Closing his eyes, he dreamed of his father walking down a dark street in New York City. Gabriel shouted and ran after him, but his father was too far away to hear. Matthew Corrigan turned a corner, and when Gabriel reached it his father had disappeared.

Within the dream, Gabriel stood beneath a streetlight on pavement dark and glistening from the rain. He glanced around him and saw a surveillance camera mounted on the roof of a building. There was another camera on the lamppost and a half dozen others at various points on the empty street. That was when he knew that Michael was also searching, but his brother had the cameras and the scanners and all the other devices of the Vast Machine. It was like a race-a terrible competition between them-and there was no way he could win.

Although Harlequins sometimes saw themselves as the last defenders of history, their historical knowledge was based more on tradition than on the facts found in textbooks. Growing up in London, Maya had memorized the location of the traditional execution sites scattered around the city. Her father had shown her each place during their daily lessons on weapons and street fighting. Tyburn was for felons, the Tower of London was for traitors, the shriveled bodies of dead pirates hung for years from the Execution Dock at Wapping. At various times, the authorities had killed Jews, Catholics, and a long list of dissenters who worshipped a different god or preached a different vision of the world. A certain spot in West Smithfield was used for the execution of heretics, witches, and women who had killed their husbands-as well as the anonymous Harlequins who had died protecting Travelers.

Maya felt the same sense of accumulated misery the moment she entered the Criminal Court building in lower Manhattan. Standing just inside the main entrance, she gazed upward at the clock that hung from the two-story ceiling. The building’s white marble walls, the Art Deco lighting fixtures, and the ornate railing on the stairways suggested the grand sensibility of an earlier era. Then she lowered her eyes and studied the world that surrounded her: the police and the criminals, the bailiffs and lawyers, the victims and witnesses-everyone shuffling across the dirty floor to the gateway metal detector that awaited them.

Dimitri Aronov was a plump older man with three strands of greasy black hair plastered across the top of his bald head. Carrying a battered leather briefcase, the Russian émigré approached the metal detector. When he entered the gateway, he stopped for a second and glanced over his shoulder at Maya.

“What’s the problem?” the guard asked. “Keep moving…”

“Of course, Officer. Of course.”

Aronov stepped through the gateway, then sighed and rolled his eyes as if he just remembered that he left an important file in his car. He passed back through the checkpoint and followed Maya out the revolving door. For a moment, they stood at the top of the broad stairway and looked out at the skyline of lower Manhattan. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Thick gray clouds hung over the city, and the sun was a blurred patch of light on the western horizon.

“So? What do you think, Miss Strand?”

“I don’t think anything-yet.”

“You saw it yourself. No alarm. No arrest.”

“Let’s take a look at your product.”

Together, they came down the steps, zigzagged through the sluggish traffic clogging Centre Street, and walked into the small park at the middle of the square. The Collect Pond Park had once been the site of a massive pool of raw sewage during the early days of New York. It was still a dark place, overshadowed by the tall buildings that surrounded the patch of ground. While several signs commanded New Yorkers not to feed pigeons, a flock of the birds fluttered back and forth and pecked at the dirt.

They sat down on a wooden bench just beyond the range of the park’s two surveillance cameras. Aronov placed the briefcase on the bench and wiggled his fingers. “Please inspect the merchandise.”

Maya snapped open the top of the briefcase. She peered inside and found a handgun that looked like a 9mm automatic. The weapon had over-and-under barrels and a textured grip. When she picked it up, she discovered that it was very light-almost like a child’s toy.

Aronov began to speak in the cadence of a salesman. “The frame, the grip, and the trigger are high-density plastic. The barrels, the slides, and firing pin are superhard ceramic-as strong as steel. As you just witnessed, the assembled weapon will pass through any standard metal detector. Airports are not as easy. Most of them have back scanners or millimeter wave machines. But you can break the weapon into two or three pieces and hide them in a laptop computer.”

“What does it fire?”

“The bullets were always the problem. The CIA has designed the same kind of gun using a caseless system. Amusing, yes? They are supposed to be fighting terrorism, so they created the perfect terrorist weapon. But my friends in Moscow went for a less sophisticated solution. May I?”

Aronov reached into the briefcase. He pushed back the slide and revealed what looked like a stubby brown cigarette with a black tip. “This is a paper cartridge with a ceramic bullet. Think of it as the modern equivalent of the system used by an eighteenth-century musket. The propellant ignites in two stages and pushes the bullet out the barrel. It’s slow to reload, so…” Aronov wrapped his left hand around the gun and snapped the second barrel into place. “You get two quick shots, but that’s all you’re going to need. The bullet cuts through your target like a piece of shrapnel.”

Maya leaned away from the briefcase and looked around to see if anyone was watching. The gray façade of the Criminal Courts building loomed above them. Police cars and the white-and-blue buses used to transport prisoners were double-parked on the street. She could hear the traffic circling the little park, smell Aronov’s floral cologne mixed with the slippery scent of wet leaves.

“Impressive, yes? You must agree.”

“How much?”

“Twelve thousand dollars. Cash.”

“For a handgun? That’s nonsense.”

“My dear Miss Strand…” The Russian smiled and shook his head. “It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone else selling this weapon. Besides, we’ve done business together. You realize that my merchandise is of the best quality.”

“I don’t even know if the gun can fire.”

Aronov shut the briefcase and placed it on the pavement beside his feet. “If you wish, we can drive out to a garage owned by a friend of mine in New Jersey. No neighbors. Thick walls. The cartridges are expensive, but I’ll let you shoot two of them before you give me the money.”

“Let me think it over.”

“I’ll drive past the street entrance to Lincoln Center at seven o’clock this evening. If you’re there, you get a special deal for one night only-ten thousand dollars and six cartridges.”

“A special deal is eight thousand.”

“Nine.”

Maya nodded. “I’ll pay you that if everything works as promised.”

As she left the park and cut across Centre Street, Maya called Hollis on her cell phone. He answered his phone immediately, but didn’t speak.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Columbus Park.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.” She dropped the phone into her shoulder bag and took out a random number generator-an electronic device about the size of a matchbox that hung from a cord around her neck.

Maya and the other Harlequins called their enemies the Tabula because this group saw human consciousness as a tabula rasa-a blank slate that could be scrawled with slogans of hatred and fear. While the Tabula believed that everything could be controlled, Harlequins cultivated a philosophy of randomness. Sometimes they made their choices with dice or the number generator.