PicoCon’s molecular knights-errant had gobbled up the Old Lady’s cancers and stopped her biological clock ticking. They had snatched her back from the very threshold of death, and made her as fit and well as anyone could be who’d suffered seventy-odd years of more-than-usual deterioration. Nine hundred out of a thousand people in her situation would have been irredeemably set on the road to premature senility, and ninety-nine out of the remaining hundred would have keeled over as a result of some physical cause that the nanomech hadn’t entirely set aside, but Harriet was the thousandth. Gifted with the poisoned chalice of eternal old age, she’d gone on and on and on—and she was still going on, nearly forty years later. She was a walking miracle.

In a world full of old ladies who looked anywhere between forty and seventy years younger than they actually were, Harriet was theOld Lady, Tithonia herself. Madoc knew, although most of her acquaintances did not, that her second nickname came from some ancient Greek myth about a man made immortal by a careless god, who’d forgotten to specify that he also had to stay young.

Even as a walking miracle, of course, Harriet aliasTithonia would have been no great shakes in a world lousy with miracles. PicoCon had a new one every day, all wrapped up and ready for the morning news, with abundant “human interest” built in by the PR department. Harriet had taken it upon herself to become more than a mere miracle, though; she’d become an honest-to-goodness legend. Almost as soon as she was pronounced free of tumors she’d reembarked on a life of crime, mending her ways just sufficiently to move into a better class of felonies.

“If Ican’t live every day as if it were my last, who can?” she was famous for saying. “I’m already dead, and this is heaven—what can they do to me that would make a difference?”

Madoc supposed that if the LAPD had reallywanted to put Harriet out of business, lock her up, and throw away the key, they could probably have done it twenty years ago—but they never had. Some said that it was because she had powerful friends among the corps for whom she undertook heroic missions of industrial espionage, but Madoc didn’t believe that. He knew full well that any powerful friends a mercenary happened to acquire were apt to be out of the office whenever trouble came to call, while the powerful enemies on the other side of the coin were always on the job. Madoc’s theory was that the LAPD let Harriet alone out of respect for her legendary status, and because a few notorious adversaries on the loose were invaluable when it came to budget negotiations with the city.

Either way, Madoc and everyone else figured that it was a privilege to work with the Old Lady. That, as much as her efficiency, was why she was so expensive.

Harriet finally finished her scrutiny of the VE tape and ducked out from under the hood. Her face was richly grooved with the deepest wrinkles Madoc had ever seen and her hair was reduced to the merest wisps of white, but her dark eyes were sharp and her gaze could cut like a knife.

“The body had been burned, you say?” she questioned him—not because she didn’t remember what he’d said but because she wanted it all set out in neat array while she put the puzzle together.

“Thoroughly,” he confirmed. “It must have been covered in something that burned even hotter than gasoline, then torched.” It was easy enough to see what Harriet was getting at. Whoever had committed the murder had had time. They could have torched the VE pack along with the body if they’d wanted to, or they could simply have picked it up and put it in a pocket. If they’d left it behind they had done so deliberately, in order that it would be found. The only hitch in that plan, Madoc assumed, had been that it was he and Diana who had found it instead of the police. Madoc, naturally enough, had brought it to the Old Lady instead of to Interpol.

“We’re supposed to believe that the tape explains why the guy was killed,” Harriet concluded.

“That’s the way I figure it,” Madoc admitted. “If that really is the original tape that was used as a base to synthesize Silas Arnett’s confessions—or the first of them, at any rate, it identifies Surinder Nahal as the kidnapper in chief.”

Madoc had inspected the tape himself before giving it to Harriet for more expert analysis. It contained a taped conversation between the captive Silas Arnett and another man, easily identifiable in the raw footage by voice as well as appearance as Surinder Nahal. Various phrases spoken by both men—but especially those spoken by Nahal, carefully distorted to make recognition difficult—had been used in the first of Arnett’s two “confessions,” but nothing Arnett had said on thistape amounted to an admission of guilt regarding anycrime, past or present. On the other hand, there was no evidence on thistape that he had been tortured, or even fiercely interrogated.

“Insofar as the discovery points a finger at anyone,” Harriet went on, “it implies that Arnett’s friends took swift and certain revenge against Surinder Nahal because he tried to set them up, and left the VE pak on his body to explain why they killed him.”

“Thus setting themselves up all over again,” Madoc pointed out. “I think it stinks, but I’m not sure where the odor originates. How about you? Is the tape genuine? Is it really raw footage, or is it just a slightly less transparent lie than the one they dumped on the Web?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Harriet said.

“I know it is,” Madoc said, trying not to let his exasperation show. “What’s the answer?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Madoc,” Harriet said. “The tape’s a fake. It’s not a crude fake, but it’s definitely a fake. Even Interpol could have determined that—probably. The fact that Silas Arnett still hasn’t turned up would have alerted them to the same stink that reached your sensitive nostrils.”

“So why the hesitation?” Madoc wanted to know.

“The thing is,” the Old Lady said, “that I’m not sure how much deeper we ought to dig into this. You see, if Arnett’s friends didn’tkill the man whose body you found, then someone else did—and it certainly wasn’t some dilettante Eliminator.”

“I don’t get it,” Madoc said. “You’re supposed to be the only ace Webwalker in the world who doesn’t give a damn what she gets involved with. You’re supposed to be utterly fearless.”

“I am,” she told him coldly. “This isn’t a matter of watching myback, Madoc—it’s youI’m worried about. Nobody’s going to come after me, and I doubt that they intend to harm Damon Hart, but you’re not part of the game plan. You might easily be seen as a minor irritation best removed from the field of play with the minimum of fuss. If this tape was really intended to fall into Interpol’s hands rather than yours the people who left it might be a trifle miffed, and they’re not the kind of people you want to have as enemies. It’s one thing to set yourself up as an outlaw, quite another to become a thorn in the side of people who are above the law.”

Madoc stared at her. “Do you know who’s behind all this?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t knowanything,” she told him, “but I’m absolutely certain that I can make the right guess.”

“Is that why you called it an interestingproblem?”

“Yes it is—but what interests me is why, not who. It’s the whythat I can’t fathom. The how has its intriguing features too, but I think I understand pretty well how the moves came to be played the way they were—I just can’t figure out why the game’s being played at all.”

“Well,” said Madoc a little impatiently, “what interests meat present is that Damon has disappeared. When I first got you involved, I admit, it was mainly a matter of money—Damon’s money. I was just doing a job for him. I don’t really care about Arnett, or Nahal, or Kachellek—but I docare about Damon.”