CONROY SWUNG The blue Fokker off the eroded ribbon of prewar highway and throttled down. The long rooster tail of pale dust that had followed them from Needles began to settle; the hovercraft sank into its inflated apron bag as they came to a halt.

“Here’s the venue, Turner.”

“What hit it?” Rectangular expanse of concrete spreading to uneven walls of weathered cinderblock.

“Economics,” Conroy said. “Before the war. They never finished it Ten klicks west of here and there’s whole subdivisions, just pavement grids, no houses, nothing”

“How big a site team?”

“Nine, not counting you. And the medics.”

“What medics?”

“Hosaka’s. Maas is biologicals, right? No telling how they might have our boy kinked. So Hosaka’s built a regular little neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them are company men, the third’s a Korean who knows black medicine from both ends. The medical pod’s in that long one there” – he pointed – ‘gotta partial section of roof.”

“How’d you get it on site?”

“Brought it from Tucson inside a tanker. Faked a breakdown Got it out, rolled it in. Took all hands. Maybe three minutes.”

“Maas,” Turner said.

“Sure” Conroy killed the engines. “Chance you take,” he said in the abrupt silence “Maybe they missed it. Our guy in the tanker sat there and bitched to his dispatcher in Tucson on the CB, all about his shit-eating heat exchanger and how long it was going to take to fix it. Figure they picked that up. You think of a better way to do it?”

“No. Given that the client wants the thing on the site. But we’re sitting here now in the middle of their recon foot-print...”

“Sweetheart” -and Conroy snorted – “maybe we just stopped for a screw Break up our trip to Tucson, right? It’s that kind of place People stop here to piss, you know?” He checked his black Porsche watch. “I’m due there in an hour, get a copter back to the coast.”

“The rig?”

“No. Your fucking jet. Figured I handle that myself.”

“Good.”

“I’d go for a Dornier System ground-effect plane myself. Have it wait down the road until we see Mitchell heading in. It could get here by the time the medics clean him up; we toss him in and take off for the Sonora border...”

“At subsonic speeds,” Turner said. “No way. You’re on your way to California to buy me that jump jet. Our boy’s going out of here in a multimission combat aircraft that’s barely even obsolete.”

“You got a pilot in mind?”

“Me,” Turner said, and tapped the socket behind his ear. “It’s a fully integrated interactive system. They’ll sell you the interface software and I’ll jack straight in.”

“Didn’t know you could fly.”

“I can’t. You don’t need hands-on to haul ass for Mexico City.”

“Still the wild boy, Turner? You know the rumor’s that somebody blew your dick off, back there in New Delhi?” Conroy swung around to face him, his grin cold and clean.

Turner dug the parka from behind the seat and took out the pistol and the box of ammunition. He was stuffing the parka back again when Conroy said, “Keep it. It gets cold as hell here, at night.”

Turner reached for the canopy latch, and Conroy revved the engines. The hovercraft rose a few centimeters, swaying slightly as Turner popped the canopy and climbed out. White-out sun and air like hot velvet. He took his Mexican sun-glasses from the pocket of the blue work shirt and put them on. He wore white deck shoes and a pair of tropical combat fatigues. The box of explosive shells went into one of the thigh pockets on the fatigues. He kept the gun in his right hand, the parka bundled under his left arm. “Head for the long building,” Conroy said, over the engine. “They’re expecting you.”

He jumped down into the furnace glow of desert noon as Conroy revved the Fokker again and edged it back to the highway. He watched as it sped east, its receding image distorted through wrinkles of rising heat.

When it was gone, there was no sound at all, no movement. He turned, facing the ruin. Something small and stone-gray darted between two rocks.

Perhaps eighty meters from the highway the jagged walls began. The expanse between had once been a parking lot.

Five steps forward and he stopped. He heard the sea, surf pounding, soft explosions as breakers fell. The gun was in his hand, too large, too real, its metal warming in the sun.

No sea, no sea, he told himself, can’t hear it He walked on, the deck shoes slipping in drifts of ancient window glass seasoned with brown and green shards of bottle. There were rusted discs that had been bottle caps, flattened rectangles that had been aluminum cans. Insects whirred up from low clumps of dry brush.

Over. Done with. This place. No time.

He stopped again, straining forward, as though he sought something that would help him name the thing that was rising in him. Something hollow.

The mall was doubly dead. The beach hotel in Mexico had lived once, at least for a season

Beyond the parking lot, the sunlit cinderblock, cheap and soulless, waiting.

He found them crouched in the narrow strip of shade provided by a length of gray wall. Three of them; he smelled the coffee before he saw them, the fire-blackened enamel pot balanced precariously on the tiny Primus cooker. He was meant to smell it, of course; they were expecting him Otherwise, he’d have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.

Two men, a woman; cracked, dusty boots out of Texas, denim so shiny with grease that it would probably be water-proof. The men were bearded, their uncut hair bound up in sun-bleached topknots with lengths of rawhide, the woman’s hair center-parted and pulled back tight from a seamed, wind-burnt face. An ancient BMW motorcycle was propped against the wall, flecked chrome and battered paintwork daubed with airbrush blobs of tan and gray desert camo.

He released the Smith & Wesson’s grip, letting it pivot around his index finger, so that the barrel pointed up and back.

“Turner,” one of the men said, rising, cheap metal flashing from his teeth. “Sutcliffe.” Trace of an accent, probably Australian.

“Point team?” He looked at the other two. “Point,” Sutcliffe said, and probed his mouth with a tanned thumb and forefinger, coming away with a yellowed, steel-capped prostho. His own teeth were white and perfectly even. “You took Chauvet from IBM for Mitsu,” he said, “and they say you took Semenov out of Tomsk.”

“Is that a question?”

“I was security for IBM Marrakech when you blew the hotel.”

Turner met the man’s eyes. They were blue, calm, very bright. “Is that a problem for you?”

“No fear,” Sutcliffe said. “Just to say I’ve seen you work.” He snapped the prostho back in place. “Lynch” – nodding toward the other man – “and Webber” – toward the woman.

“Run it down to me,” Turner said, and lowered himself into the scrap of shade. He squatted on his haunches, still holding the gun.

“We came in three days ago,” Webber said, “on two bikes. We arranged for one of them to snap its crankshaft, in case we had to make an excuse for camping here. There’s a sparse transient population, gypsy bikers and cultists. Lynch walked an optics spool six kilos east and tapped into a phone...”

“Private?”

“Pay,” Lynch said.

“We sent out a test squirt,” the woman continued. “If it hadn’t worked, you’d know it.”

Turner nodded. “Incoming traffic?”

“Nothing. It’s strictly for the big show, whatever that is.” She raised her eyebrows.

“It’s a defection.”

“Bit obvious, that,” Sutcliffe said, settling himself beside Webber, his back to the wall. “Though the general tone of the operation so far suggests that we hirelings aren’t likely to even know who we’re extracting. True, Mr. Turner? Or will we be able to read about it in the fax?”