strings and everybody dancing to their tune while Eddie and I are both in hiding, which is better than dead, I guess, which is what we'd both be if not for you.'
'Easy, Weezy. It'll be all right. We take it a day at a time. And who knows… I mean, who knows how much time we really have left?'
'You mean about everything ending in the spring?'
He nodded. 'Yeah.'
'We're losing, aren't we.'
'We're not winning, that's for damn sure. And we'll never win as long as we let them keep us on the defensive.'
She said, 'We don't seem to have much choice.'
'It only seems that way-because they have a center, a focal point, a leader. We don't.'
'We have Veilleur.'
Jack shook his head… Glaeken. But Glaeken wasn't Glaeken anymore.
'Who won't let me go on the offensive. He's old, he's tired, he's fading. He's got only a few more years left and he knows it. He's ready to pack it in. But the One, the Adversary, R, or whatever we're calling him at the moment-he's immortal, he's got powers, and he smells blood. He's going for the kill.'
'It's like those lines from 'The Second Coming'… 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' '
'I guess it is a second coming of sorts. He lost out in the First Age, but now he's back to get it right. And he's got troops to help. The Otherness maintained an active infrastructure during the half millennium the One was imprisoned, while the Ally let its own deteriorate.'
'And hasn't done much to rebuild it since the One's rebirth,' she said. 'Plus the other side's got something we don't: a specific goal.'
Jack knew exactly what she meant. 'Kill the Lady.'
A bizarre errant thought popped into his head and he brushed it away before it could complete itself. Something must have shown in his expression.
'What?' Weezy said.
'Nothing.'
'You just made a strange face. What? Maybe it's important.'
'Oh, trust me, it's not important.'
'Can I decide that?'
'Okay. Don't say I didn't warn you. For an insane instant I heard a strange little voice singing in my head. It went'-he did his best approximation of Elmer Fudd-'I'm going to kill the Waaaaaady!' ' He watched Weezy's features go slack. 'Warned you. Happy now?'
She stared at him a long moment. 'You know… the way your mind indexes and references is a little disturbing.'
'A little? You should be on this side of it.'
'Not to mention inappropriate at times.'
'Yeah, that too. But we're off topic. Let's get back to their goal of killing the Lady-which, by the way, brings us full circle: We're on defense again-or should I say, as usual.'
Jack had been racking his brain but couldn't come up with any way of taking the battle to them outside of a direct assault.
Weezy said, 'That's always the problem with the conservative position.'
'Who's conservative?'
'Well, in the basic, non-political/philosophical meaning of the term, we are. We're trying to preserve the status quo, while they're the radicals, trying to undermine it.'
Me… a conservative. What a kick in the head.
But when he thought about it…
'I've never been a fan of the status quo, but when you consider the alternative these creeps have got waiting in the wings…'
Weezy nodded. 'The status quo we're protecting now is the Lady's existence. On our side is the fact that nothing of Earthly origin can harm her, including the One himself, since he's human. The only way to strike at her is indirectly-through the noosphere.'
'And they seem to be trying to strike at that via the Internet.'
'Right. By bringing it down.'
Jack said, 'But the Internet's already got a whole slew of governments protecting it, and it's so diffuse and redundant it's virtually impossible to bring down. So I don't see how we can be useful on that front.'
'Speaking of the Internet, what was supposed to be in that email you sent me?'
'What email?'
'About an hour ago.'
'I haven't been home since early this morning. I checked my email then but didn't send any. And you know I don't have a BlackBerry or anything like that. What did I say?'
'Nothing. It was blank.' She frowned. 'Ooh, I don't like that.'
'What's wrong?'
'You may have picked up a virus.'
'Show me the email.'
He followed her to the laptop sitting on the kitchen counter. She wiggled the mouse, the screen came to life, she clicked around, then pointed to the screen.
'There. Empty subject line, empty body.'
Jack didn't use email very often, and when he replied to strangers inquiring at repairmanjack.com, he used a pseudonymous remailer. The site used a webmail account on a different server from the Web site. Neither host knew him or his whereabouts, and didn't care so long as the money order for the annual fee arrived on time. This was from the Gmail account he used for the rare email he sent to even rarer friends.
'Come to think of it, I got a blank email from Abe this morning.'
Weezy was clicking around again. 'Damn. Three more emails with no subject line.' More mousing. 'All blank. I think we've got a virus running here. I could be infected too. Weird. My firewall should have stopped it.'
He thought about Valez stealing Munir's code. Related? But Munir's code was for an online game.
'What do we do?'
'I'll check it out later.' She straightened and looked at him. 'Right now we need to figure out what we do about Dawn.'
An idea had been growing. Not a battle plan so much as a path to explore.
'I'm going to look into this baby. See if it's really dead.'
'How're you going to do that?'
Jack smiled. 'A friend at the city morgue. Every dead newborn or even a stillborn past twenty weeks' gestation gets a death certificate.'
'And you know this how?'
He felt his smile vanish. 'Emma.'
Weezy looked away, then back. 'Oh. Right. Sorry.'
'Anyway, if her baby's really dead, then that ends that trail. If not, then we do our damnedest to find out why they want it. If it's been spirited off, then I'm pretty sure whoever's behind it is connected to the One in one way or another. And if the baby's important to the One, it's important to us.'
Weezy nodded. 'Sounds logical. Find out where she's been hiding during her pregnancy and we'll have a good idea who's got the baby. But I can see only one way to learn that.'
So did Jack and he didn't like it.
'Yeah. Ask her.'
'And that means contact with her, which you think is a bad idea.'
'Because it's pretty obvious that's why she was put here: to make contact with you.'
'Well, let's fall for it. Except we won't be falling for it. We'll be going in with our eyes open. That way we might be able to turn the situation to our advantage.'
