In the beginning the gods were men. The gods did not dwell in the sky or beneath the sea, and the treacherous climb and biting cold kept them from the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus. They were not feared; they inspired courage. They did not demand obedience; they called for freedom. They were not revered for their greatness; they were humble. All people were equal in their eyes, for they hated gold, and it made them faultless in their judgment. This story is told of them, for the gods are a vanishing people and they should not be forgotten.

Know, O Muses, that this is the tale of the great arrow that shines in the night sky and the power of a weapon that cannot miss. For it was to our beloved isle of Calydon there came an unmanly thief of lives and a warning of what all manner of iniquity and unrighteousness to come after the gods are no more. Yet as these things came to pass, the gods had become few but they were not gone. Our king, Alexandros, son of Alius, was of their race. With wisdom from a time before humans came into the world, he lay dying on the battlefield and brought back from the land of the dead the knowledge to keep murderers from being born.   

The scribe Timokrates had no reason to write those words yet as he struggled to steady himself in the horse-drawn chariot as it climbed the steep, winding staircase-like road from the harbor city of Calydon and dashed into the dense black oak forests of the high country of the island of Calydon. The steep roads that climbed into the highlands provided a natural, open-air amphitheater from which to view the drama being played out across the western sky of the fiery Mediterranean sun being quenched in the sea.

At sunset the sun hovered for a suspenseful moment, struggling to keep from being banished behind the golden gates that the God of the Sea had put up to keep day apart from night. At last the gates would open with a majestic flash, and as the last rays of light shimmered across the wine-dark sea like hammered bronze, night would be borne out on the cool, stiffening breeze that escaped.

Clinging desperately to the handrail of the chariot, Timokrates was constantly steadying himself on the driver's shoulder to avoid being pitched out of the open back into the clouds of dust rising behind them. The team of galloping horses was utterly oblivious to the dim twilight giving way to moonless darkness that hid the dangerous mountain roads. The two white stallions raced one another in the harness, pulling the lightweight chariot skipping and bounding along behind them.

In places the road was little more than a widened path cut through the cliff-side forests of olive trees and black oaks by migrating flocks and herds. At times it could scarcely fit the width of the chariot's axle, and everywhere the cliffs were absolutely unforgiving of any misstep by the horses or misdirection from the driver. To one side the dark mountains loomed above the road, and over the other side awaited the thundering abyss of the sea. 

The rattling of the wheels and the clatter of hooves were too intense for Timokrates. He was caught off-guard by every bump and sweeping turn, making it far harder on his legs than on those of the stately lords who were accomplished charioteers; he much preferred to walk. In a breathtaking short time they had traveled deep into the wild countryside.

The chariot rounded a steep, climbing corner and the driver leapt into action, gathered up the reins and began to fight the team to slow down. The sound of the wheels softly drumming over the dirt turned into an intense, harsh rattling as they rolled onto one of the stone streets of the hillside village of Hyksos. The driver continued to lean hard on the reins as he skillfully threaded the horses between the doorsteps that intruded onto the narrow street from the adjacent houses. Timokrates leaned heavily on the handrail, exhausted. 

The houses on both sides of the street were two-story villas with whitewashed walls that shone in the darkness. Occasionally separated by alleys and covered courts, the houses were decorated with hanging plants and wandering vines. A few had awnings made from woven branches on timber posts to block out the intense heat of the day, which created sinister shadows at night. Wooden shutters had been thrown wide open throughout the village to circulate the cool evening air. Timokrates could see a few lamps flickering through the open windows, and he could sense people hiding at the sides of the windows, watching the arrival of the chariot.

As the chariot wheeled into the central marketplace, Timokrates was awed by the view from the village square. The night sky appeared to be both above and below the wall that separated the village from the open sea, so far below that the cresting waves appeared thin as threads in the dim moonlight. It was as if they had traveled up into the heavens. 

Mesmerized by the splendid view, he was surprised by dozens of people gathered near the fountain. The basin was empty; the water that normally flowed into it from a large, sculptured lion's-head fountain was being fed into an aqueduct of clay pipes while people formed a chain, as if to put out a house fire—only they were pouring the water over the wall. They paused in their work to watch the chariot enter the square.

“Their well has been poisoned,” the driver said.

Timokrates looked around at the unfamiliar village and saw the darkened pit of broad, shallow steps that formed an amphitheater below the ground where public performances were given at the bottom, below any interfering noise. As the driver reined the animals to a stop, they were set upon by a group of men who had gathered in the square carrying lit torches that dripped flaming bitumen onto the inlaid stones. Timokrates could not tell if they were attempting to catch the harnesses of the horses to help or waited in ambush.

The driver did not wait to find out. He shoved Timokrates aside in the close confines of the chariot, putting himself between his passenger and the menacing torchbearers. He took up the loose ends of the reins to use as a knotted whip to fend off anyone who came near enough.

“Stand back!” the driver thundered. “This man is the royal scribe and advisor to the house of Alexandros! Raise your hand against him, and it is the same as raising your hand to the king! Stand back or I'll run you down like mutts!”

The king's name, together with the imminent threat of the chariot horses— trained since birth to trample, bite and kick—drove the men with the torches back to a safe distance. Silence rang in the vast, open air of the marketplace. Faintly audible, rising from one of the houses that faced the square, was the sound of women chanting. A slow, sad funeral song, sung to the accompaniment of a stringed lyre and a slow, deep and hollow drum. The chariot horses snorted and pranced anxiously in the harness, irritated at being interrupted from their running and picking up the scent of something disagreeable in the cool night air. 

“Temple soldiers.” The driver pointed out a dozen men-at-arms in dark red and black cloaks over highly polished bronze armor, wearing helmets that hid their faces and carrying long spears. “There are priests here. There is danger here.”

“Look there,” Timokrates said as he pointed out another chariot in the square. Unlike any other on the island, the chariot had four wheels, like those used in Mesopotamia, and was drawn by four stout horses. “The chariot of Lord Pileus. No dozen men are a threat to Pileus.”

The driver nodded and reluctantly released his hold on Timokrates' sleeve, allowing him to step down from the chariot into the gathered crowd.

Straightening his robe and outer cloak, he moved into the crowd of native Pelegasian tribesmen, easily distinguished by their custom of wearing raw animal skins instead of woven clothing. They did not appear either angry or friendly, only a collection of slow expressions on unbarbered faces. Timokrates could see a variety of stone and copper weapons among them, but none were drawn. One man carried what looked like a horse's jawbone as a club in his waistband. The stiff evening breeze eerily whipped the flames of the torches.

A team of yoked oxen in the plaza, placidly chewing their cud, was hitched to a cart with solid wooden wheels that had been decorated with laurel wreaths to make it into a funeral cart.

Avoiding the gauntlet of eyes that followed him, he tried to maintain an even, dignified pace. At the last minute, he became so intent on reaching the security of the door to the house that he nearly collided with a hanging herb plant in the entranceway. Pulling the heavy wooden door open by its ring, without looking to see if the men behind him had filled in the path they had made for him, he slipped inside.

Once the door was closed behind him the chanting became clearer, but not louder. The typical Achaean-style interior of the house was a welcome relief from the strangeness of the countryside. The chanting carried softly through the large house that was subdivided by pillars and heavy, highly polished wood partition doors. Closing and opening the doors changed the floor plan of the house. The floor was inlaid with different colored tiles that created a repeating, geometric design. The house was lit by flaming braziers at the ends of bronze chains hanging from the thick timbers that supported the second story. Timokrates could smell the heavy aroma of burning hyssop and cedar covering up a far less pleasant odor¾one that smelled something like meat that had been left out to spoil in the sun.

“Ah, the wise Timokrates,” the scribe was greeted by a young priest wearing a deep purple tunic and a robe decorated with gold and ivory. The priest said with exaggerated cordiality, “What a perfect choice to send to resolve this unfortunate situation.”

“Good evening, Timon,” Timokrates said evenly. “What is the meaning of all this?”

Timon checked behind him to see that they were alone. “As you know, the High Priest of Argos has chosen to attend the Harvest Festival on our island this year.” He added, as if to impress the importance on Timokrates, “Forsaking even the grand festival in Argos and all the other islands.”

The priest continued, “His Exalted Holiness learned of the death of this Pelegasian girl while we were in the city and he felt he would come out here to the wild countryside and extend her family the honor of presiding over her funeral rites himself”

Timon then took a second look around to be sure he was not overheard. He added tightly, “Only Lord Pileus will not release her body to us.”

“The Pelegasians have their own rituals,” Timokrates said, looking in the direction from which the chanting was emanating. “Pileus is the lord of Hyksos. The king would not countermand his orders if he were here himself.”

“But this girl, I am told, is from Joppa,” Timon countered. “Those men outside are here to carry her home. Idas is the lord over Joppa and we have his full cooperation in this matter.”

“Am I interrupting?” A very old priest entered, wearing a fabulously elaborate robe, stooped over a jeweled rod bearing the bronze aegis of Apollo at the top.

 “Of course not, Your Eminence.” Timon bowed reverently. “This is Timokrates, chief advisor to the house of Alexandros.”

The elder priest offered his hand for Timokrates to kiss.

“His Exalted Holiness is the highest-ranking official of the Temple of Apollo in the entire Achaean world,” Timon said. He then added tightly, “You will lower yourself to the ground and kiss his hand as a sign of piety.”

“I apologize if you are offended,” Timokrates said, without making any attempt to lower himself. “On Calydon we do not render obedience to another man, regardless of his office. Our own king tells us not to bow to him.”

His Exalted Holiness placed a hand on the younger priest's chest to calm him. “Yes, of course. King Alexandros, the famous son of Alius. A son of Argos as well. Your king once lowered himself before the Temple of Apollo.”

“That was long ago,” Timokrates said. “Alexandros renounced his citizenship of Argos and he renounced the worship of the Temple of Apollo. The monument to him that stood outside the military barracks was taken down. Calydon is his home.”

The old priest stood suddenly to his full height and looked down his long, crooked nose at Timokrates. “Alexandros is a child of Argos, the same as Calydon itself. A settlement will never be free of the home city that founded it, the birthplace of the sacred fire carried by the first colonists any more than a child can stop being the son of the parents that raised him.”

Timokrates said, “They can when their parents have become so disgraceful with corruption and hypocrisy that they are no longer worthy of respect.”

The High Priest bristled noticeably.

“Timokrates,” Timon hissed. “I beg you to choose your words more carefully. Disrespect to the High Priest of Argos is the highest sacrilege, punishable by death by burning.”

“Calm yourself, good Timon. There is no need for such rigid formality out here on these untamed islands.” The priest looked at Timokrates carefully. “No doubt Timokrates is simply repeating what has been said within the crumbling ruins that are called a palace on this island. This is not the first time the name of Alexandros has come to my attention.” He leaned heavily on the bejeweled staff. “This fearless warrior turned gardener. A man who twenty times suffered wounds severe enough to have killed any other man. So many times that the impressionable peasants of this island believe that he cannot be killed. That he is immortal.”

“What about you, Timokrates?” he asked the scribe. “Do you believe Alexandros to be as immortal as the gods?”

Timokrates studied the older man, attempting to decipher the cryptic tone in his voice.

“You choose to visit us on the anniversary of twenty years of uninterrupted peace on this island,” Timokrates said pointedly. “Alexandros has no servants and tends his own garden and fetches his own water. Noblemen and men of great wealth and little character despise him, and small children adore him. Simple peasants may call him a god, others may say he possesses divine qualities for a man. It makes no difference to me.”

“Timokrates,” Timon interrupted. “This girl's family will receive a great blessing. His Excellency has been kind enough to offer to personally preside over her ritual and escort the body to Joppa where the proper ceremonies can be performed and a proper grave made for her.”

“I do not have the authority to order such a thing,” Timokrates said. “Our king commands that the dead go to their families. Families send them on the journey upon the funeral pyre, according to their way.”

“How very quaint that your king commands the loyalty of children,” the priest said. “Others, perhaps more worldly men, might say that a military commander with such a gift for the battlefield who has turned to gardening has lost his nerve.” The priest inclined the staff towards Timokrates. "And that a king who despises gold and places the word of an ignorant peasant above the wishes of a well-born man from a noble family has gone mad.”

The High Priest then turned to Timon and took a folded garment from the younger priest and placed it in Timokrates’ hands. Unfolding it, the scribe could see it was a black wool dress with a many-tiered, bell-shaped skirt. Each tier was ringed with tiny silver ornaments in the shape of butterflies, cuttlefish and starfish. The dress would reach to the ground and then up to just above a woman's ribs, leaving her breasts exposed. It was the type of ceremonial dress worn by the Korybantes dancers of the Cult of the Mistress of Animals.

“Or possibly under the spell of a witch,” the old priest said as Timokrates turned the dress over in his hands. “A seductress so beautiful that sea traders obsess about her years after they have returned from sea, and women in far-off cities paint their faces with cosmetics to make themselves resemble her. A woman who blinds men with her beauty so that they do not see that she is also the high priestess of an outlawed cult that practices witchcraft and human sacrifice.”

Timokrates could only continue to stare at the dress in his hands.

“I do not know what devilry this poor girl suffered down in the Black Oak Grotto,” the High Priest said. “But you will invoke your king's name and order Lord Pileus to release her body to us so that she may be given the proper rituals and burial, so that her soul does not continue to be tortured as well. I have no desire to have this poor fool killed over such a small matter. I am not unaware that giants are often slow of wit. Many of them are sent to the temple as orphans that parents have no desire for.”

“Pileus is not slow.” Timokrates looked in the direction of the hallway. “His Lordship suffered a mace wound in war that has left him beyond reason at times.”

“I can overlook many transgressions in the interest of the greater good during my visit here, Timokrates,” the High Priest explained. “But in my position I am burdened with awful responsibilities. Awful expectations that I am bound to fulfill, regardless of my own personal feelings in the matter. I cannot allow the body of this girl to be burned like a heathen while I am here. What would the faithful think of me if I was unable—unwilling—to use force to save this innocent savage from an eternity in restless limbo? I believe her to be the victim of a human sacrifice. I will not have her corpse burned in a pagan ritual as well.”

He looked down the bridge of his long, hooked nose at the scribe and told him decisively, “My men will come in here and get her, regardless of Lord Pileus. You have been summoned here to save the life of this poor brute.”

Timokrates said reluctantly, “I will speak with him.”

Lord Pileus, the giant, was at the end of the long hallway, peering into a large room at the end. Pileus squatted on his haunches to keep from needing to bend his neck to avoid roof timbers—which were laid up nine feet above the floor. Unlike many giants, Pileus had an enormous, muscular build that gave him the weight of three ordinary men. His broad back was covered with purple half-moon-shaped puckers, the scars of dozens of arrows that had pierced his skin with kisses of death. 

The scribe nervously cleared his throat as he moved along the hallway toward the warrior. Even among all the Achaean lords—decidedly violent and dangerous men—Pileus was renowned for his furious temper. The giant was naked except for a cloth twisted around his thickly muscled waist to form a loincloth and a pair of leather sandals that had been flattened under the powerfully built man's weight. Wildly unkempt hair flowed out from beneath a helmet made of overlapping pieces of boar’s tusks, hinged together to form a flexible cap. Moving to see what was holding Pileus' attention in the large room, Timokrates turned himself sideways to fit past the giant lord's elbow without touching him. The quizzical grin on his face suddenly dropped, and he drew an airless gasp. 

Between the columns of the open room, several old women wearing black shawls were moving in a carefully choreographed ceremony around a low, thick wooden plank table. A woman in one corner plucked a lyre on her knee, and next to her another slowly let her hands fall onto a drum. The chanting women moved around the table with the same pausing, slow swaying rhythm of the music. Timokrates understood many different languages, but the words of this chant were completely unfamiliar to him.

One of the old women, in time with her chanted cue, tilted a large water jar to fill a wooden bowl, as another wrung out a rag in the water. Timokrates could see that what was twisted out of the rag by the woman’s quaking old hands was unmistakably blood.

On the table were the mutilated remains of what had once been a human being. Only a pair of long, slender legs, relaxed on the tabletop in the crushed repose of death, was still recognizable. Bloodless and pale, so that the blue veins shone just beneath the skin, the legs were those of a young woman. The upper part of the body, starting at the thighs, had been completely obliterated into a tangle of twisted, blackened anatomy. The open ribcage glared up into the room off the table like long, skeletal fingers. Where there had once been a human face, there was only a hollow, darkened cavity surrounded by a mangle of hair; hair that was petrified into the shape it had been in when it was soaked and dried in the girl's own blood.

The woman kneeling over the table with her back to Timokrates turned and accepted one of the rags that had just been rinsed. She used it to tenderly wipe the body's shoulder, smearing away clots of hardened blood.

“Mother to all,” Timokrates stammered. He watched how the bare foot of the corpse moved as it was cleaned with the rag, utterly repulsed, but unable to turn away. “What happened?”

Pileus lowered his head on his great, bull neck and turned to the scribe in the hallway. As he did, he abruptly unfolded his arms in surprise and stood as much as he could beneath the confines of the roof timbers. He looked behind Timokrates, as if expecting someone else. He shouted loudly enough to be easily heard over a troop of conversing men a hundred feet away , in a voice so deep it sounded as if his lungs were caverns. “Ah, little potter! What brings you out here at such an hour?”

Timokrates cringed at the sudden sound of Pileus’ voice.

“I am not the potter, Lord Pileus. I am Timokrates, the scribe.” He looked at the man's fierce face for signs of recognition. “The queen has sent me.”

“Come, potter, do not take me for a fool.” Pileus glared hard at Timokrates. “You are not the queen.”

“Those priests sent a messenger to the palace,” the scribe explained patiently. “The queen asked me to come here.”

Pileus looked behind the scribe once again, unable to believe it was not some sort of joke. Without regard for the reverent ceremony taking place, he shouted again, “Where is Eumeaus?”

“Eumeaus has been gone for weeks,” Timokrates replied heatedly, impatiently urging Pileus to lower his voice. “He chose to sail with the king this year.”

Timokrates could not tell if his words had any affect on the giant.

“They were seen off Rhodes four days past,” he explained. “The trader who saw them said he hailed them, and everyone was well and the ship was in good order. They could be here with the morning tide.”

Pileus’ attention had already wandered back into the large room and Timokrates looked around the room for anything to further identify the woman being ritually cleansed. “Who is this dead woman?”

“It is her, potter,” Pileus said strangely, his voice as deep as a leopard’s cough. “The Pelegasian girl from Joppa. Her blood flowed from the mouth of the lion's head fountain of Hyksos.”

Timokrates looked toward the front of the house where he had seen the men cleaning the fountain in the square. “Pileus, this girl is from Joppa. Why not release her to the priests and have them take her back there?”

Pileus temper flared in his eyes, and he set his jaw tight enough to risk crushing his own teeth. He charged through the hallway to where the priests were waiting, grabbing Timon and tossed him out the door. The priest tumbled outside into the waiting crowd of Pelegasians in a flurry of robes.

He then whirled on the older priest. His cavernous lungs making his voice reverberate over the high cliffs occupied by Hyksos. “All of you, out! Out, you vultures! You will not extort these people's land and crops for your useless rituals!”

“Pileus!” Timokrates was stunned. He moved to grab the giant's arm, but then thought better of it.

“Do not force me to call in my men, you savage!” The older priest recoiled from the giant, slinking backward through the entryway and out into the square.

“You call your men, you squirrel!” Pileus shouted violently. “You send every one you got! There is no one more cowardly than a man with soft hands who leads from the rear! I will break all their necks like chicken peeps.”

“How dare you!” Timon climbed quickly to his feet and flung himself between Pileus and the High Priest of Argos.

Pileus snarled, “How dare you send men to their death for your vanity, you peacock.”

Timokrates’ eyes caught the bronze helmets of the spearmen glittering in the torchlight and he saw the great surge of the Pelegasians. The man with the jawbone in his waistband wrestled it out of his belt. The night threatened to erupt into violence. 

“Stand where you are!” the older priest shouted to the temple soldiers.

Pileus went after the High Priest again and Timokrates, struggling with all of his might, kept the giant from getting hold of the priest. The High Priest tripped over the step into the square and fell to the ground, his staff clattered away on the inlaid stones. He scrambled out of Pileus’ reach on  his hands and knees.

Timokrates, still with the dress in his hands, rushed to help the old man to his feet. “I apologize for Pileus.”

“Twenty years,” the older priest seethed at his climbed to his feet. He pulled his arm from Timokrates’ grasp and began to straighten his robes. He made no attempt to hide the venom in his tone as he seethed, “Perhaps the time has come to find out just how immortal this king of yours truly is?”

The priests moved off toward the chariot, leaving Timokrates alone in the torchlight of the Pelegasians. He angrily hurried back inside the house and grabbed the giant’s forearm. “Pileus...”

“Do not nag me, potter,” Pileus roared. “I hate nagging.”

“Pileus, that old man is the most powerful priest in the world,” Timokrates said angrily. “He has the obedience of kings and powerful men and they do not take insults lightly. They will not stop until the house of Alexandros is brought down and they hunt down all the women in the Cult to the Mistress of Animals as witches and burn down the Black Oak Grotto.”

“Let them come,” Pileus said. “They can fertilize our fields. Twenty times Alexandros has been killed in battle and twenty times he lived. He did not suffer so much to cower before soft-handed weaklings like that.”

“Nobles and priests hate him more than they love life itself,” Timokrates argued. “Nothing is more loathsome to them than a king who has sworn himself to poverty. The gold they live and breathe for, that runs through their blood like quicksilver and rules every moment of their lives, means nothing to him. These are proud men and he shames them.”

“That gold buys armies,” the scribe continued, more calmly. “You will fight better, but they will only send more. This is not a fight that he can win. You have seen what happens in other places when gods are made to do something that they cannot, and the people can no longer put their faith in them. When that time comes for us, it should be important enough to lose him forever over.”

Pileus rested his arms on the roof timbers and looked down at Timokrates. “You are very wise for a potter, but the girl is going home to her family. We must be very careful what we do at times such as this.”

“Times such as this?”

“Did you not hear what I said?” Pileus asked. “This is the Pelegasian girl from Joppa. Did you not feel it in the night coming out here? Can you not feel it in your bones?”

Timokrates listened to the drumming and the lyre accompaniment in the other room. He could hear the whispering of the bitumen burning on the torches. He looked up at Pileus. “Feel what?”

“We are no longer living in ordinary times,” Pileus said. He leaned his gigantic head with its boar's tusk helmet slightly in the direction of the dark sky above the central ridge that ran like a craggy spine the length of the island. Taking one hand from the roof timber he placed it very carefully on the dress in Timokrates’ hands. “These are events of prophecy."

Chapter 2

The sleek white helicopter contrasted sharply with the lush, Pacific Northwest rainforest. Trapped beneath an early morning overcast, it swept through a steep, winding valley that followed a meandering highway and a fast-moving river that washed over boulders and fallen trees.

The valley was crowded with the spires of evergreens, forming a blue-green carpet shrouded in radiation fog draining out of the clouds to the valley floor. The carpet showed some signs of wear through occasional breaks in the rain clouds, mottled in places with clear-cuts—twisted brown DMZs from the region's logging history. The ground moved deceptively slowly beneath the helicopter. Less than an hour after lifting off from the rooftop of the Federal Building in bustling downtown Seattle, the speed and ease with which the aircraft climbed into the mountains created a false impression that the area was less remote than it truly was.

The whirling rotor blades beat their wasp-wing rhythm, slicing the gray overcast light so that the interior of the cabin looked like film running on an old projector. Isolated from the noise of the engines, the pressurized passenger cabin buzzed with the various melodies of cell phone ringers and the sound of urgent chatter. Two plush leather bench seats faced each other, crowded with passengers.

Front and center, with her back to the pilots, was Connie Sondaricker. She was busily talking to the man seated across the aisle on her left while at the same time adroitly holding a cell phone to one ear, jutting her elbow into the cheekbone of the man seated on her right.

Sondaricker wore smart, urban librarian's glasses framed by her rounded, modern Dutch Boy haircut with a single curl on each side pointed toward the corners of her mouth. Her makeup had been chosen for its utility and ease of application using a handheld compact or the rearview mirrors of cars. She wore severely professional slacks and blouse with heavy-soled school shoes. Instead of a suit jacket, she was wearing a blue windbreaker with the large yellow letters FBI on the back.

“Sondaricker here,” she said as she flashed lines on the portable phone. She listened intently to the caller and then checked her slender, feminine wristwatch and nodded. “No, we’re still in the air. We left Seattle about half an hour ago.”

After the caller asked her something, she spun around as far as she could in the confines of her seatbelt and whacked the pilot solidly on the shoulder. “How long?” 

“Fifteen minutes,” the pilot responded. He pointed to the radio headset he was wearing around his neck. “Sounds like a bunch of press choppers up there. They're trying to get all the air traffic sorted out.”

Sondaricker told her caller, “We'll be up there in thirty minutes. The town?” The question stumped her and she elbowed the special agent on her left. “The town?”

He replied without looking up from the laptop computer he had opened on his knees. “Huntington.”

“Big Dawg?” Sondaricker held a hand over her cell phone receiver and looked to the man seated in the window seat across from her. “I just got off the phone with D.C., they want direct reports every hour as soon as we hit the ground.”

The man acknowledged her with a slight nod without turning his attention from the river valley passing below them. Special Agent in Charge LeMar Wallace leaned heavily on the armrest. Wallace no longer wore the nondescript, dark suits that normally distinguished FBI field agents. Instead he wore a pinstriped three-piece suit custom-tailored to fit his unusually large build with a golden embroidered vest and a red silk tie. His skin was dark black with a cleanly shaven scalp that showed the battering ram shape of his skull and a fierce scowl was permanently embedded into his brow.

He retained the impressive height and size that had gotten him through six seasons as an All-Pro middle linebacker. As he watched the scenery passing below the helicopter, he stroked his chin thoughtfully with a hand that bore two grossly oversized, grandiose silver-and-diamond rings from the Big Show, Super Bowls.

The red and blue emergency lights of state patrol cars shimmered on the wet asphalt. Troopers in yellow rain slickers and clear, elastic covers over their flat-brimmed hats together with firefighters, snug against the drizzle in their heavy bunker gear, directed an endless stream of cars that included several TV satellite trucks.

One lane was marked off with flares, crisscrossing in sparkling red zigzags so that one burning out would ignite the next one, preparing for a long day as a highway construction crew was distributing pylons and barricades. Traffic was completely stopped in the opposite lane to make way for a convoy of olive drab National Guard vehicles that were crawling slowly up the mountain highway.

Wallace shook his head in abject disbelief. He swore quietly in his deep voice, mellowed with the remains of a Texas drawl, “God Almighty.”

The former logging and mill town of Huntington passed beneath the helicopter as though from out of a different time. A relic from the days of dinosaur trees, the boom town had sprung up when the region was covered with an endless supply of giant Douglas Firs, Western Red Cedars and Hemlock. All that remained was a roadside attraction, a museum piece from an America that no longer existed. All that remained of the endless supply of timber was a few faded photographs showing trains with single section logs that took an entire flatcar and images of gaunt Scandinavians in handlebar mustaches and suspenders, posing with their axes in front of trees that half a dozen men could not join hands around.

The town comprised a single main street of rusting tin-roof buildings with a handful of mud-road tributaries. At the center was a wood-floored general store with aisles spaced close together from a time before shopping carts. A large, handwritten sign by the entrance stated: No Credit, Don’t Ask. The general store shared a muddy parking lot with a honky-tonk. At that early hour, the neon beer signs in the windows were lit and a few pickup trucks were already parked near the front entrance.

The sole gas station had little white flakes of paint left from when it had sparkled clean in the heyday of the American automobile revolution, when teenaged boys in uniforms and bow ties would run out and surround a customer's car, checking the oil and fluids and tire pressure while cleaning the windows and mirrors, and all of it with a smile. What remained was a concrete island with two antique mechanical pumps that dated back to when a gallon of gasoline cost a nickel, surrounded by dirt blackened by decades of leaking motor oil and spilled diesel. Behind the station lay five acres of rusted hulks of automobiles that spanned from suicide doors and rumble seats to t-tops among logging yarders and trucks petrified into statues by decades of rust.   

Across the narrow, two-lane street a barber pole hung outside a large plate glass window where old men watched the helicopter pass overhead through out-of-date drugstore eyeglasses. The street led out of town into patches of mobile homes with dented siding and farmhouses with dilapidated barns with swaybacked ridges. 

Wallace watched the town school pass below from the window of the helicopter. The red brick building had a large set of wide, shallow front steps that gave it a stately dignity. Black and white checkerboard tile floors were visible through the unpainted windowpanes. The school grounds were encircled with a collapsed cyclone fence. A single set of bleachers overlooked an oval running track broken into shifting tectonic asphalt plates and a football field that was overgrown into a hay field. The scoreboard behind one of the rusting goal posts read: Home of the Huntington Hunters.

“Doesn't look like they'll be sending anybody to the NFL anytime soon,” the man seated across from Wallace remarked casually.

Sondaricker overheard the comment and spoke without missing a beat on the telephone. “The high school that Special Agent Wallace went to didn't even have goal posts.”

The man seemed content to allow Sondaricker to have the final word, but then added, “Well, he's from Texas. They grow football players on special farms down there like chinchillas.”

The remark drew Wallace out of his contemplation of the scene below. He turned from the window toward the lean, suntanned man wearing suit pants and a shirt and tie with a beige zippered jacket. The man had slipped onto the helicopter in the commotion on the helipad in Seattle. 

Beneath his seat was a black paratrooper's duffle bag that bore the eagle, pistol, anchor and trident Budweiser emblem of the US Navy's SEAL teams. The zipper of the bag was open far enough to reveal a long, hard-sided case that was unmistakably a rifle case and a portable satellite communications system. Following the cord of the com unit to the computer the man held on his lap, Wallace could see that the man was using the laptop to cover up his reading of a pamphlet—the teenager sneaking a dirty magazine in a textbook.

Without a word, Wallace lifted his eyebrows, momentarily un-creasing the unfriendly lines on his forehead—the schoolteacher issuing the command to be shown the incriminating magazine.

The man dutifully handed over a slender, pocket-sized booklet called Clearing the Air: How to Quit Smoking and Quit for Keeps.

The special agent leaned forward against his seatbelt and handed it back. Wallace asked, “How long?”

The man smiled nervously, waiting for a lull in the conversation in the chopper to respond. He said tentatively, “My second day.”

Wallace nodded, showing the slightest hint of appreciation. He circled a hand over his own midsection. “I hear lots of water helps.”

The man dug into the seat between himself and Sondaricker to show Wallace a plastic water bottle. As he did, he deliberately drove his knuckles harder into Sondaricker's bottom than was necessary.

She snatched the pamphlet out of his hand, read the title and handed it back, impatiently. “I don't remember seeing you around.” She leaned over to see what was on the computer monitor. “What office are you with?”

“Office?” The man calmly replaced the pamphlet inside his zippered jacket and closed the laptop. “Oh, right, office. I got the little one with the cubicle, desk, typewriter. You know? Stick ‘em notes, stapler. The whole thing.”

Sondaricker regarded him suspiciously. “You're not with the Bureau?”

Wallace, watching the exchange, was unable to resist a short chuckle. “Not anymore,” he answered her. “His name is Jack Corbett. Used to be a sniper on an FBI tactical team back East. Former Navy SEAL and blood kin to Colonel Jim Corbett. They say the best cold shot rifle sniper in Bureau history.”

Wallace then turned to the man sitting across from him. “Resigned over some kind of administrative trouble, wasn't it?”

Corbett only turned up one corner of his mouth.

“Now he's the Lone Ranger,” Wallace continued. “Probably has the State Department on his paychecks, but basically wanders the halls of the Pentagon and the cocktail parties in Washington D.C. running errands for very important people.”

“State Department?” Sondaricker studied the side of Corbett's face. “I didn't think this was a national security issue?”

This time Wallace did not answer for him, but waited with Sondaricker for an explanation from Corbett as to why he was on the helicopter. 

“Hey, don't look at me,” Corbett said defensively. “You guys know as much about why I'm here as I do.”

“Well, then, I guess we're all going to find out together, right, Mr. Corbett?” Wallace leaned forward in his seat. “Just so you know, over here on the Major Crimes side of the FBI, we're not really into all that cloak and dagger stuff. We're more of your straightforward types. I understand you Special Forces fellows are real good at hand-to-hand combat. Tae Kwon Do and Ninjitsu and all that nonsense.” He dismissed the martial arts with a wave of one hand. One of the hands he had used to get the undivided attention of high-risk youths in the Bay Area by tearing the San Francisco phone book in half across the binding. “I sure hope there's nothing you and me gonna go out back of the woodshed over?”

Corbett stared at the knot of Wallace's tie—the center of his mass. He made no attempt to hide his sudden need to swallow, then said with a voice that was still dry, “Me, too.”

Wallace nodded with satisfaction as he sat back in his seat. Turning back to the window he broke into a grin. “Chinchillas.”

The helicopter lowered for a landing in an area where the tall grass had been beaten flat. Standing at the front of a crowd of people who awaited the helicopter's arrival was Jerry Moore from the Seattle field office. His gray business suit was soaked dark on the shoulders and he wore tall rubber boots, looking sleepless and exhausted. His damp, silver hair whipped wildly, his shoulders bent, as if the swirling propwash of the rotors of the descending helicopter might knock him over. He looked as though he had just walked away from a serious car accident.

Moore shook Wallace's hand the instant the Special Agent in Charge was able to stand to his full height after avoiding the spinning rotors. “Welcome to sunny Washington State.”

The group from the helicopter merged with the group from the landing area as they moved between several police cars parked in the tall grass. Moore pointed out a short man with a neatly-trimmed beard in a tweed suit that was too big for him. “This is Michael Rosen. He's with the US District Attorney's office.”

“You look familiar.” Wallace struggled to recognize Rosen's face. “We worked together on something up here?”

“United States v. Peal,” Rosen refreshed his memory. “I didn't have the beard.”

“Oh, right,” Wallace said. “Sorry about that.”

Rosen asked anxiously, “You don't like it?”

“It's fine. It looks very...” Wallace looked at him again as they walked. “Makes you look very distinguished.”

Wallace was stopped by a tall, stunning woman with smooth, Nigerian features wearing a clear plastic raincoat over a deliberately unpretentious skirt suit.

Moore introduced her. “This is Lucinda Brown. She's with the American Civil Liberties Union. She's here on authority from D.C..”

Sondaricker stepped up to her. “ACLU? You're in the wrong camp, aren't you? The bad guy sidelines are on the other side of the field.”

“I was not aware there were any suspects, yet?” Wallace regarded Brown as he walked.

“There aren't,” Brown answered him. “I’m here as part of the appeals process while the ENFORSUR program cases are before the Supreme Court. I'm here to monitor the evidence gathering and preservation and then pass along my findings to whatever defense attorney the suspects decide on after an arrest is made.”

“So a person has a lawyer keeping an eye on us before we even know who they are?” Wallace said dubiously. “Only a bunch of lawyers could have come up with an idea like that.”

“I understand you have a criminal law degree from the University of Texas, Special Agent Wallace?” she countered. “I would think you'd appreciate that laws change.”

“I got one of them old school law degrees.”

“How old school is that?” Brown challenged. “Does it date back to the time when the law said folks like you and me were three-fifths of a person? Or only back to when we had to ride on the back of the bus?”

“Listen up, girlfriend,” Sondaricker stepped between them. “We'll call you when we've got something to report, until then—”

“Hold up.” Wallace touched Sondaricker on the shoulder as he appraised Lucinda Brown with renewed interest. The attorney returned his gaze with fiery determination. The sharp, regal shape of her jaw, like Nefertiti, when jutted forward, created the impression of having pissed off someone important. Wallace said, “The sister can come along.”

As they threaded their way between the cars, the group moved among sheriff’s detectives and coroner's technicians, carrying plastic equipment cases, making their way toward a village of military tents. Moore asked, “Has this thing hit the air down in San Francisco yet?”

“C'mon, Jerry,” Wallace said. “You can't believe anything you see on TV.”

“State Patrol is handling traffic. They've got the mountain closed off to everyone except residents and the press.” Moore indicated the tents. “They have their detectives helping with the evidence gathering and technicians from the state crime lab. The local sheriff's office isn't big enough to have its own homicide division, so we got some sent out from Seattle helping supervise the evidence collection and to canvass the town.”

The lanky, silver-haired special agent explained, “The governor has called up the National Guard to provide kitchen facilities, barracks and latrines for all the cops, a portable air traffic control station for all the press choppers and a temporary morgue.”

“Great, Army food again,” Wallace said without enthusiasm. “Where's the crime scene?”

“Back down there,” Moore pointed to an area a few hundred yards down the logging road that was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. He explained, “They just finished up with the tire impressions and paint scrapings off the bushes along the trail, so we can start getting vehicles back in there. There's giant boulders and puddles the size of lakes. Whoever was going back in there must have been using some kind of four-wheel drive.”

Moore stopped walking and unhurriedly lit a cigarette. Wallace and Sondaricker both turned to watch Jack Corbett, who was studying the cigarette so carefully he appeared to be counting the microscopic silver rings in the paper that made it look so crisp and neat.

Moore haphazardly exhaled the smoke and continued. “There's a cabin down there. It's some kind of old trapping or hunting shack. It looks like it's been there a while. There's a pile of magazines inside. Ones on the bottom date back to the fifties. There's tons of garbage all over the place up in there, it looks like a landfill. Some of it’s pretty recent.”

Moore suddenly realized something important. He reached into the outside pocket of his sport jacket and produced a clear plastic evidence bag. Holding it with two fingers he offered it to Wallace.

Wallace took it and examined what was in it. It looked like a silver marble with three thin metal wires protruding from it. “What's this?”

“A camera,” Moore explained. “It's a little spy camera. This whole place is covered with them.”

“Is it live?” Wallace held it up in the air to where he could see the tiny lens.

“Yeah,” Moore said. “The technical guys are working with the phone company to track down where the signal is going.”

“They're watching us?” Wallace looked out across the clearing at the heavily forested hills shrouded in rainy mist. He handed off the clear plastic envelope to Lucinda Brown without looking at her. “Say hello to your clients.”

Brown held the envelope in two fingers and looked at it with disgust.

“Big catch so far has been a bunch of video tapes,” Moore explained. “Dozens of them. Some of them go back to eight-millimeter home movies and Beta cassettes, but some of them are real recent. Digital disks.”

Wallace turned to the older agent.  “Videos?”

“There's no power out here,” Moore told him. “We're guessing they were just stored here. The ENFORSUR team is working on them in their mobile lab.”

Moore continued, “Down behind the cabin there's these three holding cells built into the hill. Cinder block construction with reinforced steel doors. Dr. Hong calls them the Straw Chambers in her preliminary report.”

Moore watched Wallace's face, expecting an explanation. 

“Straw Chambers?” Wallace looked back at Sondaricker for help. When she shrugged, everyone turned to Jack Corbett where he was following along. “Straw Chambers?”

Corbett lowered the pamphlet he was reading intently and said quickly, “Sure, it’s from Rumplestiltskin. You know? The three chambers where the Miller's daughter had to spin straw into gold or the king would kill her.” He looked at each one of their faces in turn. “The little leprechaun helped her every night. He said he'd let her out of it if she could guess his name.” 

“Hey, Corbett.” Sondaricker spun on him. “You used to be a Navy SEAL, didn't you? So you're probably real good around water, right?”

“Water?” Corbett leapt at the opportunity to help. “You bet, that's right.”

“Great, so why don't you go see if you can find a place to make some coffee?” 

Corbett wandered off into the encampment, returning to his small pamphlet as he made his way through the gathered police and scientists.

“Whatever it is—” Moore stopped walking, squaring himself to Wallace. “The bodies are in an area around the cabin, all over the bushes and trees around it. All women, so far. Most of them been here a while, bunch of remains overlapping each other. Some of them have been here long enough to be grown over with trees and bushes, there's a few still in various stages of decomposition. Some just a few weeks, the most recent ones look like they've only been dead a couple of days.”

“They're not bodies, Jerry,” Wallace quietly corrected Moore. “They're victims. How many?”

“Jez, LeMar, I dunno.” Moore showed the first signs of not being in control.  His voice was unsteady as he said, “It's just out of this world in there. There could be a hundred.”

Wallace stared at the plastic yellow crime scene tape in the distance flapping gently in the rain. “What's the talk of the town? Has anybody noticed there's a hundred people missing?”

“There hasn't been a crime worse than a drunken lumberjack busting up the local bar in thirty-five years around here,” Moore said. “Whoever these victims are, they're not from around here.”

Moore pushed one hand through his damp hair. “Dr. Hong said there is a place where all the socks that end up missing in the dryer are,” he told Wallace, his voice shaking. “This place is where all the women who vanish every year end up.”

Wallace asked, “Well, what's your impression? This a gang of crazies out digging up people out of cemeteries or something?”

“No way,” Moore shook his head ardently. “These people were murdered.  The way the victims are, all women, the differences between the times of death.  This could be one guy.”

Wallace stiffened. “A serial killer?”

“I think this is somebody who has been doing this for a long, long time,” Moore said, looking through the rain down the road at the crime scene tape. “We found the Boogeyman’s house.”

“Well, it ain't the Boogeyman’s house no more,” Wallace said forcefully. “Now it's my house.

Chapter 3  

LeMar Wallace led the group of people who had greeted him at the helicopter towards a cluster of white government vehicles near the makeshift command center. A white tractor-trailer with a refrigerated trailer was parked alongside a converted airport fire engine with tall, bulbous tires and an actuated middle that allowed it to pivot in half. In front of these was a large RV connected to a trailer by an accordion vestibule. On the sides of the RV and the semi trailer were the FBI seal together with the NASA logo and the words ENFORSUR: Early National Forensic Support Response.

“Special Agent Wallace?” The federal prosecutor Rosen hurried to the front of the group. “I'm sure you're aware the entire Ninth Circuit Court has just finished a major review. Among the findings of that review is that early evidence preservation and handling routines are a crucial component to keeping prosecution costs down.”

“I read it,” Wallace said shortly. “Only I didn't see where the extra funding for early evidence preservation or training was coming from?”

“We're all being asked to do more with less these days,” Rosen said. “Bottom line is weak cases are expensive. I've already gotten a phone call from the State Attorney General's office about the ENFORSUR team being out here. They're relying on us to help them keep costs down, not to hand them grounds for an automatic appeal that could run court costs into the millions.”

Wallace asked, “Why would I bench my star quarterback for the big game?”

Lucinda Brown interrupted them and said succinctly, “Because every one of those cases has already been shot down in US appeals court and are now before the Supreme Court where they're most likely going to be overturned. Just having ENFORSUR here could be creating grounds for a dismissal of this case before you've even lifted a fingerprint.”

Wallace shook his head. “The Supreme Court of the United States is not going to release convicted murderers.”

“They may not have any choice,” Rosen countered. “There's no way to independently verify that the computer searches Egor uses don't violate Fourth Amendment guarantees. In fact, most of the testimony that has been presented to the Court so far has indicated that it routinely performs unconstitutional searches and invasion of privacy.” 

“Egor?” Sondaricker asked.

“Yeah, that's what they call Dr. Hong's robot,” Wallace explained as he walked among the white ENFORSUR vehicles. He touched one of the trucks as he spelled out Egor’s acronym, “Evidence Gathering Operations Robot. A joint project between the Justice Department, NASA and the robotics department at MIT. It's a portable evidence-collecting robot with state-of-the-art forensic analysis capabilities. It's like taking the whole FBI Laboratory to a crime scene and then some. Every case it's been used on, Egor has pointed straight to a suspect.”

Sondaricker walked as she contemplated what he had told her.

Wallace continued, “I testified in front of the congressional committee to help Dr. Hong get the funding for ENFORSUR in the Crime Bill a few years ago. I'm kind of like Egor's uncle.”

As they walked alongside the RV, a woman's voice interrupted them. “I don't think the General Accounting Office would be happy to hear about your half-billion-dollar nephew playing in the mud.”

“Well, if it isn't Doctor Frankenstein.” Wallace looked among the RV windows for the source of the voice. “Where’s the Tin Woodsman?”

“He's smart enough to come in out of the rain.” A woman in one of the windows waved them over toward the door.  “Come on in.”

Diane Hong looked like a tiny, delicate doll as she politely hugged Wallace. His impeccable suit mismatched to her blue and white striped Russian sailor's shirt and blue jeans. Her face was like an Oriental vase that got its beauty from its simplicity. She ushered them all inside the interior of the lab vehicle, which resembled a spaceship retrofitted with new components along with the outdated ones. It was alive with computerized instruments and video monitors and half a dozen technicians in white clean-room suits and booties over their shoes, many peering intently into microscopes.  

“Don't worry about contaminating anything,” she assured them casually. “Anything that's going to be used in court is stored in a separate trailer.”

“Well, congratulations,” Wallace said. “You've got the Supreme Court mad at you, you must be doing something right.”

He pointed to Sondaricker. “Connie Sondaricker, meet Dr. Diane Hong. NASA liaison to the Justice Department and ENFORSUR's mom.”

“How's it going, Hong?” Sondaricker shook her hand once. She explained curtly, “I'm surrounded by PhDs and Jurisprudences all day. I only call people doctor if they've been to medical school.”

“Oh,” Hong regarded Sondaricker. “Well, then you can call me doctor if you’d like. My medical degree is from Harvard, specializing in forensic pathology. My other doctorate degrees in robotics and cybernetics are from MIT.”

As Sondaricker stood motionless, Wallace hit her playfully on the shoulder and said, “And she's an astronaut.”

Sondaricker forced a smile and said, a little more quietly, “Well, half the people at NASA call themselves astronauts. I think people should have to make an actual space flight first.”

Still entirely un-offended, Hong pointed out a picture hanging near the entrance of the ENFORSUR vehicle. “See that?”

Sondaricker leaned over to see a photograph that captured the unbridled fury of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters during ignition, taken from off of the coast of Cape Canaveral where the exhaust was vented out to sea away from the other buildings.

“That's nice,” Sondaricker said. “Standard publicity photo of a shuttle launch. What about it?”

Hong said, “That's me driving.”

As those crowded into the RV moved into the enclosed vestibule and into the trailer that housed Egor, a few of them politely covered their mouths to conceal a repressed ripple of laughter. Sondaricker retreated into the small kitchen in the lab vehicle the size of an airliner's galley where she encountered Jack Corbett, who handed her a cup of coffee. 

Sondaricker asked as she accepted the coffee, “How can she be an astronaut? She looks like she's about twelve.” 

Corbett took a sip from his own cup. “Maybe instead of a pony she wanted a rocket ship?”

“Hey, hot damn! LeMar Wallace in the flesh.” A large, overweight  man leapt up from his seat at a computer terminal and stopped Wallace as he entered the Egor transport trailer from the covered vestibule that connected it to the RV. The portly fellow had rosy cheeks and soft, pale skin except for an unevenly grown beard. He was slovenly dressed in surfing shorts and a wrinkled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt. Before Hong could move to stop him, he grabbed Wallace's hand and pumped it fervently.

“How you getting on with your bad self these days, homey? I'm Codepheater,” the man said, beaming.

Wallace smiled cordially. He leaned closer. “Your name is Codepheater?” 

“That's me,” the heavy man grinned unabashedly, “With the amazing feats of code.”

“Also known as Rubin Sutton,” Hong explained. “Mr. Sutton is on loan to us from the National Infrastructure Protection Center. He is a convicted computer hacker who has volunteered his expertise to help us in lieu of federal prison.”

Wallace wrenched his hand away from Codepheater and placed his finger only millimeters away from the programmer’s nose. “You call me by my first name again and you'll be eating soup through a straw back in the federal lockup. I am Special Agent in Charge Wallace to you.” Then he added, his voice thick with sarcasm, “Codepheater.”

In the rear compartment, towering over the human technicians moving around it in the small support trailer, weighing as much as a compact car, was the robot called Egor. It was surrounded by an array of sophisticated computer and diagnostic equipment and a horde of specialists watching blinking readouts. The robot’s superstructure had been created by an elite group of scientists, robotics engineers and computer programmers with an obvious eye on its public appeal.  Egor was big and sleek without being intimidating. The simple addition of a third dimension in movement—especially its shoulders and hips that moved with naturalistic ease—together with its uncanny fluid stance and ability to sway from one side to another made it appear far too human.

The machine's motions had surpassed bipedal movement and appeared for all the world as if it were a person inside the giant suit of space armor who was constantly surprised how little their limbs weighed. Its movement approximated organic motion in a way no other machine had before. It struck something profound within a human to see it, something familiar, and made the machine appear infinitely brighter than mere electrons flowing through circuit boards. There was a connection. There was no beeping, whirring or clicking to dispel the illusion. In spite of its great size and weight, it was silent.

Wallace whispered in amazement, “It’s alive!”

Hong and the other team members only smiled proudly.

Wallace slowly walked around Egor. He ducked a number of power cables that connected the robot to the vehicle. “Can it talk?”

“You bet your ass he can,” Codepheater said. He then added in a sudden blurt, “Mr. Special Agent in Charge Wallace, sir.”

Wallace continued to examine the machine.

The programmer continued, “He has artificial intelligence programming for verbal interfacing. He can perform his own diagnostics and tell us where to look for problems. He rounds off numbers in his speech and uses pronouns and contractions correctly, stuff like that. He learns. He can talk and solve problems on his own. Talk to him.”

“Do I have to say 'Good morning, Hal' or something?” Wallace asked. The look on Hong's face told him he didn't. He asked out loud, as if speaking to a slow person, “Hello, Egor, how are you doing, my man?”

The robot responded. Its synthesized voice approximated that of a monotone, genderless drone. “Good morning, Special Agent Wallace. I hope you are having a good day. How is the sports team that you enjoy following performing so far this season?”

“How does it know who its talking to?” Sondaricker interrupted. 

Codepheater explained, “Aw, that's nothing. He stores a visual record of people he's encountered before, just like we do. For feds—err—federal officers, he also has access to FBI personnel photographs.”

Wallace grinned. “And he's polite, too.”

Jack Corbett had been watching Egor while he idly sipped his coffee. He turned to ACLU attorney Lucinda Brown, who was standing next to him in the narrow doorway. “Just what we need, another government robot.”

Sondaricker persisted, “I don't see how that can help if he doesn't have a record of somebody? I mean, how is he going to identify human remains?”

“Egor,” Hong drew the robot’s attention—readied it for a query—as she clasped her hands behind her back. “Tell us what Special Agent Sondaricker had for breakfast, her present blood pressure and total cholesterol level, the grade she got in American History in seventh grade, the outstanding balance on her best credit card and the last time she had sexual intercourse.”

A light illuminated on Egor's chest, and words were broadcast from the speaker located on the robot’s head approximately where a human mouth would be. “Special Agent Sondaricker consumed twelve ounces of liquid dietary supplement and one powdered raspberry jelly donut forty-two minutes ago. Her blood pressure is one hundred and twelve over seventy and her total cholesterol is one hundred and sixty-five. She did not attend seventh grade, but submatricated from sixth to eighth grade where she received an A. She has a Platinum Visa card with an outstanding balance of six thousand, four hundred and twenty-two dollars and she has not had sexual intercourse within the parameters of my detection capabilities with an active, living subject.”

“Which is how long?” Hong asked.

“Five-thousand hours.”

The people gathered in the trailer all turned to Sondaricker. 

“What's everybody looking at?” she asked defensively. “I used that card to put in a hot tub at my condo. Ended up costing as much to install the damn thing as it was to buy it.”

Wallace shook his head doubtfully, returning to Hong. “How in the world does he do all that?”

“The secret is his computer processor,” Hong explained. “He has access to a first-of-its-kind processor in California. It takes images from his various onboard telemetry and accelerates those images to obtain higher resolution than has ever been possible by any other means. He can see inside the human body better than a medical MRI, using less power and no radioactivity. Instead of sending out a powerful source signal to get better return, he can take very faint signals and relay them to his external processor where they're amplified into usable data. His radio imagery telemetry emits less voltage than the clock radio on your nightstand, and yet he can view substances on a subatomic level with far greater detail than an electron microscope. He can tell who walked through a room by creating a complete DNA profile from the skin cells that naturally slough off your skin as you walk. He can analyze the composition of microscopic fibers with a light spectrograph that uses less voltage than a pocket flashlight and he uses his artificial intelligence programming to cross-check himself. Examining the microscopic crumbs on the front of somebody‘s shirt to verify their stomach contents, for example.”

Sondaricker looked down at the front of her blouse and began to discreetly brush at it with one hand. 

“Sound waves never eliminate themselves,” Hong explained. “They only become inaudible after a period of time. It takes a few fractions of a second for what I'm saying to reach your ears and then they become inaudible, but the sound is still in this room. Egor can detect those latent sounds and amplify them. Depending on the absorption rate of the wall materials and other environmental factors, Egor can detect and recreate a conversation that took place weeks ago.”

There was a stunned silence among those gathered in the trailer with Egor.

Wallace stepped up in front of the robot and looked up at its inhuman, ergo-dynamically shaped face. “This is going to change everything.”

“Special Agent Wallace?” Rosen spoke up nervously, “This has all been very informative, but Dr. Hong and her people are on their way back to Quantico, remember?”

“Egor is the only machine capable of using that processor,” Lucinda Brown added.  “Which leaves everyone else with no way to verify its results.”

“There's no way to verify what all it goes through while performing those searches,” Rosen agreed vehemently. “There's no way to protect the public from it.”

“I've already testified in front of the Supreme Court about this,” Hong explained to Wallace. “No matter how much data he searches, he's still just as limited by storage as any other system. He can’t possibly store even a fraction of what he goes through. Even if he could, it would be such a huge volume of data it would be impossible to organize, let alone for anybody to look at it all.”

Wallace looked at her and asked flatly, “Can this machine identify them folks out there?” 

“Yes, he can, LeMar,” she insisted. “This is exactly the sort of case this program was put together for.”

“All right.” Wallace looked at Egor and nodded, “Your Tin Woodsman can wear a badge for today. Bring your can of oil in case he freezes up.”

“Absolutely not,” Rosen argued. “Every American is guaranteed the right to be secure in their homes from unreasonable searches and seizures. The only way any authority can violate that right is with a warrant based on demonstrable probable cause that specifies exactly what is being searched for, and signed by a human judge. What if he finds something critical to the case out there? We won't be able to use it.”

“Special Agent Wallace,” Brown said hotly. “You don't have the authority for this. There is an injunction in place that states this thing is not to be used during the Supreme Court appeals process.”

“People are not evidence,” Hong immediately confronted the attorneys. “You want these women's parents to find out they've been murdered by having a TV camera crew show up on their front lawn?”

“I hate to agree with the lawyers, but maybe they're right,” Sondaricker said, as she eyed Egor suspiciously. “Catching this guy is only half the battle. We've got to make a case stick and we don't want to hand a defense any wiggle-room to plea bargain with. Maybe we should wait on the Big Court before involving this thing in a case like this?” 

Wallace held up one finger and silenced everyone. “I want to thank all of you for your input. You know I like to run an open investigation. I like to hear everybody's opinion. But, there's something ya'll don't understand. Make no mistake,” he said, “there's going to be a time that I am going to go looking for whoever did this. Have no doubt, whoever did this done spent their last restful night. I am going to hound them to the ends of creation. I will never stop looking for them and when I catch them, they are going to be punished to the ultimate extent of the laws of this country. Somebody is going to make that long walk to the gallows at Walla Walla for this.”

He looked at Sondaricker, then Brown and finally at Rosen. He said very calmly, “But not yet. Right now there are people lying out there in the rain. People with families, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, boyfriends and children, some of them. Yeah, we gonna find some whores out there. We gonna find some drug addicts. Some runaways. But somewhere there's somebody out there waiting for them to come home. Every one of them, sometime, somewhere had a place left for them at the dinner table some night they didn't show up. Right now I have a job to do for those folks at those dinner tables. So they can stop waiting. So they aren't stuck for one more night between hope and grief and they can start trying to piece together what's left of their lives and begin moving on as best they can.”

Wallace turned to Lucinda Brown and looked down at the attorney. “Nobody's going to fault me for that. Supreme Court's not going to fault me for that. Not just every American, nobody in any country is going to fault me for that. Because that's what anybody would want me to do if it was their people out there.”

Wallace returned to stand in front of Egor. ”I’m gonna tell you something else.” He reached out a hand and laid it on the robot’s mechanical chest. Patting it three times with his fingertips. “When that court decision comes down, I am gonna put the dogs on him.”

As the group began climbing down from the ENFORSUR vehicle,  Sondaricker carefully balanced her coffee cup as she descended the steps and found herself next to Diane Hong. She asked, “So, what’s that mean? Cholesterol one sixty-five?"

Chapter 4

The crime-scene tape was removed, and the white ENFORSUR transport truck crawled off the road and into the ditch and onto the narrow trail on the far side. The cab twisted and climbed independently from the main body of the vehicle, allowing it to travel over the difficult terrain like a convoy of monster trucks. Diane Hong wheeled the steering wheel furiously as she attempted to fit the large truck between the trees along the sides of the trail. A few of its six tires missed traction on the rutted trail as boulders scraped the bottom, which was two feet off the ground. As they traveled, pine branches scraped the windshield and Hong was constantly forced to stop, reverse and work her way around impossibly tight corners. In the passenger's seat, Wallace steadied himself from the violent lurches and buckles on the center console and the door handle. Jack Corbett sat in the center of the rear seats between Moore and Sondaricker.

“Jesus Christ,” Corbett muttered as the transport took a hard jolt. “What in the hell were these people driving back here?”

Sondaricker told him severely, “Don't blaspheme around Special Agent Wallace.”

The truck slid to one side and as he was forced to lean against Sondaricker, he did nothing to hold himself, but only turned and watched with a slightly bemused  expression as she struggled under his weight.  

Looking out the windshield, Wallace shook his head in amazement at the difficulty of the trail.  As he fought the violent movement of the vehicle, he attempted to read through a pile of police reports.

“The police reports from Huntington,” he said, holding up the papers for Moore to see in the rear seat. “I've got at least three so far that mention that the locals used to scare kids out of playing up here with some story about a mad trapper who lives up here.”

He held up another sheet of paper. “This is how well that works. Two kids from the high school report it's a popular pastime on Halloween to drive the logging roads in the Huntington area and scare the hell out of freshman by leaving them out here to walk out in the dark.”

“That's a nice campfire story,” Moore said as he absorbed the shock of another turn. “State police already checked those out. There hasn't been a missing person reported in this area since the sixties. There was two of them in the same year.”

Wallace looked down at the pages. He muttered to himself disappointed, “I guess all the freshman make it back out.”

The transport took a massive jolt and buckled hard to one side. Hong ably switched into reverse and worked them out of a drop-off that the truck had fallen into.

“Well, you say this cabin is probably older than that.” Wallace looked back at Moore in the rear seat. “What happened back then?”

Moore began flipping though pages and absently reached for a cigarette from his shirt breast pocket. He had it dangling from his lips as Corbett turned next to him with the expression of a man starving in the wilderness who had suddenly found himself sixteen inches from a large plate of spaghetti bolognaise. Corbett’s jaw relaxed and his lips parted slightly as he examined the delicious shape of the cigarette.

“In June of sixty-four,” Moore spoke as he read from one of the forms in his hand, “fifteen-year-old white female named Molly Spencer came up here for a camping trip with four other students from the high school. Everybody's stories matched. She got scared in the tent, and went to sleep in the back seat of the car with the doors locked. When everybody got up the next morning, she was gone. The keys were still in the ignition and the doors were locked with her sleeping bag and things still inside. No sign of forced entry. The other kids had to walk down off the mountain to get help because they didn't want to break the car windows.”

At the instant Moore began to roll his thumb over the lighter, Hong caught sight of him in the big school bus mirror that gave her a view of the passenger's cab above her visor. “You light that thing in here and I will beat you out like a brush fire.”

Moore glanced up from the report, noticed the lighter in his hand and haphazardly tossed it in his pocket. Much to Corbett’s dismay, who watched him snatch the unlit cigarette from his lips and use it as a reading aid.

Corbett urgently reached for the pamphlet in his zippered jacket.

“Two months later,” Moore continued, “another girl in Huntington gets in a fight with her mother about her clothes, storms out and starts hitchhiking for her aunt's house in Seattle. She was last seen getting into a light-blue pickup truck with a white teenaged male with red hair and a slight build that nobody knew.”

“Small town, Huntington. He must have been from somewhere else.” Wallace considered that for a moment. He said idly, “If the redhead kid was old enough to drive in the mid-sixties, that puts him in his fifties now, maybe early sixties.”

Everyone in the cab strained forward in their seats to see the cabin as they approached. The trail had not originally been intended for vehicles and the entrance to the cabin was in the opposite direction, facing a thinning area in the trees where more light would reach it. The wooden siding was bending and blackened from age, a cedar shake roof covered with moss. A single window on the side of the cabin was made opaque by a decades-old film of mildew.

A sheriff’s four-wheel drive blocked the road and Hong allowed the transport vehicle to grind to a halt. She left the engine running to drive the generators and set the air parking brake with a pop and a sudden hisss! from underneath. She reached for the door handle and exchanged a quick glance with Wallace.

Holding the door handle, she paused and took a deep breath. “I always hate the hideouts.”

Wallace looked over at her.

Before climbing out of the cab she said, “This is where they get to be themselves.”

While Hong and Codepheater lowered the ramp to offload Egor from the rear of the ENFORSUR transport, Wallace moved toward the dilapidated cabin. Workmen, sheriff’s deputies in coveralls, wearing booties over their shoes,  were using small gardening spades to excavate around the cabin.

The area had been cordoned off with strings tied to stakes that divided the areas around the cabin into a scientific grid system. Police photographers placed small arrows and scale rulers next to each piece of evidence as they took pictures, while videographers meticulously filmed the entire process.  The precautions were never enough, Wallace knew too well. It was always a shock how poorly crime scenes were preserved by the time the evidence was shown to a jury.

Wallace approached the cabin and stepped onto the rickety wooden porch. Inside, the stale, musty odor was overwhelming. Technicians in white clean-room were poring over a large pile of pornographic magazines, carefully turning the glossy pages with tweezers and dabbing them with brushes of fingerprint powder. The majority of the pile had succumbed to the Pacific Northwest weather in the leaking, uninsulated cabin and had moldered into a giant glob. On the floor were hundreds of cigarette butts of different brands that had been smoked to different lengths, as well as several rusting tin beer cans intermingled with newer, aluminum ones.

Jack Corbett stepped into the close confines of the cabin with Wallace. Turning to acknowledge him, Wallace noticed something in a crevice in the wallboards. He unfolded a pair of surgical gloves from his suit jacket pocket and pulled them on before removing a small spy camera from the wall.

Wallace then turned to the wooden tabletop where someone had carved words with a knifepoint. He read out-loud, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength?”

Corbett stepped next to Wallace and read the tabletop himself. “Yeah, that's from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. They're the mottos of Big Brother.”

“Big Brother? You mean, the Big Brother?” Wallace asked. “The one who intrudes into everybody's life and uses drugs to get everybody to act like robots?”

“No,” Corbett shook his head, “you’re thinking of Aldus Huxley's Brave New World. Big Brother just pretty much operates on totalitarian terror and brainwashing.” He pointed to the camera in Wallace's hands. “It's what Stalin would have done if he had those.”

“That all you did was read books up there in those sniper nests?” Wallace asked.

“Unless they ran me cable.”

Wallace moved aside and allowed Corbett to view the tabletop, examining the markings.

“Injun Country,” Wallace read another one of the carvings out loud as he looked out through the mildew-stained window. “You think this is old native land or something?”

Corbett shrugged. “Indian Country was a term they used during the Vietnam War. It's what the GIs called hostile territory.”

“He would be old enough to have served in Vietnam.” Wallace considered that for a moment. “If he was the redhead kid in sixty-four, you think our bad guy could still be fighting a war that isn't over for him?”

Corbett shrugged, moving to leave the cabin and follow the others. From the small front porch he examined the cabin exterior once again. He said, “I think he's fighting something.”

Behind the cabin, and dug slightly into the hillside, were three cinder-block holding cells with wrought-iron bars. The doors had been opened and technicians in white clean-room suits and booties were carefully examining the interiors.

In one, the nude body of a young woman with the bluish-white skin of death hung from a bar in the center of the cell, all of her limp weight dangled from a set of handcuffs on her wrists while her head hung far back on her neck—much further than the living muscle allows a human head to tilt back, to where her thin neck appeared flat. Her feet had been tied with strips of cloth and hung from the same bar so that her body was not touching the filth-encrusted floor of the cell. From where he stood, Wallace could mercifully not see her face, but he was able to see that she had been gagged with strips of torn bed sheeting.

“What happened?” Wallace asked the technician who was applying fingerprint powder to the handcuffs the girl was hanging from.  

“Undetermined at this time.” It was impossible to corner forensic technicians into making guesses. They lived in constant dread of being contradicted on the witness stand and qualified everything they had not proven conclusively in a laboratory.  

Wallace tried anyway. “What's your initial assessment?”

“Looks like she got sick with the gag on,” the technician admitted with unusual candor as he was distracted attempting to lift the latent print. “She asphyxiated on emesis.”

“Asphyxiated on emesis?” Corbett asked Wallace.

Wallace explained quietly, “She choked to death on her own vomit.”

Behind the Straw Chambers the forest floor was littered with white medical sheets to keep the press helicopters that circled overhead from filming what was under them with long-range lenses.  Hong and Codepheater were with Egor where the machine stood on a slight hill, overlooking the scene. Codepheater carried a laptop computer on a lightweight table that was supported with a strap around his neck like a ball-park vendor’s tray.

Egor stood on the embankment as red, low voltage laser beams projecting from his chest danced over the white medical sheet below him.

Wallace stepped up to Codepheater. “What’s the hold-up?”

“I dunno. He's not locked up,” Codepheater quickly tapped a few keys on the computer.

Hong stepped out in front of the robot and looked at the indicator lights on its chest. “He's still processing something.”

“Well, squirt some oil on him, Diane,” Wallace looked across the vast number of white sheets. “We've got a long day ahead of us.”

Hong looked over Codepheater's shoulder at the control pad, then turned to Egor. She looked up at his robotic face while he kept his camera eyes focused on the white sheet at the bottom of the small hill. “What is it, big fella? What are you thinking so hard about?”

Wallace stepped around the robot and down the embankment to stand next to the detective who was examining something underneath the sheet. With a nod from the big FBI agent, the detective removed the protective sheet.

“She's still stiff. Probably died some time last night,” the detective said, nodding towards the body he had exposed. He moved the sheet to show her right arm where a set of stainless steel handcuffs were attached to her wrist. Lifting the sheet further he showed her horribly contorted left thumb. “Looks like she broke her own thumb to get out of the cuffs. Got out of one of those detention cells and then came running over here where she cut her own throat on a tripwire strung between these trees. Slit her throat like a razor.”

“Pretty as a prayer book,”  Wallace said as he admired her extremely attractive face. Coated with her own blood from the neck wound, and her face distorted and discolored from the blood pooling in her cheek once she lay dead, it was still clear that she had been extremely attractive in life. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, a small woman, hardly over a hundred pounds. Her naked body looked more like a pubescent teenager than a grown woman.

Wallace asked Codepheater without looking away from the girl, “So who is she?”

Codepheater typed on the keyboard around his neck and brought up a different screen. He quickly scrolled through some information, looking over at Egor and then back at the display. “LeMar, you're not going to believe this.”

“Oh, I don't know about that, Codepheater.” Wallace did not feel up to arguing about the use of his first name. “I’d believe about anything at this point.”

Codepheater turned to Hong. “This is Mary Mann. This is that missing programmer from the EXAP Center.”

“Who's Mary Mann?” Wallace looked up at them. “What's the EXAP?”

“The EXAP is God.” They turned to see a man standing over the embankment in a military fatigues and tactical vest with a sharp, silver crew cut. “Returned to Earth.”

On the collar of his fatigues were general’s stars and the name tag above his shirt pocket read: Tower. On both sides of the general were other men in tactical fatigues wearing black balaclava hoods that hid their faces, and carrying submachine guns. Tower slowly and methodically lowered himself down the embankment, digging in deeply with the heels of his combat boots as he stepped.

“It sees everything, it knows everything,” the general explained casually.  “It's the crown jewel of the Information Age, with the power to send us all back into the Dark Ages. It's the big processor down at the University of California in Berkeley that Hong's robot uses to do all its magic. Put together by a bunch of beatniks who got tired of just wasting mommy and daddy's tuition money and thought it'd be a cute fraternity prank to design a machine that could bring about the end of life as we know it.”

Tower stopped next to Egor. Looking over the machine he said distastefully,  “It's not like a regular computer that has a chip in it that determines how fast it can process. The EXAP accelerates the more you give it to process. It could accelerate to infinity. It could go through all of the stored electronic data on this planet faster than flipping on a light switch.”

Tower looked around at the assembled people in the wet blue-green forest littered with white sheets. “It's read your email, it's gone through your bank records, it knows the sound of your voice off your answering machine and it knows what you look like from all the store surveillance cameras. It can detect every minute radio wave on every one of the billions of different stations and channels and cell phones floating through the air. Everywhere there's the tiniest trace of electricity it can accelerate it into a readable signal. Even the electromagnetic field created by the magnesium electrons jumping across the synapses that make your heart beat.”

The general put his fists onto his hips and glared hard down at the much smaller Hong. “It doesn't waste time with encoding and decoding data. No, sir, at those speeds it can detect the flow of individual electrons as they're running through the power cord and know what's on a hard drive. There's no security that could ever protect a system from it. It's a mathematical impossibility.”

“Only what those bright, young geniuses didn't think about when they were designing it,” Tower said angrily, “Is that if it fell into the wrong hands, it could flash the BIOS of every server connected together to form the Internet. It could crash the power infrastructure providing electricity to every major metropolitan area across the globe. All the emergency services communications. It could get through every security firewall of the New York Stock Exchange and scramble it to cause a panic that would collapse the United States economy. ATMs and credit cards would be worthless, and as the federal depositories were cleaned out to feed the run on the banks, people would stand in lines for days to withdraw US dollars that weren't good for anything except to feed a fire.”

The other soldiers moved to form a well-rehearsed perimeter around the general as he explained sarcastically, “Fiji could invade the United States, while we tried to organize a counter-offensive over a communication net that broadcast dead airspace . Using tanks that couldn't acquire targets and aircraft that didn't respond to flight controls. It could scroll through the launch codes of our entire intercontinental ballistic missile fleet.” Tower held out his hand in front of Hong. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

Wallace turned slowly and looked at the white sheet that covered Mary Mann's body. He climbed the hill to stand next to Tower. Even the lean, imposing general was no match for Wallace’s height. He then turned to Egor, looking up at the robot's dull camera lens eyes. Eyes that were not the window to the soul that human eyes were, but cold and lifeless as marbles, shaded and unshaded by shutters as the light in the Washington woods changed.

“Who found this place?” Wallace asked.

Moore shifted nervously. He looked over at Hong and then said, “Nobody found this place. It found us.”

“That's different,” Wallace said without turning away from Egor. “How does a crime scene find the police?”

Moore said, “This morning we got these coordinates from FBI Headquarters in Washington D.C.. They asked us to come out here and see what was here. I don't think they knew what we were gonna find.”

“Are you trying to tell me that a computer in California found one of its programmers lying in the woods a thousand miles away in the middle of nowhere?”

No one had any answers. Wallace regarded General Tower for a moment, and then looked at Jack Corbett, the representative from the State Department. Finally, he returned to Egor’s camera eyes and said, “You’re not the Tin Woodsman at all. Looks like you found yourself quite a brain.”