"Any more good news?"

"Oh, yeah, the CO, issue. There's a guy up at Harvard who says if we dump iron filings into the Indian Ocean, we can encourage the growth of phytoplankton, and that will fix the CID, problem almost overnight. The math looks pretty good. All these geniuses who say they can fix the planet, like she needs fixing instead of leaving her the hell alone."

"And the President says what?" Mayflower asked.

"He says for me to tell him if it'll work or not, and if it looks like it's going to work, then test it to make sure, then try it for real. He hasn't got a clue, and he doesn't listen." She didn't add that she had to follow his orders whether she liked them or not.

"Well, maybe our friends at Earth First are right, Carol. Maybe we are a parasitic species on the face of the earth, and maybe we're going to destroy the whole damned planet before we're done."

"Rachel Carson come to life, eh?" she asked.

"Look, you know the science as well as I do - maybe better. We're doing things like-like the Alvarez Event that took the dinosaurs out, except we're doing it willfully. It took how long for the planet to recover from that?"

"Alvarez? The planet didn't recover, Kevin," Carol Brightling pointed out. "It jump-started mammals-us, remember? The preexisting ecological order never returned. Something new happened, and that took a couple of million years just to stabilize." Must have been something to see, she told herself. To watch something like that in progress, what a scientific and personal blessing it must have been, but there'd probably been nobody back then to appreciate it. Unlike today.

"Well, in a few more years we'll get to see the first part of it, won't we? How many more species will we kill of this year, and if the ozone situation keeps getting worse - my God, Carol, why don't people get it? Don't they see what's happening? Don't they care?"

"Kevin, no, they don't see, and, no, they don't care. Look around." The restaurant was filled with important people wearing important-looking clothes, doubtless discussing important things over their important dinners, none of which had a thing to do with the planetary crisis that hung quite literally over all their heads. If the ozone layer really evaporated, as it might, well, they'd start using sunblock just to walk the streets, and maybe that would protect them enough… but what of the natural species. the birds, the lizards, all the creatures on the planet who had no such option? The studies suggested that their eyes would be seared by the unblocked ultraviolet radiation, which would kill them off, and so the entire global ecosystem would rapidly come apart. "Do you think any of these people know about it-or give a damn if they do?"

"I suppose not." He sipped down some more of his white wine. "Well, we keep plugging away, don't we?"

"It's funny," she went on. "Not too long ago we fought wars, which kept the population down enough that we couldn't damage the planet all that much- but now peace is breaking out all over, and we're advancing our industrial capacity, and so, peace is destroying us a lot more efficiently than war ever did. Ironic, isn't it?"

"And modern medicine. The anopheles mosquito was pretty good at keeping the numbers down-you know that Washington was once a malarial swamp, diplomats deemed it a hazardous-duty post! So then we invented DDT. Good for controlling mosquitoes, but tough on the peregrine falcon. We never get it right. Never," Mayflower concluded.

"What if?…" she asked wistfully.

"What if what, Carol?"

"What if nature came up with something to knock the human population back?T-"

"The Gaea Hypothesis?" That made him smile. The idea was that the earth was itself a thinking, self-correcting organism that found ways to regulate the numerous living species that populated the planet. "Even if that's valid-and I hope it is, really - I'm afraid that we humans move too fast for Gaea to deal with us and our work. No, Carol, we've created a suicide pact, and we're going to take down everything else with us, and a hundred years from now, when the human population worldwide is down to a million or so people, they'll know what went wrong and read the books and look at the videotapes of the paradise we once had, and they'll curse our names-and maybe, if they're lucky, they'll learn from it when they crawl back up from the slime. Maybe. I doubt it. Even if they try to learn, they'll worry more about building nuclear power reactors so they can use their electric toothbrushes. Rachel was right. There will be a Silent Spring someday, but then it'll be too late." He picked at his salad, wondering what chemicals were in the lettuce and tomatoes. Some, he was sure. This time of year, the lettuce came up from Mexico, where farmers did all sorts of things to their crops, and maybe the kitchen help had washed it off, but maybe not, and so here he was, eating an expensive lunch and poisoning himself as surely as he was watching the whole planet being poisoned. His quietly despairing look told the tale. He was ready to be recruited, Carol Brightling thought.

It was time. And he'd bring some good people with him, and they'd have room for them in Kansas and Brazil. Half an hour later, she took her leave, and headed back to the White House for the weekly cabinet meeting.

"Hey, Bill," Gus said from his office in the Hoover Building. "What's happening?"

"Catch the TV this morning" Henriksen asked.

"You mean the thing in Spain?" Werner asked.

"Yep."

"Sure did. I saw you on the tube, too."

"My genius act." He chuckled. "Well, it's good for business, you know?"

"Yeah, I suppose it is. Anyway, what about it?"

"That wasn't the Spanish cops, Gus. I know how they train. Not their style, man. So, who was it, Delta, SAS, HRT?"

Gus Werner's eyes narrowed. Now Assistant Director of the FBI, he'd once been the special agent in charge of the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team. Promoted out, he'd been Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta field division, and now was the AD in charge of the new Terrorism Division. Bill Henriksen had once worked for him, then left the Bureau to start his own consulting company, but once FBI always FBI, and so now, Bill was fishing for information.

"I really can't talk much about that one, buddy."

"Oh?"

"Oh? Yes. Can't discuss," Werner said tersely.

"Classification issues?"

"Something like that," Werner allowed.

A chuckle: "Well, that tells me something, eh?"

"No, Bill, it doesn't tell you anything at all. Hey, man, I can't break the rules, you know."

"You always were a straight shooter," Henriksen agreed. "Well, whoever they are, glad they're on our side. The takedown looked pretty good on TV."

"That it did." Werner had the complete set of tapes, transmitted via encrypted satellite channel from the U.S. Embassy in Madrid to the National Security Agency. and from there to FBI headquarters. He'd seen the whole thing, and expected to have more data that afternoon.

"Tell them one thing, though, if you get a chance."

"What's that, Bill?" was the noncommittal response.

"If they want to look like the local cops, they ought not use a USAF helicopter. I'm not stupid, Gus. The reporters might not catch it, but it was pretty obvious to somebody with half a brain, wasn't it?"

Oops, Werner thought. He'd actually allowed that one to slip through his mental cracks, but Bill had never been a dummy, and he wondered how the news media had failed to notice it.

"Oh?"

"Don't give me that, Gus. It was a Sikorsky Model 60 chopper. We used to play with them when we went down to Fort Bragg to play, remember? We liked it better than the Hueys they issued us, but it ain't civilian-certified, and so they wouldn't let you buy one," he reminded his former boss.

"I'll pass that one along," Werner promised. "Anybody else catch on to that?"