Dance Of Death

to the silent neighborhood.

A shadow moved behind a shuttered window in a second-story gable-a figure in a wheelchair-barely outlined in the soft blue light that emanated from the depths of the room. Back and forth the figure went in silent pantomime, busy at some unknown task. Inside the room, metal racks stood from floor to ceiling, packed with electronic equipment: monitors, CPUs, printers, terabytes of hard drives, units for the remote seizure of computer screen images, cellular telephone scanner-interceptors, wireless routers, NAS devices, and Internet port sniffers. The room smelled of hot electronics and menthol.

The figure rolled this way and that, a single withered hand tapping keyboards, pressing buttons, turning dials, and punching keypads. Slowly, one by one, the units were being powered down, shut off, closed out. One by one, the lights went off, LAN and broadband connections were cut, screens went dark, hard drives spun down, LEDs winked out. The man known in the underground hacking community by the single name of Mime was shutting himself off from the world.

The last light to go off-a large blue flat-panel LCD-plunged the room into darkness.

Mime rested when he was finished, breathing in the unaccustomed darkness. He was now completely cut off from the outside world. He knew that, blacked out like this, he could not be found. Still, the information that had reached him from the man known as Pendergast, one of only two people in the world he trusted implicitly, made him uneasy.

Mime had not been cut off in many years from the vast torrents of data that washed over his house like an invisible ocean. It was a cold, lonely feeling.

He sat brooding. In a minute, he would turn to an entirely new set of controls, and new lights would come on in the room: the lights from a battery of video camera monitors and security readouts from a surveillance system set up around and within his house. It was a protective measure that had been installed years before, but that had never been needed. Until now.

Mime breathed in the darkness, and-for the first time in his life-he was afraid.

Proctor carefully locked the door to the great shuttered mansion at 891 Riverside Drive, looked around, then slipped into the waiting Hummer. The building was shut up tightly, every potential breach or entry point carefully sealed. Constance was still within, hiding in the secret spaces that had shielded her in the past, spaces that not even he-not even Pendergast-knew about. She had supplies, an emergency cell phone, medication: everything she needed.

Proctor accelerated from the curb, easing the enormous armored vehicle around the corner, moving south on Riverside Drive. Out of habit, he glanced in his rearview mirror to see if he was being followed. There was no evidence of it, but-as Proctor well knew- the lack of evidence of being followed was not evidence of a lack of being followed.

At the corner of 95th and Riverside, he slowed as he approached an overflowing public trash receptacle; as he passed, he tossed into it a sack of greasy, congealed McDonald's french fries almost completely coated with solidified ketchup. Then he accelerated onto the on-ramp to the West Side Highway, where he headed north, keeping to the speed limit and checking his mirrors frequently. He continued up through Riverdale and Yonkers to the Saw Mill River Parkway, then the Taconic, then I-90, and then I-87 and the Northway. He would drive all night and much of the next morning, until he reached a certain small cabin on a certain small lake twenty-odd miles north of St. Amand l'Eglise, Quebec.

He glanced to his right, where an AR-15 lay on the seat, fully loaded with 5.56mm NATO rounds. Proctor almost hoped he was being followed. He'd like nothing more than to teach the fellow a lesson he'd never forget as long as he lived-which in any case would not be long, not long at all.

As the sky paled and a dirty dawn broke across the Hudson River, and a freezing wind whipped scraps of newspaper down the empty streets, a lone derelict, shuffling along Riverside Drive, paused at an overflowing garbage can and began rummaging about. With a grunt of satisfaction, he extracted a bag of half-frozen McDonald's french fries. As he stuffed them greedily into his mouth, his left hand deftly pocketed a small piece of paper hidden in the bottom of the bag, a paper with a few lines written in a beautiful, old-fashioned script:

There is only one man in the world who meets your particular requirements:

Eli Glinn of Effective Engineering Solutions

Little West 12th Street, Greenwich Village, New York

THIRTY-EIGHT

A brilliant moon, huge and intensely white, seemed to gild the vast expanse of sea far, far below. Looking out her window, Viola Maskelene could see a long white wake like a pencil laid across the burnished water, at the head of which was an enormous ocean liner, looking like a toy boat from 33,000 feet. It was the Queen Mary, she thought, on its way to New York from Southampton.

She gazed at it, feeling the enchantment of it, imagining the thousands of people below on that great ship in the middle of the ocean, eating, drinking, dancing, making love-an entire world on a ship so small it seemed she could hold it in her hand. She watched until it vanished on the far horizon. Funny how she'd flown at least a thousand times and still it was such an exciting experience for her. She glanced at the man across the aisle, dozing over his copy of the Financial Times, having never once looked out the window. That was something she couldn't understand.

She settled back in her seat, wondering how to amuse herself next. This was the second leg of her journey from Italy, having changed planes in London, and she'd already read her book and flipped through the trashy in- flight magazine. The first-class cabin was almost empty, and as it was almost 2 A.M. London time, what few passengers shared the cabin were asleep. She had the flight attendant to herself. She caught the woman's eye.

'Can I be of assistance, Lady Maskelene?'

She winced at the use of her title. How in the world did they all seem to know? 'Champagne. And if you don't mind, please don't call me Lady Maskelene. It makes me feel like an old bag. Call me Viola instead.'

'My apologies. I'll bring the champagne right away.'

'Thanks ever so.'

While Viola waited, she rummaged in her purse and withdrew the letter she had received at her house on the Italian island of Capraia three days before. It already showed signs of being opened and closed one too many times, but she read it again, anyway.

My dear Viola,

This letter will no doubt come as a shock to you, and for that I'm sorry. I find myself in the same position as Mark Twain in having to announce that the reports of my death are much exaggerated. I am alive and well, but I was forced to go underground due to an exceptionally delicate case I have been working on. That, combined with certain recent events in Tuscany with which you are no doubt acquainted, created the unfortunate impression among my friends and colleagues that I was dead. For a time, it was useful for me not to correct that impression. But I am alive, Viola-though I experienced a situation that put me as close to death as a human being can get.

That terrible experience is the reason for this letter. I realized during those dreadful hours of near-death how short life is, how fragile, and how we must none of us let slip those rare opportunities for happiness. When we met by chance on Capraia scant hours before that experience began, I was taken by surprise-and so, if you'll pardon my saying so, were you. Something happened between us. You made an indelible impression on me, and I entertain hopes that I made a not dissimilar impression on you. I would therefore like to invite you to stay with me in New York forten days, so that we may get to know each other better. To see, in effect, if indeed that impression is as indelible, and as favorable, as I strongly believe it to be.

At this, Viola had to smile; the old-fashioned, somewhat awkward wording was so like Pendergast that she could almost hear his voice. But the fact was, this was an extraordinary letter, unlike any she had ever received. Viola had been approached by many different men in many different ways, but never quite like this. Something happened between us. It was true. Even so, most women would be surprised and even shocked to receive an invitation like this. Somehow, even on one meeting, Aloysius already