Standing by the desk, he gazed down for a moment at the recent 4-D photo of Jason Taverner—the photograph taken by Katharine Nelson. What a damn good-looking man, he thought. Almost professionally good-looking. Well, he’s a singer; it fits. He’s in show business.

Touching the 4-D photo, he listened to it say, “How now, brown cow?” And smiled. And, listening once more to the “Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan,” thought:

Flow, my tears …

Do I really have pol-karma? he asked himself. Loving words and music like this? Yes, he thought, I make a superb pol because I don’t think like a pol. I don’t, for example, think like McNulty, who will always be—what did they used to say?—a pig all his life. I think, not like the people we’re trying to apprehend, but like the important people we’re trying to apprehend. Like this man, he thought, this Jason Taverner. I have a hunch, an irrational but beautifully functional intuition, that he’s still in Vegas. We will trap him there, and not where McNulty thinks: rationally and logically somewhere farther on.

I am like Byron, he thought, fighting for freedom, giving up his life to fight for Greece. Except that I am not fighting for freedom; I am fighting for a coherent society.

Is that actually true? he asked himself. Is that why I do what I do? To create order, structure, harmony? Rules. Yes, he thought; rules are goddamn important to me, and that is why Alys threatens me; that’s why I can cope with so much else but not with her.

Thank God they’re not all like her, he said to himself. Thank God, in fact, that she’s one of a kind.

Pressing a button on his desk intercom he said, “Herb, will you come in here, please?”

Herbert Maime entered the office, a stack of computer cards in his hands; he looked harried.

“You want to buy a bet, Herb?” Buckman said. “That Jason Taverner is in Las Vegas?”

“Why are you concerning yourself with such a funky little chickenshit matter?” Herb said. “It’s on McNulty’s level, not yours.”

Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. “Look at what this man has done. Somehow he’s managed to get all data pertaining to him out of every data bank on the planet and the lunar and Martian colonies … McNulty even tried there. Think for a minute what it would take to do that. Money? Huge sums. Bribes. Astronomical. If Taverner has used that kind of heavy bread he’s playing for big stakes. Influence? Same conclusion: he’s got a lot of power and we must consider him a major figure. It’s who he represents that concerns me most; I think some group, somewhere on earth, is backing him, but I have no idea what for or why. All right; so they expunge all data concerning him; Jason Taverner is the man who doesn’t exist. But, having done that, what have they achieved?”

Herb pondered.

“I can’t make it out,” Buckman said. “It has no sense to it. But, if they’re interested in doing it, it must signify something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t expend so much”—he gestured—“whatever they’ve expended. Money, time, influence, whatever. Maybe all three. Plus large slabs of effort.”

“I see,” Herb said, nodding.

Buckman said, “Sometimes you catch big fish by hooking one small fish. That’s what you never know: will the next small fish you catch be the link with something giant or”—he shrugged—“just more small fry to be tossed into the labor pool. Which, perhaps, is all Jason Taverner is. I may be completely wrong. But I’m interested.”

“Which,” Herb said, “is too bad for Taverner.”

“Yes.” Buckman nodded. “Now consider this.” He paused a moment to quietly fart, then continued, “Taverner made his way to an ID forger, a run-of-the-mill forger operating behind an abandoned restaurant. He had no contacts; he worked through, for God’s sake, the desk clerk at the hotel he was staying at. So he must have been desperate for ident cards. All right, where were his powerful backers then? Why couldn’t they supply him with excellent forged ID cards, if they could do all this else? Good Christ; they sent him out into the street, into the urban cesspool jungle, right to a pol informant. They jeopardized everything!”

“Yes,” Herb said, nodding. “Something screwed up.”

“Right. Something went wrong. All of a sudden there he was, in the middle of the city, with no ID. Everything he had on him Kathy Nelson forged. How did that come to happen? How did they manage to fuck up and send him groping desperately for forged ID cards, so he could walk three blocks on the street? You see my point.”

“But that’s how we get them.”

“Pardon?” Buckman said. He turned down the lute music on the tape player.

Herb said, “If they didn’t make mistakes like that we wouldn’t have a chance. They’d remain a metaphysical entity to us, never glimpsed or suspected. Mistakes like that are what we live on. I don’t see that it’s important why they made a mistake; all that matters is that they did. And we should be damn glad of it.”

I am, Buckman thought to himself. Leaning, he dialed McNulty’s extension. No answer. McNulty wasn’t back in the building yet. Buckman consulted his watch. Another fifteen or so minutes.

He dialed central clearing Blue. “What’s the story on the Las Vegas operation in the Fireflash District?” he asked the chick operators who sat perched on high stools at the map board pushing little plastic representations with long cue sticks. “The netpull of the individual calling himself Jason Taverner.”

A whirr and click of computers as the operator deftly punched buttons. “I’ll tie you in with the captain in charge of that detail.” On Buckman’s pic a uniformed type appeared, looking idiotically placid. “Yes, General Buckman?”

“Have you got Taverner?”

“Not yet, sir. We’ve hit roughly thirty of the rental units in—”

“When you have him,” Buckman said, “call me direct.” He gave the nerdish pol type his extension code and rang off, feeling vaguely defeated.

“It takes time,” Herb said.

“Like good beer,” Buckman murmured, staring emptily ahead, his mind working. But working without results.

“You and your intuitions in the Jungian sense,” Herb said. “That’s what you are in the Jungian typology: an intuitive, thinking personality, with intuition your main function-mode and thinking—”

“Balls.” He wadded up a page of McNulty’s coarse notations and tossed it into the shredder.

“Haven’t you read Jung?”

“Sure. When I got my master’s at Berkeley—the whole poli sci department had to read Jung. I learned everything you learned and a lot more.” He heard the irritability in his voice and disliked it. “They’re probably conducting their hits like garbage collectors. Banging and clanking … Taverner will hear them long before they reach the apartment he’s in.”

“Do you think you’ll net anyone with Taverner? Someone who’s his higher-up in the—”

“He wouldn’t be with anyone crucial. Not with his ID cards in the local precinct stationhouse. Not with us as close to him as he knows we are. I expect nothing. Nothing but Taverner himself.”

Herb said, “I’ll make you a bet.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll bet you five quinques, gold ones, that when you get him you get nothing.”

Startled, Buckman sat bolt upright. It sounded like his own style of intuition: no facts, no data to base it on, just pure hunch.

“Want to make the bet?” Herb said.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Buckman said. He got out his wallet, counted the money in it. “I’ll bet you one thousand paper dollars that when we net Taverner we enter one of the most important areas we’ve ever gotten involved with.”

Herb said, “I won’t bet that kind of money.”

“Do you think I’m right?”

The phone buzzed; Buckman picked up the receiver. On the screen the features of the nerdish Las Vegas functionary captain formed. “Our thermo-radex shows a male of Taverner’s weight and height and general body structure in one of the as yet unapproached remaining apartments. We’re moving in very cautiously, getting everyone else out of the other nearby units.”