They soon were sitting on Silkins’s thickly carpeted living-room floor. She booted up her connection into the virtual world. Daniel watched as she put on a bright pink helmet with a matte-black visor. He thought it made her look like a cross between a teenage skateboarder and a fighter pilot.

She wouldn’t let him join her inside the 3-D environment. “Too much for you to handle, plus they scatter when any outsider comes within a mile. That’s how we’ve kept it going,” she said. Aboye watched Silkins navigate on a screen above her fireplace.

He saw Silkins’s avatar, a bizarre yellow-and-blue cartoon fish that looked like Salvador Dalí had designed it, swimming alongside what looked to be an abstract, submerged rendition of Las Ramblas, in Barcelona. She darted and drifted among other resplendent but unnerving avatars, everything from Hello Kittys to nude supermodel bodies with robot heads. Then, trailing bubbles, each apparently an encrypted key that verified who she was, she stopped at the open door of a hat store. She flicked open her visor and looked at Daniel, jumping from the online world back to the real world.

“Let me make this clear. This is not about patriotism,” she said. “Our reasons are not yours — you know that, right? We’re about the net itself. Songs about flags, sending kids to die, mom and apple pie, all of those lies? We don’t buy any of that crap the system sells. But in this case, our interests align. We’d like to help you.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’?” he said.

“You don’t need to know that. My friends prefer to remain anonymous.”

Mike moved as fast as a man his age could move through a warship’s cramped passageways and ladder wells. The shouting got louder, and he forced himself to move even faster. The clanging of metal on metal had him nearly running.

“She’s one of them,” said Petty Officer Parker. “Just look at her.”

Mike took in the scene in less than a second: Parker. Wrench. Vern.

He swung a left-handed punch with his entire body weight behind it and hit Parker square in the stomach. A following jab from his right hand landed just above Parker’s heart, knocking the sailor back into the bulkhead. Just like he’d taught Jamie to do in the garage so many years ago.

Vern was sprawled on her back on the deck. He reached down to give her a hand just as she looked behind him and screamed.

Mike ducked at the last moment, and the blow from the wrench glanced off his shoulder. He grunted with anger, more at himself than Parker. It had been over twenty years since he’d last gotten into a fight, but some things he should not have forgotten. As he had been told by a senior chief when he was starting out in the Navy, there were two rules to remember in a bar fight: punch second, and leave first — but only after you’re 100 percent sure the other guy is completely out of the fight.

The arc of Parker’s swing had left him off balance in the tight corridor, so Mike bent lower to duck the backswing. He turned, feinted with his right, then moved in close and punched with his left, a short, stiff uppercut, a liver shot; he felt his knuckles crack as they smashed into Parker’s side at the ninth and tenth ribs. He’d taught Jamie that move, told him to use it only when the fight moved from boxing to brawling. A liver shot was shocking and debilitating, causing the other guy to lose his breath and sometimes even consciousness. It was also excruciatingly painful.

Parker’s desperate suck of air energized Mike. He hit him again hard with a close-in combination. And then another. He couldn’t hear the thuds that echoed inside the room; the adrenaline made his own ears ring. But he could feel the impact of the strikes resonating through Parker’s flesh.

He caught his breath, and as Parker crumpled, he struck with one more combination. Though he knew Parker was in too much pain to hear anything, Mike shouted at him: “You coward! How’s it feel?” This was a show for the others who had gathered and were now standing back in a mix of awe and fear of the old man.

And then he stopped hitting him. Parker, like Vern, was equipment. He was part of the ship, and Mike was responsible for him too. Through it all, none of Mike’s blows had touched Parker’s face. Stand him up at attention before the captain, and no one would ever know he’d just gotten his ass kicked by a man old enough to be his father. That was the way of his Navy.

He turned to the thick crowd of sailors.

“Who else agrees with him? Maybe you want to intern all the Chinese in San Francisco? Ship ’em out to Angel Island like in the last world war?” shouted Mike.

Parker, trying to get up, was now on his hands and knees, wheezing.

“Dr. Li is one of us,” said Mike. “If we win, it’ll be because of her. If we die, it’s because of ass-hats like you.”

He reached down and yanked Parker up by his arm. The man cast his gaze down to avoid making eye contact.

“Look at me. And this goes for the rest of you too. You don’t like it? Then you have five minutes to get off my ship. If you stay and this happens again, I won’t just play patty-cake like today. Test me. See if I am not one thousand percent serious. Dismissed!”

Parker shuffled out of sight along with the rest of the crowd.

“Vern, everything okay?” asked Mike, helping her up.

“We lost time just now that we can’t afford to,” said Vern. She glared at him, angry at Mike for rescuing her as if she were some lost little girl and livid at herself for feeling so damned vulnerable.

“I’m not asking about the ship, I’m asking about you,” said Mike.

She didn’t respond, but she leaned into him. He stood there, unsure of what he should do. She started shaking, and he wrapped his tattooed arms around her. He couldn’t see her face, pressed into his chest, so he looked down at his left hand, pretty sure the ring finger was broken. He felt good, though.

“Please don’t tap the glass, sir,” said Hernandez. “It makes the animals crazy.”

Cavendish pressed his face right up to a porthole. The container, which was connected to two more in a U-shaped form, had been made watertight and then filled with water. Each container was about the size of a large apartment, or one of the bedrooms in Cavendish’s South Kensington, London, block-long flat.

“I don’t see anything. Are they in there?” said Cavendish. He tapped on the Plexiglas porthole again.

“Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. “Why don’t you try the viz glasses they gave us?”

Cavendish put on the matte-black, special-made viz glasses that had been hanging around his neck; his fingers rubbed the firm’s old bear-paw logo on the side.

“What a simple proposition this all was. How did the original owner so truly screw the business up?” said Cavendish. “I have my theories but —”

He instinctively ducked as soon as the glasses clicked on. A long knife lunged for him, and he virtually counterpunched using some kind of ancient-looking brass trench knife. He settled into the fight, watching through the viz, becoming a part of the sparring from the perspective of a mask-cam worn by one of the ex-commandos.

The lighting inside the container varied; every few seconds, the lights brightened and then faded to almost pitch-black again. The men seemed to be wearing gray-and-black tiger-striped bodysuits that were accessorized with a variety of edged weapons. Swiss micro-rebreather units, the kind used by cave divers, were affixed to their upper backs. When the lights flashed on inside the tank at one point, Cavendish realized that those were not tiger-striped camouflage patterns on the gray bodysuits. They were slash marks.

He felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Sir, this is Aaron Best; he was at DevGru with me. Best is the one who provides the adult supervision for selection and training,” said Hernandez. “I’ll let him fill you in on where we are.”