— or the agency conducting the operation had done a first-rate job of misdirecting the press. They had turned what should have been a public spectacle into what amounted to a covert action.
He switched off the radio and entered the Santa Monica Freeway. East by northeast, in the lower hills, the China Dream awaited them.
To Rocky, he said, “What’s your opinion of this dog-show thing?”
Rocky looked at him curiously.
“You’re a dog, after all. You must have an opinion. These are your people being exploited.”
Either he was a dog of extreme circumspection when it came to discussing current affairs or he was just a carefree, culturally disengaged mutt with no positions on the weightiest social issues of his time and species.
“I would hate to think,” Spencer said, “that you are a dropout, resigned to the status of a lumpen mammal, unconcerned about being exploited, all fur and no fury.”
Rocky peered forward at the highway again.
“Aren’t you outraged that purebred females are forbidden to have sex with mongrels like you, forced to submit only to purebred males? Just to make puppies destined for the degradation of showrings?”
The mutt’s tail thumped against the passenger door.
“Good dog.” Spencer held the steering wheel with his left hand and petted Rocky with his right. The dog submitted with pleasure. Thump-thump went the tail. “A good, accepting dog. You don’t even think it’s strange that your master talks to himself.”
They exited the freeway at Robertson Boulevard and drove toward the fabled hills.
After the night of rain and wind, the sprawling metropolis was as free of smog as the seacoast from which they had traveled. The palms, ficuses, magnolias, and early-blooming bottlebrush trees with red flowers were so green and gleaming that they appeared to have been hand-polished, leaf by leaf, frond by frond. The streets were washed clean, the glass walls of the tall buildings sparkled in the sunshine, birds wheeled across the piercingly blue sky, and it was easy to be deceived into believing that all was right with the world.
Thursday morning, while other agents used the assets of several law-enforcement organizations to search for the nine-year-old Pontiac that was registered to Valerie Keene, Roy Miro personally took charge of the effort to identify the man who had nearly been captured in the previous night’s operation. From his Westwood hotel, he drove into the heart of Los Angeles, to the agency’s California headquarters.
Downtown, the volume of office space occupied by city, county, state, and federal governments was rivaled only by the space occupied by banks. At lunchtime the conversation in the restaurants was more often than not about money — massive, raw slabs of money — whether the diners were from the political or the financial community.
In this opulent wallow, the agency owned a handsome ten-story building on a desirable street near city hall. Bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and wine-swilling derelicts shared the sidewalks with mutual respect — except for those regrettable occasions when one of them suddenly snapped, screamed incoherent deprecations, and savagely stabbed one of his fellow Angelenos. The wielder of the knife (or gun or blunt instrument) frequently suffered delusions of persecution by extraterrestrials or the CIA and was more likely to be a derelict than a banker, or a politician, or a bureaucrat.
Just six months ago, however, a middle-aged banker had gone on a killing spree with two 9mm pistols. The incident had traumatized the entire society of downtown vagrants and had made them more wary of the unpredictable “suits” who shared the streets with them.
The agency’s building — clad in limestone, with acres of bronze windows as dark as any movie star’s sunglasses — did not bear the agency’s name. The people with whom Roy worked weren’t glory seekers; they preferred to function in obscurity. Besides, the agency that employed them did not officially exist, was funded by the clandestine redirection of money from other bureaus that were under the control of the Justice Department, and actually had no name itself.
Over the main entrance, the street address gleamed in polished copper numbers. Under the numbers were four names and one ampersand, also in copper: CARVER, GUNMANN, GARROTE & HEMLOCK.
A passerby, if he wondered about the building’s occupant, might think it was a partnership of attorneys or accountants. If he made inquiries of the uniformed guard in the lobby, he would be told that the firm was an “international property-management company.”
Roy drove down a ramp to the underground parking facility. At the bottom of the ramp, the way was barred by a sturdy steel gate.
He gained admittance neither by plucking a time-stamped ticket from an automatic dispenser nor by identifying himself to a guard in a booth. Instead, he stared directly into the lens of a high-definition video camera that was mounted on a post two feet from the side window of his car and waited to be recognized.
The image of his face was transmitted to a windowless room in the basement. There, Roy knew, a guard at a display terminal watched as the computer dropped everything out of the image except the eyes, enlarged them without compromising the high resolution, scanned the striation and vessel patterns of the retinas, compared them with on-file retinal patterns, and acknowledged Roy as one of the select.
The guard then pushed a button to raise the gate.
The entire procedure could have been accomplished without the guard — if not for one contingency against which precautions had to be taken. An operative bent on penetrating the agency might have killed Roy, cut out his eyes, and held them up to the camera to be scanned. While the computer conceivably could have been deceived, a guard surely would have noticed this messy ruse.
It was unlikely that anyone would go to such extremes to breach the agency’s security. But not impossible. These days, sociopaths of singular viciousness were loose in the land.
Roy drove into the subterranean garage. By the time he parked and got out of the car, the steel gate had clattered shut again. The dangers of Los Angeles, of democracy run amok, were locked out.
His footsteps echoed off the concrete walls and the low ceiling, and he knew that the guard in the basement room could hear them too. The garage was under audio as well as video surveillance.
Access to the high-security elevator was achieved by pressing his right thumb to the glass face of a print scanner. A camera above the lift doors gazed down at him, so the distant guard could prevent anyone from entering merely by placing a severed thumb to the glass.
No matter how smart machines eventually became, human beings would always be needed. Sometimes that thought encouraged Roy. Sometimes it depressed him, though he wasn’t sure why.
He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, which was shared by Document Analysis, Substance Analysis, and Photo Analysis.
In the Photo Analysis computer lab, two young men and a middle-aged woman were working at arcane tasks. They all smiled and said good morning, because Roy had one of those faces that encouraged smiles and familiarity.
Melissa Wicklun, their chief photo analyst in Los Angeles, was sitting at the desk in her office, which was in a corner of the lab. The office had no windows to the outside but featured two glass walls through which she could watch her subordinates in the larger room.
When Roy knocked on the glass door, she looked up from a file that she was reading. “Come in.”
Melissa, a blonde in her early thirties, was at the same time an elf and a succubus. Her green eyes were large and guileless — yet simultaneously smoky, mysterious. Her nose was pert — but her mouth was sensuous, the essence of all erotic orifices. She had large breasts, a slim waist, and long legs — but she chose to conceal those attributes in loose white blouses, white lab coats, and baggy chinos. In her scuffed Nikes, her feet were no doubt so feminine and delicate that Roy would have been delighted to spend hours kissing them.
He had never made a pass at her, because she was reserved and businesslike — and because he suspected that she was a lesbian. He had nothing against lesbians. Live and let live. At the same time, however, he was loath to reveal his interest only to be rejected.
Melissa said crisply, “Good morning, Roy.”
“How have you been? Good heavens, you know that I haven’t been in L.A., haven’t seen you since—”
“I was just examining the file.” Straight to business. She was never interested in small talk. “We have a finished enhancement.”
When Melissa was talking, Roy was never able to decide whether to look at her eyes or her mouth. Her gaze
