"Do you have those energy bars you pinched from the hotel?" she asked the Rhino, who was searching for something, presumably a pencil or pen with which he could shade the sat maps as she'd asked.

"In my smaller pack, over by the ugly coffee table," he answered as he methodically opened and closed a line of drawers in a blond wood sideboard on top of which sat an enormous flat panel television. "Hot damn! Check this out."

Jules expected to find him holding up a new gun or perhaps even chicken in a can but was genuinely surprised to find him standing there patting what looked like a Viking helmet on his head.

"Pretty sweet, huh? There's nothing a Rhino likes more than extra horns."

She refused to bite. "Just try the kitchen drawers if you're looking for something to write with," she suggested. "Even the rich write notes to themselves." As she fetched the energy bars, Jules marveled that he called his ruck a small pack. It was large enough to serve her as a full-size backpack.

The Rhino left the ridiculous helmet on his enormous head, where, unfortunately, it fit perfectly. He picked up his mug of chocolate as he walked past.

"I've never asked you," said Jules. "Are you going to take an up-front fee from Rubin when we get back-"

"If we get back," he corrected, finding a marker in the first drawer he tried.

"Of course. How very Pollyanna of me. So if we get back. An up-front fee or the equity deal?"

The Rhino stopped by the end of the island bench to sip his drink and consider her question. He actually scratched one of the giant protuberant cow's horns on his newfound head gear as he did so.

"Well, I have done some thinking on that, Miss Jules, I must admit. The prospect of a straight-up payday does appeal. I could set myself up in fine style with a quarter million new bucks. Finding a boat's no problem at all, of course. There's plenty of them lying around with no owners to lay claim. But manning them, provisioning, fuel oil, it all adds up. A payday would be mighty useful."

Julianne took a few experimental sips of her own drink. It wasn't too bad, and she was desperately hungry. "You couldn't be thinking of going back into the charter business, surely? There's no market for it."

"No," he agreed as the rumble of an especially large explosion rolled over the building. "I was thinking more in terms of a small trader, you know, zipping around the islands, maybe even down south to some of the secured ports. Old Roberto is a murderous thug, but he does run a tight ship down there in the federation now, and he's looking to do business. Coffee. Cocoa…" He held up the steaming cup. "Even sugar from the Caribbean. They're all paying well now."

"That's all?" she asked skeptically. "You wouldn't be tempted to run a little marching powder up the coast?"

He looked truly offended at the suggestion.

"Miss Jules, I was a career coast guard man! My whole life was about chasing bad guys, not being one."

"Rhino. You're a smuggler now. A people smuggler for a year after the Wave. Contraband and zone runner ever since."

He blew her off with a flip of one hand.

"Bullshit. I might be bending the odd law here and there, but I'm doing what's right. Those rich assholes we got out of Acapulco, yeah, they were rich and kind of assholey, but that didn't mean they had to die there, and that's what would have happened. And Miguel and his family, they were good folks who just needed a break. We gave them one. As for Rubin, the man says he owns a chunk of that oil field off Sonoma. Says he has the papers to prove it. Half a dozen fucking foreign oil companies say he doesn't. You know what I think? I think he does and they're just trying to frighten him off the claim, keep it for themselves. So sure, I'm breaking the law going into a zone without the exact right papers and passes signed and stamped in triplicate, but goddamn, this is still the United States, and I will go where I please, and I will be ass fucked by rabid monkeys before I stand by and let a little guy get bullied out of what's his by a bunch of giant foreign oil firms."

Jules was smirking by the time he'd finished his small speech, unsure whether he was kidding or if indeed he might have convinced himself of his own rectitude and heroic status. She moved around from behind the granite-topped island bench and into the living area to retrieve one of the energy bars.

"So, seriously," she said. "Will you be taking the quarter million up front? Or a share of the Sonoma field? And before you answer, you should know I cannot take seriously anything you say while you are wearing that ridiculous helmet."

New York In another era, perhaps he would have held his council in a grand war tent, sitting on fine pillows and handwoven rugs. Instead, the emir made war from a third-floor office in an anonymous building in the midtown region of Manhattan. He was of course more familiar with this sort of environment than he was with grand war tents or the stony deserts in which the Prophet had pitched them when he first brought the word of God to the heathen tribesmen of Arabia, but he found it hard to romanticize the image of a holy war generaled from the entirely unromantic command post of some dead heathen's windowless office. Perhaps it would help if it were not all going so badly.

The emir, surrounded by his most trusted lieutenants, leaned over the huge map of Manhattan that had been spread out on the dead man's cheap chipboard desk. From where he stood, with his knuckles resting on the New Jersey Turnpike and the upper reaches of Central Park, he could see a broken photo frame lying on the floor in the corner of the office. A pretty blond woman and two children dressed in cowboy outfits smiled out from behind the shattered glass, presumably the family of the man who had worked in this office.

The photograph reminded the emir that this was not a simple blood feud with an old foe. It was certainly that, but even more it was now a struggle to claim a new homeland for those who had survived the Second Holocaust. Many of his warriors had brought their families with them not because they wanted to but because there was nowhere left for them in the old world. This was especially true of those who had been forced from Great Britain.

Fortunately, their families seemed to be safe for the moment. He had worried privately that the Americans might bomb the makeshift villages they had established for the women and children, but for the moment they seemed to have gone undetected. It was, after all, a very large and empty land these days.

As he examined the map again, he wasn't sure if they'd be safe much longer.

"It may have been best had we waited and stuck to our original schedule," he thought out loud.

"No," insisted Abu Dujana, the Indonesian, one of the few who had come without his kin. "It was a rare opportunity to cut off the head of the taipan, and you were right to strike when you did. We all agreed then, as we all agree now."

Dujana looked at each man in turn, searching their eyes with his own for any sign of disagreement. But there was none. The emir had consulted with each of them and sought their counsel sincerely before making the decision to bring forward their attack when they learned that President Kipper would be in New York.

"Are we not told by the Prophet himself to fight and kill the disbelievers wherever we find them?" Dujana asked. "To lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war?" The four men around the table were all intimately familiar with the holy Koran. They nodded in agreement.

The emir stood up straight, stretching his back and trying to get some distance from the immediate crisis so that he might have time to think, to see a way through. He was young for one to whom such a momentous undertaking had been fated and as fit as any man under his command, but he felt tired and worried. The problem was that unlike the Prophet he was not a military commander and had no pretensions to being one. That was why he surrounded himself with men like Dujana, famed for taking the battle against the Indonesian military dictatorship right up to the gates of the presidential palace. The emir was not burdened with false modesty. He knew that inspiring men, and even women when necessary, was a special talent gifted to him by God. However, to lead men in battle, particularly in an environment such as New York, required a very different set of skills, which he did not possess.