“We can’t just walk out with it,” Dr. G said. “Fayza would never let us keep it.”

The angel had a point. I snapped the lid back in place and closed the rubber curtain. I walked out of the bathroom, then back in.

Dr. G said, “We need—”

“A decoy,” I said.

I jogged back to the office and grabbed the box of communion wafers.

In the front room, Pastor Rudy and Luke sat on the seats—the pastor relaxed, Luke anxious—while Hootan paced in front of them, still holding his hand in his front pocket.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked him.

“What?” Hootan asked.

“The hand thing. Either show them the gun or not. What’s the deal with hiding it, but letting everyone know you’re hiding it?”

Hootan resentfully removed his hand from his pouch, sans gun. He looked at the box in my hand. “Did you find it?”

“I have to test it, but I’m ninety percent sure the pastor here is delivering it through these.”

“Crackers?”

Oh, right. Muslim. “Communion wafers,” I said. “The powder form of the drug mixes easily with unleavened bread.”

Luke looked surprised. Pastor Rudy seemed calm. “You’re welcome to them,” he said to me.

“If you’re wrong—,” Hootan said.

“Then we come back and bust up the joint. Or whatever it is gangsters do.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Dr. G said.

Luke said to the pastor, “You’re not just going to let them walk out of here?”

Rudy patted the man’s arm. “Everything works out, Luke.” He looked at me. “Vaya con dios.”

“Like I have any choice,” I said.

*   *   *

Hootan, his mission accomplished now, dropped me off at Bobby’s apartment. It worried me that I didn’t have to give him directions.

Before I went in the building, I used the flip phone Fayza had given me to call the hospital. I had to speak my way through half a dozen options until the patient phone rang on the NAT ward. If you’re looking for the last pay phones in North America, they’re all located in psych wards.

A female voice answered. “Hello?”

“Put Olivia Skarsten on the line, please,” I said.

The woman said, “Who?”

I finally recognized the voice as belonging to Alexandra, a Korean college student who’d subsisted for four years on a diet of pita chips and intelligence enhancers, until she began to see Manitous residing in furniture. “I want Ollie, damn it. It’s me, Lyda.”

“Oh!” Then: “Are you calling from your room?”

“Alexandra, I left three days ago.”

“Right.” She set down the phone. I could hear the tinny roar of the open line, then Alexandra yelling for Ollie in the distance. Minutes passed while I paced Bobby’s tiny apartment. I just hoped Alexandra remembered to lead Ollie to the phone. Separating the wall appliance from wall was an exercise in object differentiation that Ollie was not prepared to execute.

“Hello?” It was Ollie.

“Hey,” I said.

“Lyda.” She had no problem recognizing voices. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“So the pellet’s working?”

“I’m clean as a whistle. This is something else. I need your help.”

“You’re in trouble.”

“If I’m going to stay out of trouble, I need you.”

She knew what that meant. Not the “you” under medication. The old Ollie.

“You want me to ride without a helmet,” she said.

“Just for a little while.”

The line went silent.

“I’m not going to be very sharp for a while,” she said finally. “And then when the meds wear off … it’s going to be the whole package.”

“I figured.” With Ollie’s particular damage, there was no happy medium for medication. The minimum dose was pretty much the debilitating dose. She was on or decidedly off.

After a moment I said, “So when do you think…?”

I listened to Ollie breathe for thirty seconds, a minute. Mulling it over. Finally she said, “How about tomorrow morning?”

“You can get out by then?”

“It’s not Fort Knox.”

THE PARABLE OF

the Ticking Clock

In those days, after the fall of the towers and the bombing of the trains and the wars in desert cities, after the chemical attacks of New Delhi and the Arab Spring chilled into the Autumn of the Iron Boot, the woman Olivia Skarsten left her post in the United States Army and became a communications analyst for Calasys, Inc., one of the hundreds of private corporations serving the signals intelligence needs of the American empire. She served her company, and her country, very well, and served them even better when she began using Clarity, a certain designer drug that was all the rage in the spook set. She might have served for longer if it had not been for the Case of the Broken Watch.

One of the subjects on the monitor list that Olivia was responsible for was a Pakistani expatriate living in New York City. The man—let’s call him Akbar—had been added to that list because of family relations: Two cousins were known members of the LeT, a Pakistani extremist group that longed to strike a blow against India and its allies. One day Akbar made an internet voice call to his brother-in-law back home in Lahore—let’s call him Bashir, for alphabetical simplicity. Akbar in New York mentioned several times that he wanted to buy a luxury wristwatch. Specifically a Maurice Lacroix wristwatch. Could Bashir the brother-in-law help him?

Olivia the Analyst was curious about this exchange. She had been monitoring cell phone calls, VoIP transmissions, and email for over five years, and she had developed an instinct for the unusual. When she was using Clarity, her powers of pattern recognition were especially keen, and that included recognizing items that were not part of the pattern. She wondered, why would Akbar go to all this trouble to purchase from a relative in Pakistan? Akbar could buy any designer watch he wanted online. Or if he wanted a knockoff, the streets of New York were full of them. Even if Bashir got some fabulous wholesale discount, Olivia categorized the interaction to be—to use a term of art in her field—“fishy.”

She issued a tracking order on Bashir’s communications, and learned that a day after talking to Akbar, Bashir sent an email to an electronics store and asked about an invoice for a shipment of watches. Olivia noticed that the last three digits of the invoice corresponded to the number of a Virgin-Atlantic flight from London to Newark.

Yes, she simply noticed. At this point in her career and chemical cycle, she was firing on all cylinders. The numbers, in a bit of Clarity-induced synesthesia, rang like chimes. Only a few weeks before, on a different matter entirely, she had looked through a list of flights to Newark and New York, and the numbers had stuck in her head.

Olivia, growing nervous now, began to comb through the NSA’s data warehouse for all the signal traffic between Pakistani nationals. She ran queries on all the cleartext available, be it human-translated, autotranslated, or untranslated. In very little time she turned up forty-two conversations—forty-two!—between Pakistanis that mentioned watches, all in the last month. Flight numbers kept appearing in the conversations: a United flight from Pittsburgh, a Lufthansa flight from Munich. Olivia realized that they were trying to decide on a target.

Time was of the essence. She flagged all the relevant data and wrote an alert memo, which she sent, per protocol, to her superior. Unfortunately, this was Memorial Day weekend, and the superior was out of his office, and Olivia could not get any response from his backup. Olivia was upset. It was clearly specified in the operations manual that the team coordinator or his backup was to be available 24-7. While she was fuming, a new cell call popped up from Akbar, her ex-pat Pakistani in NYC, to Bashir in Lahore. Olivia was listening to it live. Near the end of the call, Bashir read off the same London invoice number that Olivia had intercepted before.