"Anyway, she told Bob that he was overreacting, and you really need your schooling here. She says you can stay as long as your behavior is…" Her voice dwindled into silence, and she looked up at him. She couldn't figure how to pass on the rest diplomatically: as long as you don't blast my daughter again .

"… I understand, Miri. I'll be good."

"Well. Okay." Miri looked around. "I, um, I guess that's all I had to say. I'll let you get on with… whatever you're doing. Good luck with finals."

She swung back on her bike and pedaled industriously away. That old bike had only three speeds. Robert shook his head, but he couldn't help smiling.

20

Robert's finals were over. He had earned a 2.6 average, and a B in Search and Analysis. He had worked harder than he ever had in his life. If it weren't for the imminent irrelevance of it all, he would have been proud of himself.

Now it was Monday afternoon and Robert was counting the hours, almost down to counting the minutes. The Mysterious Stranger had been very scarce lately. The cabal had met a couple of times, with Tommie doling out information on a need-to-know basis. Tommie had read too many spy novels. For now, all Robert knew was that they were meeting at the library at 5:30 tonight.

Meantime, somewhere under Camp Pendleton…

In theory, being officer of the watch for Continental U.S. Southwest was no different than running a snoop-and-swoop operation anywhere in the world. In theory, there could be world-wrecking conspirators at work here. In fact, this was home, in some of the best-connected real estate in the world. The chances they'd have to swoop were near zero. Nevertheless, for the next four hours Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., would be responsible for protecting about one hundred million of his neighbors from mass destruction.

Gu arrived twenty minutes early, checked in with the current officer of the watch, and then looked for DHS screwups. Those were usually the worst thing about CONUS watches. Through the miracle of virtual bureaucracy, Gu's Marine Expeditionary Group was tonight a part of the Department of Homeland Security. This was how DHS kept its budget so, ahem, small. "Like a modern corporation, DHS seamlessly meshes with whatever organizations are needed at the moment." That was the hype. And tonight — well glory be — there was not a single authorization glitch in sight.

Bob walked around the bunker, transformed the green plastic walls into windows on the Southern California night. The air filled with abstractions, the status of his people and his equipment, the reorganization of his share of the analyst pool. He grabbed some coffee from the machine by the door and settled down at a very ordinary desk just a few feet from the launch area.

"Patrick?"

His second-in-command appeared across the table. "Sir?"

"Who-all have we got tonight?" An unnecessary question, but Patrick Westin produced the official list. The Marine Expeditionary Group consisted of four twelve-marine maneuver teams. Call them squads; everyone else did. Back in the twentieth century, Bob's "command" would have rated a second lieutenant. On the other hand, the MEG controlled thousands of vehicles (though most were the size of model airplanes) and enough firepower to finish almost any war in history. Most important to Bob Gu: Everyone in his group had been through combat training as tough as any in the past. They were marines. Patrick called them all in for a short meeting. The room stretched back from around Bob's desk and for a few moments pretended to be an auditorium. Everyone looked cool; it had been a long time since anything had gone Really Wrong within CONUS. And were a big part of the reason why .

"We'll be here four hours," said Bob. "Hopefully, the time will be a very boring snoop. As long as that's the case, you're free to stay in staff areas adjacent to your vehicles. But most of you have been on my watch before. You know I want you to keep your eyes open. Keep up with the analysts." He waved at the analyst pool. For a CONUS Southwest watch, this amounted to about fifteen hundred dedicated specialists, but with connections leading down to hundreds of thousands of services and millions of embedded processors. Tonight, Alice was in charge of the pool, and already the changes were evident, the three-dimensional rat's nest transformed with a clarity rarely seen outside of managers' dreams. Aside from her marvelous reorganization, the display was completely conventional. Between the humans who had clearance and could communicate directly there were hundreds of color-coded associational threads. The mass of the lower levels was constantly aflicker, weights and assessments and connections shifting from second to second.

Bob pointed at the reddish threat wackos that were always part of the mix. "What have we got to worry about for the next four hours?" The analysts behind the red nodes spewed out their consensus list and supporting pointers.

But even the paranoids didn't have much to say tonight:

Action issues

Possible Anti-Librareome protest at UCSD

Belief circle riot a near certainty

Possible organized participants

Jerzy Hacek belief circle

CIA assessment of Indo-European connection

Scooch-a-mout belief circle

CIA assessment of Central African connection

CIA assessment of Sub-Saharan connection

CIA assessment of Paraguay connection

RIAA report to Congress

Commercial entities

Possible threats to infrastructure

Proximity to Critical National Security Sites

General Genomics

Huertas International

Increased illegal computation imports

Orange County

Los Angeles County

Off-scale low probability estimate linking preceding items

Law enforcement issues

FBI vice raid at Las Vegas Splendor Farm, a near certain event

Possible request for intelligence support

DEA enhancement-drug raids in Kern County

Possible request for intelligence support

Possible out-of-area activity

Pacific Islander settlements in Alberta

Persons of Interest

Arizona

California

San Diego County

Increased short-term South Asian visitors

Others

Nevada

Recusal advisements

Bob let the list hang for a moment.

"Ha," said one of the gunnies. "At least the policias won't be a problem." Denying the law-enforcement requests should be easy tonight, not like for kidnapping or murder prevention.

A tech sergeant flickered highlights across the UCSD event cluster. "This is what will keep us busy." Her light paused, expanding on definitions. "What? This is a fight between belief circles? I never heard of such a thing."

One of the youngest marines laughed. "You're just getting old, Nancy. Cross-belief strife is tragic new."

Bob didn't try to parse the slang, but he'd heard enough from Dad and Miri to get the point. He expanded the description of the expected riot. "It looks like a combination of twentieth-century protest and modern gaming. It should be as safe as most public events. The problem is the location." There was so much bio-lab work near UCSD that any instability was a concern. "This is worth a lot of your attention. Note the stats on foreign interest." He moved on to the links in Persons of Interest. As usual, those expanded into the tens of thousands. At one point or another almost everyone — unless they were dead, in which case they might still count for bioterror paranoia — came under scrutiny. "I'm not going to ask you to dredge through the Pol or this watch will last all year. But follow what the spooks throw up at you — and watch for real-time changes." That last was classic wisdom, proven in dozens of disasters and disasters-avoided so far this century. The analysts always had a million suspicions, but when they hit the hard cold world of real time, success depended on whether the operational folks had been paying attention.