Then there was nothing. Puppetman groaned orgasmically.

The door to the surgery swung open. A doctor in sweaty scrub greens emerged. She nodded to Gregg and Ray, grimacing. She walked slowly toward them as Gregg rose.

"I'm Dr. Levin," she said. "Your wife is resting now, Senator. That was a terrible fall for a woman in her condition. We've stopped the internal bleeding and stitched up the scalp wound, but she's going to be badly bruised. I'll want to x-ray her hip later; the pelvis isn't broken, but I want to make sure there's no fracture. We'll need to keep her a day or two at least for observation, but I think-eventually-she'll be fine."

Levin paused, and Gregg knew she was waiting for a question. The question. "And the baby?" Gregg asked.

The doctor tightened her lips. "We couldn't do anything for him-a boy, by the way. We were dealing with a prolapsed umbilical and the placenta had torn away from the uterus wall."

"The child was without oxygen for several minutes. With that and the other injuries… " Another grimace. She rubbed at her hand; took a deep breath, and looked at him with sympathetic dark eyes. "It was probably better this way. I'm sorry."

Billy pounded the door with a fist, tearing a jagged splintery hole in the wood and gouging long scratches down his arm. Ray began cursing softly and continuously. Puppetman turned to feed on the guilt, but Gregg forced the power below the surface once more; for the first time in weeks, the power subsided docilely. Gregg faced the wall for a moment.

With Puppetman satisfied, the other part of him grieved.

He swallowed hard, choked it back. When he turned, the doctor wavered in a sheen of genuine tears.

"I'd like to see Ellen now," he said. His voice sounded wonderfully drained, superbly exhausted, and far too little of it was an act.

Dr. Levin gave him a wan smile of understanding. "Certainly, Senator. If you'll follow me-"

The first thing Jack thought when he heard about Ellen was: Yes. The secret ace.

"Where's the senator now?"

"At the hospital."

"And where's Ray?"

"With him."

Maybe Ray could keep the freak away, then. Jack had other things to do.

Sara's tattered notes seemed like a cold weight in Jack's breast pocket. He looked around, saw campaign workers milling around the HQ, pointlessly and silently, like survivors of a disaster. Which, of course, they probably were.

The secret ace had gone after Hartmann first, Jack figured, because Hartmann had more delegate votes. That was the only way to explain all the things that had gone wrong, from the networks cutting to commercial breaks during Carter's seconding speech to the riot before the platform fight to Ellen's miscarriage.

The thought of which, on reflection, made Jack burn with anger. The secret ace was picking not just on a candidate, but on civilians the candidate was close to.

Sara Morgenstern, who knew the ace's identity, had disappeared. Jack, along with the Secret Service, had been trying to find her all night long.

Devaugbn was gone from HQ, and so was Amy. Jack went to the phone, ordered a thousand and one roses delivered to Ellen's room on his credit card, then he headed next door to the media center. He found an unused VCR, picked up some videocassettes of the other candidates as well as their campaign biographies, and took them to his room.

Maybe Gregg Hartmann's candidacy was finished. Jack couldn't tell, and couldn't change things one way or another.

He only knew one thing for certain. He was going to have to call Rodriguez and tell him to take charge of the delegation and vote his proxy for Hartmann on every ballot. Jack had other things to do. He was going hunting for the secret ace.

Even though a hotel is a fortress armored against the outside world, the outside gets in anyway, in subtle ways. Trying to flow through the crush of delegates and press toads,

Mackie could tell it was morning, from the light that managed to battle inside, from a taste of the Chilled Sliced Processed Air Product extruded by the AC. Maybe it was just that as a Hamburg harbor rat he had an instinctive dread of morning, and could smell it when it lurked outside.

His hands were jammed in pockets, his head jammed in memories. Sometimes, when he was young and had fucked up again, the fog of booze would lift enough to permit his mother to fix him with a stern, bleary look and say, Detlev, you disappoint me so, instead of just shrieking and hitting him with whatever came to hand. He hated that the most. The shrieking he could ignore, the blows he could weather by tucking his head painfully between uneven shoulders and turning away. But the disappointment went right through him, there was no defense against that.

Every particle of his life had been a disappointment to somebody. Except when his hands were steel, were knives. When the blood ran: no disappointment there, oh no, laughter inside: yeah.

Until the last two days. Two chances: two failures. All he had to show was an incidental nigger in a suit worth more than Mackie's entire body. He thought at least the big glowing gold weenie was meat when he crashed the rail last night, but then this morning he saw on the news that he crashed through a piano and wasn't hurt.

He was glad about the piano, anyway. Son of a bitch never played his song.

Ahead of him he saw a pair of dark well-filled suits crowding a man with a garment bag over his shoulder, back toward the wall, out of the clotted traffic flow. They were leaning into him in that way pigs have when they know they have your ass. Mackie snagged a shred of conversation:

"No, really, I was wearing my pass just a moment ago. In all this crush, somebody must have brushed against me, knocked it o$="

That made Mackie smile. He had no need of badges. No need to squirm in the grip, unreeling lies as obvious as a whore's smile to amuse the pigs and make them give each sideways smirks. He was still Mackie, MacHeath the Knife as big as legend. Not a bug like this nat crasher.

He phased and sideled softly, through the crowd and through the wall, toward his rendezvous with love and disappointment.

John Werthen had arranged for the makeshift press conference in the gymnasium/auditorium of the hospital. As Amy accompanied Gregg around the back of the small stage there, he felt a sudden distress pulse from her. "John, you ass," she whispered, then glanced at Gregg guiltily. The auditorium had been used for a Lamaze class the night before. Charts of the stages of labor, cervix dilation, and positions of the fetus were stacked in one corner. They almost seemed a mockery.

You had to do it, he reminded himself quickly. You didn't have a choice.

"I'm sorry, sir," Amy said. "I'll have someone get rid of them."

"I'm all right," he said. "Don't worry about it."

The tragic death of the Hartmann infant had become The Story of the convention. Wildfire rumors flared through the convention-Hartmann was pulling out; Hartmann had decided to take the VP spot behind Dukakis or Jackson or even Barnett; Hartmann had actually been the intended victim of Nur terrorists; a simultaneous attempt had been made on the lives of all the candidates; a joker was somehow involved in Ellen's fall; no, the baby had been a joker; Carnifex had pushed Ellen or he'd just watched her fall without moving; Barnett was calling it the hand of God; Barnett had called Hartmann and they had prayed together.

There was a morbid glee to it all. The circus atmosphere had been plunged into something halfway between horror and fascination.

The auditorium was almost unnaturally quiet. "Senator, if you're ready… " Amy said. Her eyes were red and puffy; she'd been crying off and on since she'd arrived at the hospital.