“Go on,” Damon said, meekly enough.

“Firstly, we’ve received the medical examiner’s final report on the body discovered in the house where Miss Caisson was arrested. DNA analysis confirms that it’s the body of Surinder Nahal. The ME estimates that the time of death was at least two hours before Miss Caisson and Madoc Tamlin arrived on the scene, so we’re certain that they didn’t kill him, but it has become a matter of great urgency that we see the VE pak which your friend removed from the scene. We have reason to believe that it might contain valuable evidence as to the identity of the real killer and the motive for the crime.”

What reason? Damon wondered. “I’d be very interested to see it myself,” he countered warily. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to contact Madoc. I presume, then, that you’ll be releasing Diana immediately?”

“I’m afraid not,” Yamanaka told him. “The local police are still considering the possibility of charging her with illegal entry—and she was of course an accessory to the assault.”

“So charge her and bail her out.”

“I’m reluctant to do that until I’ve talked to Madoc Tamlin,” the inspector told him.

“You can’t hold her hostage, Mr. Yamanaka.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Yamanaka assured him, “but until Tamlin and the VE pak are safely in my hands, I can’t be sure of the exact extent of her culpability.” The virtual atmosphere was still heavily pregnant with some vital item of information that Yamanaka was carefully withholding.

Damon fought to suppress his annoyance, but it wasn’t easy. “You must know as well as I do that the VE pak is an ill-wrapped parcel of red herring that’s already begun to stink,” he told the inspector waspishly. “The same is probably true of its resting place.”

Yamanaka didn’t raise an eyebrow, but it seemed to Damon that the policeman’s synthesized gaze became more tightly focused. “Do you have any evidence to support the conjecture that the body is notthat of Surinder Nahal?” the inspector asked sharply.

“No, I don’t,” Damon admitted, “but the evidence that it iscould have been cooked up by a biotech team with the necessary expertise just as easily as a fake VE tape. If whoever is behind the kidnapping really is convinced for some reason that Conrad Helier faked his own death, it would be only natural for him to hire a bioengineer with a similar background to repeat the trick. Ask yourself, Inspector Yamanaka—if you were in that position, who would youhave hired to do the job?”

“I’m a policeman, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka reminded him. “However difficult it may be, my job is to collect evidence and build cases. You, on the other hand, are a citizen. Your duty, however you might resent it, is to obey the law and give what assistance you can to my investigation. That VE pak was taken from a crime scene, which makes it evidence—and I’d be very annoyed if anyone tampered with it before handing it in.”

“If I can get the VE pak for you,” Damon said bluntly, “will you drop all the charges against Madoc and Diana?”

“That’s not my decision,” Yamanaka replied unyieldingly.

Damon gritted his teeth and paused for a few seconds, instructing himself to remain calm. “What else?” he asked. “What’s happened to heat things up?”

“We’ve found another body,” the inspector told him bleakly.

“Karol’s?” Damon asked, although he knew that was the lesser of the two probable evils.

“No—Silas Arnett’s. He was found in a body bag dumped in the middle of a road up in the Hollywood Hills. Police officers conducting a routine search of the neighborhood found a chair identical to that displayed in the first broadcast tape in a house nearby. There were bloodstains on some recently severed straps that had been used to bind a man’s wrists and ankles to the chair. There were several spy eyes in the walls of the room, all of them on short loop times. The tapes we’ve recovered show Arnett being shot in the chest while still confined. The man in the body bag died from exactly such a gunshot—without his internal technology, he had no effective defenses against such an injury.”

Damon was silent for a few moments, absorbing this news.

“Does the tape show the shooter?” he asked.

“Yes, but he’s unidentifiable. His suitskin had a face mask. He had a companion, similarly masked.”

“But you think they’re Eliminators—and you suspect that the VE pak left on the burned body will be a similar record of an execution.”

“The body bag was presumably placed in the road in order to draw attention to the house, and to the tape,” Yamanaka said. “That seems consonant with the hypothesis that the shooting was the work of Eliminators.”

Damon couldn’t be sure whether the careful wording was routine scrupulousness, or whether Yamanaka was laying down a red carpet for any alternative explanation Damon might have to offer. Damon had already laid the groundwork for a rival account by suggesting that the burned body Madoc had found wasn’t Nahal’s at all but merely some dummy tricked out to seemlike Nakal’s, possibly designed by Nahal himself—but Silas Arnett’s body hadn’t been burned to a crisp.

We haven’t killed anyone, the mirror man had said—but he had certainly exposed the people he had named to the danger of Eliminator attack. Now Karol’s boat had been blown up, and Silas Arnett had been shot. If Conrad Helier had faked his own death, perhaps he had faked those incidents too—but that ifwas looming larger by the minute. Nor was Silas the only one who had been exposed to possible Eliminator wrath by the mirror man’s stupid broadcasts. Damon was the only one alive who had been forthrightly condemned as an “enemy of mankind.”

There was still a possibility, Damon told himself, that this was all a game, all a matter of carefully contrived illusions piled up tit-for-tat—but if it weren’t, he could be in big trouble. The question was: what did he intend to do about it?

“Your people always seem to be one step behind, Mr. Yamanaka,” he observed, by way of making time to think.

“So it seems,” the inspector agreed. “I think it might help if you were to tell us everythingyou know, don’t you? Surely even you must see that the time has come to give us the VE pak.”

It was the “even you” that did it. Damon felt that he had troubles enough without insult being added to injury.

“I don’t have it,” he snapped. “I don’t have anythingthat you could count as evidence.”

Yamanaka’s image didn’t register any overt trace of disappointment or annoyance, but the lack of display had to be a matter of pride. Yamanaka still had one card up his sleeve, and he didn’t hesitate to play it in spite of its meager value. “Miss Caisson is veryanxious to contact you, Mr. Hart,” he said. “I’m sure she’d be grateful if you’d return her calls.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Damon said drily. “I’ll do that. Please call me if you have any more news.” He broke the connection and immediately called the number Diana had inscribed on his answering machine in letters of fire that were only a little less clamorous than Interpol’s formal demand.

The LAPD’s switchboard shunted him into a VE very different from the one Hiru Yamanaka had employed: a pseudophotographic image in which Diana was seated in a jail cell behind a wall of virtual glass. Fortunately, she seemed more relieved than angry to see him. She hadn’t forgiven him anything, but she was desperate for contact with the outside world.

“I’ve just been talking to Yamanaka,” Damon said, by way of preemptive self-protection. “I told him to charge you and bail you if he wasn’t prepared simply to release you, but he won’t do it. He’s got dead bodies piling up all over the place, and he wants Madoc badly. He’ll be forced to let you go eventually, but you’ll have to be patient.”

“This is crazy, Damon,” Diana complained. “They must know that we didn’t kill the guy. We didn’t even know the body was there.”