“Why?” Damon wanted to know. “How many kidnappings did you do beforethey got a picture of your face?”

His captor wasn’t about to answer that one either.

“Why didn’t your employerhave his quiet word before he turned me loose last time?” Damon demanded, allowing his tone to declare that hewas the one who had the serious grievance, even though he no longer felt as if he were a fleshy ants’ nest. “Why come after me again, after a mere matter of hours?”

“Something else went wrong,” the tall man muttered. “You Heliers are absolute hell to deal with, I’ll give you that.”

“What?”

The man with the bruise shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “We were monitoring an eye at the place we left Arnett,” he said. “We were expecting hugs all round when your people came to get him—but that wasn’t the way it went. They shot him! Can you believe that? They shothim. Next thing we know, he’s been dumped in the road!”

“Are you sure they killedhim?” Damon asked sharply.

The tall man hesitated before he shrugged again, which suggested to Damon that it was a recognized possibility that Silas hadn’t been killed and that the body dumped in the road might have been the same kind of substitute as the body left for Madoc to find. “His nanotech had all been flushed,” the man with the bruise said eventually. “They must have known that if they watched the tape we put out on the Web. Maybe they were just knocking him out—but they had no reason to do that if they were yourpeople. Who’d ever have thought Eliminators could be that smart, that well organized?”

“Who are mypeople supposed to be?” Damon asked him. “You mean Conrad Helier’s people—except that Conrad Helier’s dead. So is Karol Kachellek, except that you probably don’t believe that either. So who’s supposed to be running things, given that Eveline Hywood’s a quarter of a million miles away in lunar orbit? Me?”

The tall man shook his head sadly. “All I wanted was a quiet talk,” he repeated, as if he simply could not believe that such an innocent intention had led to brawling, shooting, and kidnapping—all of it dutifully registered on spy eyes that the police would have debriefed by now.

“Where are we going?” Damon asked.

“Out of town,” the tall man informed him gruffly. “Your fault, not mine. We could have sorted it out back home if you hadn’t blown it. Now, we have to take it somewhere reallyprivate.”

The Sespe and Sequoia Wilderness reserves had supposedly been rendered trackless in the wake of the Second Plague War—by which time its chances of ever getting back to an authentic wilderness state were only a little better than zero—but Damon knew that closure against wheeled vehicles didn’t signify much when helicopters like this one could land in a clearing thirty meters across.

“You can’t get more private than Olympus,” Damon said—but as he looked out again at the nonvirtual mountains which were now surrounding the helicopter he realized that he had actually contrived to force his adversaries to take a step they had not intended. This time, there was a record of his abduction in Interpol’s hands. This time, Interpol could put faces and names to his captors, or at least to their foot soldiers. He knew that he could claim no credit for the coup—it was all the result of a chapter of accidents and misconceptions—but the fact remained that the game players had finally been taken beyond the limits of their game plan. They had been forced to improvise. For the first time, PicoCon—assuming that it wasPicoCon—was losing its grip.

“Your boss is scared,” Damon said, working through the train of thought. “He thinks it really might have been the Eliminators who got to Silas, after the people he expected to collect him never showed up. One minute he was convinced the message Silas was supposed to deliver was home and dry, the next he was unconvinced again. You’re right—if Silas isdead you could be in real trouble, especially now that Interpol has two faces in the frame. Mr. Yamanaka doesn’t like the way you’ve been running rings around him. He’ll come after you with such ferocity that you’ll be very lucky indeed to get away with only losing your job. How much damage could you do to PicoCon, do you think, if you and your partner decided to talk?”

The tall man didn’t react to the mention of PicoCon. “All you had to do was listen,” he complained. “You could have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“If you were the ones who took Silas in the first place,” Damon pointed out, “and posted that stupid provocative note under my door, you went to a hell of a lot of trouble yourselves, all because you wouldn’t listenwhen we told you that Conrad Helier is dead.”

“Sure,” said the tall man scornfully. “Helier’s dead, and para-DNA is a kind of extraterrestrial tar, just like Hywood says. All you ever had to do was listen—but now it’s getting ugly and it’s all yourfault.”

“ Whatdoes Eveline say about para-DNA?” Damon wanted to know.

“If you spent more time listening to the news and less playing cloak-and-dagger, you’d know. She made an announcement to the entire world, press conference and all. Para-DNA is extraterrestrial—the first representative of an entirely new life system, utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating. We are not alone, the universe of life awaits us, etcetera, etcetera. Now we know where you got your impulsive nature from, don’t we?”

“Are you saying that para-DNA isn’textraterrestrial—or that it isn’t harmless?”

“I don’t know,” the tall man informed him, as if it were somehow Damon’s fault that he didn’t know. “All I know is that if it’s on the news, it’s more than likely to be lies, and that if the name Hywood’s attached to it then it must have something to do with our little adventure. I may be only the hired help but I’m not stupid. Whatever all this is about, your people aren’t responding sensibly. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that Hywood was supposed to talk to my employers before she started shooting her mouth off to the whole wide world, but she decided to kick off early instead. The whole damn lot of you are so damn touchy. Must be hereditary.”

Damon didn’t bother to point out that Eveline Hywood wasn’t his mother. Conrad Helier washis real father, and Conrad Helier’s closest associates had provided the nurture to complement his nature. It had never occurred to him before that his contentiousness might be a legacy of his genes or his upbringing, but he could see now that someone considering his reactions to this strange affair alongside those of his foster parents might well feel entitled to lump them all together.

The helicopter now began its descent toward a densely wooded slope which, while nowhere near as precipitate as the slope of the virtual mountain where he had talked to the robot man, nevertheless seemed wild enough and remote enough to suit anyone’s idea of perfect privacy.

It was just as well that the helicopter could land in a thirty-meter circle, because the space where it touched down wasn’t significantly bigger. The tall man undid Damon’s safety harness before he could do it himself and said: “Can you get down?”

“I’m fine,” Damon assured him. “No thanks to you. You’re not coming?”

“I’m far from fine—and that’s entirely down to you,” the man with the bruise countered. “ Wehave to disappear. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure meeting you, but at least I’ll never see you again.”

“You know,” said Damon as the pilot reached back to open the door beside him, “you really have a problem. Apart from being an incompetent asshole, you have this moronic compulsion to blame other people for your own mistakes.” He got the distinct impression that the tall man would have hit him, if only he’d dared.

“Thanks,” said Damon to the pilot as he lowered himself to the ground. He ducked down low the way everybody always did on TV, although he knew that he was in no real danger from the whirling rotor blades.