Yves Pomeroy watched his own hand zigzagging his badge in front of the Roche Rivard lobby sensor. Many days he was able to master his palsy with a concerted effort, to mentally tunnel into each knuckle's movement and wrist's turn, willing himself through simple tasks.

Many days he could. But not this one.

A female guard rushed to help. "Allow me, Monsieur."

Her two warm hands wrapped his one, persuading the badge toward the sensor, pulling it through the infrared beam.

The contact exhilarated Yves—she was a comely brunette with a chest like Mont Blanc—but he managed to blunt his urges and proceed inside. He felt something upset in the exchange, some pocket or cuff.

Bof, it is nothing, he decided. Sensations could not be trusted when one was aroused.

Yves strode through the lobby with manufactured confidence, mouth puckered and chest out. He well knew anyone could be watching via closed circuit.

Had they been watching twenty minutes ago when he'd been in the First Arrondissement, the very heart of Paris, answering Durwood Oak Jones's questions about this very building, Roche Rivard?

American Dynamics had provided Jones a formidable intelligence cache, but it contained blind spots and was somewhat dated due to the speed at which Fabienne redoubling her defenses. Yves had clued the West Virginian in to the latest identity-protection procedures and told what he knew of recent excavations in the deep, wet limestone.

"This is yours, oui?" a voice called behind.

Yves whipped about, his aged back cracking.

The guard held aloft a scrap of paper. Even five yards out, Yves could discern the diagram he'd sketched of supply tunnels radiating eastward from the building's bowels.

"It is, yes, merci bien." He shuffled to retrieve it.

The woman seemed to hold the scrap overlong, forcing Yves to rip one corner.

He carried the incriminating paper rapidly to the bullet elevators. Fear screamed through his thoughts, for which he hated himself. As a young man—indeed, even as a not-so-young man—he had stood tall with Henri Rivard. They had faced down Somali butchers together. Israeli poisoners. Greenpeace propagandists.

Now he cowered before a woman guard. Under a woman CEO. He'd been thwarted at every turn by a woman—Thérèse Laurent—who should take orders from him, but did not.

Quelle disgrâce.

Yves frowned a line into his forehead. He boarded a waiting elevator car and pressed the button for the Enterprise Software floor.

The doors began closing, but several sets of fingers appeared in between before they could finish.

The doors reopened. Yves looked past the supplicants who'd lunged for the door to see who they'd stopped it for.

Fabienne.

"Ah, Yves." She smiled fiendishly. "My favorite elevator ami. You are heading up?"

"Yes." Yves heard his voice as a squeak, so said, deeper, "Up, that is correct."

She smirked at his attempt to be masculine.

The supplicants stepped hesitantly on, but a look from Fabienne sent them scampering.

The doors closed. The bullet elevator accelerated skyward.

Fabienne said, "Myself, I am going down."

Yves glanced over queerly. "But this car is going up."

"I have a bit of time. My engagement in the oubliette is not for another two hours."

She left these words hanging in the antiseptic, steel-tinged air.

Politesse compelled Yves to ask more, but he was wary of doing so. Wary of allowing Fabienne to lead, to cradle him by the small of the back and dip him, as it were.

However there was nothing for it.

He said, "What is happening in two hours?"

Her gaunt cheeks seemed to applaud satisfactorily. "The Americans are being executed."

"Executed?" He checked his shock, then tried, "Which Americans? The bikers who where discovered defacing the French embassy in Washington?"

Fabienne watched him coolly. "Non. The Blind Mice."

His left hand jerked, slamming a gold rail. "Piper Jackson?"

"And Molly McGill."

"Right, right. And you said t—two hours?"

"That will depend on the speed of the cocktail, of course. Pancuronium bromide metabolizes at different rates in different individuals."

"Naturally."

In a blink, the elevator had reached the Enterprise Software floor. Yves nodded perfunctorily to the heiress, disembarked, and paced to his office with a bellyful of ice.

Time was short. Yves had pledged to look in on Molly McGill and the Jackson girl for Durwood, to ensure they were treated humanely until a rescue mission took place. He'd given his word.

If the two were executed, Durwood and Quaid would call off their plan—and any associated attempt to retrieve the kernel sourcecode and restore the world's data. All possibility of salvaging Rivard LLC's legacy in this regrettable phase of history would be lost.

Yves told his secretary to hold all calls and returned to the elevators. En route he grabbed a file folder to use as a prop—in case it became necessary to invent some cover story.

His nerves jumped. His head throbbed, had been throbbing for days. These secret collaborations carried a crushing burden, an inner pressure that jangled Yves's very bones and joints.

He rode to the bottom of the main shaft, B2, then took the coarser basement elevator, then— speeding over the fine gravel path, huffing hard—the teetering final platform down into the limestone belly.

The air became dank and static-thick. Slow crackles played about Yves's head.

Through this he plunged, down with the grade, hurrying, worrying.

How long was the execution protocol? When would it start? Who would administer the cocktail? One hoped not Leathersby. The brute was known to keep the condemned writhing at the precipice for hours—from cruelty or incompetence, none knew.

By the time he'd reached the oubliette, Yves felt his legs might be ten thousand years old.

He flashed his badge. The jailer asked which prisoner he was visiting.

"I visit no one," Yves snapped. "I've come to interrogate the Americans."

The man, one of Leathersby's hulked-up dogs, consulted a ledger. "I don't find any interrogations in the schedule. You'll need to put a request through—"

"They're to die in minutes!" Yves slammed a quivering fist on the man's desk. "To the devil with schedules—if I don't speak to them now, their information is lost forever."

The jailer groused about the lack of proper notice but did finally permit Yves, ushering him through x-rays and various weapons-detection systems.

Shown in, Yves quickly appraised the detainee population. In number it had exploded since his last visit, which had been mere weeks ago.

Is this simply booming business, demand for Forceworthy's EverLock product taking off? Or are these primarily Fabienne's enemies?

At McGill's and Jackson's cell, the jailer stood with hands crossed over his belt.

Yves said, "Yes, well, I have it from here."

The troll grunted but did return to his station. Yves pressed his palm to the pentagon outline phasing in and out of the glass. At once the lock disengaged—so quickly Yves wondered whether it had been active at all.

"We must hurry," he hissed a step into the cell. "You're to be executed in two hours!"

The women looked up dumbly from the empty spaces they'd been staring into. Had they not been told? Perhaps they were too dulled from captivity to process information.

The Jackson girl said, "What's the plan?"

Yves scrubbed in his wiry white hair, thinking. "There are lower floors—deeper in the limestone, which have been excavated but not developed. These are not guarded and mostly unexplored. Perhaps some contain nuclear or chemical waste. One cannot be choosy."

Molly McGill lost her grip on the side of a steel egg chair. The Jackson girl's eyes stayed deadly still.

"Fine then, fine," Yves said. "Stay and meet your maker!"

This did pierce their stupor. They threw on flats and joined Yves at the cell door. He peered out at the jailer, who'd returned to his computer and was watching a monitor.

Yves yelled, "Talk! Tell now of your role in the anarchy, or it can get worse. Much worse..."

He barked several more demands, communicating with his wiry eyebrows they should play along, then burst from the cell with apparent annoyance.

"They will not talk," he complained to the jailer. "I must take them to the Answer Chamber."

The guard knocked his computer mouse off its pad. "I see the Chamber is available for use, but you should know the bone saw is not working."

"What happened?" Yves said. "Did you burn through the rotors again?"

"I was on holiday yesterday, but I heard we were busy, yes. A number of peacenik Swedes were processed."

Yves closed his mouth against a gag reflex. "I will make due with the tweezers and hose."

The guard shrugged and let them pass.

Yves tottered into the limestone hall. The air felt frigid, as though fingernails lived within. Their three sets of footsteps blasted back upon him in echo.

The undeveloped floors would take twenty minutes to reach, then he would need another twenty minutes to get back. Perhaps he'd be discovered and need to improvise some story explaining his loss of the prisoners.

He could claim they overpowered him. Or that they received help from some inside party.

Neither would be believed. Perhaps he should flee with them, melt into the murky roots of Roche Rivard and await rescue from the American freelancers. The cowboy whose dog was at death's door believed the operation would go soon, possibly in the next week. Could he evade capture that long?

Could he subsist that long? Where would they find food and water?

None of these questions would matter if they didn't make time now. Yves reached back for Molly McGill's hand, but the woman shook him off.

He was smarting from the rebuff—American women had always appreciated his gallantry in younger days—when a voice sounded ahead.

"What have we come upon here?" Fabienne said. "Playing the white knight, Monsieur Pomeroy?"

The damp air became colder still. Yves blinked hard in disbelief. Does she make copies of herself? Some of the technologies in Roche Rivard were not far from it.

"I—I was only taking them away for interrogation." Yves realized there was no reason his cover story to the jailer shouldn't be equally valid with Fabienne. "To extract what information we can before you...er, before the executions are carried out."

At the word executions, Blake Leathersby bounded forth from Fabienne's shadow.

The heiress said, "Rest your small mind, Blake. The Americans are not being executed. Not today."

She said to Yves, "I had Miss McGill's biometrics checked against the Roche Rivard visitor logs from the last six months. What a surprise to learn you two are previously acquainted."

Yves shuddered. He'd been found out. Fabienne knew Molly and the Silicon Valley CIO were one and the same.

Zut! Of course all incoming prisoners were swabbed for DNA. Of course Fabienne would have compared the two databases and made the connection.

Why the ruse of the execution, though?

She must've read all this in his face. "To be certain," she said. "To know the extent of your betrayal. I had hoped you might be of further use to us, like an old chemise with many holes, which one cuts into strips for kitchen rags."

She looked down Yves's tired form with contempt, then faced the McGill woman.

"A third cot will be installed in your cell," she said. "My apologies, but capacity restraints force us to mix genders. I suggest sleeping with one eye open. Monsieur Pomeroy is aged and weak, but a weak, aged pervert is a pervert still."