her career to hide her in the mob. At first it worked. When they paged her in the lobby, it set a fresh pack of reporters baying after her, hungry to worry bones from which Hartmann's bland denial hadn't filleted the last scraps of meat.
Is Hartmann telling the truth? Why did Barnett's announcement specify you? What's your connection to the Bar-
nett campaign? The questions split half and half between trying to get her to admit she'd hit the rack with Hartmann and trying to get her to admit she'd conspired with the fundamentalists to wreck the senator's good name.
Part of her ached to use the proffered forum, to announce, Yes, I slept with Gregg Hartmann, and I learned that he's a monster, a covert ace who makes people into puppets. Cowardice intervened. Or was it sanity? Her revelationsallegations,was the only way they would be viewed-were extravagant enough without turning them into Midnight Sun headline fodder.
She turned her face away and said, "No comment." And swallowed whole the steaming chunks of abuse: "Where do you get off trying to pull that shit? The public has a right to know. You're a journalist, for Christ's sake." Finally a cocktailer in leotards and one of those short black skirts took her by the arm and steered her here, into the office of the manager of the Marriott's lounge.
The receiver clicked home with the finality of a breech closing on a cartridge. Somebody took what she had to say seriously.
The caller was Owen Rayford of the Post's New York bureau. Chrysalis was dead. Murdered. Ace powers were involved.
Was it a puppet? She doubted that. Hartmann's strings quickly attenuated and broke with distance; she knew that from experience. There were bent aces-Bludgeon, Carnifex, maybe the Sleeper if he were far gone in amphetamine psychosis-who were capable of such a deed. That was an irony about Hartmann; in his position you hardly needed ace powers to get into serious evil doing. Money, power, and influence weren't exactly any weaker forces in human affairs than they'd been up until the fifteenth of September, 1946.
The fear lived within her; it coiled like a serpent, burned like a star. It brought with it terrible knowledge: the only hope of safety lay in risking all.
The manager and the waitress who'd rescued her stood by, watching with polite curiosity. She arranged her face in a smile and stood.
"Is there a back way out of here?" she asked.
6:00 P.M.
She had to take a Valium before she could get the damned acoustic coupler to work right. Her laptop had an inboard modem, but hotels were leery of modular jacks, preferring to keep their phones tethered firmly to the wall by old-fashioned cords. So she had to fiddle with the antique external modem, which was unforgiving if you didn't get the phone's handset into its twin-cup cradle just so.
Eventually she got it going. Then she sat in gloom, lit only by afternoon light straggling through the room's heavy curtains, smoking and squinting at the screen as the records transferred count spun on and her story spun down the wires that connected her NEC laptop to the Post's computers.
It had all come out of her in one orgasmic gush: Andi's death, her suspicion, the sinister hidden presence in jokertown who had flashed tantalizing clues as to his existence--and identity--during the riots attending another Democratic convention twelve years ago; her own personal quest, leading to her entrapment in the very web she'd been struggling to delineate. And finally murder.
There were two people, she'd written, who had their fingers on the Jokertown pulse. Actually there were three; Tachyon was the third, literally as well as figuratively. But he was blinded by personal regard for Hartmann, and the political plums the senator had thrown his way, the grants that kept him living in a style fit for a prince, which he was. Sara would not invoke his name.
The others were herself and Chrysalis. The Crystal Palace had never been more than a front for Chrysalis's real avocation, which was brokering information on everything that went down in J-town. Close observers of the scene took it for granted that sooner or later she'd reel in a thread and find it had a cobra tied to it.
The cobra was named Hartmann. And Chrysalis pulled his string just at the moment when he was swollen with venom and quickest to strike.
Why didn't I confide in her? she asked herself as liquid crystal numbers flickered in the dim. There had been plenty