“Damn’ foreign investors,” he muttered loudly. “Damn’ greenmailin’ leveraged buyoutin’ bank slimeballs!” He ambled slowly toward the corner where a young man stood handing out pamphlets.

“Stinkin’ banksters stole my job!” he cried to the pamphleteer.

The young man, dressed in tan slacks and white long-sleeved business shirt, glanced at the street dweller with a short look of contempt, then turned his attention to other passersby. The little booklets he handed out were printed on crisp white paper with red and black illustrations on the cover.

The bum stopped his shopping cart in front of the man. “Gimme one,” he said, looking everywhere but directly at the man he addressed.

The proselytizer-short haired, clean, and trim-gazed again at the scrungy piece of scarcely human debris before him. “Butt out,” he said sharply in a voice higher than one might expect. He cleared his throat and it lowered an octave. “Get lost.”

“Gimme one!” The old man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a thick wad of grimy, crumpled bills. Peeling a single off slowly, he offered it to the younger man. “Fer a donation?”

It being the first proffer of money he had received all morning, the young man swapped a pamphlet for the dollar. It stuck to the old man’s fingers for a second. The other gingerly slid it into his pocket, then wiped his hand against his pants before passing his propaganda to the bum. He eyed the wad of money as it disappeared back into the stained tweed jacket.

“Thankee, boy,” the geezer said, then stopped to gaze at the cover. It read

“Banksters!” he cried out. “Banksters stole my job!”

The young man feigned sudden interest. “Did they? Why, they stole mine, too, sir.” His eyes glanced unconsciously at the man’s money pocket. “Others like us have banded together to battle them. To restore our country’s former glory.”

The derelict turned the pamphlet over to read the address on the back. “The Order of the Lance and Falcon,” he muttered. “They accept donations?”

“Always,” the young man quickly offered.

“They need people?”

“Always,” he said again, a little warily.

“To hand out this stuff?”

“There is all manner of work to be done.”

“Okay,” the old man said. “Thankee.” He started to wheel his squeaky shopping cart away.

A moment of quick thought and the young man swallowed his initial disgust. “Wait, sir. Perhaps you’d like to hear more about us?”

•

Hundreds of miles north, Detective R. J. Fleming stood impatiently in front of the news cameras.

“We don’t know. The EPA is running a check on the substance.” He turned away from one reporter to face the question of another. They clustered about him in front of the police line cordoning off the abandoned diner.

“What about the second man?”

“He’s resting comf-”

An officer shouted to the detective. Fleming turned and strode over to the paramedic van. A line of police kept the reporters behind the barriers.

“Hey! Come back! What’s happening to him?”

Fleming stood beside the horrified paramedics. “Didn’t I tell you to cut off his arm?” he shouted.

The construction worker jerked about in agony as he watched his arm liquefy into a silvery, mercurial rivulet running down the brace on which it had been elevated. Then the brace collapsed as if eaten away by acid. There were no fumes, though, just the surrealistic appearance of metal melting in the warm California sun. The liquid splashed against his torso and ran over his waist and leg. They were eaten away layer by layer, exposing flesh, muscle, and finally bone. The man screamed until his chest cavity opened up under the relentless assault. A rattling hiss of air escaped from the hole, then silence, followed by the sloshing sound of his body dropping into the pool of death.

The paramedics stepped back from the dying man, staring in gape-mouthed horror at the scene. The glistening puddle spread rapidly across the floor of the van, eating into the metal with ease.

“Get out of there!” Fleming cried at the driver. “Everybody get back!”

The hazardous material team rushed to the van in their white, baggy outfits. One of them dumped a sack full of acid-neutralizing super-absorbent granules on the dissolving body. The pile disappeared almost instantly.

“All right!” the detective shouted. “Now we have two danger zones!” He turned to the paramedics. “Get your clothes off and throw them into the van. We’ve got to quarantine the block.” He looked at the HazMat team. “The whole block, right?”

One of them nodded, then the other said through the muffling barrier of her breathing mask, “We’d better have Water and Power shut down the pipes and the sewers to isolate it completely.”

Fleming waved his arms at the line of police. “Back! Everybody back!”

That was when the van crumpled in on itself, disappearing into the ever-widening lake of reflective, mercurial fluid.

“Where’s Cap?” the old man in greasy overalls shouted. He dressed like any other aircraft mechanic except for the stainless-steel autopistol tied to his leg in a fancifully tooled and equally greasy holster.

“Flash tryin’ to find him!” Rock rushed past him to the jet, followed by Leila. Both wore black flight suits made of a thick material possessing such a matte finish that no light reflected from any surface. The outfit made Leila look sleek and pantherish. It made Rock look like a great Russian bear. A bear toting an immense aluminum equipment case, which he stashed in a compartment on the left wing.

Both Rock and Leila wore black holsters made of the same fabric as their flight suits. Both carried pistols similar to the one toted by the mechanic. The ones they carried, though, were black and nearly as unreflective as the rest of their accouterments. Below the holsters, thigh pockets bulged in two strips, outlining the replacement cartridge magazines they carried.

“Is she ready, Jack?” Leila shouted as she followed Rock across the tarmac.

“Full tanks and preheated,” Jack replied. He gazed past them at the jet, once more admiring its sleek, unrefulgent ebon beauty.

It was small, as small as it could be and still have an adequate range. Conforming to the latest stealth technology developed at the Anger Institute, its fuselage, wings, and low-profile V-shaped stabilators consisted of a series of gentle curves none of which reflected enough radar to be visible even on phased-array or lookdown radar systems. And the radar-absorbing coating took care of the rest.

Its bantamweight but powerful engines, constructed of lithium-titanium alloy, gave off little enough waste heat when operating- the air ducts mixed and cooled the remainder before the exhaust escaped from the low-profile vents. Except for the engines, the airframe, and a few enhancements available in no other plane, everything else was state-of-the-art but off-the-shelf, too, which kept the airplane affordable. And that enabled an old aircraft and powerplant mechanic such as Jack to maintain Captain Anger’s fleet without needing the farrago of doctorates everyone else around the Institute possessed.

Jack watched with pleasure as Leila ignited the engines. They whined, but much less loudly than those of a military or corporate jet. She turned it, taxied it toward the runway.

“I still say it turns out to be big nothin’,” Rock muttered, tapping their flight plan into the Global Positioning Satellite computer.

“What?” Leila said over her shoulder.

Rock plugged the combination earphone/microphone into his right ear and donned the obsidian-colored helmet, leaving the oxygen mask dangling. “I said that this is probably some acid spill out of which idiot cop exaggerated all hell.”