"That's certainly not something you can say for the JJS," Sara Morgenstern said, coming over to join the conversation. An aide moved to intercept her, reaching a hand to shepherd her away from the important masculine conversation. She shied away from him as if a spark had jumped between them and glared.

Neumann said something brisk that not even Tachyon caught. The aide retreated.

"Frau Morgenstern. I am also much interested in what you have to say."

"Members of the jokers for a just Society are authentically poor. I can vouch for that at least."

"Would money tempt them, then?"

"That's hard to say. They are committed, in a way I suspect the RAF members aren't. Still-" a butterfly flip of the hand-"they haven't lost any Mideastern aces. On the other hand, when they demand money to benefit jokers, I believe them. Whereas that might mean less to the Red Army people."

Tach frowned. The demand to knock down Jetboy's Tomb and build a joker hospice rankled him. Like most New Yorkers, he wouldn't miss the memorial-an eyesore erected to honor failure, and one he'd personally prefer to forget. But the demand for a hospice was a slap in his face: When has a joker been turned away from my clinic? When?

Neumann was studying him. "You disagree, Herr Doktor?" he asked softly.

"No, no. She's right. But Gimli-" he snapped his fingers and extended a forefinger. "Tom Miller cares deeply for jokers. But he has also an eye for what Americans call the main chance. You might well be able to tempt him."

Sara nodded. "But why do you ask, Herr Neumann? After all, President Reagan refuses to negotiate for the senator's return." Her voice rang with bitterness. Still, Tach was puzzled. As high-strung as she was, he'd thought that surely worry for Gregg would have broken her down by now. Instead she seemed to be growing steadier by the hour. Neumann looked at her for a moment, and Tach wondered if he was in on the ill-kept secret of her affair with the missing senator. He had the impression those yellow eyesred-rimmed now from the smoke-missed little.

"Your President has made his decision," he said softly. "But it's my responsibility to advise my government on what course to take. This is a German problem too, you know."

At two-thirty Hiram Worchester came on the air reading a statement in English. Tachyon translated it into German during the pauses.

"Comrade Wolf-Gimli, if you're there," Hiram said, voice fluting with emotion, "we want the senator back. We're willing to negotiate as private citizens."

"Please, for the love of God-and for jokers and aces and all the rest of us-please call us."

Molniya stared at the door. White enamel was coming away in flakes. Striae of green and pink and brown showed beneath the white, around gouges that looked as if someone had used the door for knife-throwing practice. He was all but oblivious to the others in the room. Even the mad boy's incessant humming; he'd long since learned to tune that out for sanity's sake.

I should never have let them go.

It took him aback when both Gimli and Wolf wanted to make the meet with the tour delegation. It was about the first thing they'd agreed on since this whole comic-opera affair had gotten underway.

He'd wanted to forbid them. He didn't like the smell of this rendezvous… but that was foolish. Reagan had closed the door on overt negotiation, but didn't the current Irangate hearings with which the Americans were currently amusing themselves prove he was not averse to using private channels to deal with terrorists against whom he'd taken a hard public line?

Besides, he thought, I've long since learned better than to issue orders I doubt will be obeyed.

It had been so different in Spetsnaz. The men he'd commanded were professionals and more, the elite of the Soviet armed forces, full of esprit and skilled as surgeons.

Such a contrast to this muddle of bitter amateurs and murderous dilettantes.

If only he'd at least had someone trained back home, or in a camp in some Soviet client state, Korea or Iraq or Peru. Someone except Gimli, that is-he had the impression years had passed since anything but plastique would open the dwarf's mind enough to accept input from anyone else, nats in particular.

He wished at least he might have gone on the meet. But his place was here, guarding the captive. Without Hartmann they had nothing-except a worldful of trouble.

Does the KGB have this much trouble with its puppets? Rationally he guessed they did. They'd fluffed a few big ones over the years-the mention of Mexico could still make veterans wince and GRU had evidence of plenty of missteps the Big K thought they'd covered up.

But the Komitet's publicists had done their job well, on both sides of the quaintly named "Iron Curtain." Down behind his forebrain not even Molniya could shake the image of the KGB as the omniscient puppet master, with its strings wrapping the world like a spider's web.

He tried to envision himself as a master spider. It made him smile.

No. I'm not a spider. Just a small, frightened man whom somebody once called hero.

He thought of Ludmilya, his daughter. He shuddered. There are strings attached to me, right enough. But I'm not the one who pulls them.

I want him.

Hartmann looked around the squalid little room. Ulrich was pacing, face fixed and sullen at having been left behind. Stocky Wilfried sat cleaning an assault rifle with compulsive care. He always seemed to be doing something with his hands. The two remaining jokers sat by themselves saying nothing. The Russian sat and smoked and stared at the wall.

He studiously didn't look at the boy in the scuffed leather jacket.

Mackie Messer hummed the old song about the shark and its teeth and the man with his jackknife and fancy gloves. Hartmann remembered a mealymouthed version popular when he was a teenager, sung by Bobby Darin or some such teen-idol crooner. He also recalled a different version, one he'd heard for the first time in a dim dope-fogged room on Yale's Old Campus when antiwar activist Hartmann returned to his alma mater to lecture in '68. Dark and sinister, a straighter translation of the original, sung in the whisky baritone of a man who, like old Bertolt Brecht himself, delighted in playing Baal: Thomas Marion Douglas, Destiny's doomed lead singer. Remembering the way the words went down his spine on that distant night, he shuddered.

I want him.

No! his mind shouted. He's insane. He's dangerous. He could be useful, once I get us out of here.

Hartmann's body clenched in rictus terror. No! Don't do anything! The terrorists are negotiating right now. We'll get out of this.

He felt Puppetman's disdain. Seldom had his alter ego seemed more discrete, more other. Fools. What has Hiram Worchester ever been involved in that amounted to anything? It'll fall through.

Then we just wait. Sooner or later something will be worked out. It's how these things go. He felt slimy vines of sweat twining his body inside his blood-spattered shirt and vest.

How long do you think we have to wait? How long before our jokers and their terrorists friends blow up in each other's faces? I have puppets. They're our only way out.

What can they do? I can't just make someone let me go. I'm not that little mind-twister Tachyon.

He felt a smug vibration within.

Don't forget 1976, he told his power. You thought you could handle that too.

The power laughed at him, until he closed his eyes and concentrated and forced it to quiescence.

Has it become a demon, possessing me? he wondered. Am I just another of Puppetman's puppets?

No. I'm the master here. Puppetman's just a fantasy. A personification of my power. A game I play with myself. Inside the tangled corridors of his soul, the echo of triumphant laughter.

"It's raining again," Xavier Desmond said.