An accent. Leland still could not make out the words. The accent was faint; the careful, conscious phrasing showed that the speaker had studied the language in school, or later. Now Leland darted across the elevator area to the staircase door.

Four of them, one of whom he recognized, goddamn it — goddamnit! — all armed with the world's best one-man weapon, the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. Leland shook with rage and self-reproach. He should have done better than this!

He waited, catching his breath. If he had been spotted, someone would have shouted. He had to evaluate what he had seen, which was plenty. He had to think. The first obvious point was that he could not take any kind of effective action with the information he had so far. Now he had to make another decision. He opened the door to the staircase carefully, stepped in, and eased the door closed quietly behind him.

He went up, his bare feet taking the cool, rough concrete steps lightly, two at a time.

He stepped out on the thirty-fourth floor. Far enough. The main lights were off, and in all directions, through the full-length windows running completely around the building, he could see the city lights twinkling out to the murky horizon, the freeways streaming red away from the city. This floor was different from the thirty-second, wide open, without protection or hiding place. That was all right, for now.

He realized that he was going to have to learn a lot more about the building. It was the building's core that he wanted to understand first. The core was the same on every floor, eight elevators, four on each side, facing each other like square dancers. Right now he could not tell if the elevators were working, and setting one into motion unnecessarily would probably expose him. The four staircases were around behind the elevator banks, facing the four outside corners of the building. The party two floors down was in the southwest. Okay. Going down that staircase would get him closer to the party, but he wanted to do a little more thinking, first.

He walked around the perimeter of the entire floor, looking down into the street. Garage entrances on both side streets, the ramp's cutting down through the steps of the raised plaza. The entry level was two stories high, Leland remembered, sheathed in glass, so that all the elevator banks and the building's supporting pillars were visible. Given the size of the building, the underground garage was at least two levels deep, probably three. At the bottom level, or below it, was the heating plant, the electrical control panel, and the telephone switchboard. You could not defend the building from the ground, but above, far above, with the elevators disabled, it was better than a medieval castle. Not even assault troops could retake the place.

The four men in jeans and Windbreakers, armed with Kalashnikovs, had put on the flourescent lights and herded the crowd into the center of the big room. Leland had not seen Steffie, or Judy or Mark, but he had seen Rivers and Ellis, their hands on top of their heads.

A half dozen people down there would realize that Leland was not in the crowd, if they were calm enough to think clearly. Of them all, Leland probably had the most confidence in Rivers, in spite of what he thought of Rivers's character. Rivers was a survivor: in that, Leland was more certain of Rivers than he was of his own daughter. A longtime ago, she had loved and trusted her father completely. In recent years he had seen her grow annoyed with him, thinking him old-fashioned, out of step, superfluous. But this was not her remodeled kitchen in Santa Monica, and because of her position, she was probably in far more danger than she realized. The man Leland recognized was a killer who liked it — who almost certainly wouldn't be able to resist killing someone tonight, simply to assert his mastery of the situation.

Leland decided to go down the southeast staircase to the thirty-second floor. The door was heavy, fireproof, and almost soundproof. The knob turned smoothly and the bolt slid open in silence. He paused. There was no way of knowing if anyone was looking directly at the other side. He eased the door open.

He had a view of a blank wall. But now he could hear the man who was talking clearly enough to make out some of his words. "You people" something. Then something like "the whole world watching."

Leland stepped into the hall. He wanted to see what they were up to. He wanted to see how many of them there were. The hall narrowed into forty feet of relatively dark corridor, and it would take a good pair of eyes in that brightly lighted room to make him out in the shadows. He kept the Browning in his left hand. Even if he were seen, he would be able to get back to the stairwell, and as long as they didn't think he had a gun, they might believe he was no threat to them.

His view was not what he had been hoping for. He could see only one of the gunmen and a portion of the crowd, their hands still on their heads. The leader, the man Leland had recognized, went on talking, making something else clear: he knew he was secure from below. Leland went back to the stairwell and climbed up one flight.

Suspicion confirmed: the thirty-third floor was different from the other two above and below it that Leland had seen, a series of rabbit warrens leading to fair-sized, plush offices at the windows. Some even had television sets. He had to get organized and keep track of things, make a list of the different floor layouts he was encountering. If he had to run for his life, he might just make it because he had an idea of which direction to take.

The gang. He'd seen four. Even with their radios, they needed two people downstairs, in the lobby and in the control room. The one in the lobby was probably sending the police away at this moment. It would take Leland ten to fifteen minutes to get down on foot to the street level from here. He would have the element of surprise in his favor, and would probably be able to get out to the street. Then what?

Leland knew as well as any man alive. He had participated in the secret seminars and conferences that had developed the contingency plans of many of the nation's municipal police departments. This was the real, only and true reason for the creation of SWAT teams. The Symbionese Liberation Army shootout was a case in point. Ex-LAPD Chief Ed Davis had tipped the strategy completely with his so-called jocular response to the problem of air piracy: "Hang 'em at the airport."

The strategy: kill them all.

The Symbionese hideout had been burned to the ground, and all inside had died.

At Entebbe, a hostage was killed by an Israeli paratrooper when he did not obey orders and looked up to see what was going on.

Hostages were secondary. The nature of this wave of international terrorism was the only primary element in the definition of the problem. The lectures, slide shows, reports, psychological profiles, material made available by a dozen governments and another dozen multinational corporations left no alternatives. There now existed a world-wide network of people in their twenties and thirties, some acting independently but most in combination with other groups, orchestrated from and protected in sanctuaries like Syria, Lebanon, South Yemen, and Libya, who had committed their lives to the destruction of social order in the noncommunist world. After that, they would build a revolutionary society, and naturally enough there was sharp disagreement among them about how they were going to do that.

Think-tanks had developed various scenarios of what would really happen, drawing on the revolutions of 1789 in France, 1917 in Russia, the long Chinese struggle, and now most recently in Cambodia and Vietnam: purges, massacres, genocide, counter-revolution, new schisms. One fat little academic, proud to be among the "tough guys" packing so much heat, dropped this pearl: "We figure a thirty-three to thirty-eight percent chance of world-wide anarchy, instead of the fifteen to twenty percent we're running now."