ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, everything changed. The group had spent two hours at a jazz club in the West Village. As they strolled back to Chinatown, a truck driver tossed bound stacks of a tabloid newspaper onto the sidewalk. Gabriel glanced down at the headline and stopped moving.

THEY KILLED THEIR KIDS!

67 Die in Arizona Cult Suicide

The front-page article was about New Harmony, where Gabriel had gone only a few months earlier to visit the Pathfinder Sophia Briggs.

They bought three different newspapers and hurried back to the loft. According to Arizona police, the killing was motivated by religious mania. Reporters had already interviewed the former neighbors of the dead families. Everyone agreed-the people living at New Harmony had to be crazy. They had left good jobs and beautiful homes to live in the desert.

Hollis skimmed through the article in the New York Times. “According to this, the guns were registered to the people who lived there.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Maya said.

“The police found a video made by a British woman,” Hollis said. “Apparently, she gave some kind of speech about destroying evil.”

“Martin Greenwald sent an e-mail to me a few weeks ago,” Maya said. “He gave no indication of any problems.”

“I didn’t know you heard from Martin,” Gabriel said with surprise, and he watched Maya’s face change. He knew instantly that she was hiding something important from them.

“Yes, well, I did.” Trying to avoid Gabriel’s eyes, she walked over to the kitchen area.

“What did he tell you, Maya?”

“I made a decision. I thought it was best-”

Gabriel stood up and took a step toward her. “Tell me what he said!”

Maya was close to the door that led to the stairway. Gabriel wondered if she was going to run away rather than answer his questions.

“Martin received a letter from your father,” Maya said. “He asked about the people at New Harmony.”

For a few seconds, Gabriel felt as if the loft, the building, the city itself had vanished; he was a boy, standing in the snow, watching an owl fly in circles above the smoldering ruins of his family’s home. His father was gone, vanished forever.

Then he blinked and returned to this moment: Hollis was furious, Vicki looked hurt, and Maya seemed defiant about her decision.

“My father’s alive?”

“Yes.”

“So what happened? Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Maya said. “Martin was careful not to send that information over the Internet.”

“But why didn’t you tell me-”

Maya interrupted him, the words spilling out of her mouth. “Because I knew you’d want to go back to New Harmony and that was dangerous. I planned to return to Arizona myself once we left New York and you were at a safe house.”

“I thought we were in this together,” Hollis said. “No secrets. Everybody on the same team.”

As usual, Vicki stepped forward in her role as peacemaker. “I’m sure Maya realizes that she made a mistake.”

“You think Maya is going to apologize?” Hollis asked. “We’re not Harlequins, which means-in her mind-we’re not on her level. She’s been treating us like a bunch of children.”

“It was not a mistake!” Maya said. “All those people at New Harmony are dead. If Gabriel had been there, he would have been killed, too.”

“I think I have the right to make my own decisions,” Gabriel said. “Now Martin is gone and we don’t have any information.”

“You’re still alive, Gabriel. One way or the other, I’ve protected you. That’s my obligation as a Harlequin. My only responsibility.”

Maya turned, snapped the lock open, and stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

The word zombie lingered in Nathan Boone’s mind like a whisper. It seemed out of place in the hospitality lounge of the private airport terminal near Phoenix, Arizona. The room was decorated with pastel-colored furniture and framed photographs of Hopi dancers. A cheerful young woman named Cheryl had just baked chocolate chip cookies and brewed fresh coffee for the small group of corporate passengers.

Boone sat down at a workstation and switched on his laptop computer. Outside the terminal it was an overcast, blustery day, and the wind sock on the tarmac kept snapping back and forth. His men had already loaded sealed bins containing weapons and body armor onto the chartered jet. Once the local ground crew finished fueling the plane, Boone and his team would fly east.

It had been easy to manipulate the police and media perception of what had happened at New Harmony. Technicians working for the Brethren had already hacked into government computers and registered a list of firearms to the names of Martin Greenwald and other members of the community. The ballistics evidence and Janet Wilkins’s video statement about messages from God convinced the authorities that New Harmony was a religious cult that had destroyed itself. The tragedy was tailor-made for the evening news, and none of the reporters were inspired to look any deeper. The story was over.

There was a report from one of the mercenaries about a child running near the containment perimeter, and Boone wondered if it was the same Asian girl he had seen at the community center. This could have been a problem, but the police hadn’t found anyone alive. If the girl had escaped the initial attack, she had either died of exposure out in the desert or had been hiding in one of the houses that burned to the ground.

He activated a coding system, went on the Internet, and began to check his e-mail. There was promising news about the search for Gabriel Corrigan in New York City, and Boone answered that immediately. As he scrolled through the other messages he also found three e-mails from Michael asking about the search for his father. Please send a progress report, Michael wrote. The Brethren would like immediate action on this matter.

“Pushy son of a bitch,” Boone muttered, and then glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had heard him. The Brethren’s head of security found it disturbing that a Traveler was giving him orders. Michael was now on their side, but as far as Boone was concerned he was still the enemy.

The only biometric data available for the father was a driver’s license photo taken twenty-six years ago and a single thumbprint placed next to a notarized signature. That meant it was a waste of time to check the usual government data banks. The Brethren’s search programs would have to monitor e-mail and phone calls for any kind of communication that mentioned Matthew Corrigan’s name or statements about Travelers.

In the last few months, the Brethren had finished building a new computer center in Berlin, but Boone wasn’t allowed to use it for his security operations. General Nash had been very mysterious about the executive board’s plans for the Berlin center, but it was clear that it was a major breakthrough in the Brethren’s goals. Apparently they were testing something called the Shadow Program, which was going to be the first step in the establishment of the Virtual Panopticon. When Boone complained about his lack of resources, the staff in Berlin had suggested a temporary solution: instead of using the computer center, they would bring in zombies to help with the search.

A zombie was the nickname for any computer infected by a virus or Trojan horse that allowed it to be secretly controlled by an outside user. Zombie masters directed the actions of computers all over the world, using them to send out spam or extort money from vulnerable Web sites. If the site owners refused to pay, their servers were overwhelmed by thousands of requests sent out at the same moment.

Networks of zombies called “bot nets” could be bought, stolen, or traded on the Internet black market. During the last year, the Brethren’s technical staff had purchased bot nets from different criminal groups and had developed new software that forced the captive computers to perform more elaborate tasks. Although this system wasn’t powerful enough to monitor all the computers in the world, it could handle a search for a specific target.