Cynthia could no longer suppress her outrage. "They're unarmed!"

"They're scum!"

Shotgun took out another runner. The driver slammed on the brakes. Shotgun was out and running, firing as he went. The driver went after him, leaving Cynthia alone in the flashing police car. Bursts of static barked from the radio. She unlocked the rear door and slowly climbed out. There were more shots in the distance and then silence. She was tempted to walk quietly away. Unfortunately, her escape would not be quiet: she would have to do a lot of explaining before she would be allowed out of the sealed riot zone. She realized that she would have to stick with the cops for a while longer.

It was a full minute before they came back into view, breathing hard and carrying their weapons and helmets loosely at their sides. They seemed exceedingly pleased with themselves. The driver had stopped to inspect one of the bodies, but Shotgun was moving straight toward Cynthia. There was nothing at all pleasant about his grin. He seemed to be intoxicated by the violence.

"So you got out to watch the fun, did you?"

Cynthia didn't say anything. He was very close to her. She could smell his breath. He had been chewing gum or eating mints.

"Maybe we can have a little fun of our own?"

"I'm not interested. I just want to get home."

"We're interested." He was reaching for her. "Come on, baby. Nobody's going to hurt you."

"I'll report you."

"You won't report anyone, bitch. You know the score. You'd never survive the scandal. Besides, it'd only be your word against the two of us."

His hands were on the front of her uniform jacket. The driver had finished looking at the body and was coming toward them. He, too, was grinning. Something snapped in Cynthia. It was part revulsion, part anger, and part the conditioned reflexes of her training. Her hands and knee came up as one in a move that she had practiced a hundred times. As Shotgun doubled over in pain, she half turned and flipped him over. He was lying in the dirt with an expression of pure, ugly fury. His hand was creeping toward the pistol on his belt. Already she was down on one knee, scooping up the Remington that Shotgun had dropped. Behind her, the driver was laughing. The gun roared. Shotgun was blown backward. His face was a bloody pulp. The driver's laugh froze in openmouthed horror. He was fumbling with his own gun. The Remington in Cynthia's hands roared again. The driver spun and fell. She lowered the gun, trying hard to control her breathing. Every instinct screamed at her to run. Somebody was bound to be on their way to investigate the gunfire. She fought down the impulse to flee. What had they always told her? Do not react. Think. She leaned into the driver's seat of the cruiser and detached the mike from the radio.

"This is an emergency. Two officers are down."

"Who is this?"

There was no longer chaos on the airwaves. She identified herself and gave her position. It was scarcely a minute before the gunship was overhead and had her in its light. She placed the Remington on top of the police car and raised her hands.

Carlisle

Harry Carlisle let himself into the apartment. It was over a year since Gail had been arrested, but the place still had the air of gaping emptiness each time he walked into it. Gail had been a damned fool. It was not as though her woman's group had actually been doing anything. They had not been planting bombs or robbing banks. They had been little more than a leftover from the abortion protests with a few proscribed books and magazines, a meeting place, and some minimal contacts with the underground railroad and refugee organizations. It was having a regular meeting place that had been their downfall. They had been labeled a coven. At the show trial, there had been talk of Satanic rituals, animal sacrifice, and orgies, but he knew there had been nothing like that. The deacons had wanted something to throw to the media. The public had been getting bored with the dopey kids from the suburbs who dropped belladonna, burned black candles, and collected Led Zeppelin records, and were being hyped as the menace of Satan. A cult of radical lesbian devil worshipers was something that they could finally get their teeth into.

Carlisle had been lucky that he had not been arrested along with them. Gail had always maintained a nominally separate apartment of her own, and that single fact had saved him from cohabitation and consorting charges. As it was, his record had been terminally tarnished. There would be no more promotions. After the trial was over, he had been severely tempted to quit the police department. Friends had advised him against it. There was little future for an ex-cop under a cloud. The deacons would eventually find a way to get him.

When Gail had been in Joshua, he had managed to visit her quite regularly. Seeing her in that place tore him up every time. The drab uniforms, the electric fences, and the obvious brutality filled him with a cold, sick anger, but he knew that she needed the lifeline, and he persevered. After four months she had been transferred to Solomon, the new supercamp outside St. Louis. Her letters had grown fewer and fewer and then stopped altogether. He had used his position to make sure that she was still alive, but all other contact had been lost.

Carlisle checked his answer unit. No one had called. He realized that he was turning into a recluse, but he seemed to have no inclination to do anything about it. He poured himself a stiff drink and dropped into the old leather armchair. It had been a long depressing day. He was weary of the continual madness and worn out by a world that was run by bigoted thugs. There was a frozen dinner in the icebox and dirty dishes in the sink. He also had no inclination to do anything about them. He flicked on the TV. It would be a suitable background to his internal gloom. There was a deacon show on the screen. Handsome, dedicated young dekes kicked down the door of a Hollywood mansion and stormed into the dark interior. There were pentagrams on the purple walls, and the cult that was getting busted consisted, in the main, of well-developed young women in skimpy leather nun habits that showed off a lot of thigh. It was the usual propaganda nonsense that passed for action adventure. Carlisle could remember when detectives had been the heroes of TV fantasy. He sighed and flipped the channel. He needed a girlfriend, but that was yet another thing about which he seemed unable to do anything. Next up was Roone Nelson.

"… so let's us ask ourselves, my friends: Do we want to see a return to those heathen days when our popular entertainment was provided by drug addicts and sexual deviants and our children aped Godless barbarians? Jesus has time and again demonstrated…"

Carlisle quickly flipped again. He did not give a rap what Jesus had time and again demonstrated. He was sick of goddamn preachers. He hit the Ten O'Clock Good News. A family of heretics had been killed by the Border Patrol. A Fort Worth woman's sight had been restored by the direct intervention of God and Larry Faithful. There was some local coverage of the riot on Eighth Avenue. Most of it was patently phony footage of steadfast riot police holding the line against ravening mobs of hideous and diseased inner city subpeople from the depths of some suburban nightmare. He flipped on. Disgust was becoming a way of life. An antique rerun of Little House on the Prairie got short shrift, as did the quiz show Catch It and Keep It. TBS was running an Audie Murphy festival, and he settled on that. The green and magenta of decaying technicolor added a tint of unreality to the TV twilight.

He wanted off this damn case. It was a pain in the ass to have to work so closely with the deacons. He needed to get back to real crime. He would take the robbery detail. Hell, he would even go back on vice. Busting hookers and pillrollers was preferable to the current nonsense. There was too much weirdness attached to terrorism. There was the constantly looming threat of politics, and that brought him right back to the deacons again. Not that anyone was going to let him go anywhere. The hunt for the Lefthand Path was going so badly that it was starting to feel like an albatross he was doomed to carry around his neck for the rest of time. There was something a little spooky about the case itself. Carlisle distrusted the way that this latest bunch of terrorists had come right out of nowhere. There should have been some kind of whisper somewhere, an informant, something. They were efficient and apparently well funded. He was not the kind who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all evils were hatched in the dark Satanic mills of Moscow, Damascus, or, at the very least, Montreal, but it did seem that they might be controlled by a foreign power. Even the name bothered him. Most terrorists went for initials, or else the people's this or the revolutionary that. There was a mystic ring to the name 'Lefthand Path' that smacked of a slick, twenty-first-century magic. It was as though they had given considerable thought to hitting the Fundamentalists right where they lived. It had to be assumed that more of such thinking would come into play if the campaign continued. The official fear was that they would escalate from bombing to political assassination. Privately, he would not have minded that at all. At least cops would not be getting blown up. It might not be a bad idea if politicians and preachers got shot up. It would certainly introduce a measure of reality into their lives.