The sun had gone, and the block beyond the airshaft was a black silhouette against a deep red sky. Speedboat did not turn on the light but just sat in the gathering gloom, staring at the shape of the girl on the mattress. She had told him that she had been a phone whore for nine months. That was probably enough to have flipped her over all on its own, sitting there and listening night after night while the holy bastards with the jobs and the plastic spewed out the sump poison of their God-fearing psyches. He could imagine them crouching in dark rooms, muttering their equally dark fantasies to a girl at the end of an anonymous phone. It was a world where everything had to be hidden from the light. Speedboat had stopped getting angry about it a long time ago. He was getting out.

He realized that he himself was crouching in a dark room. It was time to go to work. He carefully closed the drapes before he turned on the light. The single unshaded bulb made him blink. The girl muttered something and turned over, but she did not wake. Speedboat watched her for a moment, then stooped down and removed his contraband from its hiding place. He had to distribute it around his body – carrying any kind of a bag was asking for trouble. The diskettes of pornosoft were no problem. They would fit into any of the dozen or so secret pockets of his old, stained military parka. The audio discs were a bit more of a problem. The only place where they would fit was in the large pocket just below his shoulder blades. Even then, they were. sufficiently bulky that there was a risk they might produce a telltale outline, even in the deliberately voluminous olive drab. He would have to chance it and try to walk with his shoulders back instead of up around his ears as he normally did.

He started down the stairs on silent Reeboks that had cost him an entire bag of yellow octagonals down on Delancey Street. He paused for a moment in front of the street door. He opened it a crack. Nothing on the street looked out of place. The box people were setting up their homes, and a couple of fires had been lit. That was usually a good sign that there was no law about. A couple of the streetlights were out. He ran a hand through his close-cropped suedecut and slipped out into the dark.

Winters

Deacon Winters put down the phone with a sigh. The sweep of the crime scene had given the lab boys exactly nothing. It was the third LP bomb in a month and it had gone off right on the corner of Broadway and Eighth, within walking distance of the Astor Place CCC complex where he was based. Three of the bomb squad were dead, and no one was even a fraction closer to identifying the terrorcult. There was bound to be another internal inquiry, and as one of the investigative team assigned to the case he would find himself being asked a lot of questions to which he had no answers.

He wanted to slam his fist into the desk, and it was only with the greatest of effort that he restrained himself. Any such display of temper would be picked up by the surveillance cameras and go down on his record. It would indicate that the Peace of the Lord was definitely not upon him. Being suspected of having a potential low-stress quotient was a black mark that he could do without. He had enough problems already. The very last thing he needed was to slip any farther down the ladder of departmental grace. Not even the long hours of visible public prayer at the Deacon Tabernacle on Seventy-third Street seemed to help. After all the kneetime for the cameras, it still had been a nightmare of a week, and it was only Wednesday. The efficiency ratings and devotion assessments had been released on Monday morning, and he had showed up well down in the pack.

When he had transferred from Cleveland to New York City, he had had the reputation of being a bright and promising young man with an equally bright future. The New York deacons had a policy of recruiting their young officers from the heartland, where youths supposedly were untainted by the Babylonian evils of the metropolis. Once they were in the city, though, they were expected to shine. Winters was not shining. In fact, he was floundering. The inquiry after this latest bombing might actually turn that floundering into a state of mil-scale drowning. He could not even see a way that he could pass some of the buck onto the NYPD task force. He had played that card twice already.

Back in Ohio, he had woven small-town, TV dreams about high-city law enforcement. While he had chased minor-league pornographers and teenagers fooling around with petty Satanism, he had played with romantic images. He pictured himself kicking down doors with a machine pistol clutched in his fist, smiting the ungodly, bringing the terrorists and heretics to justice, and generally making the world a safe place for decent, God-fearing people. Those comic-book scenarios had been destroyed in the first flaming crash of his innocence. In the eleven months that Winters had been in New York, he had not kicked down a single door. He had not even so much as drawn an automatic weapon from the armory. He had been buried in an avalanche of cross-referential data. He tracked and matched minor details and ran patterns looking for possible anomalies. The most drama that ever came his way was provided by the spying and backbiting of internal politics. It was a long way from the heady excitement of swashbuckling, more akin to the constant numbing fear of walking the edge of a razor or swimming in a tank of man-eating sharks.

The phone rang. It was Carlisle from the NYPD team. The debris from the explosion had gone to the deacons' lab, and he wanted to access the results. No doubt he was also looking for a clue to what, if anything, Winters or the other deacons might be planning to pull when the reports went in. Winters did not trust Carlisle. The way the man played the world-weary street cop only barely concealed a deep-seated contempt for the established religion. Winters inwardly toyed with an image of Carlisle in the pit. On the phone, he adopted a closed and neutral tone.

"They've come up with nothing so far," he told the cop.

On the other end of the phone, Carlisle sounded as if he did not believe him. Winters gave just a fraction. Carlisle was probably a closet heretic, but Winters had to do business with him.

"Of course, I'll let you know immediately if they do find anything."

Carlisle grunted and hung up. Winters silently vowed that one day he would get the NYPD officer. Making empty, unheard threats, though, did not help too much. He was still in a vise and he had no way that he could see to stop it from closing on him. He stared across the large open-plan squad room with its beige walls and bright panel lights that made it look like an aquarium. Orderly lines of dark-suited figures hunched over blue-gray computer terminals. Overhead, the small, black watch cameras with their glowing red LEDs swivelled from side to side, scanning the people below like inquisitive birds. The watch cameras were the electronic eyes of the Lord. All was seen and all was noted. Winters picked up a pencil, trying to give the appearance of doing something. Unfortunately, there was nothing that he could do except wait and pray for a break in the case. If that break failed to materialize, the case would undoubtedly break him.

Cynthia Kline walked by his desk carrying a sheaf of printouts. In her mid to late twenties, she kept her chestnut hair swept back into a tight bun and wore little or no makeup; her only jewelry was a pair of discreet gold earrings. Yet even in the severe and unflattering tailoring of her clerical auxiliary uniform, there was something about the way she moved, the way she carried her slim, athletic figure, that caused Winters to observe her covertly whenever she was in the junior deacons' squad room. She had never smiled at him or even given him any indication that she was aware of his existence. There was no way he could think that she was somehow encouraging him in the lusts of the flesh. The problem was that his interest was not limited to simple observation. Despite all his efforts, he could not stop his imagination, could not stop the dark thoughts and images that crept into his inner mind. The most vivid picture was straight out of a proscribed magazine: Cynthia Kline stripped down to scanty silk lingerie, standing on tiptoe, arms stretched above her head, wrists secured by leather thongs. He shook his head as if trying physically to dislodge the vision. He found that his palms were sweating. Get behind me, Satan. He realized that if anyone could read his thoughts, his career would be over.