Pre-Anarchy, Quaid Rafferty had enjoyed air travel. He liked hearing what Carly from Minneapolis thought about driverless cars, or giving Len from Pensacola his spiel on why you always, always, order the chef's special at restaurants. He hadn't even minded delays or layovers, which just gave life more chances to plant wildflowers in your path.

Post-Anarchy, he enjoyed it less.

The flight into Davos showed an Arrival Window of 3:13 to 5:43. Boarding, Quaid tipped his head to the pilots, who were conversing out the cockpit window with the F-16 pilot escorting them to Davos.

Quaid pressed through to their seats, followed by Molly, Durwood, and a thinner looking Sue-Ann. Flight attendants helped passengers jam bags into overhead bins—checked luggage was almost unheard of, nobody in their right mind willing to hand over a bag to some stranger. Backs hunched. Eye avoided eye. Adults transferred guns from duffel bags into jacket pockets.

Quaid's boarding pass read 37-A, window, but a large, mulletted man was there.

"Excuse me," Quaid said. "I believe we need to switcheroo."

The man gestured to his camo-pattern rucksack, wedged tightly underneath the seat in front, and closed his eyes.

"I'm sure assistance is available moving your bag," Quaid said. "What seat did they give you? Could be you got one of those fake tickets."

The man raised his middle finger without opening his eyes.

Quaid had scarcely registered the gesture when Durwood shot past and seized the man's knobby finger in his fist.

"Ow!" he cried. "Hey, what're you—"

He stopped when he saw not Quaid's accommodating face, but the drum-tight glare of Durwood Oak Jones. Before he could protest or start to comply, Durwood yanked the rucksack out from under the seat—jerking the man's knee unnaturally—and slammed the bag into his gut.

"G'on," said the ex-marine. "Find your right place."

The man looked at Durwood, then at Quaid, Molly, and the coonhound, then seemed to decide that whatever this motley crew was about, he wanted no part.

He moved across the aisle.

Once tray tables were up and anti-missile plating affixed to the plane's exterior, Quaid perused the magazines in his seat-back pocket. Somebody had left a Maxim, and as luck would have it, the cover featured none other than the woman they were on their way to see.

"We Cook The Books With Fabienne Rivard," read the headline, across a shot of the French heiress-CEO straddling a boardroom chair.

Fabienne was the daughter of the great Henri Rivard, founder of Rivard LLC. Henri had built Rivard into a titan, dominating commerce across the Continent, defying United States sanctions to form lucrative partnerships with Mideast dictators, trading in murky industries—weapons, various "professional services"—that others shied from.

When Fabienne had taken the reigns six years earlier amid reports of her father's deteriorating health, there had been speculation she would bring a feminine touch to the organization. She'd grown up in the media glare, spilling out of Hollywood clubs with famous actors at fifteen, briefly hosting a reality show.

Might she begin a charity arm to fight Third World disease? Finally apologize for, or at least address, the allegations of atrocities committed by Rivard's combattantes de contrat?

She did nothing of the sort. Although it was said she imposed merciless gender equalization policies among Rivard management, nothing about the company's outward engagement with the world changed.

If anything, Rivard LLC became more aggressive. Quaid and Durwood had stopped two cataclysmic plots—one involving space lasers, the other a mind-altering virus that nearly necessitated every human being on the planet taking BienVous, Rivard's signature psychotic.

"Is that her?"

The question from McGill brought Quaid out of his thoughts—which had just begun to verge on daydream, Fabienne's sharp legs making an inviting V across the magazine.

"Uh, right," he said. "The one and only Fabienne Rivard."

Molly scooted closer to examine the picture. Her upturned nose wrinkled, and she smoothed her pants to her thighs. "So we think the Anarchy is something she engineered?"

Quaid looked to his partner.

Something like a snarl came into Durwood's mouth as he said, "I do."

Quaid was, by trade, more diplomatic with words. "Who can say? That's why we're flying to Switzerland, to find out."

The World Economic Forum had insisted on holding its annual meeting in Davos, despite the security challenges and hostile corporate climate, pronouncing that "now more than ever, leaders of all stripes must step to the fore."

Fabienne Rivard, whose company investors had heralded as a fantastic Anarchy play for its continued financial success, was delivering the keynote address.

"I still don't understand," Molly said. "The Blind Mice hate corporations. Rivard is a corporation. Why are they working together?"

"Money," Durwood said, disgust tinging his voice. "Profit."

"But destabilizing the world—destabilizing commerce, destabilizing credit. How does that help Rivard?"

Quaid looked at the picture of Fabienne, the smoldering eyes, the brow ridge—heavy like Henri's, a stiff rod off holding up the rest of her gaunt, catwalk face.

"They're like vultures, Rivard," he said. "You see roadkill and think tragedy, but not them. They see lunch."

The flight over the Atlantic was uneventful, by and large. The F-16 scrambled twice, booming off parabolically to check some threat, but mostly kept to their wing. The pilot, beginning her descent, announced they would be maintaining altitude until the last possible moment—a harder target for shoulder-fired RPGs that way—but managed to set them down with barely a bump.

Quaid, Molly, Durwood and Sue-Ann deplaned to a horde of protesters. Signs screeched from all directions. "GREED-con!" "World Economic Farce." "'You change the equation at the top,'" over a nose-eyes-whiskers symbol.

The conference organizers had arranged countermeasures. Snipers in all black topped each building corner like chunky antennae, and battalions of shield-thrusting police enforced a path to the limousine stand.

En route to the hotel, Quaid saw further dissent. Crowds staggering through clouds of teargas. In the distance, a mountain gondola on fire. Sagging power lines, decapitated lampposts, buildings without facades—he'd heard rumors the richer countries were doing better, but it seemed not by much.

Their hotel stay was on Jim Steed's dime. The American Dynamics CEO met them in the lobby.

"Good, you made it," he said.

Steed looked like he'd just come off the graveyard shift, bleary, keeping himself upright by a lobby armchair.

Quaid said, "What happened to you?"

"Ah, I'm behind—got the Board of Directors hanging off my neck." Steed waved his phone ambiguously. "Forget that. When do we nail these froggy cheats? I want this done."

"We need to take our time, do it right."

"Like hell—they sent that albino freak to assassinate me!"

"To be fair, we haven't proved the exact sequence of planning."

Rivard had a long history of subterfuge against AmDye, from simple price manipulations to more elaborate—such as the time a new fiberglass formulation was stolen by a Rivard agent posing as a sympathetic bartender at the watering hole near the plant.

Quaid believed that, at this crucial juncture in the AmDye-Third Chance relationship, telling Steed the truth about who'd tipped the Mice off to his Pittsburgh schedule would be unproductive.

Steed, leading the way to his bank of rooms, asked Durwood, "You got the evidence, right? We go public with the fact they're scheming with the Blind Mice? Blow a hole right through Fabienne Rivard's big speech."

Durwood walked on with Sue-Ann near, sniffing the hotel baseboards.

Quaid answered on their behalf, "I tipped a guy in the media pool. He can put it out there, but Fabienne will just deny. She'll call it fake news, and they'll use their own press puppets to muddy the waters."

Quaid had given this explanation over the phone, but Steed hadn't wanted to hear. Nah, we go for the jugular—we take the fight to them.

Now, staring the truth in the face, he seemed to grasp the logic in Quaid's argument.

"I know, I know," Steed conceded. They'd reached his room, which was littered with dossiers and stacks of manila folders. "I have to do something, though. Got my shareholders, whole Board of Directors, pushing me to retrofit our factories for military production. That's where Rivard is, and look at their results."

Quaid said, "They want you to start building tanks?"

"Yeah!" Steed fished through a pile of folders for one whose cover showed a hulking gray M1 Abrams. "I told 'em we should wait. The data comes back, we're stuck with the wrong products again. Giant manufacturing plants devoted to stuff nobody wants—right back to Detroit."

"They weren't convinced?"

"They think the Anarchy is permanent. They think it's the 'new normal'"—Steed used air quotes and his nasal corporate voice—"and none of this data's ever coming back."

"Okay," Quaid said reasonably. "So we show them it is."

"How?"

Quaid opened his shoulders to Molly, who'd found a patch of uncluttered carpet to occupy near the door. "We still have McGill here positioned inside the Mice. She has an intimate relationship with the key techie, Piper Jackson. We can use that relationship and find out more about the nitty-gritty of the data loss."

Steed kneaded his forehead. "Blind Mice are the B-team. They're barely relevant."

"Except that they have this kernel, this thing that's zapping the data," Quaid said. "Molly's seen it in action. If she can pull the string—"

"Too much pussyfooting around," Steed cut in. "She's been dancing that jig for months."

"She's made progress. She's penetrated their inner circle."

"A whole lotta good it's done. While she's been off—"

"Alright, she," Molly said, tiptoeing between papers to insert herself between them, "is standing right here. I don't see any of your methods panning out. I don't see either of you putting yourselves in the cross-hairs, figuring out where the Mice are weak or might crack. All I see is ego."

Jim Steed pulled back as though dodging Viet Cong sniper darts. "Where could they crack?"

As Molly's bright green eyes stayed hot, her lips worked a few seconds before answering.

"Piper Jackson has serious misgivings about all this."

"Misgivings? She told you this?"

She nodded, trying—it seemed to Quaid—to convince herself. "We've batted around misgivings."

"Can you turn her?" Steed asked with a giddy squat. "Get her to switch sides?

"Absolutely," Molly said, with only the merest mid-word blip betraying any doubt. "If I reveal myself, she'll help us. We can figure out where the kernel started and what needs to be done to stop it."

She stated this course, which was fairly audacious on its face, with supreme confidence. Is this the same woman who worried about having to put down felonies on job applications last year?

After several moments' consideration, Steed said, "Feels like a Hail Mary. Is that the whole plan?"

"Oh no," Quaid jumped in. "You hire Third Chance Enterprises, you get the best. I'm working it from the other side. I'm having a tête-a-tête with Fabienne Rivard tonight, and we're going to figure out their angle."

"How? Why's she meeting with you?"

Steed had asked the question, but now all three looked at Quaid askance. Even Sue-Ann seemed to droop one bloodshot eye slightly lower.

Quaid straightened one lapel of his sportcoat. "Because we have a special relationship."

The heat in McGill's face—which had ebbed since her outburst—came roaring back. The answer seemed to displease Durwood, too; his bottom lip pushed past his top, jutting like a peeved horse's.

Durwood had never shared Quaid's appetite for cozying up to the other side, for cultivating understanding of the enemy. Quaid knew his black and white worldview was, in fact, hostile to understanding. Durwood preferred to put people in boxes and leave them there.

"Fabienne Rivard is the key," Quaid continued. "If we can get inside with her, this mess might unravel itself yet."

And he believed this, about 73 percent.