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Ciao."
    "Ciao."
    Zur Linde stepped past the planters walling the red-awninged cafe and was gone.
    John ordered the prime rib and sat nursing his drink, wondering when the resistance would contact him.
    "Hey, Major Harrison!" Walt Wenschel was rolling toward his table, clad in a great swath of three-piece pinstripe.
    "Hey, Wenschel," said John as the chemist stopped by his table. "All settled in?"
    "Sure am—big Beacon Hill town house for free, free maid, free car. God bless America."
    "Amen."
    "My lunch just came," said Wenschel, pointing three tables away, where a big plate of steaming clam linguine sat. "Care to join me?"
    "Thanks, but no. I'm expecting someone." John smiled apologetically. "Take a rain check?"
    "A what?"
    "Another time?"
    "Any time. Good to see you."
    Sighing, John lifted his drink, draining the last of the vodka-and-tomato-juice.
    A shadow fell across the table. Two UC troopers, corporal and sergeant, stood there, lean, pale kids with hard faces. The corporal had bad acne. John returned their salute.
    "Sorry to bother the major, sir," said the sergeant. "May we see your ID?"
    John looked around. A second set of troopers was checking the other side of the cafe. All carried those deadly little machinepistols he'd first seen at the airport. Schmeisser minimacs, he'd learned.
    The diners presented their orange IDs with practiced boredom, hardly noticing the soldiers.
    "Thank you, sir."
    John put his green card away.
    The troopers moved on to the next table as John's food arrived. Chewing, he watched the black woman at the corner table smile, open her lavender purse, take out a large-bore derringer and shoot both troopers in the face. The gunshots were still ringing as she leaped the low wall, turning to hurl back a small round something. It rolled clattering beneath a table.
    "Grenade!" shouted Wenschel, trying to squeeze under the tiny table.
    Taking two quick steps, John dived over the concrete planters as a minimac burped and the grenade exploded.
    He rose to pandemonium—dead and dying littered the shattered cafe, moans and screams mingling with hoarse shouts. Eyes glazed, Walt Wenschel sat with his thick legs splayed in a growing pool of blood. Ignoring the intestines spilling over his cordovans, he daubed with crimson-soaked napkin at the clam sauce and blood ruining his suit.
    Sirens rose, drawing near. The woman who'd thrown the grenade lay on the sidewalk, right leg shattered. The gathering crowd watched silently as she began crawling the pavement, blood trailing her, face twisted in agony.
    One small, well-formed breast hung from her chic lavender evening dress.
    On the crowd's edge, a dapper young man in khaki boating togs pointed to the girl, saying something to the slim, tanned brunette at his side. They chuckled.
    Oblivious to all else, bleeding in a dozen places, the UC sergeant walked slowly, painfully to the woman. As he reached her, she sat up and spat, white spittle smearing his crotch.
    John saw it before it happened. "Sergeant!" he snapped, voice ringing across the plaza. "Take her into custody!" He scooped up the dead corporal's minimac.
    Gleaming black, the NCO's steel-toed boot broke the woman's jaw with a loud snap, slamming her head onto the paving. "Nigger whore," he said, the long burst from his minimac smearing the cobblestones with blood and brain.
    John put three bursts into the sergeant, toppling his body across the woman's.
    "God bless America," he said, letting the minimac slip to the ground.
    Black uniforms filled the plaza. After a while, they took him away.

4
    Surely one of history's great ironies: The same day Roosevelt heeded Einstein's admonition to scrap the atomic bomb proposal as "the beginning of the end of humanity," Hitler directed Heisenberg to "proceed with all dispatch on Prometheus.''
    —Harrison , ibid., p. 38
     
    It was very hot in the small, white interrogation room. Stinking of sweat, eyes burning, John dropped his head, trying to avoid the burning