He arrived at the third floor at the far end of the hall and froze. His office door was ajar. He knew he had locked it when he left. He reached around and unpacked his AMT Hardballer. It was a lightweight forty-five that had seven in the clip and a burnished 125-mm barrel. He slid it from his belt-mounted Yaqui slide holster, chambered it silently, and crept slowly down the hall toward his office. As he got closer he could see that the lock on his door had been shattered. Wood splinters decorated the yellow linoleum corridor.

He paused next to the door and listened… Someone inside was talking in a low voice:

"If you don't, I'll have to do it for you… that's no damn way to act," the voice whispered.

Jack took a deep breath, then kicked the door open. It slammed against the inside wall hard and he came in fast behind it. A man he had never seen before was sitting at his desk.

The guy yelled: "Yeeeeeekkkkk!", threw the telephone receiver over his head, and jumped to his feet. He was wearing iridescent plastic blue jeans and a silk pirate's shirt.

"Who the fuck are you?" Jack demanded, pushing the Hardballer into his face. Jack guessed he was about twenty, but his eyes were ageless.

"I'm Gary. Miro told me to sit in here and answer phones and shit," the boy shrieked.

Then Jack heard footsteps in the hall and Casimiro Roca came running-sliding actually-into the room. He had to grab the door frame to keep from falling. "What? What? What!" he squawked as he skidded to a stop in the threshold. He was wearing ballet slippers. "What is it? What's going on?" Miro demanded.

"Jesus, Miro, who the fuck is this?" Jack holstered his Hardballer and looked at these two guys who were dressed from the beach bonanza section of the International Male catalogue.

"When I came in about two this afternoon your little office had been broken into," Miro said. "I figured you'd want it, so I called a man to fix the lock, but he said the door hadda be replaced. So I asked Gary to sit in here to watch your stuff, 'cause those nasty people from the herbal place down the hall kept looking in. I thought they might steal what was left."

"That's really nice of you, Miro," Jack said, feeling bad that he'd pulled his gun. "Sorry I scared you." He looked at the narrow-shouldered, panicked boy in the iridescent jeans and billowing pirate shirt who, on second glance, looked more like an ice skater than a pirate.

"Jack Wirta, meet Jackson Mississippi," Miro intoned delicately.

"My God. My God," Jackson whined. "My heart is pitty-patting like a little bunny."

"I'm really sorry, guys… I'm having an off day." Then Jack sat in the guest chair and began looking around his office, taking inventory.

His clock radio was gone, along with his old desktop calculator. The calculator was a candidate for the Smithsonian anyway. His two police certificates were missing, along with his formal Academy graduation picture. He wondered why the picture was gone. "Not much of a heist," he muttered softly.

"Beg pardon?" Jackson Mississippi huffed, hands on his slender hips.

Miro glanced at Jackson. "It's okay, honey, thanks. I'll take over now."

"I would say 'any time,' except I'm never coming in here again. Here's your only message." He handed Jack a slip of paper. "That lady from your bank called. I put her name and number down, but she said they close at five… so they're closed." He snapped this off savagely. Then he got up and flounced out of the office.

"I hope you didn't scare him back into the closet." Miro grinned, then sighed theatrically. "This neighborhood… there's a lot of drug use and break-ins. Some of these boys have deep sexual anger and depression. They do all kinds of bad shit."

"Maybe it's only that, maybe it's something else."

"Something else?"

"Yeah; Look, thanks for keeping an eye on the place." Jack opened his bottom desk drawer and found a bottle of Blue Label scotch that, surprisingly, had not been lifted during the robbery. He pulled it out and showed it to Casimiro Roca. "Do you think a seasoned drug bandit would leave a good, fifty-year-old downer like this behind?"

Casimiro looked at the bottle and shrugged. Jack pulled two chipped jelly glasses out of the bottom drawer and set them on the desk, just like Sam Spade.

"Join me?"

"I never refuse a drink from a handsome, well-intentioned gentleman."

"Listen, Miro, if we're gonna be friends, we gotta get past the sexy repartee, okay? I'm not used to it from guys."

"I'll try, but in your case it's gonna be hard… no pun intended." He smiled and nodded at Jack, who poured him the drink and then handed it across the desk to him. They clinked glasses and sipped scotch, both thinking separate thoughts.

"Tell Jackson I'll pour him a shot if he needs something to calm his nerves."

Miro tossed off his drink like a Singapore sailor and went next door to fetch Jackson Mississippi and bring him to the party.

When Chick O'Brian-the policeman's policeman and one-time LAPD heavyweight boxing champ-entered Jack Wirta's office it was a little past 6 p.m. He was surprised to find his old bud with his shoes off, sitting behind the desk, feet up, drinking scotch with two nutsack chorus boys. Chick was massive and kept things simple: guys were guys, girls were pussy. Everything else was perverted. He had shoulders like an American buffalo. His face was pink and oily and he always looked like he'd just finished running two miles-a condition he blamed on acute dermatitis. Miro looked up at the huge, glowering apparition in Jack's doorway and set his jelly glass down quickly. He knew homophobic intolerance when he saw it.

"Well, it's been ever so…" he said, getting up from the chair where Jackson Mississippi was perched on the arm like a parlor ornament. Then the two of them hit the road, grinding their way out the door.

"Jesus," Chick said, watching them go. "Whatta you doing hangin' with those two sternwheelers?"

"In this neighborhood you have to adapt. Come on over here, big guy, and give your little Jackie a sloppy, wet kiss."

Chick actually took a step backwards. "That ain't funny. Don't even joke about that shit."

"You find out what I wanted?" Jack asked. "You coulda just called."

Chick moved over to the chair that Miro and Jackson had been using and looked at it cautiously, inspecting it for the AIDS virus. Then he sat down carefully, like an Episcopalian taking a dump in a public toilet.

"I ran what you wanted through my secure contact in D.C. He called back two hours ago and said Octopus is a black op computer lab."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he found only one mention of it, but it was in a secure Pentagon computer. This lab is located out at Pepperdine University, in room 212 of the Computer Science building, if you can believe that. It's being supervised by something called Echelon which my friend tells me is like a satellite spy network-real hush-hush."

"No kidding. That's what my client thought."

"Yeah. But that's all he could find on it. He said it was buried under a layer of UP codes. That's Ultimate Priority. It's supersecure. But here's where it gets interesting…"

"Good, 'cause so far that doesn't quite figure."

"An hour after my guy gives me this he calls back, and Jack, I never heard him in such a panic."

Chick squirmed slightly in the brown leather chair, screwing his ass in for better traction, then he leaned forward and said, "He tells me to forget everything he just told me. Says, whatever I do, don't tell a soul. He said his career is cooked if it gets back to anybody on his agency flow chart that he gave me this. Apparently he wasn't supposed to be able to access it, but because of his White House security number he leaked in. Big mistake! The systems administrator traced the breach to him. It's called a back-finger. Anyway, a team of federal hitters shows up in my friend's office twenty minutes later and they put him through a half hour of bullshit. He tells these two suits that he'd heard about Octopus, got curious, and was checking because he thought it might be part of one of his drug cases-that it was all just a dumb mistake. He doesn't think they bought it. They rattled him good, but he held up, didn't tell them he gave it to me, and I didn't tell him I was doing this for you. Whatever it is, Octopus is not supposed to see daylight."