It was still cold in D.C. at this time of year-blustery. L.A. had it all: beaches, mountains, deserts, and bright sunshine twelve months a year. And yet there seemed something prefab and superficial about it. A town designed for tourists. The fringe celebrity commerce of Tinseltown seemed absurd to her: maps to the stars' homes, a tour of famous actors' gravesites in a twenty-year-old black Cadillac hearse, plus the tacky Hollywood sign. In L.A. fame towered over accomplishment. That was a concept that didn't fit the heroic proportions of Herman Strockmire Jr., a man she fought daily to protect and whom she adored.

Susan had grown up watching her beloved father run headlong into legal and political brick walls, often badly damaging himself. "No, Daddy, don't!" she would yell, feeling helpless to stop him, even as an adult. Then she'd watch in awe as her battered father would pick himself up, shake it off, back up, and do it all over again. Always in pursuit of an idea, a principle, an underdog. He became her hero early in life and had never once disappointed her. She never saw him do one thing she couldn't respect.

Not that he didn't have his shortcomings. Hell, he wore them like plates of tarnished armor-and he had plenty. He didn't seem to know that sometimes discretion was the better part of valor. He couldn't distinguish between causes, taking on an important lawsuit against the Pentagon for illegally developing bio-weapons at Fort Detrick with the same fervor that he chased after the silly Area 51 alien thing. But, to Herman they were equally important, because to him it was always about morality, honor, and integrity.

Herman was the last defender of justice in a world that no longer cared, because life in America now seemed to be only about celebrity, money, and success. The core values her father stood for had been left in the vapor trail of a seesawing Dow Jones Average.

Sometimes she cried for her father as she watched him standing alone against huge corporate bullies and government tyrants, sick and bloodied, but unbowed. A squat little warrior with a runaway heart who wouldn't back down no matter what; not when he was protecting the weak, not when the cause was just. And yet somehow, despite all of his courage, she knew that to most people who bothered to look, he came off as old-fashioned, silly, and more than a little bit corny.

Susan sat on the stone bench in the courtyard and watched the windows of Cedars-Sinai Hospital turn orange with the reflected sunset. She couldn't let her father die. She couldn't let him risk his life, but she didn't know how to stop him. When he was committed there was no turning him back. She had tried everything in the past: tears, begging, prayers, but he would just hold her hand and smile sadly, because he wanted her, above all others, to understand. He wanted her to get it.

"Honey," he would say. "Some people are unlucky, and you know why?"

"Why, Daddy?" But she knew.

"Because they have second sight. Or maybe it's just that they have a better view. They can really see what's going on, while the rest of society is out buying a new, hip wardrobe. But if you've been given this gift of sight you must use it. It's bigger than any one life, certainly bigger than mine." That was what he would tell her. If she went up there now and pleaded with him to ask the court for a continuance so he could get the radio frequency ablation, he would just smile sadly-mildly disappointed that she didn't understand. Then he would tell her all over again.

Herman Strockmire Jr. is the last great knight, she thought proudly.

She turned and trudged to the elevator for the ride back up to the cardio unit, thinking that if she lost her father she would just as soon die herself.

Roland Minton had taken a room in the new Fairview Hotel, on the thirty-second floor, with a spectacular vista of the San Francisco Bay. He always stayed at the new Fairview, because he thought the place looked like a huge rectal thermometer jutting up into the San Francisco sky, round and silver-tipped, its lone, mirrored spire flipping off the whole town.

He was planning to hit the bricks later in search of some prime female tatta, but first he decided to pursue the downloads he had cracked from Gen-A-Tec. Trouble was, the more he studied the stuff, the lamer it looked to him. The bio-corn file seemed like it was just low-grade PR, not the kind of sophisticated technical material you'd put in a secure computer.

So what gives? he wondered. He had just clicked over to the e-mails and was fast-scanning the messages when something got his hackles up. He couldn't pin it down at first, but something was definitely skeevy here.

What was it? He slowed his scan and began to page the e-mails one sheet at a time.

Hold it! Stop!

The e-mail he was looking at was a communique from the head of personnel. He'd seen that e-mail before, somewhere else. He selected a different e-mail box and searched through it.

There it was again. The same request to submit credit forms for reevaluation.

What is going on here? Roland wondered. He tried a few more boxes, and each one of them had the same e-mail loaded in with a bunch of other worthless clutter. Come to think of it, none of these e-mails looked legit. There were no letters containing specific project names, and that same, damned e-mail from personnel was in a half-dozen inboxes. Okay, he thought. So maybe the company sent this same request to a bunch of employees. Roland switched to the outbox files and started scanning.

There it was again!

The same e-mail requesting credit forms. What is going on? He could see how a group of employees could all have received the same e-mail, but how in the hell did ten or twelve people all send out the same e-mail, each message worded exactly the same?

What the fuck is this? Am I getting chewed here?

Was this whole system he'd accessed just an elaborate shadowbox of some kind? Had he been tricked? He sat back and scratched his purple hair, all thoughts of poontang gone. His credentials as "master of the game" had been severely called into question. Maybe the systems administrator at Gen-A-Tec wasn't such a Barney after all.

As Roland scanned through his stolen material he became more convinced that he'd been scammed. The lousy security, the holes in the version software, the easy password file-the whole thing was dogwash. Roland Minton, Cyber Hood of the Internet, had gone down in front of this scam like a broken deck chair.

The systems administrator was smart, but in the end he'd gotten lazy and started to fill up his dummy mailboxes with the same memos-and Roland caught him.

The shadowbox is a nice little piece of security, Roland thought. But what are they protecting? Whatever it is, they sure don't want anybody outside the company A-list to see it. Roland decided he would find a way in, even if it meant forgoing the belly ride in Berkeley.

As he continued to scan the e-mails, another line popped out at him:

We should put in a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.

Roland had heard of DARPA. It was a black-ops U.S. government defense agency that developed advanced weaponry. The acronym stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In composing his phony e-mails, Gen-A-Tec's SA had obviously cut up some real ones and scattered them around in the boxes as filler. This reference to DARPA was ominous and interesting. Why does DARPA, a weapons research agency, fund genetically enhanced foods? Damn strange. ..

Roland sat back, glared at his screen, and tried to devise another way to gain access to the mainframe of the Gen-A-Tec computer. He needed to get around the shadowbox that protected it. He sat on the edge of his bed and ran through his options for almost fifteen minutes.