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out?”
    “It was a faceoff,” she said. “The guerrillas refused to hand the kids over. Things were tense until Harry used a Sidekick and Colonel Toledo’s authorization code to get through to the Chief in Mexico City. Solaris called off Hodge and let the guerrillas bring in the kids.”
    “Shit.”
    “Yeah,” Scholz said. “Shit. By the way, I understand you have a personal interest in the Bartlett girl, Sergeant. Isn’t sixteen a little young for you?”
    Trethewey shrugged.
    “She’s a genius who finished school at fourteen and flies planes at sixteen,” he said. “I never think about her age and I’ve never . . . you know, done anything. Besides, when I’m forty she’ll be thirty-four, and nobody sees anything wrong with that.”
    “Sounds like you have long-term motives.”
    The major held one coupling while Trethewey shot the glue to it and screwed it in. She hung it over a sawhorse so it wouldn’t bond to the concrete floor. Trethewey dragged over a couple more.
    “I might not be a genius, Major, but I’m not a jerk, either. Besides, she and the Toledo boy are inseparable. How’s he doing?”
    “Pretty shook up physically, but nothing broken. Recovering from a heavy trank that the Colonel slapped him with. But Harry had the presence of mind to grab a data drop that Red Bartlett made before he died. The sooner we get this stuff together, the sooner we find out what’s on it.”
    “Can’t you just run it through one of the machines at the office?”
    “Not likely, Sergeant. The medicos don’t want anybody touching it, and the spooks don’t want it duplicated. Contamination risk, remember? I think we have enough hose on this one to reach.”
    She dragged another length of hose to the next isolette, and Trethewey followed with three more.
    “Harry’s a very smart boy,” she said. “He’s pretty upset about leaving his dad behind just before the dam blew. . . .”
    Here Major Scholz choked back her own feelings for Colonel Toledo—feelings which, until this nightmare hit, she’d hidden even from herself.
    He was a bastard, she thought. But under there somewhere was a good man once, trying to find his way out again.
    “Are you okay, Major?”
    The voice behind her was that annoying and insistent nasal whine of Colonel Toledo’s replacement in Costa Brava’s DIA office, Major Ezra Hodge. Scholz had been in-country for years, but the Agency had put this greasy tenderfoot in charge of Operations. That did not sit well with Major Scholz, but she was accustomed to doing an excellent job for the occasional bastard, and this would be no exception. She put on the appropriate face.
    “Just tired, Major,” she said. “What’s the latest?”
    “We need another isolette,” he said, “on the double. And not with these three. I want it in the next building. Get a complete intensive-care setup from Merced Hospital and install it inside. Accommodations for two—a patient and caregiver. And communications. I want it ready within the hour.”
    Major Scholz felt the blaze of anger flash from her collar to her cheeks, and noted the theatrical rolling of the eyes from Sergeant Trethewey, who stood behind Hodge. Trethewey followed the eye-rolling with a quick jab of an up lifted middle finger, and, at a nod from Scholz, hurried out to start work next door.
    “Who’s our new guest, Major?” she asked.
    “Toledo,” he said, and the name spat from his tongue like a foul taste. “Our SEAL team picked him up. He’s alive, barely. The corpsman who’s treating him will have to stay with him, you understand. And post sentries. He’ll be under arrest.”
    “Arrest?” Scholz was incredulous. “What for?”
    Major Hodge was clearly agitated, rare for such a self-controlled little maggot.
    “For the embassy bombing, of course. For kidnapping the kids. And for blowing the dam that killed who knows how many people. Including, it would seem, Calvin Casey, the Master of the Children of Eden. A little