Giuliani stopped pacing and looked at Voelker. "We aren't going to disavow him. Even if that's what he wants, it's wrong. More to the point, it won't work. He's one of Ours, in the eyes of the world if not in his own eyes." He walked to the windows and stared out at the crowd of reporters and seekers and the merely curious. "And if the media continue to indulge in idle speculation and baseless supposition, we'll simply call it what it is," said the Father General in the light ironic voice that generations of graduate students had learned to dread. He turned to gaze with cool appraisal at his secretary, sitting sullenly all this time. Giuliani's voice didn't change but Voelker was stung by what came. "I am not Emilio's judge, Father Voelker, and neither is the press."

And neither was Johannes Voelker, S.J.

They concluded their meeting with one or two businesslike remarks, but the younger man left knowing he'd overstepped his bounds, politically as well as spiritually. Voelker was efficient and intelligent but, atypically for a Jesuit, he had a polar mind: everything was black or white, sin or virtue, Us versus Them.

Still, Giuliani thought, such people could be useful.

The Father General sat at his desk and fingered a stylus. Reporters thought the world had a right to know. Vincenzo Giuliani felt no need whatsoever to pander to that illusion. On the other hand, there was the question of what to do next, regarding Rakhat. And he did feel a need to bring Emilio to some sort of resolution. This wasn't the first time the Jesuits had encountered an alien culture and it wasn't the first mission to come to grief and Sandoz wasn't the first priest to disgrace himself. The whole business was regrettable but not beyond redemption.

He's salvageable, Giuliani thought stubbornly. It's not as though we have so many priests that we can write one off without an effort. He's one of Ours, dammit. And what right have we to declare the mission a failure? Seeds may have been sown. God knows.

Even so, the allegations against Sandoz and the others were very serious.

Privately, Vincenzo Giuliani was inclined to believe that the mission went wrong at its inception, with the decision to involve the women. A breakdown in discipline from the beginning, he thought. The times were different then.

Ruminating over the same problem as he walked back to his lightless room on the eastern side of the Rome Ring, John Candotti had his own theory about how things had gone wrong. The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully considered decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters.

"Jimmy, I just heard they assigned you a vulture!" Peggy Soong whispered, and the first step toward the mission to Rakhat was taken. "Are you going to cooperate?"

Jimmy Quinn continued to move down the line of vending machines, selecting arroz con polio, a container of bean soup and two tuna sandwiches. He was absurdly tall, finally done growing at twenty-six but not really filled out yet, and constantly hungry. He stopped to pick up two packets of milk and a couple of desserts and checked his debit total.

"You cooperate, it's that much harder for the rest of us," Peggy said. "You saw what happened to Jeff."

Jimmy went to a table that had only one open seat and set his tray down. Peggy Soong stood behind him and glared at the woman sitting opposite Quinn. The woman decided she was done with lunch. Peggy moved around the table and sat in the still-warm chair. For a while, she simply watched Jimmy fork in piles of rice and chicken, still amazed by the sheer volume of food he needed. Her grocery bill had gone down by 75 percent since she threw him out. "Jimmy," she said finally, "you can't duck this. If you're not for us, you're against us." She was still whispering but her voice was not gentle. "If nobody cooperates, they can't fire us all."

Jimmy met her eyes, his gaze blue and placid, hers black and challenging. "I don't know, Peggy. I think they could probably replace the whole staff in a couple of weeks. I know a guy from Peru who'd take my job for half what I'm making. Jeff got a good recommendation when he left."

"And he's still out of work! Because he gave the vulture everything he had."

"It won't be my decision, Peggy. You know that."

"Bullshit!" Several people looked up. She leaned toward him from across the table, whispering again. "You are not a puppet. Everybody knows you've helped Jeff since he got sacked. But the whole point here is to stop them from sucking us dry, not to minister to the victims after the fact. How many times do I have to explain it?"

Peggy Soong sat back abruptly and looked away, trying to make sense of people who couldn't see the system reducing them to bits. All Jimmy understood was work hard, don't make trouble. And what would it get him? Screwed is what it would get him. "It will be your decision, to cooperate with the vulture," she said flatly. "They can give you the order but you have to decide whether to follow it." Rising, she gathered her things from the table and stared down at him a moment longer. Then she turned her back on him and walked toward the door.

"Peggy!"

Jimmy got up, came close enough to reach down and touch her lightly on the shoulder. He was not handsome. The nose was too long and no particular shape, the eyes too close together and set deep as a monkey's, the semicircle smile and the red curling hair like scribbles in a child's drawing; for a few months, the aggregate had charmed her senseless.

"Peggy, give me a chance, okay? Let me see if there's a way so everybody wins. Things don't have to be one way or the other."

"Sure, Jimmy," she said. He was a nice kid. Dumber than rice but nice. Peggy looked at his earnest, open, homely face and knew that he would find some plausible, contemptible rationale for being a good boy. "Sure, Jim. You do that."

A lesser man might have been put off his feed by a confrontation with the formidable Peggy Soong. But Jimmy Quinn was used to small, insistent women, and nothing affected his appetite; his mother complained that feeding him in adolescence was like stoking a coal-fired furnace. So he returned to his seat as Peggy stalked out of the cafeteria, and thoughtfully worked his way through the rest of his meal, letting things percolate through his mind.

Jimmy was no fool but he'd been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and over in his life, authority had proven correct and the decisions of his parents and teachers and bosses made sense to him eventually. So he wasn't happy about losing his job at Arecibo to an AI program but left to himself, he probably wouldn't have objected. He'd only worked at the telescope site for eight months—not enough time to feel proprietary about a position he'd been dead lucky to get. After all, he hadn't taken degrees in astronomy expecting a hot job market after graduation. The pay was lousy and the competition for work was savage, but that was true of almost anything these days. His mother—a small, insistent woman—had urged him to study something more practical. But Jimmy stuck with astronomy, arguing that if he was going to be unemployed, which was statistically likely, he might as well be unemployed in the field of his choice.

For eight months, he'd had the luxury of feeling vindicated. Now, it looked like Eileen Quinn had been right after all.