He turned back. “I understand what you’re telling me,” he said. “But not why. What do you care what I think?”

Freeboot’s face took on its heavy-lidded, hypnotic gaze.

“I got to have something to call you,” Freeboot said. “Coil says ‘Rasp.’ Okay?”

Monks shrugged. He was particular about who used his nickname, but he was damned if he’d let Freeboot know that he was pushing a button.

“He says they called you that in Vietnam,” Freeboot said. “You got a good look at guerrilla war, huh?”

“I was never in combat. Mostly I dealt with the results.”

“Must have been ugly.”

Monks felt a tremor of razor-keen memory: jerking awake on the hospital ship USS Respite in the South China Sea, sodden with sweat from the wet heat, the sour bile taste of fear already in his mouth and adrenaline starting to course through his bloodstream, at the far-off thunder of medevac helicopters ferrying their bloody burdens from Quang Tri.

“Very,” he said.

“Well, there you go. All because those Vietnamese got fucked over too much for too long and they started fighting back.”

Another simplistic judgment, about a war whose roots were a Gordian knot.

But the words that Glenn had been chanting came into Monks’s mind: number nine, number nine, number nine-

Revolution Number 9.

Finally, the hints that Freeboot had been dropping clicked into focus.

“Are you talking about an uprising?” Monks said incredulously.

“I’m talking about Free Companies, like I told you. That’s going to be the real new world order. Think Road Warrior, man. Roving armies doing whatever they want, armed to the teeth. They’re already on the ground in Africa and South America, and all it’s going to take here is somebody to light the fuse. They’re everywhere, right there in your town.”

“This isn’t Africa or South America,” Monks said. “We have systems of civil protection.”

Freeboot snorted in derision. “There aren’t enough cops to stop them or prisons to hold them. The necks can call out the miltary, but they got a problem there, too. What about all the ghetto kids coming back from places like Iraq? They spend a year in hell, then get home and find out they still get treated like dogshit. Whose side you think they’re going to come down on?”

“There was a lot of talk like this in the sixties,” Monks said. “Not much came of it.”

“People had things too good in the sixties,” said Freeboot, who could not have been born by then. “The people I’m talking about are hungry.”

He stood up suddenly, with the quickness and balance that Monks had come to expect.

“You think I’m just bullshitting,” Freeboot said. “I got something to show you later.” He padded to the door and vanished into the dusk.

Monks stood where he was, trying to weigh what he had just heard. Clearly Freeboot thought of himself as a leader out to liberate an underdog element of the population-the foot on the “necks” would be his.

On the face of it, his ideas were a mishmash of superficial political theory, megalomania, and chest-thumping fantasy, all wrapped up in a bubble of schoolboy logic-the kind of self-contained shell that couldn’t be penetrated without going more deeply into the issues, which, obviously, he had no patience for. Like a lot of self-proclaimed prophets, he had gleaned a few high-sounding bits of philosophy and twisted them to suit his own purposes. And like a lot of revolutionaries, he seemed to idealize violence.

To imagine that this little clutch of misfits could cause widespread unrest was absurd. But it was still disturbing. Freeboot possessed undeniable charisma-and there was enough truth in what he said to make it persuasive, especially to listeners who wouldn’t examine it closely.

Monks even admitted to a prickle of sympathy. Without doubt, there was a lot of gross injustice out there, and maybe in some ways it was getting worse. He’d had his own run-ins with the way of thinking that saw human beings as numbers on paper, livestock, pawns to be used by an elite who considered themselves godlike, and who kept themselves carefully shielded. And yet, society’s rules were the only thing that kept most people safe from the chaos and bloodshed that had been common through so much of history.

When did it become acceptable-even necessary-to cross that fragile line?

He had to agree that in some circumstances, violence was the only way for the oppressed to recover both their rights and their self-respect. There could certainly be heroism in fighting for ideals, and glory in battle itself.

But he had seen so much horrifying pain, and dignity didn’t usually go along with it.

Mandrake seemed to be asleep or sunk in lethargy. Monks decided to leave him alone until it was time for the next blood-sugar check, then to wake him and try to engage him in talk or play.

He walked back out into the main room. The shackles still lay where he had left them on the floor. He stepped around them as if they were a bear trap.

Then, seeing that he was alone, he went into the kitchen. He had wondered how food was stored without electricity. The mystery was solved by the sight of a new propane refrigerator. The rest was more rustic, with the same kind of cold-water porcelain sink as the washhouse, and a huge old Monarch wood cookstove. But unlike the rest of the camp, it was clean and well kept. He suspected the hand of Marguerite.

He quickly opened drawers and cabinets, looking for knives, but the only utensils were plastic, like the ones that Marguerite had given him last night. He went through the couple of dusty, disused-looking bedrooms next, but he found nothing that might work as a weapon. It seemed clear that this was intentional-even the fireplace pokers were charred sticks of pine. There were no other exterior doors, and the few windows were crossed with half-inch reinforcing rod, like prison bars, attached from the outside.

As soon as his shackles had come off, the thought of escape had entered his mind again, as Freeboot must have known it would. But the odds were still almost nil. Without doubt, he was being watched closely. And if by some miracle he did succeed, Freeboot might take out his rage on Glenn-even on Mandrake. There were other cards to be played before any kind of desperate attempt. Freeboot was trying to impress him, and that might just open the way to a resolution.

Freeboot’s book was still lying on the table. Monks leaned over and saw that it was Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra-the treatise in which he propounded his concept of the Übermensch, seized on later by the Nazis and distorted into a superior being with the right to dominate, without regard for law or humanity.

It was another almost ludicrous touch, part of Freeboot’s show-and yet the volume was worn, obviously much handled, with notes written in the margins in an uneven, illegible script. Monks flipped through it, looking for a name or some other identifying mark. The only thing he found was a ripped patch inside the front cover, suggesting that a library pocket had been torn off. Probably the book had been stolen.

The coffee that he had asked for was waiting, in a small blue enamel sheepherder’s coffeepot set at the edge of the fireplace to stay warm. He supposed that Marguerite had left it for him while he was at Glenn’s cabin. There was food, too, this time a sandwich of packaged baloney and cheese on white bread, and a small bag of Cheetos. It was like a boxed school lunch.

He ate standing up in front of the fire, glad for the warmth seeping into his flesh. Then he went back into the kitchen and indulged himself in the luxury of brushing his teeth again. As he was finishing, he heard someone come into the lodge. He looked through the kitchen door and saw that it was Motherlode, Mandrake’s mother, going into the boy’s bedroom. Monks quickly rinsed up and went after her.