"How's Anshiser?" I asked. The blond shut the door without locking it, and the dark man sat on a corner of the bed, looking at me. Maggie perched on the other chair.

"He's out of it," she said. "They're off the tumor theory. They think now it may have been a series of ministrokes over a period of time, killing his brain in such tiny increments it was impossible to find. They're still not sure. One of the doctors said the only way they'll ever be sure is with an autopsy. He's now in what they call a vegetative state."

"Tough. It's a bad way to go." I nodded at the dark man. "Is this the new boss?"

The dark man smiled, his even teeth glittering against his olive skin. With the broken nose and the good teeth, he would be devastating with women.

"I'm afraid you've got that backward, Mr. Kidd," he said mildly. "The board has chosen Ms. Kahn to run Anshiser. She's asked me to work as her executive assistant. Essentially, I have her old job."

"What about Dillon?"

Maggie shrugged. "Dillon is Dillon. He does the same thing. That's all he wants to do." When she first came in the room, her face was deathly pale. Now the color was coming back and the tension was seeping out. The situation was under control. The red numerals of the digital clock on the bedside table said 3:52.

"How's LuEllen?" Maggie asked.

"She's fine. She went back home."

"Was she the one who shot at me, back at the cabin?"

"Yeah. She was pissed about Dace."

"I thought it was she. I knew you were in the Army, and when I heard that machine gun going, and I didn't hear Frank's shotgun, I had an idea what happened. When I saw you coming around the corner with LuEllen and those guns, in those camouflage suits, I thought, Dear God, he's going to shoot me in the back."

"I thought about it," I said. "I had the scope right on your shoulder blades."

She shuddered.

"What happened to Frank and Leonard?", asked the dark man.

"I'm afraid they're, uh.

Maggie glanced at the dark man and then looked back to me.

"Most of the people involved in the decision to shoot Dace now agree it was a mistake. But it's a mistake that will be hard to walk away from. You and LuEllen could cause us an infinite amount of damage with a letter or a phone call, and you may have reason to do it. To get back for Dace," she said. She was using her business voice. The small talk was over.

I shook my head at her. "We won't do it. We want to cut a deal. You don't mess with us, ever, and we'll never mess with you. We've got our money and it's all over."

She glanced at the dark man again, and he said, "Ms. Kahn has suggested that you were too smart to expose yourself this way unless you had done something that would give you protection. Would you like to tell us what it is? A letter with a lawyer or something? A letter in a safety-deposit box?"

"Ah, no." I glanced at the clock. 3:56. "That, I'm afraid, could be managed. People could be bought, the charges denied, especially if LuEllen and I weren't around to back them up. Somebody might say the whole thing was a fantasy. and even the people who would believe it wouldn't have any way to prove it for sure. Besides, the instigator of the whole thing is a vegetable. You can't put a vegetable on trial."

"So what did you do?" Maggie asked.

I shrugged. "Same old shit you saw in the Washington apartment. A computer blitz. The fact is, if you mess with me or LuEllen, our friends on the computer net will take Anshiser right down the toilet. Right down."

Maggie glanced at the dark man again. He frowned and tipped his head back and stared at me, figuring, and finally said to Maggie, "I don't know."

She thought she did, though. She had decided it was a game, and looked at me with what may have been genuine regret.

"I'm disappointed, Kidd. We thought you'd be better than this. Let me tell you what we've done. We have the best people-the very best, better than you-watching every move that's made on those computers. It has been a major inconvenience, and it cost us a lot of money, but we'll get it back with the Sunfire contract. In any event, we know you're not in there. Just in case, we have backups of all our software, and all the daily work. We can shut down and sterilize our system in half an hour, and be back up with completely clean software. Everybody who does anything on the system is logged in and out, and the input is studied by the security crew. There isn't any way you can reach us. You just don't have the leverage for a deal." She shook her head and stood up. "I think it's time to leave," she said to the dark man.

The clock said 3:59.

"By the way, don't try to use your telephone. It won't work," she said, showing a few teeth. "I couldn't figure why you stayed in an Anshiser Hotel. You must know we could control the place."

"Don't go," I said. "We have more things to talk about."

"I don't think so," she said. A note of triumph had crept into her voice. The clock ticked over to four, and she started toward the door, the dark man standing to follow. The blond opened the door, and she walked away, giving it a little extra effort as she walked. At the door she paused, and seemed about to say something.

Then the lights went out.

Everything else went with them-the clock, the TV, the air conditioning. There was a stuttering, and emergency lights came on in the hallway. Somewhere, a smoke detector screeched, and doors started popping open down the hallway.

I had pulled the blackout drapes over the windows to intensify the effect. I waited for a few seconds, and reached back and pulled the drawstring. Daylight flooded the room, and the blond was standing just inside the door, pointing a small-caliber automatic pistol at my chest. A long, fat silencer was attached to the snout.

"Why don't you come back in and sit down?" I suggested.

Maggie looked shocked, but came back in. "What have you done?"

"I've shut down Anshiser," I said. "Or at least, my friends have."

"What are you talking about, we have the best security, there was no way.

"It's awful good," I agreed. "Too good to penetrate in the time that we had. So we had to do something different."

"What did you do, Kidd?"

"We went into the power company computers. We couldn't get every little dinky Anshiser operation, but we got all the good ones. All the hotels, all the factories, your headquarters back in Chicago. Not a single one of the big operations has power. If you call up your airframe fabrication plant you'll find they don't have a computer problem, they've got a problem with everything. They can't run a fuckin' power drill."

The Tower of Destruction. The lightning bolt. Power plants, of course. And it had been shown in conjunction with the Magician, the computer-freak card. It was all coincidence, but a timely one-I really don't believe in that magic shit.

"This can't last. " Maggie blurted.

"Yes, it can. Believe me: Anshiser is shut down. Unless I tell my people to bring you back up, you'll be down for three or four days before the electric people find the fault. And then the next bomb goes off. If you're really efficient, you might get fifteen or twenty days of work out of your companies in the next year."

She sank down in the chair opposite me, and the dark man said, "Sonofabitch." He looked at the blond and said, "Put it away." People were shuffling through the hall in the dim light, moving toward the stairwell. The smoke alarm, apparently triggered by the power shutdown, was still screeching into the gloom. The blond stepped inside and shut the door.

"How long will it take to get us back up?" Maggie asked.

"Probably two or three hours. We have a lot of them to deal with," I said. "But we don't want to bring them back up too soon. We want to give you a chance to call around. Find out how bad things can get. See if you can fix it yourself."