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to fret over this unforeseen complication.
    Of course, he had known there would be children at the Academy. They were a naturally occurring species in this type of environment.
    He just hadn’t realized how many of them would be running about the facility, untethered to any supervising adult.
    • • •
    FROM SAM’S POINT of view, there was nothing wrong with children, per se. He found them a bit difficult to relate to and their tendency toward loud shrieking noises horribly off-putting, but, generally, they weren’t any more of a bother to him than their adult counterparts.
    The problem with children, at least for purposes of today’s operation, was their keen sense of perception, Sam thought with growing unease. They had a way of picking up on things. They saw right through even the whitest of lies.
    He shuddered with apprehension. He couldn’t escape the sense that someone was tracking his every movement.
    One of the little people, he feared, had seen through the ruse.
    • • •
    SAM TOOK A wide step to the side to avoid the approaching child, but the action only served to draw the boy’s interest.
    “Shoo,” Sam whispered hoarsely as the battery-powered shoes stomped ever closer. “Get lost.”
    Sam eased backward toward the exhibit space behind the central atrium, his thick boots scraping against the concrete floor as he kept his eyes fixed on the tiny, inquisitive human.
    “Run along now,” Sam urged again, waving his hands in the air.
    The boy only giggled and continued to trot toward him, his face lighting up as brightly as his shoes.
    Sam had backed halfway across the room when his attention was diverted to a second short-statured interrogator moving in on his left flank, a little girl with a high-pitched voice and long pigtails that whipped through the air like samurai swords.
    “Little buggers are everywhere,” he muttered under his breath as the girl raced toward him.
    A nervous sweat broke across his brow. They were all onto him. He just knew it.
    “Dr. Kline?” he called out desperately as a swarming mass of the Academy’s younger clientele rushed in from one of the side corridors.
    For a few tenuous seconds, Sam struggled to maintain his composure, but after a short hesitation, he turned and ran the remaining length of the atrium, his fleeing figure trailed by a squealing line of children who thought they were participating in an impromptu game of tag.
    • • •
    STANDING JUST INSIDE a gift shop located on the far side of the atrium, an elderly man wearing the shabby clothes of a tramp watched as Sam sprinted headlong across the building.
    The man wore several grimy shirts loosely draped over his upper half; each layer was riddled with holes and stained with smears of dirt. His ragged pants were two sizes too big, secured around his rotund middle with a worn piece of rope. The shoes on his feet had been reinforced with used duct tape, the frayed strapping wrapped around the arch of each foot.
    A ray of sun fell across the man’s pale, wrinkled face as he stepped into the atrium, illuminating his bristly gray eyebrows, thinning white hair, and scruffy false beard.
    He lifted his right sleeve to his mouth and whispered into a hidden microphone that relayed his voice back to the kitchen of a North Beach fried-chicken restaurant.
    “Wombler, this is Lick.”
    He paused and stared at the far side of the atrium, where he’d last seen the fugitive frog-man.
    “We might have a problem.”

Chapter 6
    A CONTENTED CAT
    BACK IN JACKSON Square, a woman with long brown hair tied up in a messy ponytail collapsed onto a worn couch in the apartment above the Green Vase antiques shop.
    Her face was flushed, and she still wore the sweaty exercise clothes from her late-afternoon run. It had been a fantastic jog, out and back through the Presidio’s Crissy Field to Fort Point at the southern foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. But after the second lengthy route in as many days, she was too tired, as