“What happened?” Zero said.

“He thought he could find Meerm himself.”

“Oh, God!” Romy said.

“I know, I know, it was foolish. But it’s okay. We’re picking him up at the McDonald’s we passed back there on Springfield Avenue. Now nobody get on his case, okay? He was just trying—”

“But this means he found out where Meerm is.”

Patrick nodded, with no little pride in his grin. “That he did. And if we can decipher the directions he got, we’ll have Meerm on her way to Dr. Cannon before you know it.”

Romy smiled, sharing his infectious optimism, allowing herself to hope.

Lister’s voice grated through the encrypted phone line. “Still no sign of that damned monkey?”

Damned monkey was right. Double-damned monkey. Luca leaned back in his sofa, put his feet up on the old coffee table, and scratched his throat. His shaver had been a little dull this morning and it had irritated his skin, but not as much as the events of the past few days were irritating his gut. How many places could a pregnant sim hide?

“Not a trace.”

Behind him, in the kitchen, he could hear Maria humming as she cooked up their Saturday night feast. A spicy aroma wafted around him, making his mouth water.

“Shit,” Lister said. “I’m getting lots of questions about all the men we’re tying up. Let me get this straight: You’ve got five cars and twelve men involved in this surveillance?”

“Correct: four cars stationary, one on patrol, with rotating twelve-hour shifts of six men each.”

Suddenly Maria’s face hovered above him, grinning as she dangled a glistening sliver of chicken over his lips. He opened his mouth and she dropped it in. Delicious. He blew her a kiss and she swayed back to the kitchen.

Damn, he was going to miss her.

“And you think that’s the way to go?”

Luca chewed and swallowed quickly. “That’s what all our sim experts advise. They say she’s got to eat, so that means if we don’t catch her wandering around or trying to sneak back into the sim crib, we’ll find another sim sneaking out to bring her food.”

“Makes sense to me, but upstairs is complaining about the manpower commitment.”

“It’s not as if these guys have anything better to keep them busy.”

“Oh, but very soon they will. Guillotine is a go.”

Luca stiffened. “When?”

“Can’t say more now. Maybe in person.”

Luca understood. Even a hard-encrypted phone wasn’t secure enough for a conversation about Operation Guillotine. Because Guillotine was what SIRG was all about, and the neck scheduled to be placed under that blade was Aazim Saad’s.

Al Qaeda was gone, but its goals and methods lived on in various smaller offshoots. The most active was the Malaysian Mujahideen led by Aazim Saad.

One of his men had ratted out the Omani terrorist kingpin, and his headquarters had been traced to a rubber plantation in Borneo. Operation Guillotine would drop three commando teams of specially trained mandrilla sims into the surrounding jungle and have them raid the compound, killing anything that moved. All their gear—weapons, clothing, communications—would be foreign-made to obscure their point of origin. Even if one were captured alive, it couldn’t give anything away, because it wouldn’t know anything, and couldn’t tell if it did. The Malaysian Mujahideen would be wiped out, and no one would know by whom.

This had been the Old Man’s dream: an anonymous strike force that could operate with greater efficiency and ferocity than any human equivalent. All SIRG had needed was clearance from the Pentagon to proceed. Now they had it. And if Guillotine was a success, Conrad Landon would be the toast of a very small, very elite inner circle in the Department of Defense.

Luca had seen the mandrillas in training. Their ferocity awed him. They knew no fear, and gave no quarter. Their downside was the difficulty controlling them, and stopping them once they got started. Heaven help any innocent bystanders near the Saad compound.

“All I can say,” Lister said, “is that some of those surveillance men are going to be needed back in Idaho for the launch.”

“I don’t think I’ll need much more time. It’s been only forty-eight hours. She can’t go—”

His PCA rang. “Just a sec. That’s from the surveillance team.” He put Lister on hold, snatched up the phone, and recognized Snyder’s voice.

“Guess what just happened?”

“What?” Please, Luca thought. Nothing bad. Don’t tell me anyone’s dead.

But Snyder sounded pleased with himself; almost happy.

“I’m pulling up to the drive-thru window of this McDonald’s near the crib to get coffees for the guys when I see this beat-up old van with New York tags pull into the lot. And I’m thinking, you know, there’s a lot of dirty old white vans with New York plates, but maybe this is the one I spotted in Brooklyn, you know, when Palmer and Jackson disappeared from that op. And I was wishing I had the tag number handy when—”

“Get to the goddamn point!”

“Okay, okay. So I’m watching the van and I see the rear door swing open. No big deal, but then this sim hops out of the bushes and jumps inside.”

The PCA’s seams let out a faint squeak as Luca’s grip tightened. “Was it her?”

“Nah. This was a skinny male, but you could tell from his coveralls he’s from the crib.”

“He’s leading them to her! Where are they now?”

“About twenty-five yards ahead of me, heading back toward the crib.”

“Don’t lose them. You hear me, Snyder? Do…not…lose them. And don’t let them spot you either. You spook them, they’ll take off.”

“Maybe I should contact the others so we can tag team them on the tail.”

“Good idea. No, wait.”

Luca’s mind raced over the possibilities. These people had fooled him before. Was it sheer luck that Snyder spotted the sim jumping into the van, or was hesupposed to see it? The expected response was to mobilize the entire surveillance team, which would leave the sim crib unguarded. Could that be their real purpose?

“Do it this way. Lowery and Stritch have the front door. While Lowery takes the car to back you up, tell Stritch to go inside and find out from that jerk Morales which of his sims is missing. If the sim from the van somehow makes it back to the crib, I want to know which one it is.”

“Got it,” Snyder said.

“I’m on my way over now. I can’t emphasize how important this is, Snyder. Don’t blow it.”

He returned to Lister. “Gotta go. Tell the folks upstairs our ‘big manpower commitment’ just paid off.”

He ended the call without waiting for a response. He told Maria not to wait up as he rushed for the door.

“You did a good job, Tome,” Romy said, feeling for the agitated old sim.

Tome sat hunched on a rear seat of the van, distraught that he’d failed to find Meerm. Romy had moved out of the front. She and Zero flanked him.

“Yes,” Zero added. “An excellent job. But now tell us again what Beece said. Try to remember exactly.”

Romy listened closely to Tome’s recitation of Beece’s fractured directions to Meerm’s hiding place, trying to fathom a way to put them to practical use.

And then from the front seat Patrick said, “I think we’ve got trouble.”

Zero leaned forward. “What’s wrong?”

“A green Taurus has been following us since McDonald’s.”

Romy tensed. “You’re sure?”

“He’s hanging back, but I just made a couple of turns and he’s still with us.”

“Let’s leave the neighborhood, then,” Zero said. “Head for one of the highways—22, 78, doesn’t matter, just so long as it takes us to the airport.”

“Newark Airport?”

“It’s a maze, and a traffic nightmare. If we can’t lose them there, we never will.”

“But what about Meerm?” Romy said.

Zero shook his head. “Too risky to look for her now. We’d lead them right to her.”