Jim Steed insisted on meeting at the American Dynamics factory site in Pittsburgh. A big man with a lunchpail jaw, he pumped fists with the guys, scritched Sue-Ann below the ear, then led them up the factory catwalk.

"Git 'er done, Tommy!" he called down to a man working an industrial stamper.

"Roethlisberger going this week, that sore shoulder?" he asked the room at large, then compared the Steelers quarterback to part of the female anatomy.

The factory workers shouted up and tipped their hardhats.

Steed grinned wide, his workboots clapping the metal grate.

"This is the only way to get your head around morale," he explained to the guys. "Corporate Security hates it. Long as the Blind Mice are still at large, they say I'm supposed to restrict myself to 'secure sites.' Which means Bridgewater. Screw that. Every Thursday I come here, either take the jet or get up early and drive."

Quaid asked, "You drive five hours both ways to check morale?"

"More like three-forty. State police don't have the bodies to run speed-traps, makes I-76 a drag strip."

Quaid glanced around at towering drums, rusty with age, and copper lines caked by white-green gunk at the joints. The grease and solvent smells were noxious despite a thunderously-sucking hood every twenty yards. Quaid had toured Intel's microchip assembly plant during that rogue AI job for NSA: white, clean, automated—nothing like this Industrial Revolution relic.

"Yep," Steed continued, hitching the strap of a work bib, "being CEO is no different from commanding a military unit. In 'Nam, I always took patrol duty with the men. They see you all muddied up, bamboo poking through your socks? Out there engaging the enemy? It matters."

He looked back meaningfully to Durwood, but the fellow soldier had stopped to free Sue-Ann's paw from the grate.

"These fumes are brutal," Quaid said. "Sue here's gonna keel over and die if we hang here much longer. So what's going on? What's so important we had to schlep out to Pittsburgh."

Steed ambled to a stop, draping an arm over the canopy railing. Filled his cheeks. Paused dramatically before exhaling.

"Gotta terminate the contract."

"You're firing us?" Quaid said.

The AmDye CEO set his jaw. "Not seeing results. It's been two months."

"Maybe you need to get away from these fumes. Are you bonkers? We have our man—our woman—planted inside the organization."

"Lotta good that does me."

"Half the law enforcement agencies in the country are after the Blind Mice. Nobody's laid a finger on them—and we missed by a fluke. Couple breaks go our way? They're in the slammer."

Quaid didn't need to see his partner to know those steel-colored eyes were boring into the back of his skull. Durwood, lacking Quaid's inborn capacity to forgive and forget, still blamed him for their failure to stop Ted Blackstone's murder.

"That was three weeks ago," Steed said. "Little pissants have scrambled our supply-chain software, redirected the website to some porn site. And you got nothing."

"The Josiah kid spooked—he went to ground after Blackstone. Tightened up security."

"You're saying the scent's gone cold?"

"No. I am not saying that." Quaid passed a hand through his wavy blond hair. "Look, we still have our asset in play. She's in the fold. Sitting right there among the Mice leadership. As soon as Josiah surfaces, we take him down."

The picture he was painting was, even by Quaid Rafferty's lax standard, grossly misleading. The Mice had more than "tightened up security." Josiah, Hatch, Piper Jackson—none had exposed themselves as part of a group mission. That infrastructure attacks continued they only knew from media reports. Molly's sole link to the group right now was Garrison, the wimpy longhair she had fled with. (Quaid hadn't seen him, but that's how he translated McGill's "great hair" description.) Garrison claimed the Mice were purging their rolls, weeding out possible spies. The guys told Molly this was nonsense, her cover was rock-solid, et cetera.

She refused to listen. "I am a single parent. If I'm killed, what happens to Zach and Karen? My ex was somewhere in the Yucatan last I heard. They'd be wards of the state."

"Nobody is getting killed."

"Ted Blackstone got killed!"

"You aren't the ruthless leader of a billion-dollar healthcare company," Quaid pointed out. "It was a thrill kill. Josiah got carried away, and the rest of 'em were too shocked to step in." He gave a brush-off gesture of the knuckles. "Never happen again."

When he said this, Durwood grunted dubiously from the wings.

Molly wasn't buying either, and yesterday, when a text arrived from a burner number inviting "Mice of all tenures" to a mission at a Lower Manhattan office park, she'd balked.

"It's a trap, just like Garrison said. They're flushing out traitors."

"Garrison is too busy toasting his own granola to have the first clue," Quaid said. "This is our shot. We've got a good, hard location—Wood and I can set up way in advance. We can bag 'em. We can end this."

But Molly held firm. The danger was too great. She had lucked out the night of the murder, getting away when the police chase mysteriously fell apart. She wasn't about to chance it again, to squander that minor miracle.

Alright, Quaid said—so they were kaput? He could stop cutting her those weekly $2000 checks? Perfect. Durwood kept saying The Vanagon needed new tie rods, and personally he was hoping to catch one of these low fares the cruise-lines were using to offset the broader anxiety.

Good luck with that mortgage.

He hated putting the screws to Molly like this, but they needed to strike. The opportunities would only get scarcer. By the time they'd headed back to the hotel, he had talked her around to a solid "I'll think about it."

Now Steed's administrative assistant, a woman with an auburn uptwist who traveled everywhere with him, climbed noisily up the catwalk to deliver a stack of mail.

"Thank you, Cindy," Steed said.

The woman reciprocated the courtesy, then left, tossing her hair and a look toward Quaid. Cindy was a perk of working for AmDye. She and Quaid had enjoyed a low-simmering flirtation for years, banter over the breakroom coffee, handsy farewell embraces at the end of jobs. He had once massaged a kink out of her shoulder, which might've progressed nicely if Durwood hadn't walked in with some niggling tactical question.

"These guys again?" Steed said, holding up an envelope with "Exclusive Offer Inside: up to 50% off Forceworthy CorporateGuard Solutions Suite!!!" in red cursive.

Quaid fished a pamphlet from the envelope. The cover showed a businessman addressing a large crowd from a sort of glass-enclosed truck bed. "Check it out, a hulked-up pope mobile."

Steed scoffed. "Forcewothy's been trying to put me in one for months."

"They look pretty slick."

"I got no budget for slick, even if I wanted it. Which I don't." He leaned close, confidentially. "I hope this Josiah punk comes for me. I honestly do. I'll gut him like a fish."

Again he glanced at Durwood after the macho proclamation.

Again Durwood offered no response.

Quaid asked, "Did Forceworthy ever send a rep up to Bridgewater?"

"Yeah, this Finley character. Real talker, this one. Came every week there for a while."

"Persistent?"

"Like a dog with a bone," Steed said. "It's been about a month, though."

Quaid did not think Steed—or anybody else—would be hearing more from Todd Finley. There'd been no news of him since that night at the Dakota, when Quaid had last seen him bound and gagged in a circle of armed commandos.

Now Quaid steered conversation away from Third Chance Enterprises' imminent firing. It wasn't hard. When nudged, Jim Steed would talk endlessly about the ways American Dynamics was besieged. By regulation, by unfavorable Asian tariffs. By activist investors. By cheap foreign labor and the impossible math of "doing things the right way" under globalization. His lunchpail jaw shifting side to side, he told of being squeezed in the capital markets.

"Fund managers are nervous, all this anarchy talk. Meanwhile I got that federal bailout money due in October."

Quaid was getting a slight pain in his brow, which had been crimped sympathetically for fifteen minutes.

"Well, my contacts in all three branches of government are extensive, and if it makes you feel better," he said, deciding the time had come to move things along, "nobody expects AmDye to pay back one red cent of that."

"Damnit, I do!" Steed's words bellowed through the factory. "I make a commitment, I honor it. That's how I do business. But I'll never get us back into the black with these Blind Mice taking potshots from the weeds."

The man on the stamper below tilted his hardhat, watching.

"We're on it," Quaid said. "We're moving as fast as circumstances allow."

"Not fast enough."

As the two men glared at each other, Quaid considered ways out of the impasse. The quickest would be to tell Steed about tomorrow's office-park mission. If he did this, though, Steed would grill him over the details. Would Josiah be there? What kind of surveillance equipment were they lining up? Steed would try micromanaging the whole deal, which would chafe Durwood and annoy him. Too much hassle for the momentary breathing room they'd gain from the disclosure.

"You want to can us?" Quaid said. "Go ahead. I talked to the mayor of New York City this morning—FBI is telling him their capture horizon is on the order of six months. So enjoy your new porn homepage. Maybe you can get yourself camo'ed up in kelp and take out Josiah yourself."

He could play this card convincingly because in truth, losing the contract wouldn't have been the end of the world. The unrest made fertile ground for small-force private arms contractors; lately Quaid had received a number of meeting requests from potential clients. The Brazilian opposition leader Vitor Gonçalves wanted help with the ruling party's media suppression. Fabienne Rivard, CEO of the French conglomerate Rivard LLC, had promised "significant compensation" for a matter she could not discuss by telephone.

"These budgets, I dunno," Steed said. "You put me in a bind."

As he frequently did in trying times, the AmDye CEO leaned on a war story. He paced the rickety catwalk and told the guys of Tommy Dix, the young platoon sergeant who'd been a ham radio operator back home in Tuscaloosa. The unit had taken a wrong turn on a jungle fork and driven an armored vehicle out of gas far behind enemy lines. Neither the primary nor backup radio seemed capable of reaching HQ to call in a search and rescue—not until Dix stepped up, mounting the antennae by a rattan tree, shoving anything metal behind brush. He fiddled more than an hour before static gave way to the crackle of connection.

"What I took from that," Steed finished, "is that you need the right personnel. Personnel is the key to any mission."

A wisecrack or two came to mind, but Quaid held his tongue. "No argument here."

Steed folded his arms over his work bib. "Man to man, point blank, here's what I'm asking: do we have the right personnel to bring down the Blind Mice?"

Quaid answered that Durwood handled a rifle pretty decent, and he'd been known to talk his way out of—

"Not you two," Steed cut in. "I'm talking about your mole. This woman you got planted inside. Is she up to it?" With sober eyes, he addressed the question to both men. "Is she the right person for the job?"

A handful of images from the last month flashed through Quaid's mind. Molly demanding payment in the boob sweater. Molly celebrating her Blogger Royale appearance, punching air, hopping into his arms. Molly climbing from her wrecked Prius, quaking, walking straight through their concern to her kids' rooms.

Durwood looked at his boots. He hadn't spoken, and Quaid knew he would not speak now. When clients posed tricky questions like this, the ex-marine always chose silence rather than tell a lie or half-truth.

Quaid had no such compunction.

"Absolutely," he said, his voice clean as blue ocean. "I believe in Molly McGill."