Smith leaned back in his chair. With one hand he picked up an odd, knobby plastic gadget; with the other he pulled a string that seemed to vanish into its guts. It began to whirr as he rotated his wrist. "You're going into fairyland."

"Fairyland."

"Where the bad guys come from. Official code name for Niejwein, as of now. The doc's little joke." Whirr, whirr. "How's the grammar?"

"I'm-" Mike licked his lips. "I have no idea," he admitted. "I try to talk to Matt in hochsprache, and I've got some grasp of the basics, but I have no idea how well I'll do over there until-" He shrugged. "We need more people to talk to. When can I have access to the other prisoners?"

"Later." Whirr, whirr. "Thing is, right now they're our only transport system. Research has got some ideas, but there's a long way to go."

"You're using them for transport? How?" Mike frowned.

Smith smiled faintly. "You're a cop. You wouldn't approve."

I'm not going to like this. "Why not?"

"The first army lawyers we tried had a nervous breakdown as soon as we got to the world-walking bit-does posse comitatus apply if it's geographically collocated with the continental USA?-but I figure the AG's office will get that straightened out soon enough. In the meantime, we got a temporary waiver. These guys want to act like a hostile foreign government, they can be one-it makes life easier all round. They're illegal combatants, and we can do what we like with them. There's even some question over whether they're human-being able to cross their eyes and think themselves into another universe is kind of unusual-but they're still working on that case. Meanwhile, we've found a way to make them cooperate. Battle Royale."

"Tell me." Mike sat up.

Smith reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled something out. It looked like a giant padlock, big enough to go round a man's neck. "Ever seen one of these?"

"Oh shit." Mike stared, sick to his stomach. "Shining Path used them…"

"Yeah, well, it works for our purposes." Smith put the collar-bomb down. "We put one on a prisoner. Set it for three hours, give him a backpack and a camera, and tell him to bury the backpack in the other world, photograph the location, then come back so we can take the collar off. We're careful to use a location at least five miles from the nearest habitation in fairyland, to stop 'em finding a tool shop. So far they've both come back."

"That's-" Mike shook his head, at a loss for words. Ruthless sprang to mind. Abuse of prisoners was another unwelcome thought. Something about it crossed the line that divided business as usual from savagery. Fucking spooks!

Smith grinned at him. "Before we sent them the first time, we showed them what happened when one of these suckers counts down. Trust me, we've got no intention of killing them unless they try to escape." Whirr, whirr. "But we can't risk them getting loose and telling the Clan what we're doing, can we?"

"Crazy." Mike shook his head again. "So you've got two tame couriers."

"For very limited values of tame."

"So." Mike licked his dry lips.

The thing in Smith's rapidly swiveling hand was now making a high-pitched whine. He caught Mike staring at it. "Gyroball exerciser. You should try it, Mike. They're really good. I'm spending too much time with this damn mouse, if I don't exercise my wrist seizes up."

Mike nodded jerkily. What's going on? Smith was serious-minded, committed, highly professional, and just a bit more paranoid than was good for anyone. The collar-bomb thing had to be a need-to-know secret. "So why are you telling me all this?"

"Because you're going to cross over piggyback on one of our mules before the end of the month, and once there you'll be staying for at least two weeks," Smith said, so casually that Mike nearly started coughing.

"Jesus, Eric, don't you think you could give me some warning when you're going to spring something like that?" Mike paused. He'd tried to keep a sharp note out of his voice, not entirely successfully. Since Dr. James's visit he'd known this was coming, sooner or later-but he'd been expecting more time. "Look, the lexicon and dictionary aren't done yet, our linguists aren't through their in-processing, and Matt's not competent to work on it on his own. If something goes wrong while I'm on the other side and you lose Matt's cooperation as well, it'll seriously jeopardize my successor's ability to pick up the pieces. Anyway, don't I know too much? Last week I had a GS-12 telling me I'm not allowed to leave the country on vacation, I can't even go to fricken' Tijuana, and now you're talking about a hostile insertion and a theater assignment? I'm a cop, not James Bond!"

"Relax, Mike, it's all in hand. We've cut orders for some army linguists, they're already cleared. You don't need to know everything about the contingency planning that's going into this. More to the point, by the time you go out into the field you'll be far enough out of the core decision loop that even if the bad guys capture you, you won't be able to give our strategic goals away." Smith's smile was unreassuring.

"That's supposed to make me feel better?" Mike stared. "Listen, this is all ass-backward. We ought to be trying to arrest more couriers on this side before we even think about going over there. We can secure our own soil without engaging in some kind of insane adventure, surely?"

Smith snorted. "You're still thinking like a cop. I'd be right with you, except we've got a big tactical security problem, son. We're not dealing with some Trashcanistan where the State Department can make the local kleptocrats shit themselves just by sneezing: we're in the dark. We have zero assets, SIGINT is useless when the other guy's infrastructure is pony express… We're going to need to get intelligence on the ground, not to mention establishing a network of informers. We don't even know what local political tensions we can leverage. So we've got to put someone in charge on the ground with enough of an overview to know what's important-and the hat fits you."

"You're talking about making me semi-autonomous," Mike said, then licked his suddenly dry lips. "What is this, back to the OSS?" He was referring to the almost legendary Second World War agency-the predecessor to the CIA-and the cowboy stunts that had led to its postwar shutdown.

"Not entirely." Smith looked serious. "And yes, you're right. Normally we wouldn't let someone like you loose in the field. But you're on the inside, you're one of our local language and custom experts, and you can hand Matt over to someone else-"

"But I can't! Not if we want to preserve his cooperation and keep getting useful stuff out of him. He's a key witness-"

"He's not a witness," Smith said quietly. "You forget he's an unlawful combatant. He's just one who's chosen to cooperate with us, and we're giving him the kid-glove treatment because of that. For now."

"He's enrolled in the Witness Protection Scheme," Mike persisted. "Meaning he's on the books, unlike your two mules. There's no need to treat this like Afghanistan; we can crack the Clan over here by handling it as an enforcement problem."

"Wrong." Smith shook his head. "And if you went digging you'd find that Source Greensleeves has vanished from the DEA evidence trail and the WPS. Look, you're looking at this with your cop head on, not your national security head. The Clan are a geopolitical nightmare. All our conventional bases are insecure: they're designed to a doctrine that says security is about keeping bad guys at arm's length-except now we're facing a threat that can close the distance undetected. It's like a human stealth technology. Nor are our traditional allies going to be worth a warm bucket of spit. Firstly, they don't know what we're up against, and if they did, they'd be up against their own private insurgencies as well. Secondly, they're positioned badly-we can't use 'em for basing, they can't use us, the normal rules don't apply. And then it gets worse. Imagine what Al-Qaida could do to us if they could hire these freaks for transport. Or North Korea?"