Mountain City, population two thousand five hundred, was built along the stems of the crossroads of 421, 91, and 67 in a valley between mountain ridges, and it had ridden up the mountainsides in some places. Like towns anywhere, it had its nicer side and its not-so-nice side; its profusion of fast food on the big roads leading out of and into town; its shabby, ignored old main street; but also its share of beaten-down strip malls off the main drag. But in one of them he found a computer store and went in, finding it full of bustling, earnest young geeks, exactly the kinds of boys who wouldn’t end up in the United States Marine Corps. They were all gathered around a monitor that showed some kind of war scenario, mainly beefy Special Ops types with super weapons destroying giant insects with their own set of super weapons. Finally a boy looked up and lumbered over.

“Can I help you sir? Whoa, that looks like toast.”

He was referring to the laptop with its spidery fracture lines knifing jaggedly across the bent screen, the scuffed and cracked plastic, the keys out of whack or sprung, the whole mess looking finished for all time.

“I don’t know if we can do much with that,” the boy said. “You might have to replace the whole unit.”

“I’m guessing y’all have a genius here,” Bob said. “All these places do. Some real smart kid-all the others dislike him he’s so smart, he wins the alien games all the time and he doesn’t mind letting you know what a geek you are?”

“Charlie. How did you know?”

“I just figured it out. Anyhow, Charlie should be at Caltech or MIT except he flunked out of community college or got busted for marijuana or some such and he don’t mind telling you how much more he deserves.”

“That’s Charlie. He flunked out of Vanderbilt. Math scholarship. It was the games. He is good with the games. He’s the best. You can’t beat him.”

“I’d like to see Charlie, please.”

Soon enough, Charlie was put before him, a surly kid in a hooded sweatshirt, still wearing a smear of acne, but no needles or pins through his flesh.

“Charlie, I hear you’re pretty smart.”

“Know a thing or two. Can’t help you with that box, though, mister. It’s completely wasted, I can tell you that.”

“I don’t want it fixed, Mr. Charlie. I want it mined.”

“Mined?”

“Yeah, I want you to dig out the hard drive and salvage what information you can-”

“Data.”

“Data, yeah. Whatever you can, particularly in the last few days. It was beaten up in a car accident last Thursday. Today is Tuesday. I’m particularly interested in the day of the accident.”

“Mister, I don’t know. Looks like someone took a hammer to it.”

“Does, doesn’t it? Maybe the FBI could tell me, but maybe you know more than the FBI, wouldn’t surprise me. And you’re here and the FBI is in Washington, D.C.”

“Are you with law enforcement, sir?”

“No, just an amateur at all this.”

“Well, I can make a try. It would be expensive. I charge-”

“Charlie, wait a second.”

He pulled out a stockbroker’s checkbook, dated it, signed it, but left the name and amount blank. He handed it to Charlie.

“You start now. You work hard. You say goodbye to blowing up monsters from space for a while. This is a maximum effort. And anything you learn, you call me ASAP on my cell, no matter the time. And when you’re done, you’ll know what you’re owed. You fill it in on the check and go cash it and that’s all there is to it. Are we on the same page?”

“Yes sir. I’ll get busy right now.”

“Good man, Charlie, knew I could trust you.”

Bob checked into the Mountain Empire Motel, and set about the melancholy task of examining what remained of the effects his daughter carried that day. The first, of course, was her key ring, which held the Volvo key-thank God he’d bought her a strong automobile for her first job; maybe it had saved her life-and what had to be the key to the Kawasaki he saw parked out in front of the apartment building. That one was particularly biting, as it recalled many happy hours he’d spent bombing across the prairie outside Crazy Horse on his own bike, where he’d built the new house, and she’d joined him. She couldn’t keep up on horseback, so she’d bought a bike, a Honda 250, and the two of them went on bounding rides over the low hills, under the huge sky in the baking heat. Those were good days, maybe his best, and, he remembered thinking, maybe more necessary than he acknowledged.

It was about then his hair started to turn; it was about then he started having the dreams.

He saw the yakuza swordsman with his perfect English and his smart, feral eyes, and his swordsman’s ambition, and he knew that what everyone told him was true: when you saw this man, you were looking at death.

The last face-off in the snow, on the island.

What was he doing there? What had consumed him with the idea that with his week of training, suppleness from six months of cutting back brush on his desert property, and his anger, that he could stand against this guy? It wasn’t David against Goliath, it was little Davy the three-year-old against Goliath-san. But he’d waded in, delusional, and learned in seconds he was overmatched. Now and then, as the fight wore on, he’d unleash a good combination, his four-hundred-year-old Muramasa blade cleaving dangerously close to the Japanese killer.

But the man was playing with him. It was killer’s vanity. It was a little game. He knew he’d die when the man tired of it, when the macho chit-chat between them no longer amused him, when the magic hour came, and civilians started coming into the zone.

There was a moment where he had nothing, he’d lost everything. His lungs were blown, he was bathed in sweat, fatigued, as the other swordsman stalked him. It was all gone. He remembered the despair: why did you ever think you could do this? Why didn’t you bring a gun? Pull it out, blow a 230-grain hardball through the guy and that was it. But no, you had vanity too. You could be in this game too. Fool. Bitter fool on the slippery edge of extinction.

No, he didn’t think that. There hadn’t been time in the fight. That was imposed later by his subconscious as he reconstructed it in the dream state. And in the dream state, night after night, he saw the yakuza laugh and cut, and open him deeply. He saw his own blood spurt and felt the dizzy weakness fire through his body, felt his knees give. Then he imagined the man making a witty riposte-“Sorry, cowboy, time to catch the last stage out of Dodge” or something-and then drive forward on the horizontal (shimo-hasso) and take his head. More than once he awoke with a scream in a sweat, seeing the world go atilt and then to blur in the eight seconds of oxygen and glucose a detached brain holds to sustain itself, felt the separation, felt the loss.

Why had he survived? That was the mystery, as strange to him as anyone. He knew only that at a certain late moment, he realized he had a steel hip and he remembered some bit of samurai gibberish-“Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel”-and pivoted and opened and the target was too great. Exhausted himself, the great yakuza killer took the easy way out, drove the blade through the opening and felt it torque out of control when, an inch into Swagger, it hit the metal that was harder than it was.

Bob came off the blow and cut him hard upward, belly to spine, and that was that.

You were so lucky, he thought. Gunfighter’s luck, arriving in the middle of a sword fight. Or maybe it was just that his subconscious had figured out a way to beat the guy, and it e-mailed him the info just in time. Maybe it was just that he came from fighters and sired fighters and had a strange gift for fighting. But he knew this: You will never be that lucky again. Your weakness turned into your strength and you figured it out one one-millionth of a second in time. The memory came at night and each time it came, it left his hair grayer.