On the third day of the Jimmy Cain Nexus, events were proceeding rapidly on all fronts toward a showdown with destiny....

Mina and Margaret were coasting to the end of a twelve hour work day in virtual reality. Alone in their own blacked-out offices a floor apart wearing tasteful business suits, they saw each other in a virtual reality setting wearing scandalous bathing suits lounging side-by-side on a tropical, sunlit beach. They had earned this break from their prodigious mental labors and the setting for it was precisely what they needed to unwind. It was also what Margaret needed to see whether the virtual reality persona created by a scan of Mina’s actual body showed the same birthmark she had seen in the Alpine VRS....

In a basement office barely large enough to fit a chair, a desk, a T-window and computer keyboard, Walter Judd looked in on the women in the VRS with a growing lump in his pants. Seeing them this way in a program he didn’t create himself was bound to have that effect on him but it was a distraction he couldn’t afford. They were closing in on the X Channel fast. Walter Judd was the X Channel. At the rate they were going they’d have the whole thing figured out in a week.

Whatever the women learned, he could stop them from doing anything about it. He was the only one who could stop them....

Rick Tyler stood on the steps of his precinct building conversing with a small group of fellow officers in uniform. Ordinarily, he would have been long gone from the premises, but this was as good a place as any to wait until Mina was ready for him to pick her up. He would have driven straight out to Auburn Hills and waited for her there if she wasn’t so sensitive about people seeing them together.

He wondered what she would do if she found out that his explanation for escorting her back and forth to work was only an excuse to be near her. He knew how silly he was acting but he couldn’t help himself. Not even the grave circumstances of his association with her could keep his mind from drifting more often than not into romantic-erotic fantasies centered around her. He checked the time in his wristband T-window, patted his pockets for a roll of breath mints, then looked to the building and excused himself to get some mints from the vending machine inside. It was time to go....

Arthur and Lydia were in their family room watching Vivian’s last production of God, while their ears filtered out the sound of dogs barking more than usual somewhere out back. Nancy was upstairs in her bedroom playing an animated game of baseball in her telewindow with a cousin in Toledo. The curtains framing her bedroom window were drawn wide and the shade lifted all the way to let in the fading evening light. If her ears hadn’t also filtered out the barking dogs, she might have looked out of that window and seen a dark figure darting across the lawn from the ally with a ladder—and a gun....

In the house where Shag Man had taken Hector and Vivian, only Shag Man and Hector remained to plot their next moves....

High-ranking members of The Circle, including Dean Piper and Phil McBain, were at home with their families:

Dean Piper was making passionate love in the proper man above/woman below position to Bridget, his lovely, obedient wife of thirty-three years. They were a perfect match, teenage sweethearts, wedding night virgins and faithful partners in holy matrimony for life. When he reached orgasm, they would both feel the joy of it in different but mutually satisfying ways. They were what God made all men and women to be, a husband and wife who loved and cared for each other and enjoyed sex in the natural, wholesome way God intended, with tenderness and moderation.

After all their years together they still found each other sexually desirable. Bridget didn’t know what an orgasm was so she didn’t miss it, and neither of them could picture sex in any way other than the way they enjoyed it without feeling a wave of nausea. If the things other people did for sexual satisfaction made the Piper’s sick to think about, it was clear to them that the people who did those things had to be sick. Abnormal sex was an affront to God and a danger to society. Bridget knew all too well how true that was from experience and nothing could change her mind.

In her warm, loving passion that never got hot enough to ignite, Bridget was able to resist the prurient urge to reach down and clutch her husband’s heaving, furry buttocks in her hands. It was something that the wicked part of her lusted for and the Christian part of her, who remembered the shame and apprehension of life with a porn-addicted father, knew better than to allow. Not everybody had the inner moral resources to repress their depraved sexual impulses. That was why there had to be laws to stop them, just as there had to be laws to stop people from acting out other destructive impulses. It was for their own good as well as the good of society.

The thought of her father’s deviate pursuit of sexual gratification through pornography and the humiliation that went with his arrests and court hearings, cooled what passion Bridget had in her husband’s embrace. She could see pictures now in her mind of Dean and herself having sex on the X Channel for the amusement of weak-willed men like her long-dead dad who were corrupted by perverts like Charm...Charm. God! What that woman did to that word. You couldn’t even say it anymore without thinking of her. How dare anyone call pornography a victimless crime when that evil woman’s twisted and debased victims alone were legion. Even her name and her body were pornographic.

The only good Bridget saw in the X Channel was the number of its own twisted kind it exposed for what they were. Hoisted on their own petards, she thought, moaning softly while dutifully meeting her husband’s quickening thrusts. People like that deserved what they got. Still, it was wrong to expose the public to their perversions as well as those of all the other sickos who wanted to be seen for the sick thrill of it. Innocent children could be watching and children wouldn’t know the difference. That’s why she belonged to STOPIT, Dr. Estelle Gidarb’s Society To Outlaw Pornography In Total.

Her eyes drifted to a hard cover copy of Dr. Gidarb's book, Doing Without, on her night table. When the name "Gidarb" came to mean as much to everyone as "Charm" did, the one true God had promised her that the day of deliverance would not be far behind....

McBain was joining his blonde-haired, blue-eyed wife, Tammy, and their all-white church choir in the cumulus clouds above the gold-paved streets of a heavenly VRS. He floated in on gossamer wings after helping their genetically engineered, blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenage daughter with a T-window lesson in higher math. The lesson had been absorbed quickly and the fatherly pride he had in his girl showed on his glowing VR face....

That is how some of the world’s most important people in the upcoming flood of events would have appeared in a snapshot of the moment.

Sitting upstream of time in his gold-flaked Lexus sedan ready to open the floodgates, was Jeff Easton. He was parked on Greenlawn, directly across the street from the Tylers with a loaded, automatic assault rifle on his front seat.

A straight-haired, black-skinned youth with ruby Daylights stood in the street beside the car leaning down to look through the open window at the hawk-faced man behind the wheel. The young man was wearing combat boots, army fatigue pants and a shirtless black ammunition vest with loaded, 7mm magazine pouches going all the way around. A pistol was holstered low on his right thigh and a hunting knife was hilted in a scabbard on his left. His double strand of miniature white skulls hung low.

"We set," said the youth, "I got a good man in position ta go when I give the word. I got a van load’a crazy niggas in da alley in back’a da house ta back up da play if he fuck it up. An’ two’a my boys on each end ta make sure we don’t get no surprises."

"Good work, Demetrious," said Jeff Easton, "I knew I could count on you."

The young man grunted, "Yeah. I gotta tell you, dough, da boys is a little nervous about dis. I mean, like, you know, dis ain’t exactly no DZ." He looked anxiously up and down the street. "The police has been known ta show up in neighborhoods like dis—an even when day don’t, day take dem pictures a what happened an’—"

"Demetrious, use your head. Would I be here talking to you if there was any danger of a time trace?"

"Ta tell you the truth, I wouldn’t agreed ta do it if you hadn’t a come. A million dollars ain’t what it used ta be, an it ain’t worth shit on death row. I just wanna be able ta reassure da boys, ya know. We could still get some police hero-types tryin’ ta bust in on da show. Dat happen sometime."

"It won’t happen this time." Easton patted his assault rifle. "Not on a large enough scale to gum up the works if your people are any good."

"If they wasn’t," said Demetrious, straightening up in preparation to leave, "I wouldn’t be here talkin’ ta you...."

The sound of breaking glass upstairs coupled with an hysterical scream brought Arthur and Lydia to an upright position on the love seat holding their breaths. Only now did they hear the barking dogs.

The burglar alarm that should have gone off with the shattered glass, didn’t, which triggered a different kind of alarm in Arthur. His old combat training took charge as he jumped to his feet, burst through the door to the hall and stormed up the stairs.

Nancy was still screaming and the dogs barking more insistently than ever when he reached the upstairs landing and hurled all of his 238 pounds through the door without breaking stride. The door frame splintered with a frightful noise as the door itself swung open and banged against the wall.

Of all the things the ex-marine thought he might see, what he did see was not among them. His little girl had thrown herself on top of the broken glass lying across the foot of her bed and grabbed an intruder in a headlock. She had done so before the intruder could get more of his body through the window than his gloved gun-hand, which dangled with the weight of a magazine-filled ammunition belt wrapped around it. She was smacking him in the face over and over with the thumb side of her closed fist. All the while she was screaming in terror and strangling the life out of him.

It wasn’t quite the way her father had taught her to defend herself, but it was close enough. The intruder’s face was a bloody mess. That was the least of his problems. Arthur could tell by the unnatural way that his head was cocked in Nancy’s arm, that his initial impression of life being choked out of him was wrong. His neck was broken. He was already dead.

Arthur was appalled by what his daughter had done. But that was nothing compared to the rage he felt toward the intruder.

"Nancy!" he called, rushing over to her and trying to pry her arm from around the dead boy’s head, "Nancy! Let go!" The big man was no match for the small girl, managing in the glass-crunching struggle only to stretch her body out into space as he moved the bed a body length away from the wall.

He switched to the arm landing the blows, tying it up in both of his huge arms as Lydia rushed into the room looking more like a hardened field medic than a worried mother. While the struggle with the hysterical girl was winding down, Arthur spied the gun on the floor amid the shattered glass. He picked it up with one hand and with the other, he reached for the Velcro-secured flap of the boy’s ammunition belt wrapped around his forearm and jerked it open.

"Get her out of here!" he yelled to his wife, who tugged hard one last time and pulled the girl free of the boy. The body slid out of sight leaving the ammunition belt in Arthur’s hand and hitting the ground like a side of beef.

Lydia helped Nancy to her feet, tossing a nasty shard of glass from the bed to the floor and checking for cuts on the girl where she saw blood. As unlikely as it seemed, with all of the sharp-edged glass she’d been thrashing around in, the only blood on the girl appeared to have come from the intruder.

While Lydia led the sobbing girl away, Arthur stepped back from the window issuing a string of orders that sent them scurrying to defend the house against a siege. There was nothing he could point at to tell him the scope of what was happening. Never-the-less, the part of his brain assigned to handle such things in an emergency had pulled together enough raw data to know what was going on in the instant he entered Nancy’s room.

Following her husband’s orders, Lydia had turned off the light from the telewindow and the ceiling before she left the room. It was just dark enough outside to make a great deal of difference inside. Arthur, knowing that any difference could mean life or death, was making sure that as much difference as possible favored the Tylers.

Now, as he checked his weapon to be sure he could load and unload it in a hurry, his eyes moved back and forth from the pistol to his back yard bounded by high cyclone fences on all sides. Having no garage gave him an unobstructed view through the broken window to the fence bordering the ally.

The gate, which should have been locked, was wide open. An armed man stepped into the opening and broke for the house followed by two other armed men.

Arthur Tyler squeezed off three well-aimed rounds, the first two hitting the lead man in the chest and the third hitting the second man in his knee. The lead man fell dead, the man behind him hit the ground howling in pain and the trailing man, who had taken no more than a step inside of the gate, stepped back.

The effect was precisely what the ex-marine had intended: one dead, one maimed and one left to tell the tale. There would be no further assaults on the house for a while, from this direction at least, giving Arthur a chance to leave the room and move to another window.

Lydia and Nancy were in the hall leading to the kitchen when the shots rang out. They fell to the floor the way Arthur had told them to do until they could tell where the shots were coming from. When Lydia determined that her husband was doing the shooting, she sent Nancy racing through the lower part of the house checking locks and switching off lights. Lydia did likewise while trying unsuccessfully to get the police on her wristband radio transmitter. She then went from one radio-telephone to the next downstairs then up in her bedroom to call for help with the same unlikely result: She could get no one.

Never had Lydia been exposed to a situation remotely as hazardous as this one, and she was amazed at her ability to cope with it—to in fact, be thrilled by it. She didn’t believe that harm would come to her family no matter how precarious things looked at the moment. Having a United States Marine as her defender had a lot to do with that belief. But there was something controlled and unreal to her about the experience that gave it more the feel of a ride in the dark through an amusement park fun house than a craps game with death.

That’s what happened to some people who watched too many telewindow shows....

On the front steps of Detroit’s 10^th police precinct, the conversation that Rick was a part of before he went inside to get breath mints, had changed. As he skipped passed the group, a young officer who hadn’t been there before he left was talking about a siege at a private home. Without intending to, Rick slowed to a stop and listened.

"Yeah," said the newcomer, a muscular, dark-haired man in his mid twenties. His name tag said, Lacy. "Me and Hollister were within a block of the place. We heard three shots, ‘Bang, bang! Bang!’ just like that, and we called in that we were going to check it out. Two seconds later, we get a call telling us to back off."

Another peace officer who looked too young to wear the uniform sneered, "You shoulda gone in anyway."

All of the experienced men gave the rookie the same scornful look. "Sure," said one of them, "If you did, you’d be acting outside of the law. You could be fined, fired, prosecuted or all three."

The curly-haired cop who had propounded the Bogeyman theory to explain the death of Mayhew added, "The department does not pay death or injury benefits where officers are killed or injured outside of the line of duty."

The rookie was about to say something when an older officer said, "They don’t come right out with this in the academy," but when they tell you not to respond to something like that, it’s because they know what’s happening and they don’t wanna stop it. You should be bright enough to figure that out for yourself."

No one in the group, including Rick, wanted to clearly acknowledge their prior understanding of what the older officer was saying but they couldn’t deny it. It would have been nice to think that everyone involved in the incident was a despicable criminal so that it didn’t matter who was killing whom. That was indeed the unofficial line on such incidents but Rick couldn’t get himself to believe it anymore.

Lacy went on, "That was only the start of it, man. We didn’t go in, but we kinda hung around for awhile, you know, and shit, it was like the 4^th of July. It ain’t that far away. If you listen, you can hear it. Listen."

They listened. They heard.

The older officer groaned in apparent disgust and threatened to quit on the spot. Another expressed his conviction that things had gotten so bad that they were bound to get better soon. The rookie, still itching for action, urged them all to respond, whatever the consequences. A more reasoned voice questioned his motives but agreed in principle with his idea. Everybody agreed with his idea—in principle.

At some point, a real or make-believe veteran of a notorious shootout that ended badly for the police would preach the lesson of that experience and the weight of argument would lean unmovably against intervention. It was the same conversation that always followed a no-response call.

Rick turned to leave, wondering what it would take to turn their braver words into action when somebody asked Lacy to be more specific about where the fireworks were taking place. "On the west side of Greenlawn," he said, "between Curtis and Thacker—Jesus, Rick! You look like you just saw a time bomb ticking with two seconds to go."

"It’s my parent’s house!"

He raced down the stairs, around the corner of the building and into the parking lot where the rapid response Pursuers stood ready to roll. He ran faster than he had ever run, so fast that none of his fellow officers were yet in sight when he reached the first car in line. The other officers still hadn’t shown up when Rick opened the squad car door and got in. But if ever the time was right to put the department that was created to protect and serve the public back on course, this was it. They would come through for him. He knew they would.

Rick couldn’t see the men in blue looking at each other in bewilderment, or hear the thoughts that went with the looks. He couldn’t hear Lacy’s query about how Rick knew which house was being shot up, the older cop’s fear of losing his pension or the rookie’s hesitation to risk everything for a man he didn’t know. He couldn’t hear any of the questions, reasons or excuses behind any of his fellow peace officers’ willingness to do no more than discuss and debate the issue at hand.

What he could hear was the shooting....

"So far," said Margaret, twisting her virtually naked virtual reality body over onto her stomach, "you haven’t given one good reason for not putting a rolling hip lock on that guy."

She and Mina were now lying prone on the feather-soft, non-clinging sand. Margaret had at last gotten a look at what she had arranged this virtual reality vacation to see. After telling Mina about her bisexuality she could hardly have asked her to bend over and drop her drawers.

It was there, all right, the birthmark she had seen on the nude computer model in the Alpine VRS. The next question was, what to do about it? If she told Mina what she knew, Mina would have deduced as well as she had that someone at Condor was spying on her. With that knowledge, how would she change her private behavior and what would that tell the eavesdroppers?

"Margaret, don’t you ever think of anything but sex?" said Mina good-naturedly, turning her radiant face to Margaret’s.

The older woman seemed to give the question some thought. "Sometimes," she said, with an inflection that said more was coming and a pause that said it funnier the longer it lasted. Mina tried not to laugh, but it swelled up inside of her like expanding air in a rubber balloon until she let go. She twisted around on her back, holding her stomach as the little girl inside of her laughed and laughed and laughed....

Theoretically, no one could monitor a virtual reality session without an access key. According to the same theory, the purchase of a privacy license by citizens of good character could protect them from time scans of their "private chambers." According to Walter Judd, the theory had little to do with the world as it was.

Walter got into Margaret’s program the way a landlord would get into one of his tenant’s apartments; he used a "master key." It wasn’t ethical or legal but, contrary to popular belief, it was possible and it was what the people with the power to make it happen wanted. If the legal authorities had the technology and the inclination to enforce the law, Walter would not have had a job. They had neither. Therefore, he had the certain knowledge that his job was secure.

Walter hated his job. Watching Mina and Margaret all but naked on the white sands of Margaret’s computer-crafted paradise would have excited him immensely had he not been acting in the line of duty. How had Phil McBain put it? "Jack off on your own time, creep."

Yeah, that’s what he said all right, the supercilious son of a bitch! He hadn’t actually used the word, creep, but his face had. His tone had. And he hadn’t given a damn how Walter felt about it.

Walter could tell that Margaret was as put off as McBain was by the neural disorder that gave his face the look of a stereotypical degenerate. But she was considerate enough not to show it. Or was it his feelings for her that kept him from seeing it—No. She was a great actress but not that great. He saw it. His feelings for her made him forgive what he saw. Love could do that to a man.

Walter wasn’t spying on Margaret for himself; he was doing it for that rotten bunch of bastards at the top of the company, Piper, Easton, McBain, the ones with the big round rings who acted like they owned the world. Maybe they did. Maybe they wouldn’t for much longer....

Mina sighed. She had seen skies as majestically blue as the one she was looking at now and puffy white clouds as beautifully shaded in pastel grays, but not often. This is heaven, she thought, basking in the warm, glareless sun as colorful birds sang their exotic songs and flitted from palm to fragrant palm of lush green trees ringing the beach. Silvery dolphins splashed in the shimmering, sapphire-blue lagoon. A cool breeze caressed the virtual reality body that seemed to fit her so well.

The senses were perfect, absolutely perfect and the body scanner had picked up every line and pour of the body she was born with. Doing things in virtual reality that she wasn’t doing in her office chair were a bit awkward for now but she was getting the hang of it. The trick was to begin a motion with her actual body and simply allow the computer to continue it in virtual reality until it was stopped by something in the virtual reality environment or the willful expanding and contracting of her muscles. The natural tendency was to overdo it which meant more squirming and jerking in her chair than necessary to get her virtual reality persona to do what she wanted it to. An experienced user would appear to barely move. She couldn’t have asked for a better teacher than Margaret. Nor could she have asked for a better friend.

"Mina?"

"Yes?"

"Have you heard from your sister, yet?"

"No, but Rick told me not to worry. His father was with the military police when they first started using time traces to gather evidence. Apparently, Vivian used an old trick to beat the system. The military caught on to it pretty quick but most of the civilian authorities never did."

"Hmmm. I’d like to know more about it."

"Really?"

"Sure," said Margaret, "Now that we know the police never time-traced that old guy’s money back to her, whatever she did to beat the police time trace might beat a Condor time trace, too. We’re playing a dangerous game with these guys. That’s the kind of thing that could come in handy for us before we’re through."

Mina propped herself up on her elbows and nodded, "Maybe you’re right. I could talk to Mr. Tyler tonight. Better yet, why don’t you talk to him? He’d love that."

Margaret beamed, "Did he really say he was my biggest fan?"

"Uh-huh. To be honest, I didn’t know you were such a gifted programmer until he got me to watch some of the first things you did with ELFing old movie characters. You wrote the book on retro-casting, didn’t you?"

"Yes," said Margaret, with a cold edge to her voice that seemed to come out of nowhere. Mina had learned to adjust to her sudden mood shifts but she hadn’t learned to anticipate them. The adjustment was never a smooth one. Maybe there was more to Arthur Tyler’s admiration of her than her groundbreaking work in telewindow programming. They had much in common.

"Oh," said Mina, "I just thought of something; I don’t know the phone number. I’ll beam out and look it up."

Don’t bother," said Margaret, the warmth flowing back into her face as easily as it had drained out. "Give me his name again and I’ll look it up. You’ve earned this little vacation. Enjoy it."

"Thanks. The name is Arthur J Tyler. Arthur or Lydia. On Greenlawn."

"They don’t have a privacy license, do they?"

"Oh, Margaret. How could people like that justify a privacy license to the Secretary of State? And where would they get the money?"

Margaret blushed and beamed out. Not thinking of herself as wealthy and well-connected had its social advantages with people who weren’t. This was one of the disadvantages....

One burst of fire from Easton’s automatic was all it took to keep the people in the house from trying to get out of the front. That was good enough as far as it went but the fact that it had gone that far wasn’t good. It had been early twilight when the siege began. Now it was dark.

Niggers! thought Easton angrily. He opened the car door and got out. It had been years since he’d fired a weapon in the field. Those were the days when the Drug Enforcement Administration was the place to be for action as well as contacts at every level on both sides of the law. Demetrious was at the lowest level, heir to a personal contact seven times removed but highly recommended by his current government contact.

In the days before The Circle, it would have been unthinkable for Jeff Easton to deal personally with someone like Demetrious. Now that Easton was a part of the network of friends that controlled the images that could hurt him, it mattered less who he was seen with than whether the job got done right. Piper would be glad he came to Detroit to make sure the job got done right.

With no fear of the loud, sporadic gunfire from the back of the Tyler house, Easton strode toward the side of the house where Demetrious should have stationed somebody to begin with. True, Arthur should not have had a gun and so much ammunition but he was only one man. He could be in only one place at a time. A properly coordinated attack would have to succeed.

Easton had crossed the street to the driveway of the Tyler house when the distant sound of a police siren turned into a rapidly approaching threat. He stopped and jerked his head to the right. How it happened was inexplicable but the fact that it had was inescapable. He saw it coming, the flashing red and blue lights and then the Pursuer. A rout was something else he could see coming if he didn’t act quickly....

Rick Tyler’s introduction to the gun battle came with the smashing of bullets through his windshield.

"Shit!" he cried, stomping on the breaks and cranking the steering wheel hard to the right as he fell to his side behind the protective beam of the police car door. The car ran over the curb and crashed into the steps of a yellow brick house four houses away from his parents’ house. A man cursed. A child screamed.

Rick froze as more bullets slammed into the door and fractured his driver side glass on their way over his head and through the passenger side glass.

This was his first taste of battle and he didn’t like it. It was one thing to go after a man with a gun when he wasn’t shooting at you and another to be the target of a phantom spitting hot lead. "Shit! Shit! Fuck! Jesus! Fuck!"

His abdominal muscles were coiled painfully tight and his image of himself was quickly becoming even more painful. But not enough to move him. The thought of his family being shot at, which had gotten him this far, could get him no further even as he heard the peppering of bullets over the whoop of his siren—a peppering of bullets that were probably being aimed at them.

Then, he pictured Mina in her programming chair looking at him on flashback film and the vice-like grip of fear holding him to his car seat let up enough for him to do what he had to.

He pushed open the passenger side door and crawled out, his service pistol in his left hand. He was angry now, angry at the gunman who had showed him a part of himself that he would forever more be ashamed of, and at himself for having it in him. He was angry enough to kill. Crouching low, he edged toward the rear of the patrol car, with its siren and flashers still going. He peeked around the side.

To his dismay, he saw no sign of who was shooting at him. The fear which had pinned him to his seat threatened to reassert its grip. He could no longer tell where all the fire was coming from and he didn’t want to shoot blindly so he sweated and waited until he had a reasonable target.

When he saw the white man in the dark business suit step away from the cover and concealment of the tree next to his parents’ driveway, he didn’t know what to make of him. When the man slapped a fresh magazine into the port of his weapon and advanced toward him, Rick still didn’t know what to make of him. When he leveled the gun and started spraying bullets into the patrol car, Rick jerked his head back behind cover unable to believe what was happening.

This was not one of Shag Man’s boys.

Whoever he was, he was the enemy, and Rick was tired of being on the defensive. He leaned to the side once more and fired his service pistol until the man in the dark suit fell to the ground.

Rick used the respite he got from that exchange to take off through the neighbor’s yard and see what he could do about the gunmen in the alley. Making the man in the suit drop to the ground was positively exhilarating. Rick was confident now that his presence on the scene could have an impact and there was no longer any question in his mind that he was going to see it through....

Mina was about to beam out of the tropical VRS when Margaret beamed back in, fully clothed and clearly concerned.

Mina could see that her hands were trembling. "What is it?"

"They’ve been erased."

"They? Who? What?"

"The Tylers, on Greenlawn. There’s no record of them."

"There has to be."

"Not if their communication link has been cut at the source. This building is the source."

"Are you saying—"

The sky opened with a rush of wind, a roll of thunder and roiling clouds on either side of the void. A god-like voice boomed, "YOUR FRIENDS ARE IN MORTAL DANGER. I WILL HELP THEM. TRUST ME...."

In the alley in back of the Tyler house young men in and around a van were shouting curses and shooting wildly into the house. Rick could hear them but he couldn’t see them, yet. He was in the backyard of the yellow brick house. He had just reached the corner of the garage next to the alley and couldn’t tell whether he was more frightened or confused until his fear nearly turned to panic. Around the corner he heard two male voices speaking in rapid, hushed tones.

"Man, dis shit is all fucked-up. Let’s get the fuck out’a here!"

"Naw, man!"

"Don’t you hear dat siren? Goddamn flasher lightin’ up the whole block."

"You leave befo’ Demetrious say an he kill yo’ black ass."

"What the fuck you talkin’ bout, nigga! That muthafucka in da house done already kilt Leon an’ Moochee an dat muthafucka from the projects spos’ta be so bad. Goddamn!"

"You don’t know day dead! You don’t know!"

"Den why day still shootin’, muthafucka, tell me dat. Day was spos’ta been in da muthafuckin’ house fifteen minutes ago. You ever been in a fight that lasted this long?"

Rick had heard enough. Fear and confusion be damned, it was time to act. Stepping boldly into the ally with his pistol cocked and ready, he yelled, "Police!"

The effect was the same as it would have been had he rolled a live grenade at their feet. They ran like roaches fleeing a rapidly descending shoe, their sudden action triggering an impulse for Rick to do likewise.

Just then, the area was bathed in light. The muffled sound of whirling blades overhead called everyone’s attention to the source, a Condor Spotlight News tactical helicopter. The effect on the remaining gang members was the same as Rick’s call of, "police," had been on the first two.

"CONDOR RESCUE," blared a loudspeaker as six heavily armed men with shoulder patches bearing the famous White Condor crest were rapidly lowered to the ally pavement on independent lines. One of the armed network commandos with his ruby Daylights trained on Rick all the way, landed directly in front of him and pulled a cord that released his line from his shoulder harness.

"Please stay where you are, sir. Everything is under control."

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