On jandered my escort, past various office doors-all mahogany, all notably missing nameplates; presumably, if you didn't know where to find the office you wanted, you just plain didn't belong here. Another couple of turns, and another double door; this time floor-to-ceiling transpex with some kind of chromatic coating that made the doors look like huge opalescent soap bubbles. Again the doors swung back as we approached and again closed silently after us.

End of the line, apparently. The elf stopped in the middle of an antechamber or waiting room and gestured silently to one of the coral-hued leather couches. And then, still without saying a word, she turned on her heel and strode back out through the soap-bubble doors.

On a whim, I tried to follow. Predictably, those doors didn't open for me the way they did for her.

Okay, so I'd been bagged by pros and taken to see some high corp suit who had something he/she/it wanted me to know… presumably. (Unless TIC was a yak cover, and this was the waiting room for the torture chamber.) I remember reading once that, "Life is just one damn thing after another." Wrongo. It's the same damn thing over and over again.

I wandered back into the middle of the waiting room and took a good, hard look around. The soap-bubble doors took up much of one wall. In the center of the opposite wall was a single wooden door. (Not mahogany; something even richer-looking, with an even stronger grain pattern. A native Hawai'ian species, maybe?) Again, there was no nameplate on the door. But it didn't need one, I can recognize the office door of the head muckamuck without any outside cues.

Along the other two walls were couches, a delicate coral in color, perfectly coordinated with the pastel carpets and wall-coverings. On the walls were three large paintings.

Yes, I mean paintings. Flat things with no 3-D to them. Paint manually applied to some kind of backing material. Rare, these days, and generally very expensive because of it. Out of curiosity-and because I didn't have much else to do at the moment-I strolled up to the nearest one and gave it the scan.

Strange drek, chummer. It was an undersea scene, complete with coral and brilliantly colored reef fish and happy, smiling dolphins. (Dolphins! I guess that was some indication of the painting's age. Dolphins went out quite a while back when they couldn't adapt to the concentration of toxics we were tossing into their oceans. And you can bet they weren't smiling for quite some time before the end.) So far so good, I guess. Then it started getting weird. There were Grecian-style columns, temples, and other crap-even pyramids, honest to Ghu!-on the bottom of the ocean, and the happy, smiling dolphins were swimming in and out among them. Hmm.

I moved on to the next painting. Much the same thing: same reefs, same ruins, same happy, smiling dolphins. Except this time there was some kind of glow emanating from inside the ruined buildings. And maybe the dolphins looked just a tad happier, I don't know.

Third painting, exactly the same, but more so. And this time, over the glowing door of one of the pyramids, there was some strange symbol carved into the rock. The Eye of Horus crossed with the biohazard trefoil, that's what it looked like, but I know squat about art, so I might have been wrong. Weird drek. Atlantis?

I bent closer for a look at the signature: an incomprehensible scrawl that might have been "Andrew Annen-something", or maybe not. The date was 1996.

"What do you think, Mr. Montgomery?"

The husky contralto voice sounded from close behind me. I tried to keep tight rein on my sphincters, and struggled to keep my movements smooth and urbane as I turned around.

The dark-grained wood door had opened silently, and, just as silently, an elf had emerged. Tall and slender she was, with fine blond hair curled into a coif that seemed to defy gravity. Her eyes were pale-faint blue, maybe, or gray. She was dressed in a broad-shouldered, tab-collared corp skirtsuit that could have been made of liquid gold. On one epaulet was the designer's marque-the stylized Z of Zoe. On the other was the Telestrian Industries Corporation logotype.

The elf smiled at me, and extended her hand. On reflex I took it. Her grip was firm, her skin cool and silk-smooth. "Again I feel like I'm at a disadvantage," I told her as calmly as I could manage. "You know my name…"

She smiled. "I meant no disrespect, Mr. Montgomery." Under the right circumstances that voice could curl my toes. At the moment, though, I wasn't in me mood. "My name is Chantal Monot." She gave the name a strong French inflection.

I racked my brain for any details I could recall about TIC. "James Telestrian's… daughter-in-law?" I guessed, naming the CEO of the overall TIC empire.

The elf's smile broadened. "Nepotism isn't that bad in the company," she chided me lightly. "Not every executive is related to James. Many, but not all."

I yielded the point with a nod. "And your position is, Ms. Monot…?'

"President and chief executive officer of Telestrian Industries Corporation, South Pacific Operations."

I blinked. Ookaay… It always pays to know what level you're working at. (In this case, me highest.)

Monot inclined her head toward the painting and repeated, "What do you think, Mr. Montgomery?" She chuckled. "And please don't tell me you 'know nothing about art but know what you like.'"

Since mat was exactly what I had been about to tell her, I thought about it for a moment. "Strong colors and pretty good technique," I said finally. "But it's going to overwhelm the wrong decor."

She quirked an eyebrow in what seemed to me genuine amusement. "And the subject matter?"

Fragging squirrely didn't seem to be a politic thing to say, so I settled for, "Interesting."

"Yes," she agreed with an arch smile. "Isn't it?"

Frag, that's one of the reasons I hate dealing with elves. No, correct that-with some elves. It's that pervasive "I know something you don't, nyah nyah" attitude so many of them have. Irritating, big-time.

Chantal Monot gestured to the open door. "Please," she said. "There are some things I'd like to discuss with you."

Of course there were. I shrugged, and I preceded her through the door into her office.

I was familiar with the way Diamond Head looked from the west-from the Honolulu side. Now I got to see it from the other side, and I had to admit it was just as striking. The TIC building was only three stories tall, but it seemed to be built on some kind of ridge or bluff, so there was nothing to block the president's view of the old, eroded crater.

While I was still staring, Monot took a seat behind the large desk. She gestured to one of the comfortable-looking guest chairs, and I sat down. "Tea?" she asked. Before I could either refuse or accept, she'd turned to a silver samovar on the credenza beside her and prepared two cups. Glasses, actually, in the Russian style. She handed one over to me. I sniffed, then sipped appreciatively. Never tried real Oolong tea? Your loss.

"I was serious about the subject of the paintings outside," Monot said at length. "Have you ever realized quite how pervasive the legend of a sunken continent, a lost world, actually is?"

I shrugged. "It's never really kept me up nights," I had to admit.

"It is interesting, though. What do you know about Lemuria?"

Again I shrugged. "It's where lemurs come from?"

I'd meant it as a smart-hooped comeback line, but she nodded approvingly. "In a way, yes. Did you know that, before geologists understood about continental drift, scientists were puzzled by the fact that fossilized lemur bones were found on two distinct continents, separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean? How had the lemurs crossed from one continent to another… if there hadn't once been a land bridge, a midoceanic continent, connecting the two? Since mere was no land bridge in existence, the only logical conclusion was that it had sunk centuries or millennia before."