Ann looked and frowned. "Think they found the Porsche?"

"Money talks. Cops love to listen. The church can make lots of conversation." I smiled. "I wonder how Golding's going to explain it."

"Let's get back to the rest of the message." She chewed on her lip. "Do you think we should risk going to your office?"

I took a long drag on the cigarette while considering the question. Finally I said, "I think we'll have some time before any officer decides to brave the Arco itself. The story about the radiation dies hard. Beathan and his boys are more likely to conduct the search rather than bring in a third party."

"Gambit!" she said suddenly.

I ground out my cigarette butt under my heel and turned toward her. Her eyes had regained some of their life.

"A gambit is a move in chess where an unimportant piece is sacrificed near the beginning of the game as part of a greater strategy."

"And who's the pawn we're looking for?"

"Bridget said, `The paradoxical one is the gambit.'" Ann mused for a moment. "`A thousand men yet none' is a paradox."

"It's a contradiction, actually. You think a thousand men are going to be sacrificed somewhere?" I watched the `copter circle around south Hollywood a couple more times. They gave up and flew east.

"Maybe a thousand men. Maybe none." She leaned back to stare at the ceiling. "The paradox is linked to the gambit somehow. And what about the monsters beneath the earth born of fire and all that?"

I shrugged. "Hell, obviously. It's got to be all a metaphor."

"Yes! But for what?"

I spread my hands helplessly. "I'm no philosopher."

The bus rumbled over the Harbor Freeway junction, which was more pothole than pavement. It lumbered up the Third Street offramp. I pressed the bell strip to signal the driver. He turned around to look back at us with languid, pained eyes. Air brakes wheezed, coughed once, and growled us to a halt. The doors ached open.

"Metaphors are fine," I said, stepping off the bus and extending my hand to her like some scruffy Galahad. Like a tousled Guinevere, she took my arm and stepped to the pavement. "Except that a metaphor can be misconstrued. Look at the different ways the stories in the Bible are interpreted. That stuff she mumbled could have a hundred different meanings. If it means anything at all."

We crossed the freeway overpass to stroll down toward Figueroa and the Arco Towers. Ann grew moody.

"We'll just have to keep at it until we find the answer."

"Fine," I said. "My fee is five hundred grams a day. In the meantime, I'm involved in another project."

She stopped and turned toward me. The wind from the freeway blew through her hair, tugging at her dress. Her hair and shiny Danskin top shimmered in the descending sunlight like a dream of drifting gold dust on a distant blue horizon.

"This is part of your project. Those phenomena were no coincidence. Those priests didn't pick us randomly to kidnap. Those Nazarene Nazis didn't just happen to pass by the store and decide to smash it up. They recognized you as being a focal point of fundamental importance."

"So I've got someone running scared. So Ammo's setting up the crime of the millennium. The world trembles." I kept walking.

She fell in step with me after a moment. "It's more than that, Dell. Bridget said, `The time of the Number is nigh.' I think you just hit on it. We're less than two months away from the millennium. A lot of people believe that the millennium will mark the return of the kingdom of god."

"Then they'll be off by a year. The millennium begins with the year two thousand one."

"People like large round numbers."

"Yeah," I said. "Especially on pieces of engraved paper. And that's just what all the professional prophets and doomsayers have been getting in exchange for undelivered goods."

"Wouldn't it be nice to change that?"

We'd reached the bottom of the offramp. I turned right at Figueroa.

"Killing God wouldn't change that," I said. "If He even exists at all, He hasn't done much to prevent people from exploiting His name. Removing Him won't stop the con game."

"It might," she said, "if the victims saw through the sham."

The day was still clear, the sky about as brown as it usually is in fall. Most of the derelicts were somewhere else. A beautiful day. Not a drop of blood in the sky. Old Downtown lay quiet and still, the late afternoon shadows long and cool.

Ann stopped to point in shock at what was left of the sign advertising the underground Arco Plaza shops. The shops had been abandoned after the blast, of course, and the below-street mall sealed up.

"Dell-" She dropped her arm down and turned to me. "You know the traditional image of the Devil's tail, don't you?"

"Long. Black. A heart or spade shape on the end."

"Like an arrow."

I nodded. She nodded. We looked at the Plaza sign. A fat black arrow described a three-quarter circle to point downward.

"`The tail of the Dark One points to the out and down, running near full-circle,'" she recited. "He's down there!"

It was as if someone had thrown a switch.

I tried to ask, "Who?" but the word froze in my throat as I stared at the sky. Without a cloud anywhere, the sky suddenly darkened. A wind whipped up behind us, icy and insistent. My ears rang from growing pressure, like an inaudible vibration that blanked out all sound. Above us, the jagged remains of the tower were transformed into a gleaming black dagger poised over the earth.

"We can't get down there," I said over the deafening silence. "The Plaza's been a ruin ever since the bombing. Abandoned. Most of the radioactive debris was washed into it during the decontamination."

Ann stared in horror at the phantasmal ebony blade suspended above us. Blood formed along its cutting edge, running down to fall in impossibly huge droplets to the rubble in the street.

Laughter echoed up from somewhere. A mocking, derisive obscenity that sounded uneasily familiar, like the voices that shout in nightmares.

We both stood our ground. Shadows reached down from the lightless sky to flit about us. They snaked and twisted about, always at the edge of perception, just at the far corner of sight.

"How dangerous is it down there?" Ann asked.

"You have to ask?" I swatted at the spooks even as the wind pushed us closer. "I lived two hundred feet above it for twelve years and got cancer for my trouble."

"If he's down there," she said, not even hearing my answer, "we've got to stop him." She glared unblinking at the dagger aimed at the heart of the world.

"If he's down there-whomever you mean-I need to get into my office. The church tithed my Colt when they sapped me."

"You want to go inside that?" The glittering, bloody image transfixed her.

I grabbed her arm. "Sure." I pulled her toward the mirage. "It's just like the blood before-an illusion. Fake. You want to burrow down into a radioactive swamp! Which is crazier?"

The cold wind had become a gale. It blew at our backs, urging us toward the glistening point of the blade. I didn't like that one bit. Maybe, I thought, just maybe some magical equivalent of judo was called for. Take the offensive. Turn the impetus against the attacker.

Running away seemed much more sensible.

Something small and hideously blue-black skittered past us, chattering like an angry monkey, to vanish into the false night. The shadows gained strength. They squeezed at our chests to keep us from breathing. My lungs labored like a frantic animal in a giant's fist. I dragged Ann forward.

She snapped her wrist out of my grasp with a defiant tug. She didn't run away, though-she kept my pace. We clambered over crumbled steel and glass to reach the place where the tower's revolving doors should have been. A roiling pattern of black and grey enveloped everything. It looked like the surface of some horrid polluted sea. I reached out toward it, plunged into it up to my wrist. It felt like liquid nitrogen.