“… how to stop it,” Marena was saying. “Right?”

“Sorry?”

“What?”

“Sorry, I tuned out,” I said.

“I said, Jed-Sub-One thought the Cascade wouldn’t be stoppable because you couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Right?”

“Well, yes,” I said, “if you mean that just doing random things and hoping one of them’ll work is too much of a shot in the dark. Presumably it’s a robust autocatalytic event chain with a variable n of-”

“Okayokayokay, hang on.”

“I tried to access his finances, but I couldn’t get much of it.”

“The thing is he didn’t know about the Human Game, right? So it may be figure-outable with that, I mean, it might identify a whateveryouguyscallit, there may be, you know.”

“A stopping mechanism.”

“Right. And with the LEON version of that, the, I guess we’re calling it the Human Game, that should do it, right?”

“I hope so. I mean, we hope-”

“So, so let’s just put everything into finding Jed-Sub-One, and then, we’ll get out of him what, you know, whatever’s going on, and then we’ll bring in LEON and work from there.”

“Get out of him, like, sweat him.”

“Right. Why, do you mind?”

“Oh, uh, no, no, definitely-”

“Hang on.” Ana and one of her tech people were calling for us to come back in. We did. They’d really torn up the place, but so far, it looked like they hadn’t disconnected any of the fish tanks. They’d pulled up the rubbery jigsaw matting and were prying the old half-ton Chubb safe out of the concrete. Needless to say, Jed 1 had reset the combination.

“Any erasing or explosive triggers on this?” Ana asked.

“Not that I know of. Unless I got even more paranoid after the Guate trip.”

“No radioactive materials or anthrax powder or whatever?”

“No, no, are you kidding? I wouldn’t-”

“Anything that’s going to erase the hard drive on opening?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’ll erase without the password, though.”

“Right. Any ideas on the password? Any favorite pet names, TV characters-”

“No, I don’t do it that way, it’s like with the safe combination, every Sunday when I do my Grandessa Game I just grab a new sixteen digits off a randomizer and reset it to that.”

“What’s a Grandessa Game?”

“Well, a Grandessa…” Hell, I thought. It felt violating, getting interrogated. But I’d screwed up. Pretty regally, in fact. You deserve it, Jed. Just co-fucking-operate. I started again. “A Grandessa’s just a word for a sort of pouch of like, seeds and stones that all Maya sun-adders have. And we use it to tell the suns, you know, like divination. So it’s kind of an abbreviated version of the Sacrifice Game. But I use it with a full Game board. And I do it at midnight on Sunday and that kind of maps out the next week.”

“Why on Sunday, aren’t you on a Mayan calendar or something?”

“Oh, well, you could do it anytime, it’s just a Catholic habit, my mother would get querents then because the farmers stay up late on Saturday, like a midnight Mass.”

“Okay.”

“And I do all my numbers then, investments, passwords, upcoming dates, all that. Of course, clients want lottery numbers.”

“Right.”

“But anyway, that just tells you when the last combination got set. It doesn’t have anything to do with the combination itself.”

“Right, okay, never mind, we’ll deal with it.”

I’ll bet you will, I thought. And I bet it’ll be with an oxyacetylene torch rather than with logic. I just hoped they wouldn’t ship the safe to Quantico or some other godforsaken place where it would attract the attention of politically motivated gangsters.

“You’re sure there’s no other strongbox around?” Ana asked. I said no.

“No other hides?”

I shook my head.

“What about all your safety deposit boxes?”

“I’m sure he would have changed those,” I said. Come on, five isn’t “all,” I thought. Five is still a nonparanoid amount. “Unless he didn’t get the time to go to Vegas and deal with the one at the Bank of Nevada.”

“Yeah, Bill’s already on his way to check on that one,” she said. I’d never heard of Bill, but I didn’t think he’d come up again anyway.

“Great,” I said. And be sure to put my underwear up on eBay, I thought.

“Hey, check this out,” another of the tech people said. I think his name was Chet Nguen. He called us over to my old desk, which had a new Samsung laptop on it. There weren’t any sensitive files on it, of course-those were all in the safe-but it did have the names of some recently modified files, and the last-touched file had automatically named itself after the first distinctive phrase in the contents, and, in the last five minutes, Chet had already deciphered the name out of EncryptX. It was a little on the ominous side: Why I Did It.

Marena got the Mission: Impossible — style team together again-herself, me, Taro, Ashley 2, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, Hernan, and Ana Vergara. Our main goal was, of course, to track down and capture Jed 1 and interrogate him about the Domino Cascade. We’d also be trying, concurrently, to identify the Cascade and divert it directly. So far, though, we hadn’t recognized even a single one of the “dominos.” Finally, the members other than me had a third directive that I suspected-to keep a close eye on me. That is, me, Jed 3. Marena was still worried that I might make the same decision as Jed 1 — even without an overdose of tsam lic-and then there would be two Game-savvy homicidal maniacs running around. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter how sentimental Marena might get about me, it wouldn’t matter to the Firm. As soon as I’d delivered the goods-the full deposition, the Game, and Jed 1, in increasing order of importance-Warren would slate me for cleansing. Still, I went along with it all for now.

Jed 1 could have been anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, Indiana, Peru, or even Peru, Indiana. There had been a hint, though. Jed 1 would be happy that the end of the world would kill the Mano Blanco guys and that damn nun. He’d want to let them know ahead of time and suffer. So I had feelers out watching them. And of course, I was watching all the nudibranch sites. He’d be happy to be in a place where he could take a last look at his favorite genus of animals, nudibranchs-but that could be at almost any of the reefs in the Caribbean, on the Pacific Coast, or even Southeast Asia or Australia. However, since Jed 1 and I shared versions of the same mind, I was at least able to compete with him on a high level, with almost a kind of virtual ESP.

I played four Games against the absent Jed 1. Unfortunately, somehow-despite my using the Human Game algorithms against his less powerful ones-he was able to anticipate my moves. And he kept eluding me.

Finally, on the Second Day of the Dead-that is, Friday-we got the certified decryption of Why I Did It. Marena and I read it without saying anything. There were sixty-two pages of Executive Solutions research attached, confirming that what Jed had identified as the first dominoes had, indeed, fallen.

Marena and I-the rest of the team were setting up a temporary office in the Holopaw compound-were alone on the sofa in her office, and we sat for two minutes without saying anything. I know because I was facing the clock collection on her big desk and this gaudy ormolu French Directoire thing had a big old second-counting annular ring that kept whirling around like a damn salad spinner. We sat for another two minutes without saying anything.

“Maybe nothing else is going to happen,” I said, finally. “Maybe he’s just blowing smoke at us.”

“Um… yeah, I hope so,” she said. “I don’t think so. Though.”

“No.”

We sat without saying anything, this time for two and a half minutes.

“Hey,” I asked, “are you sure Jed-Sub-One never told you how he thought the world would end?”