the syndrome. She had extremely thick, black, luxuriant Italian hair with a natural wave that, during the humid summers, turned into a curl. She would have preferred to shave her head for the duration of the residency. Dad was never happy unless she let it grow down to her waist. In compromise, she had settled on a cut that let it hang just above her shoulders.

She showered and climbed into bed with wet hair. A few bits of mail had arrived, notes and cards from friends and family members in other parts of the country, and she leafed through them by her bedside lamp. Her eyes could not trace the handwriting, and the contents penetrated her brain only feebly. It was a waste of time. She reached to turn off the ringer on her telephone, but discovered that it was already turned off. She had probably turned it off the last time she had attempted to get some sleep, whenever that was. The time was 9:15 p.m. She set her three alarm clocks for five o'clock in the morning. She tossed the pager and the stun gun on to her bedside table. The pager no longer responded when she pushed the TEST button. Apparently the stun gun had fried its microchips.

When she woke up, the bedside clocks all read within a few minutes of 9:45 and someone was pounding rhythmically on her front door with a heavy object. For a moment she thought she had overslept and that it was 9:45 in the morning, but then she realized that it was dark outside and her hair was still wet.

It sounded like someone was trying to break in with a sledge-hammer. She pulled on jeans and an ILLINI sweatshirt, went to the door, and peered out through the peephole.

It was a cop. The wide-angle view in the peephole made his body very large and his head very small, amplifying his already cop-like appearance. He had a hug L-shaped billy club in one hand and was patiently ramming the butt of it into her door. Standing behind the cop was a man in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. He was shorter than the cop, so that the peephole magnified his face rather than his body. It was Mel Meyer.

"Okay!" she shouted. "I'm up." She sounded cheerful and ready for anything, even though she was neither. Women of the prairie did not bitch, nag, or whine.

Then she thought: Why is Mel here?

Dad had as many lawyers as a mechanic had wrenches. He embodied a large business, a fortune, a few charities, and the state of Illinois, and lawyers came with all of those things. They were always around. Always calling Dad, taking him to dinner, coming over to his house with papers to sign. Sometimes she couldn't tell which were his friends, which were his business associates, and which were actually representing him. To Mary Catherine, lawyers had always seemed as common as air, the taxi drivers, bag boys, and janitors of the world of affairs.

But if all those other lawyers were William A. Cozzano's army, then Mel Meyer was the stiletto strapped to his ankle. Mel was the eschatological counselor of the Cozzano clan, drafter of wills, executor of estates, godfather of children, and if the whole world turned to decadence and strife one day and civilization collapsed, and Dad were trapped on a hilltop surrounded by the heathen, Mel would shoot himself in the head so that Dad could use his corpse as a rampart. He was small, bald, rumply, tired-looking, lizard-eyed, and didn't talk much, because he was always thinking everything out two hundred years into the future.

And now he was standing in her hallway, with a cop, quiet and motionless as a fire hydrant, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, staring at the wallpaper, thinking.

She undid the locks and opened the door. The cop stepped aside, clearing a wide space between Mel and Mary Catherine. "Your pa needs you," Mel said. "I got a chopper. Let's go."

Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick Hospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly shorter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that looking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine could see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wandering around lost. The roofs were mostly flat tar and pea-gravel, totally dark at this time of night, though in areas that were perpetually shaded, patches of snow glowed faintly blue under the starlight. But the roof of one of the old, original wings was a patch of high noon in the sea of midnight. It bore a red square with a white Swiss cross, a red letter H in the center of the cross, and some white block numerals up in one corner. Well off to the side, new doors - electrically powered slabs of glass - had been cut into the side of the old building's central tower.

It made her uneasy. This wasn't Dad's style. As the governor of one of the biggest states in the union, William A. Cozzano could have lived like a sultan. But he didn't. He drove his own car and he did his own oil changes, lying flat on his back in the driveway of their house in Tuscola in the middle of the winter while frostbitten media crews photographed him in the act.

Zooming around in choppers gave him no thrill. It just reminded him of Vietnam. He took this to the point where he probably wouldn't have known how to get a chopper if he had needed one. Which is why he had to have people like Mel, people who knew the extent of his power and how to use it.