Jules frowned, unconvinced, but there didn't seem to be many alternatives. If the Rhino was right and this was the first day of a battle to retake the city, the army would roll up the island block by block, probably destroying everything in its path. They had to get to Rubin's apartment and retrieve his documents before that happened, even if it meant dialing up the risk for a day or two. This gig was a big score. If it paid off, she could probably retire from assing about in the smuggling game and set up a legitimate business out on the West Coast, running salvage charters down to LA or something. Or, rather, not running them in person, just raking off the cream while some other poor bastards did the hard work as her contractors and remitted all the profits back to her.

She shivered as the wind knifed in off the river. Her shoulder ached terribly, and she longed to be out of the cold. Across the water New Jersey was a dark continent with just a few mystery points of light to give some sense of the vastness of the graveyard it had become. She wondered idly who or what those lights might be. Freebooters? Scavengers? Some sort of special forces camp with a lot of unwashed Lord Jim types sitting around eating roasted rats off coat hangers?

Possibly not.

There were still mountains of canned and vacuum sealed food in the big cities to make a resort to hobo's chicken-one of her father's favorite jokes-a rarity. Another jet plane-no, two of them-came shrieking down out of the night sky, flying just under the low ceiling of cloud, which lit up with their exhausts and running lights. They appeared to drop a stick of bombs somewhere near Gramercy Park.

The Rhino grunted in approval but frowned.

"Miss Jules, I'm going to do something that a good Rhino never does," he said. "I'm going to lower my horn and back the fuck up. This looks to me like a fight that is only just getting warmed up, and I wonder if we should be heading out into it just yet."

"We could end up like poor Ryan," she said.

"Yeah. I vote we hunker down here for a few hours, get some rest, review our plans, and see whether there's a lull anytime before sunup when we could move a few more blocks."

Julianne shivered inside her Gore-Tex. The thought of getting somewhere warm and dry appealed in a way that no trip to the Virgin Islands ever had.

"Sounds good to me. Let's see if this building had a penthouse, shall we?" "May God strike me down if the worst thing about the end of the world isn't the impossibility of securing a decent cup of tea when I fucking need it. I could murder a pot of Twinings right now."

Jules stood at the black granite island bench in the massive, luxuriously fitted out kitchen with hands on hips and frustration acid etched into her face.

The building did not boast a single penthouse, but the top-floor apartments were considerably larger than those below, there being only four of them in all. The Rhino had tried to kick in the door of the first apartment they came to, but it seemed to have been secured by something as extravagant as thick metal locking bolts driven deep into the walls. His size-twelve boots boomed off the hardwood surface without any appreciable return on the effort. The next apartment door, however, yielded to his second kick with a terrible splintering and cracking of the door frame. The noise was awfully loud inside the empty building but insignificant when one considered the uproar of the street fighting a mile or two away. The two smugglers swept the darkened entry hall and a large open-plan living room beyond, but it was obvious that no living soul had set foot in there for years. After securing the wreckage of the front door by pushing a heavy couch up against it, they went about settling in for a few hours: drawing curtains so they could turn on a battery-powered camp light, firing up a small gas stove, and searching the kitchen cupboards for any usable supplies, whereupon Jules was yet again confronted by the barbaric habits of Americans high and low.

"There simply is no fucking tea in this place," she complained.

The Rhino snorted his amusement.

"Got plenty of stale coffee if you want. Or drinking chocolate. Does that stuff keep?"

"Let me see," she said, taking the small white canister from him. A twelve-ounce tin of Dagoba organic. Jules rolled her eyes. "Well, it's hardly Vosges La Parisienne Couture cocoa, but I suppose we'll see. At least it's never been opened."

As the Rhino set to brewing a small pot of water poured from his canteen, Julianne retrieved their commission papers from her small backpack. In addition to the satelilite maps and out-of-date intel on the surrounding area, she carried a private lettre de course from Samuel Rubin's attorney in Seattle, authorizing them to search Rubin's New York apartment and seize any and all documentation relating to his disputed claim to part ownership of the new Sonoma "Sunset" gas and oil field, along with detailed floor plans of the apartment and instructions for accessing a hidden safe in the library. She also found their original letters of acceptance into the Manhattan clearance and salvage program. She was about to toss them away as being no longer necessary, when caution stayed her hand. The only safe and sure way into New York, a Declared Zone, had been via the salvage program, and given how everything had gone so spectacularly wrong in the last twenty-four hours, it might turn out that those crumpled form letters were their only way out of the city as well. They wouldn't stop an F-16 from dropping smart bombs on them should they be mistaken for villains, but if they ran into any U.S. ground forces, it probably would pay to have a piece of paper explaining how they came to be in the city.

Of course, what they were actually doing was illegal in a Declared Zone, even with Rubin's letter to wave in the face of any overzealous state-sponsored busybodies who might care to interfere.

The Rhino used their single fluorescent camp light to search the kitchen for coffee mugs. The white glow threw long, swinging shadows over the living area as he moved from cupboard to cupboard.

"Damn, but these folks lived well," he said. "They gotta have eight different types of noodles in here."

Jules looked up from the sat maps of the Upper East Side she had been studying to find the Rhino waving a packet of linguini around.

"That's pasta. Not noodles," she said.

"Here we go. Cups and saucers. Got a special cupboard just for themselves. How pretentious is that?"

"Depends on the make of china," she said, standing up straight and stretching her back muscles. "Tell you what, Rhino. How about you come over here and update these maps. Draw in what you know of who controls which parts of the city now. It might help us find a way through to Rubin's place. I'll make supper."

"Huh, good luck with that," he scoffed. "These snobs didn't have anything worth scavenging from the larder. You know, we'd be a lot better off looting from dead rednecks. Score ourselves a whole chicken in a can or some Vienna franks. Have to be better than these… what the fuck are these? Imported dog turds?"

He held up a small plastic packet and scowled at it in the lamplight.

"Give me those," said Jules, suddenly excited. "Oh, my God, you fucking Philistine, they're dried porcini. We may well dine in style yet. Let me see if I can find any decent oil. I'm willing to bet a place like this will have top-shelf extra virgin. It keeps for years."

"Just don't burn my hot chocolate while you're getting carried away there, Martha Stewart."

He had a point. The pot of water on their little primus stove was but a moment away from bubbling merrily, so Jules put off her grocery search to make the drinks. Her injured arm was still half numb and next to useless, which meant doing everything one-handed, a slow, frustrating process. The Dagoba drinking chocolate came in a powder that had all but solidified in its cardboard canister. With some difficulty and discomfort she managed to hack off a couple of chunks, which she stirred into the hot water. She checked the walk-in larder, hopeful of finding a tin of condensed milk, but that was too much to expect, and she resigned herself to the necessity of a thin, stale brew. The scent of it was still heady enough to make her mouth water and her stomach grumble in protest.