For his October check-in with the guys, Jim Steed had to sneak up to New York in a rental. The place gave him an Impala with a bad serpentine belt—thing started yipping in Altoona and never quit. He chugged through the Lincoln Tunnel, made it to Cusser's Last Stand—the bar Quaid had said—by ten-thirty.

Steed growled around for a parking spot. Half the vehicles had no tires, rims rusting into the curb. Finally he found a clear patch of asphalt. He cut the noisy motor and felt good unsticking his butt from vinyl, walking to the bar.

So what if was four dark blocks and his security detail was back in Pittsburgh?

Inside, Cusser's Last Stand was mostly rubble. A plywood bar laid across stacks of cinder blocks. The stools looked like fire salvage—chipped, singed black.

Quaid sat on the center one, Durwood to his right. That ancient dog sprawled out underneath, asleep.

"Slick joint," Steed said, fitting his bad knee around the cinder blocks.

Quaid sat before a tumbler—gold liquid, blushed red with Tabasco. Judging by the sagging posture, Steed figured it was not Quaid's first prairie fire.

Quaid said, "You bring our cash?"

Steed sucked a hard breath. "About that."

Durwood's eyes, beneath the brim of his hat, cut over.

"Somebody snitched to my board of directors," Steed continued. "They've red-flagged all the Third Chance Enterprises line items in the cash flow statement. I begged 'em, said we had to keep trying to reverse the data loss."

He pulled an envelope from his jacket and tossed it on the plywood. "It's light. About a fourth of the regular stipend."

"A fourth?" Quaid downed his drink and gestured for another. "I thought you were the CEO."

"For now," Steed said. "Rest of the management team thinks I'm nuts to be spending a dime on you guys."

"But American Dynamics is on fire. Stock's up something like 300 percent, right?"

"Yeah. It is." Steed raised two fingers to the bartender fixing Quaid's drink. "Pittsburgh's back close to max utilization. We just added a third shift in Akron. But it's all Anarchy segments. Guns, Fortification, Extra-Legal Security."

It wasn't just the product mix, either. AmDye's various business units had made wholesale changes to their sales teams, stocking them with shady underworld types. Research and Development was pursuing joint ventures with companies like Haliburton and McDonnell Douglas. Across the company, operations were being reworked under the assumption that anarchy was here to stay.

Quaid smeared a hand down his face. "Same gameplan as Rivard."

"Not the same, damn it!" Steed slapped the plywood, waking the dog below. "We're responding to them. It's an arms race."

"You could just...stop. Couldn't you?"

Quaid's eyes were blue and airy and full of booze.

Stop.

Sure thing. No wonder he didn't last in politics.

Morale was soaring at AmDye. Steed heard the big talk during his weekly walk-thrus of the factory floor. Machinery operators wearing holsters, leaning proudly up against the giant missile tubes that streamed off the line now. When they caught sight of him, up above on the catwalk, they'd start a chant.

"Steed, Steed, Steed, Steed..."

He could feel their energy and enthusiasm through the metal grate—rumbling, rocking.

But in his heart, he felt dread.

The Vietnam War had been formative for Jim Steed. He'd started as a green eighteen-year-old and ended with the belief his government had failed him. For as long as he lived, he would smell the fetid jungle air of Khe Sanh and feel—in his flat, prematurely arthritic feet—the twenty klicks he and his squadmates hiked one October night into Vietcong territory.

They had camped under a harvest moon after taking two sniper casualties. Steed and a squadmate carried a possible third—pulse strong but with a nasty gut wound—between them on stretched bamboo. They laid the injured man at the foot of a towering jackfruit tree.

Steed felt half-dead himself. Sweat had made a stinking second skin of his clothes. He couldn't tell if the deafening insect noises and giant fruits overhead were real or hallucinated.

All he had to hang onto, his lone touchstone to sanity, was the men.

Though exhausted, they were too amped up to sleep. In three hours they would attack a VC stronghold upriver. It had been a daring, costly mission, but it was nearly over—one way or another.

A four a.m., the comm crackled. Greggie from Omaha, the radio engineer, tuned his dial and listened at the earpiece. His sigh told the squad all it needed to know: mission abort.

They sat around and bitched. Mad, relieved, frustrated—they felt it all.

Ricketts, a Mississippi kid who'd joined the Fifth straight from boot camp, said, "Can't anyone stop this?"

For a while, only the insects answered him.

Then Steed—youngest in the squad—said, "LBJ could. Right? If he wanted to?"

The rest looked at him with eyes black as bullets.

Forty years later, here was Jim Steed: not a president or wacko dictator, but the leader of a corporation—holding the same awesome, paralyzed power.

"Oh, I could step in front of the runaway train," he said now. "I could refuse to profiteer, keep us out of the mud. Outta the anarchy segments. They'd just run over me. The board.

"Got this one jerk, guy wears this bow tie? Says I'm being too timid. He's even got the unions ginned up against me. Believe that? The unions. I started out a stamper, Quaid. A damn stamper on the line."

Quaid made an indeterminate fizzing noise.

Steed went on, "But they tell the men, 'More aggression equals more jobs.' They pump 'em up. Give out free ammo in the parking lot, quitting time Friday."

As he finished, the three men—and dog—sat in silence. Bar silence, anyhow. Cusser's Last Stand featured the steady din of the homeless, the alcoholic, the stray hipster couple braving crime.

Steed knew Quaid and Durwood had their own reasons to despair. The Morganville operation had flopped. Josiah—their most valuable asset—was dead, and Rivard had captured the woman they'd had embedded with the Mice, who—you had to figure—Quaid had a thing with.

Steed rubbed the corners of his eyes. "You think there even is a sourcecode? This kernel deal."

Durwood's steel eyes aimed straight down.

Quaid said, "Yes. Yes, I do. And I believe it's locked up tight at Roche Rivard."

"You're not gonna try getting it, are you? That's a suicide mission."

Quaid hefted the stipend. "Be a lot easier if we had sufficient funds. If this envelope weighed what it was supposed to."

"Damnit, I put my butt in a sling to get you that much—"

"We're going," Durwood said.

The ex-marine looked up with an expression hard as the plywood under Steed's elbows.

"Kernel don't matter," Durwood said. "Whether it's there or the bottom of the ocean. Moll's there. The Jackson girl too."

Jim Steed nodded. This stance didn't surprise him. He'd known these two would go after their own—surely as he would've gone back for Ricketts or Dave Possum or any other squaddie the VC nabbed.

"Well," he said. "You're gonna have to go quick."

Quaid stopped a snort of prairie fire at his lips. The dog looked up.

The former said, "Why's that?"

Steed palmed his jaw. "Board wants me to hit 'em. They think it's only a matter of time before Rivard engages us directly."

"Engages?" Quaid said.

"Right. Our weapons face off against theirs in the field every day, through different proxies." Steed ran a dirty fingernail around the rim of his glass. "There's a school of thought that one day, the proxies go away."

He'd never seen Durwood Oak Jones scared—possibly no one had—but as the West Virginian mulled Steed's words now, the whites of his eyes grew.

"Hitting Roche Rivard..." Durwood's head ticked side-to-side. "Defenses they have in place...kinda firepower you'd have to strike with..."

Steed sighed. "I know."

"They got drone patrols. Missile defense."

Steed briefly sketched the internal situation he faced. The board had brought in outside consultants who'd analyzed thousands of satellite and seismic surveys and concluded Roche Rivard's inner shaft was vulnerable. A tactical nuke straight down the shaft would do the job.

"Be just like the Death Star, they're saying. Last Star Wars movie."

Durwood's mouth took on an ugly set.

"Board' directors. Consultants," he said. "Bunch of suits. Bunch of chicken hawks in suits."

"No argument there," Steed said. "They say we gotta go. Say we can't afford to squander our 'window to surprise.'"

Durwood's bootheel ground the concrete below.

Quaid had been preoccupied through the last exchanges, drinking.

Now he muttered, "Their own little Pearl Harbor, huh? Except this time it's the good guys dropping bombs."