“Now that was a profile in courage, wasn’t it?” There was cold humor in Weitzman’s voice.

“I’d say,” Dagmar said, “that the Alamo spirit is definitely dead.”

On the roof at eleven, she thought.

And fuck you, Mordechai, whoever you are.

FROM: Desi

I’ve emailed the Bayangan Prajurit people, but it’s the middle of

the night in Indonesia and it may be a while before we hear from them.

I did hear what happened with Bersih Jantung. They’re pro-military,

remember, and the army was supplying them with food, fuel, and

other black market items. So their neighbors, who all hate the military,

decided to hijack their latest convoy and steal their food and stuff.

Which they did. Successfully.

Bayangan Prajurit claims they weren’t involved, but they’re very

pleased with this development, and they had a hard time keeping

a straight face.

Dagmar stood atop the silent, dark tower as the monsoon spat warm drizzle in her face. She hoped that the reconnaissance craft would be able to find her through the cloud cover.

If it was like everything else Zelazni had tried so far, it would drop into the ocean somewhere west of Krakatoa.

As she looked over the edge, she could see that lack of electricity hadn’t stopped the looters. They were working by flashlight, and now they were loading mattresses and chests of drawers into their trucks.

They’d finished looting the ground floors, she saw, and had started on the guest rooms. The power outage meant they weren’t going to get to the fourteenth floor anytime soon, but Dagmar had considerable respect for their industry and assumed they would reach her eventually.

And besides, sooner or later she was going to have to descend to the ground in search of food and water.

Around her, the city was dark except for a few fires burning here and there. The locals were still exercising blazing benevolence upon their neighbors.

She could see the pool down below, on the third-floor terrace.

She had decided against her nightly swim. Her courage did not extend to defiance of mobs with spears and knives.

Not that her courage had done anything so far but fail her.

She gave a jump as her phone let out a bray. She answered.

“Are you on the roof?” said Mordechai.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

She ransacked a mental map. “Northeast corner,” she said.

“Stay back from the edge. We don’t want the package dropping to the street.”

She stepped back until she came up against one of the roof structures. Water dripped down her neck, a surprising splash of warmth, and she took a step forward.

“Any minute now,” said Mordechai.

Dagmar scanned the sky. A flurry of rain pelted down for a few seconds, then ceased. Then there was a faint whooshing noise, and the wind carried a warm breath of burned hydrocarbon.

Suddenly she saw it, hovering right above her. There were no wings and no tail structure-the thing was just an aerodynamic shape, like an elongated Frisbee, black against the opalescent cloud. It made a sound like a crowd in a distant stadium, a far-off roaring, and Dagmar realized it was propelled by arrays of the same miniturbines that served as backup power for her computer. There had to be some method of directing the thrust so that the machine could hover or fly in any direction. From the smell, Dagmar assumed the machine was loaded with some form of high-powered aviation fuel, as opposed to the stuff in her computer, a substance that, at the insistence of the Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t burn fast enough to be used to blow up an airplane.

“I see it!” she said into her phone. “It’s right over my head!”

“How far above you?”

“Maybe twenty feet. It’s hard to say. I can’t tell how large it is.”

“We’ll take it down three meters.”

The tone of the turbines shifted, and the machine wafted gently toward Dagmar. The hydrocarbon smell grew stronger.

“Right,” Mordechai said. “We’ve got you. It was hard picking you out from the background. Stand by.”

The drone was, Dagmar guessed, about eight feet long. Despite the gusting of the monsoon, the machine hovered with perfect stillness in the air, its fly-by-wire computer adjusting to every shift of the wind.

“Hold out your hand,” Mordechai said. There was amusement in his voice.

Dagmar put out her right hand, her left hand still holding the phone to her ear. The package dropped and bounced off Dagmar’s forearm, then fell to the rooftop with a little slap.

“Have you got it?” Mordechai asked.

Dagmar knelt, swept her hand over the roof, and found the package. Her fingers closed around it.

“I have it,” she said.

She straightened and looked up in time to see the drone take off, its low roar increasing as it turned northeast and flew away with surprising rapidity. She watched it until it disappeared into the night.

“You want to be careful with that money,” Mordechai said. “What you had before was maybe not worth killing over, but what you’ve got now can get you killed very fast.”

Dagmar felt an invisible hand clamp over her throat. She managed to speak in a kind of whisper.

“How much is it?” she said.

“Two thousand dollars. That should pay for a boat to take you away. Now listen.”

He told her that she should split the package up once she got it to her room, carry it in different places so she wouldn’t be peeling bills off a huge roll and offering someone far too much temptation.

“Right,” she said. “No temptation. Got it.”

FROM: Joe Clever

Widjihartani’s got money for fuel. I don’t know how. Apparently

Charlie arranged it.

Widji’s on the way to Jakarta, and he’s got a satellite phone so

that he can be told where he needs to anchor. Or dock, as the case

may be.

Sea rescue is go!

FROM: Desi

Bayangan Prajurit is go!

FROM: LadyDayFan

Evacuation is go!

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Thunderbirds are go!

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Sorry about that last, by the way. My enthusiasm got the better

of me.

FROM: Hanseatic

That’s all right. I knew someone was going to say it.

Dagmar helped the Tippels move eight floors up from their looted hotel room. It took the elderly couple a long time to slog their way up the stairs-the elevators, when they were working, were now reserved for looters.

None of them had eaten in more than twenty-four hours, and Dagmar gave her guests the stale rolls she’d smuggled out of the breakfast room five days ago. She couldn’t do anything about the temperature: the power had been out for fifteen or sixteen hours, and the room was at least a hundred degrees-and since it was a modern hotel, all glass and steel, there was no way to open a window.

She had considered offering to take them with her when she made her exit, but the European Union was in the process of arranging an evacuation, and the Tippels had decided to wait. Dagmar asked how they planned to get past the looters.

“The looters have no reason to stop anyone from leaving,” Anna Tippel said.

What, Dagmar wondered, did reason have to do with anything?

Be in the northwest stairwell at 1600 hours. It was the stair farthest from the front doors, and one that the looters weren’t using: the Bayangan Prajurit didn’t want to risk a collision with whatever group was gutting the hotel.

Dagmar was ready a quarter of an hour early, sitting in the hot, stale air of the staircase and waiting for the sound of her rescuers. She had her satellite phone on her belt and her laptop in a rucksack-in view of the amount of cash she had on her person, she was no longer worried about someone killing her just for her computer. Her bag held toiletries and a change of clothing. She wore her panama hat on her gray hair and Reeboks on her feet and couldn’t tell if her current mood of buoyant optimism was a good thing or not.